He has written about having sex with an underage girl, and claims he once threatened to kill a pregnant girlfriend unless she had an abortion. He claims to hate marijuana, but recommends heroin as the cure for suburban boredom. He mocks “Tea Baggers” and scorns “hippies.” His Russian newspaper was shuttered after a government crackdown, and he’s a regular on The Dylan Ratigan Show on MSNBC.

Meet Mark Ames, the provocateur who created the Koch brothers conspiracy theory.

Long before John Podesta’s Center for American Progress began targeting the Koch brothers for their supposed role in the Tea Party, and two years before the Kochs were cast as the villains of public sector union protests in Wisconsin, Ames had already shaped the Koch brothers meme.

Ames and co-author Yasha Levine launched the conspiracy theory–and its twin themes of drug abuse and gay sex–with a blog post (now removed) at Playboy.com in February 2009, entitled: “Backstabber: Is Rick Santelli High on Koch?” They published almost exactly the same article at their own site, exiledonline.com, as “Exposing the Rightwing PR Machine: Is CNBC’s Rick Santelli Sucking Koch?”

Ames and Levine alleged that Santelli’s famous “rant heard around the world” that inspired the Tea Party movement “was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger” for an “anti-Obama campaign.” That campaign, they claimed, had been planned for months before the 2008 election, and funded by “the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups.”

Ames would later explain that he had been inspired to write about the Kochs by his experiences in post-Soviet Moscow, when he edited a sensational newspaper, the eXile–described last year by Vanity Fair as “arguably the most abusive, defamatory, un-evenhanded, and crassest publication in Russia” before it closed in 2008. (more…)

I sometimes wonder if the opinion writers for the Washington Post let anyone read their articles before they get published. The main stream media at one point prided itself for its “layers of editors and fact checkers,” but they seem to have disappeared. I say this because, every once in a while, I come across an article so deaf to its own irony that I need to stop and wonder. I don’t mean to say that I don’t expect a misrepresentation of facts, the building of straw men and a dozen other logical mistakes in the writings of ideologically compromised “journalists.” It’s just the absolutely unbridled transference that I would think that someone in those vaunted layers would maybe dare to say, “uh … about that.”

Such is the feeling I got when reading Richard Cohen’s latest screed in the Washington Post. I hope you’re ready for this one, it is pretty laughable. The GOP is a cult. You need to take a pledge to join up. Well, no, not exactly, but certain interest groups want you to promise to agree to their causes to get an endorsement. That’s totally like joining a cult, except it isn’t. For the sake of entertainment and to see how oblivious to irony these people are we’ll take a look.

Cohen has to make a silly jab at the memory of Ronald Regan to start things off.

“It is not enough to support the party or mouth banalities about Ronald Reagan …”

It is true there are those in the Republican Party who would use President Reagan’s memory as a political tool without actually believing in any of the principles that made the GOP the party of Reagan. However, the majority of Republicans do not “mouth banalities” about Reagan; they hold the truths that he espoused to be the bedrock upon which the country stands.

What are the pledges that have Cohen so up in arms?

No increase in taxes and any closing of loopholes would be matched by other tax cuts. Right, you can now run screaming into the woods as the mad cultists of the GOP come for you. Just not for your money.

The pro-life pledge is next on the list of bugaboos for Cohen. GOP candidates who want the endorsement of the Susan B. Anthony List must agree to oppose abortion including the opposition of judicial nominees who might decide against the wholesale slaughter of the unborn. Can you smell that? That’s the irony burning. If I could remind the Washington Post editorial staff it is the Democrat party who have for years been using the pro-abortion stance as a litmus test for judges. It is the radical feminists of NOW who have raised the concept of abortion to an inalienable right. A right that trumps every other consideration.  A politician can be the biggest womanizing, sexual harassing scum bag, but if they are a pro-abortion advocate Democrat then they’re good to go. That’s a Pro-Hypocrisy stance if I have ever seen one.

(more…)

God knows I’ve criticized Rachel Maddow before.  She’s trite, pretentious, and smug, a female version of Jon Stewart without any of the charm.  Like Obama, the left loves her largely because of her constant aura of pedantry – do you ever get the feeling that leftists still long for the guidance of the college professors who called them brave for toking up and sexually experimenting? – her supposed brilliance, and her sonorous baritone.

Only one problem: last week she proved that not only was she a raging blacklister, she proved that she was an ignoramus.

It all went down on last Thursday night’s show.  Maddow decided to “debunk” Mike Huckabee’s “Learn Our History” program, a rethinking of the American journey from the conservative point of view.  Specifically, Maddow had a problem with Huckabee’s “new and improved past, a revised American history carefully constructed to make you feel more comfortable than you might otherwise feel about our national history.”  She then picked out one specific example – the left’s favorite example:

“You may remember the House Un-American Activities Committee.  Part of that was Senator Joe McCarthy red-baiting the living heck out of the entertainment industry … In 1947, Ronald Reagan testified before that committee as a friendly witness, as the president of the Screen Actors Guild.  And in 2011, Mike Huckabee reimagines all of this as six words in his animated hagiography of Ronald Reagan for kids: … ‘He worked against Communism in Hollywood.’”

She then proceeded to attempt to blacklist the company that did the animation for the Learn Our History series, explaining, “If you know who brought this amazing animated sauce to life, please get in touch with us.  We would like to know.”

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From Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid:

The old lie about Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s daughter supposedly being killed in a 1986 raid ordered by then-President Reagan is back. Several stories in U.S. and foreign media about the turmoil in Libya have discussed Gaddafi’s rule in Libya, involvement in terrorism, and the time when we had a President, Ronald Reagan, who ordered military retaliation against pro-terrorist dictators.

On Monday’s NBC Nightly News, reporter Andrea Mitchell said Libya was “accused of bombing a Berlin nightclub frequented by U.S. soldiers” and that “Ronald Reagan retaliated, ordering an air strike against Gaddafi’s tent, accidentally killing his young daughter. Gaddafi escaped unharmed.”

Mitchell showed Gaddafi visiting someone in a hospital.

Mitchell had also flashed a photo of Gaddafi standing next to a girl—the “daughter”—who looked about six or seven years old.

In fact, he had no daughter. It appears that Gaddafi “adopted” the girl after the strike in order to generate sympathy for himself after the raid. The phrase, “adopted daughter,” is the usual formulation that we found in reports about the raid. Mitchell omitted the “adopted” part.

Making Reagan out to be a heartless brute, Mitchell showed Reagan justifying the attack on Libya by saying, “if necessary we will do it again.”

(more…)

Michael Kinsley, in response to the current TIME cover story, which claims that Obama is channeling Ronald Reagan, concludes in a recent LA Times op-ed that:

Reagan, with his sunny disposition amid catastrophe, taught Americans that it will all be OK; don’t worry about it. So for 30 years we didn’t worry about it. Now we’re worried. But it’s a little late. I don’t call that greatness, or worth emulating.

Claiming that Reagan was a “terrible president,” Kinsley gleefully states, “I know, I know, you’re not supposed to say this …” as if he’s somehow committing the ultimate sin in American politics and is simply tickled purple to be doing so. If Kinsley is merely titillated to be wee-weeing in the punchbowl, I can appreciate that — the adulation for both politicians and celebrities does get quite absurd and annoying in this country — but if he’s trying to make a convincing argument here that Reagan was a terrible president, he doesn’t succeed. In fact, one might question whether or not he’s even seriously trying to make a case.

Regarding Time’s claim that Obama is emulating Reagan, Kinsley asks, “Where is the evidence?” I’m asking the same of Kinsley’s claim that Reagan was terrible. For someone who induced America into not worrying for three full decades, Reagan possessed some paradoxically influential suckage.

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If I were to write a birthday card to President Reagan on his 100th birthday what would it say?

Happy birthday, Mr. President!

The phony liberal media loves you (now that it is politically convenient). Your son, Ron, Jr., who you did not agree with in life, also loves you. In fact, Ron, Jr. loves you so much that he has written a book about you, and for the purposes of publicity, has continued to allow himself to be used by the MSM to condemn your Republican Party and the Tea Party Movement in the build-up to your centennial birthday celebration.

It is a sorry state of affairs when your own son would allow your legacy to be misstated and abused for political purposes.

In his book, My Father at 100, Ron Jr. writes, “I argued plenty with my father when he was alive; I have no intention of picking a fight with him now that he’s gone and can’t defend himself.”

However, Ron Jr. apparently sees no problem in helping to enable the MSM in its 2012 strategy to recast what it means to be a conservative – his father’s true legacy. This week, we witnessed more comedy masquerading as journalism and Ron Jr. aided and abetted the effort to undermine and misstate his father’s belief system, a belief system that was in full public view for eight crystallizing years.

One case in point was a story by AOL News’ Andrea Stone, with the headline, “Son Says Reagan Would See Today’s GOP as ‘Mean-Spirited and Stupid.’” In the piece, Ron Jr. says, “I feel comfortable saying he [Ronald Reagan] would be very, very disturbed by the vitriol, very disturbed by the ‘birther’ business, that (President Obama) is a ‘terrorist,’” Reagan said. “All of that kind of stuff he would think was way, way over the top and just mean-spirited and stupid.”

How interesting.

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Last weekend several of us at the Bigs visited the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. We toured Reagan’s Air Force One and saw his old school motorcade. Well, it was old school to me; I was in elementary school when Reagan was in office and was unaware of most everything the man did until I was old enough to want to pay attention and understand the significance of his administration.

I remember hearing about Reagan’s speech on the evening news as my mom fried up dinner. I remember asking my seat mate about it one morning on the way to school. Her name was Tracy or Tracey; all I remember was that she was the only kid I knew who could speak two languages. Her mom was English, her dad was German still living in Germany and working as a mechanic. Everything I first learned about divided Germany came from Tracy/Tracey on the ride to and from school every day.

It was the first time I’d heard about governments splitting up a country with one half of it communist. She told me about communism, about how the government dictated your life and your reward from your own hard work. She told me how her entire family was working on immigrating to the United States.

After the wall fell I recall looking at my globe, the one my grandparents’ had given me to help with my geography homework. I sat at the kitchen table in our tiny little run-down house with the secondhand black and white television (we were pretty poor when I was young) listening to the news and looking at East and West Germany on my globe thinking that the Replogle people were going to have to recast it because the boundaries had changed, the whole world had changed.

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Sometimes it’s the questions you don’t ask that are telling.  Case in point: the New York Times account of our event with Governor Palin last night.

Young America’s Foundation hosted Governor Sarah Palin for the keynote address at the opening banquet of our Reagan 100 weekend. This weekend marks the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth. Celebrations are taking place across the country, but this is a particularly significant weekend for our organization—since the spring of 1998 we’ve been preserving Ronald Reagan’s beloved Ranch home in the mountains north of Santa Barbara, Rancho del Cielo. Today Ronald Reagan’s Western White House is a place where young people come to be inspired by the life, the ideas, the character of Ronald Reagan.

Photo credit: (c) Jensen Sutta

And Governor Palin visited the Ranch for exactly the same reason.

The Governor gave a powerful speech at our banquet last night, before an enthusiastic overflow audience. She eloquently and gracefully paid tribute to one of the most significant speeches in American history, Ronald Reagan’s “Time for Choosing” address—while at the same time outlining a vision for America that builds upon President Reagan’s.

The speech was universally well received by our audience of all ages. But the New York Times chose to focus on some of the logistics of the event in their account:

Presidential contenders, regardless of their celebrity, are put through a gauntlet of rituals that require a delicate air of patience as they deal with their admirers. Prospective candidates, particularly if they are courting supporters, routinely sit through dinners and mingle with guests. But in her case, Ms. Palin entered the room only for her speech and left immediately after.

The appearance here was marked by tight security and rigid rules, with guests admonished to stay in their seats when she arrived. (“We’d all like to jump up and give her a high-five, but please stay at your tables,” Kate Obenshain, vice president of the foundation, announced from the dais. “There will be no book signings or autographs.”)

Governor Palin has a remarkable effect on people. For many conservatives, she’s a rock star. When the Governor walks into a room, normally even-keeled and good-natured people tend to forget their surroundings and rush towards her—to give her hug, to tell her how grateful they are for her courage, to tell her specifically how she has touched their lives. Event planning requires adherence to a basic schedule. At a minimum, you have to make it possible for your speaker to take the stage, in the “friendly confines” of tightly-packed and small room. Not an easy task with a superstar like Sarah Palin but our team sought to make the event run smoothly. (more…)

Berlin Wall at sunset, Reagan Library, Simi Valley. Photo by Dana Loesch

I was in elementary school when the Berlin wall fell but the imagery which comprises my mind’s history of it are photos of youths tearing chunks from it and crying when it fell.

I had a conversation with a friend last night about the fast growth of conservatism in new media. Having been schooled in old media and learning a new industry on an old PHP group blog right as new media exploded over a decade ago, I’ve watched with interest the tug-of-war between the left and right in terms on Internet influence. The left dominate during Dean and Obama’s campaigns but something happened in ‘08 and now conservatives are out-organizing the left on the web. More conservative blogs are created each day.

(more…)

Governor Palin Chooses Young America’s Foundation’s Reagan Ranch Center as the Backdrop for her Speech to Honor the 100^th Anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s Birth

Young America’s Foundation announced today that Governor Sarah Palin will give the keynote address on February 4 at its Reagan 100 Opening Banquet at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara, California, for the 100^th anniversary celebration of President Reagan’s birthday. Governor Palin was Alaska’s youngest and first woman governor and the first female Vice Presidential candidate in the history of the GOP.

“I am very excited to have been selected to address Young America’s Foundation’s Reagan 100 dinner,” Governor Palin said. “Young America’s Foundation has been sharing the values of President Reagan with young people for more than 40 years, and there is no organization more committed to preserving freedom’s future.”

To commemorate the 100^th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, Governor Palin will reflect on the seminal speech by President Reagan, “Time for Choosing,” that discussed the risks and rewards before an America at a crossroads in the early 1960’s. Governor Palin will draw parallels to today while calling for young people to continue the Reagan revolution into the future.

Vice President Dick Cheney will also headline the celebration weekend and deliver the keynote address at the closing Reagan 100 Dinner Banquet on Saturday, February 5 at the Reagan Ranch Center. (more…)

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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Former President Jimmy Carter didn’t start out bashing the media, as he often does today. In fact, prior to the election of Barack Obama, and after the media’s early-sixties love affair with all things Kennedy, it was Jimmy Carter’s turn to be the media’s annointed one. Post-Watergate and Vietnam, his consultants and their liberal media accomplices created everybody’s every man, Plains’ peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter.

It was a cold and rainy October night when my mother and I stood outside a Skokie, Illinois Synagogue to hear and hopefully meet Georgia Governor James Earl “Jimmy” Carter. My parents and most Americans were still sickened over Watergate, President Gerald Ford’s unconditional pardon of Richard Nixon and the disaster of the Vietnam War. They hungered for “change” and “new hope”. Many Americans believed they found what they desperately yearned for in a peanut farmer turned politician from Georgia.

Carter started out by milking it for all it was worth from day one. Flashback to 1977. Carter didn’t fail because the media turned on, or was somehow out to get, him. Carter failed because the walks, talks and cardigans were mere pomp and circumstance. America demands a little bit more of its presidents once they get to the end of Pennsylvania Avenue they call home. But the combination of his liberal policies and naivete, if not incompetence, left Carter completely unable to deliver it – leadership. It took four years and Ronald Reagan to return that quintessential American quality to the White House. Pardon me if I look at Washington today and feel a sense of deja vu all over, again.

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Say goodnight, Barry, Nancy, Harry, Barney et al.:

Remember when we had leaders who spoke from the heart and from conviction, instead of reading words off a TelePrompter and dancing to the tune of Congressional leaders?

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Anyone who’s been paying attention for the last ten years is aware that the level of public acrimony has been increasing steadily. This applies to acrimony in politics and journalism, as well as to surging xenophobia in many countries around the world, involving Jews, Catholics, Americans, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese, French, Mexicans, and so forth.

I’ve written about continually increasing acrimony many times on my web site, over the last eight years. The one time that I got a big chuckle out of all the political bickering occurred in 2007, when I wrote, “Today’s Schadenfreude: The Congressional pay raise is blocked.” If bickering prevents a Congressional pay raise, then it can’t be all bad.

Journalistic acrimony was the subject of CNN’s Reliable Sources on Sunday. Moderator Howard Kurtz began the program this way:

We [journalists] have been called everything from patsies to pinheads, blamed for bias, skewered for sensationalism, ripped for recklessness. The atmosphere is just plain ugly.

What accounts for these mean-spirited attacks on the media, and in many cases perpetuated by the media? Why are journalists being called not just wrong, but dishonest, racist, corrupt? …

It’s not that the criticism is not legitimate. The media did perform badly, by and large, in the sacking of Shirley Sherrod. Liberal journalists did say some awful things about conservatives on that off-the-record discussion group [the Journolist]. Conservative commentators did accuse the mainstream media of shilling for Obama by not getting exercised about that New Black Panther Party controversy. There are serious questions about what Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings did with General McChrystal.

But never in my professional lifetime has the media bashing been so deafening, so personal, and so much of it carried out by some pundits against other pundits.”

Here are quotes from several of the clips that Kurtz showed to illustrate the point: (more…)

*** Updated and Clarified

Out here along the Picketwire, we were mighty surprised ten years ago when we heard about an historian back east who’d proved that nobody to speak of had actually owned guns back in early America. This came as a big surprise, because it wasn’t what we’d heard from our daddies and granddaddies. But this historian, Michael Bellesiles by name, had all the facts and figures to prove it. This was pretty cheering to the New York Times’ reviewer (Garry Wills, “Spiking the Gun Myth,”), who said Professor Bellesiles had “dispersed the darkness that covered the gun’s early history in America” and provided “overwhelming evidence that our view of the gun is as deep a superstition as any that affected Native Americans in the 17th century.” Apparently a lot of people agreed, because Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture was given the Bancroft Prize.

Well, you probably know what happened. Some gun nuts and spoilsports started looking into Professor Bellesiles’ research, and it turned out that the evidence Garry Wills was so happy about didn’t actually exist. Professor Bellesiles had made it up, and the press had eaten it up. “Now many of Mr. Bellesiles’s defenders have gone silent,” the Times had to report a year later (Robert Worth, “Historian’s Prizewinning Book on Guns is Embroiled in a Scandal“):

Over the past year a number of scholars who have examined his sources say he has seriously misused historical records and possibly fabricated them. They say the outcome, when all the evidence is in, could be one of the worst academic scandals in years.

And in the end, they took his Bancroft Prize away, and he lost his job at Emory University in Atlanta. (more…)

Some lessons never get old, and there’s always a new generation in need of hearing them.