Yesterday Elliot Abrams was part of a calculated effort against one of the GOP primary candidates whose last name wasn’t “Romney.” It’s typical in any primary, but what wasn’t typical was that in this republican primary, the information was misconstrued and presented a false narrative to readers. Jeffrey Lord at the American Spectator takes Abrams to task for his piece and says it is “not worthy” of its author:

Abrams

A piece like the one Abrams wrote depends for its success in garnering headlines — which it did — by assuming no one will bother to get into the weeds and do the homework. Usually a safe assumption when dealing with the mainstream media, particularly a mainstream media that, as one with Establishment Republicans, hates Newt Gingrich.

Not so fast.

Due to the diligence of one Chris Scheve of a group called Aqua Terra Strategies in Washington, Mr. Abrams has been caught red-handed in lending himself to this attempted Romney hit job.

Mr. Scheve, you see, is himself a former foreign policy aide to none other than Speaker Newt Gingrich in his days as Speaker. While now out on his own and not working for Gingrich, Scheve is considerably conversant with the Gingrich foreign policy record.

Uh-oh.

That’s right. Mr. Scheve, incensed at what he felt was a deliberate misrepresentation of his old boss by Abrams and the Romney forces, specifically of Gingrich’s long ago March 21, 1986 “Special Order” speech on the floor of the House, and aware “that most of his [Abrams'] comments had to have been selectively taken from the special order” — Scheve started digging. Since the Congressional Record for 1986 was difficult to obtain electronically, Scheve trekked to the George Mason Library to physically track down the March 21, 1986 edition of the Congressional Record. Locating it, copying and scanning, he was kind enough to send to me …

… I can only say that what Elliott Abrams wrote in NRO about Newt Gingrich based on this long ago speech is not worthy of Elliott Abrams.

Specifically, Abrams implies that Newt Gingrich was spewing mindless vitriol about Reagan on the House floor. Not only not so, it was quite to the contrary.

Read the whole thing. Ben Shapiro has the full text of Gingrich’s remarks.

Such hits on candidates is expected in primaries, but a heated primary is no excuse for conservatives in media to forget their principles and assume the characteristics of progressive media. Lord is right on this. Let the purposeful inaccuracies stop.

As a communications professional, my assessment of the Obama Administration’s communications strategy is that it may be the most inept performance I have ever seen of any political regime.

Crisis communications is not a silver bullet.  Some thing simply cannot be repaired.  The whole point of communications in general, however, is that the job should never be challenging if the entity the communicator works for doesn’t provide fodder for the opposition.

The Obama Administration has repeatedly handed its opposition ammunition — not 9mm bullets, but everything from Stinger missiles to bunker-busters.  The result is the appearance, to this citizen, of a White House on the verge of panic.  I’m not the only one.  When legendary far-left blabbermouth James Carville tells the White House it’s time to panic, it’s time to panic (That’s no diss on Mr. Carville.  I love watching him.).

Almost none of this has to do with the truth or facts of any given situation.  It has to do with how it all appears.  Generally, it makes Mr. Obama appear like an amateur politician.

It Started Out So Well!

The Obama campaign had it made in 2008.  The GOP had put up the Grumpy Old Troll against a PR juggernaut — the first viable Black presidential candidate.  Young and slick vs. old and creaky.  The backlash against the Bush presidency had peaked — people were tired of the war in Iraq, gasoline had hit $4, and the mainstream media so controlled the political narrative that it would’ve taken a literal disaster to push the Obama campaign off-message.  Not only did the GOP face an uphill battle anyway, but now they were facing a wave of messaging that was hard to ignore: hope and change.  So powerful was this message that, despite it and the candidate it spoke for being utterly lacking in substance, it swayed enough of the electorate to create an historic moment for America.  The country had elected a God.  I don’t need to tell you how this photo comes off:

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We are told Fareed Zakaria is an intelligent man, a man of letters and a journalist. With his latest article in TIME, I’m just not seeing it. It is full of contradictions and transparent attacks on conservatives followed by praise for Ye Olde School conservatives, who espoused more or less the same thing as current conservatives.

Zakaria starts by praising the classical conservatives for basing their ideas on reality, as compared to the Marxists as socialists who start from an imagined society. The great conservative thinkers, he goes on, have tried to understand society, accept it and then help it evolve. He’s one hundred percent correct.

This is the point at which he begins to go wrong. His main claim is that conservatives have moved from the concrete to the abstract and he laments this supposed shift. His first attack is on the idea that Americans are over taxed. While it can be argued that America has a relatively low INDIVIDUAL tax rate as compared to other industrialized nations, he doesn’t take into effect two main points. If one includes State taxes, for those states that levy these as well as other taxes, the mean tax rate on Americans is approximately 40%. More importantly the CORPORATE tax rate on American businesses is the second highest amongst OECD nations, also at about 40%. Zakaria goes out his way to point to Germany as a country that has high taxes while avoiding the same financial issues that we see in the US. That is a debatable issue, one that balances on Germany’s role in the European Union and its control of the Euro, but one thing that the article leaves out is that, in 2008, Germany cut its corporate income tax rate by 8.7%, putting it as one of the countries with the LOWEST corporate income tax rates.

The next straw man Zakaria tries to build is in finding another President who has been as hostile to business as Obama. Yes, Nixon was not a conservative when it came to business. Yes, Nixon presided over 70% tax rates and price controls, but nobody can say that Nixon took every opportunity to bash business, increase the regulatory state exponentially or create such a wide swath of uncertainty in the business markets.

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In some Tweets I sent to Jim Geraghty at NRO yesterday, I was pointing out that I thought he was allowing his expectations to get in the way of his reporting on Sarah Palin’s bus tour. Unfortunately, perhaps he was too busy to respond. But while ribbing him some, I was attempting to make a point.

I re-Tweeted him, initially and laughed.

lol @jimgeraghty: Sarah Palin’s bus destinations: information is need-to-know, & the MSM doesn’t need 2 know.

How can one read the above and not be reminded of Reagan’s practice of going over the media’s head, directly to the people? That holds true even if some media outlets might promote, or fancy, themselves to be of Reagan in some sense, as still others might think they actually are not quite that?

@jimgeraghty Kinda funny, Jim – Bcuz it isn’t what you think it shld be, it must be wrong, or odd, somehow. I think if she wnted 2 do wht you think she should, she wld have asked. ; ) Oh well,

What if its mostly about filming location shots, too large a crowd might be bad for that? Try putting dwn Ur assumptions for it then you could, you know, just report whatever it is, or isnt. w/o judging everything so much.

I’ve no desire to single out Jim for criticism here, media over all – and especially DC-based media, is increasingly long on opinion, while short on facts. To some extent, we are seeing that reflected in the broader media coverage of Palin’s bus trip. Here is Jim’s piece: (more…)

Doublethink.

Since Time Magazine has decided to suspend disbelief (which is the nice phrase that Hillary Clinton once used to describe General Petraeus back when the left hated him) by putting Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan on the cover of their magazine, we thought you’d need to see the view from behind:

So that’s why Reagan had his arm around Obama’s shoulder.

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How on earth do you not challenge a statement like this?

“I think it speaks volumes about the man’s temperament,” said Robert Dallek, the presidential historian. “He doesn’t crave the spotlight the way some of these other presidents have. They needed to be constantly in the eye of the public; it propelled them into politics in the first place. Obama is less that way; he is more of a self-contained person, someone who can genuinely spend time by himself with his family.”

[...]

He is not the first. Ronald Reagan played host to the queen of England at his mountaintop ranch in Santa Barbara, Calif., but he rarely invited members of his own cabinet there.

That the author of the article didn’t circle back with a question as to why a leader who’s appeared on everything from the late night talk shows to Mythbusters, earned him a write-up in Politico with the headline “The Everywhere President” “doesn’t crave the spotlight.”

Did you miss President Barack Obama the other day discoursing on college basketball on ESPN? Then perhaps you caught him instead Thursday night chatting with Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show.”

Wondered how the first family stays in such fine shape in the White House? Michelle Obama described their morning workouts earlier this month in People magazine. Last winter, before taking office, the president-elect and his wife also shared their thoughts on the family’s eating habits for Parents magazine.

From CNN to Men’s Journal, Obama has decided to make himself the Everywhere President.

In an era where people can be famous for no reason other than being known, a tautologous way of climbing the ladder when fame amounts to experience and weight on a resume; Barack Obama isn’t the first president to exploit this ascent up the ladder but he is the first president to be made entirely from it. The first reality president. The “Barack Obama Show” began with his 2004 DNC keynote, after which he was, and continues to be, everywhere. The main difference between Obama and Reagan is that Reagan was a better actor. (And a more skilled leader with better policies, but definitely, better actor.)

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When Sarah Palin recently cited the legendary C.S. Lewis and the phrase “divine inspiration” in the same sentence during a Barbara Walters interview, liberal talking heads went apoplectic.  MSNBC’s Richard Wolffe thought there were a lot of things Palin could have read besides C.S. Lewis if “divine inspiration” was the goal, and The View’s Joy Behar mocked her for reading books that were (supposedly) written for children.

Such desperate and unprofessional commentary from Wolffe and Behar is undone by the fact that millions upon millions of people have read Lewis for divine inspiration throughout the years. Moreover, those reading him for such inspiration are adults, not children. (Sure, children do enjoy Lewis’ “Chronicles of Narnia,” but his eye-opening works like “Mere Christianity,” “The Great Divorce,” and “The Abolition of Man,” to name but a few, are so in depth that an adult must read them time and again to grasp everything that Lewis is saying.)

Of course, this really isn’t about whether Lewis wrote children’s books or not, nor is it about whether Palin reads such books. Rather, it is just one more attempt to prove how dumb Palin is, and thereby show the public how unfit she is for office.

The liberal talking heads want us to know that only a megalomaniac like Adolf Hitler or, even worse, an idiot like George W. Bush, would talk so openly about divinity or divine inspiration in this secular world. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews revealed as much just days after the 2008 Presidential Elections when he examined Palin’s claim that she was “putting [her] life in [her] creator’s hands” and would make a decision on a possible run in 2012 based on whether God opened the door for her or not. (more…)

During the Reagan Administration news stories were everywhere on the homeless in America. Almost like Reagan invented homelessness.

During the Bush Administration, again, more stories on the homeless. Almost like there is only homelessness while a Republican is in the White House.

Breaking news here, there is homelessness, and it’s on the rise under Barack Obama.

Since the activist old media is not interested in doing the story, I took a camera out there myself and talked to the homeless in Las Vegas. My goal—to find out why they were homeless and to see where they stand politically. We broadcast the results on www.Liberty.com. (more…)

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy:

President Ronald Wilson Reagan:

President Barack Hussein Obama: (more…)

Second place looms large and it is quite an honorable — or maybe onerous — award on our top ten most left-biased working American journalists list. Amusingly our number two guy even graduated from a school that foretold his future work. From the bowels of New York’s exclusive Hackley School comes our number two most left-biased journo, Time Magazine’s Joe Klein.

Klein is another one of those far left writers that imagines himself to be unconventional in his politics when the truth is he is a left-winger all the way down the line without a scoshe of non-conventional thinking.

For instance, in his book, The Natural, of his politics Klein wrote, “… the conventions of journalism prevent me from fitting too neatly into one political niche (although as a columnist for the New Yorker and Newsweek my predilections are obvious).” Far from not “fitting too neatly” into the left’s “niche,” that niche fits him like a glove. For the better part of thirty years, Klein has been revealing his ill-fitting niche to the reading public and we couldn’t be more grateful for his niche-like, nichieness.

So let’s start by finding an example of Klein supposedly being nicheless, shall we? How about in 2007 when Klein attacked the left-wing blogosphere as being too vitriolic. Did that piece show that he was able to criticize his own? Did it show he isn’t just a knee-jerk leftist? (more…)

In his June 8, 2010, 7,000-plus word Rolling Stone article entitled “The Spill, The Scandal, and the President,” Tim Dickinson fixed blame for the oil leak in the Gulf, but ignored how the effort to fix the mess it’s causing has been badly mismanaged. In that sense, he hit his intended targets, but missed the mark.

The subtitle of the piece identifies his targets.

The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world’s most dangerous oil company get away with murder.

The storyline is simple. A notoriously negligent oil company, British Petroleum (BP), plus a corrupt Minerals Management Services (MMS) inherited from Bush, equals The Spill. It’s a variation on the “It’s Bush’s Fault” motif.

Even a Republican Congressman piled on:

It’s tempting to believe that the Gulf spill, like so many disasters inherited by Obama, was the fault of the Texas oilman who preceded him in office. But, though George W. Bush paved the way for the catastrophe, it was Obama who gave BP the green light to drill. “Bush owns eight years of the mess,” says Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican from California. “But after more than a year on the job, Salazar owns it too.”

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During an interview with MSNBC’s Joy Behar on Feb. 21, MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch let his bigot flag fly.  While fulminating against the tea-party movement in general and in particular against the candidate known as “the tea-party candidate,” who gave the rousing opening speech at CPAC, Deutsch blurted:  “You almost need that blank piece of paper. That’s the new model. Like, you know, this coconut (Marco) Rubio down in Florida.”

In settings like MSNBC (but usually backstage) the term coconut (brown on the outside white on the inside) is generally used to castigate “Hispanics” who ignore marching orders barked by Democratic/MSM drill sergeants—same as “Oreo” for similarly uppity blacks.

Never mind that the Cuban-American Marco Rubio is probably more purely Caucasian than Elvis Presley, Hank Williams, Oral Roberts, Johnny Depp among many other southerners who boast Choctaw/Cherokee heritage. We’ll deal with Deutsch’s stupidity in another article. This one’s about Deutsch’s bigotry, a derivative of his stupidity.

Exit polls show that Cuban-Americans voted against Obama by the highest margins—and by far!—of any U.S. ethnic group, including “anglos.” So we’re fair-game for ethnic slurs—and have been for decades. In fact, Deutsch has as much reason to fulminate against Cuban-Americans as the most virulent nativist.  Regarding the U.S. political mainstream, Cuban-Americans obstinately refuse to assimilate. To wit: (more…)

Remember when the Left was the champion of the Little Guy?  When they hated the “undemocratic” Electoral College and passed the 17th Amendment to force the direct election of Senators?  When Andrew Jackson effectively invented the modern Democratic Party by throwing open the doors of the White House to the people and defying Supreme Court orders?

Well, that was then and this is now, because here comes Kurt Andersen in New York Magazine to tell us that the problem with democracy is… you guessed it:

So now we have a country absolutely teeming with irregular passions and artful misrepresentations, whipped up to an unprecedented pitch and volume by the fundamentally new means of 24/7 cable and the hyperdemocratic web. And instead of a calm club of like-minded wise men (and women) in Washington compromising and legislating, we have a Republican Establishment almost entirely unwilling to defy or at least gracefully ignore its angriest, most intemperate and frenzied faction—the way Reagan did with his right wing in the eighties and the way Obama is doing with his unhappy left wing now.

Just as the founders feared, American democracy has gotten way too democratic. (more…)

In a stunning repudiation of Obama’s entire program, Scott Brown made the 1969 Amazing Mets look like a foregone conclusion.

It wasn’t Scott Brown taking on the machine. It was America. Despite the media’s mad machinations, in coaxing the Kennedy faithful to come out for a Coakley victory, and assuming the sale, the people weren’t fooled. The Boston Globe went so far as to publish a map that showed pre-poll-closing results depicting Coakley winning. Of course, they were trapped, and apologized. (more…)