Just last week, just before the Thanksgiving holiday, the Obama campaign and their MSM pals went apoplectic with phony outrage over an ad released by Governor Mitt Romney. The only real mistake the Romney ad made was a tactical one in that it gave Obama and his Media Palace Guards the ammunition they crave to to keep the focus on anything other than Obama’s failed record. Later, Democrats went even further and attempted to call the Romney ad — you guessed it — racist. The reasoning is so stupid I won’t waste your time, but The Hill has more.
Now Slate wants us to believe that the ad below, which quite accurately attaches Mass. Senator Scott Brown’s challenger Elizabeth Warren to Occupy Wall Street, is — you guessed it — sexist.
The Crossroads GPS ad against Elizabeth Warren works not just by portraying her as radically liberal, but by implying that she is unhinged. After showing chaotic scenes of angry young mobs and what looks like a street explosion, and noting that protestors “support radical redistribution of wealth and violence,” the ad cuts to a clip of Warren’s “class warfare” speech, with the volume turned way down, so that the viewer cannot hear the warmth in her voice or the substance of her argument. She is gesticulating strenuously, and the scene implies passion without reason.
Images of female candidates looking angry or self-righteous are a staple of negative ads; the implication seems to be that they are out of control, overtaken by their own emotions and, utterly unfit for office. Nevada Sen. Harry Reid showed his opponent Sharron Angle first smiling sweetly, and then with her face contorted with feeling. “Not just extreme,” the ad intones: “dangerous.”
What’s going on here is that in collusion with their media allies, Democrats are attempting to make Republicans gunshy about launching ads that effectively criticize and define them. Everything in the Warren ad is true and even after you read Slate’s nonsense, there’s not a single frame that comes close to crossing any kind of line.
But the MSM’s tactics here are not about truth or clarity or informing the public; they are about distracting from the issues that should define the 2012 election.
The left is having more of a tantrum in pushing this issue than the right. They used this tactic successfully to knock the path clear for then-Senator Barack Obama. For a party that loves to preach about Uncle Sam not turning the bedroom into a federalized threesome, progs love gossiping about the sex lives of married people. Honestly, who CARES what you did at a Halloween party with your husband years ago? So what, the photos made it to the press, if I were working Ball’s campaign I’d release the photos, Demotivational-style and titled them: “KEEPING THE LOVE ALIVE.”
This isn’t politics. This is Ball embarrassed and freaked-out and trying to boost her campaign by crying wolf. She could have easily said: “So what? My husband and I had some racy photos on Facebook. And? We were married at the time and I was pretty young. What does this have to do with the issues?” (more…)
Do you know — and more important, do your Representatives and Senators know — that the just-passed Dodd-Frank financial reform bill will unleash a tsunami or racial quotas on financial regulatory agencies and, inevitably, on the financial industry itself? Not if you rely on the New York Times, the Washington Post, and their network news equivalents.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Hudson Institute, a veritable one-woman truth squad on this issue, raised the alarm here, here, and here, and her warning was discussed by Andy McCarthy of National Review, Carl Horowitz on Townhall.com, and on several blogs — Hot Air, Professor Bainbridge, and my own Discriminations. But aside from an excellent editorial in the Wall Street Journal last month, not a peep from the mainstream press.
How odd, since this bill has been sold as necessary to prevent another financial meltdown and yet, insofar as that meltdown was precipitated by a burst housing bubble produced at least in part by the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie and Freddie, et al. forcing lenders to offer mortgages to borrowers who couldn’t afford them, the new legislation threatens to institutionalize and magnify those very abuses. As Ms. Furchtgoff-Roth explained, Section 342 of the bill creates at least 20 “Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion” to ensure that “race and gender employment ratios must be observed by all government agencies that regulate the financial sector, as well as private financial institutions that do business with the government.” (more…)
On her Bravo TV show Tuesday night, left-wing comedian Kathy Griffin referred to Sen. Scott Brown’s two daughters as “prostitutes,” and a CNN reporter apparently thought it hysterical. [Audio available here.]
Griffin, who was readying herself for a trip to Washington, DC to rally and drum up support for a repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” brought CNN reporters (husband and wife) Dana Bash and John King onto the show to “coach” her for handling Washington. Bash is a congressional correspondent for CNN, while King anchors the news hour “John King, USA.”
When the couple showed Griffin a picture of Sen. Scott Brown and asked her to identify the figure, she responded “Scott Brown – who is a senator from Massachusetts, and has two daughters that are prostitutes.”
Bash erupted with laughter, while King grimaced.
This is who we are fighting, and this is how they fight.
Unfunny celebrities (Scott Brown’s daughters are prostitutes! Har har har!) are taken seriously and granted credibility by members of the mainstream media. When the celebrity, who has had a career resurgence doubling as an activist, ridicules a sitting Republican Senator with a sexual joke at the expense of his family, the media personalities not only affirm that the joke is kosher, but that it’s flat out hilarious! Now the celebrity/activist’s hate is validated with CNN’s seal of approval and the journalists punch their Cool Kid Tickets. (more…)
In the first (and still best) “Austin Powers” film, a United Nations representative makes a faux pas and calls the film’s villain “Mr. Evil.”
“It’s Dr. Evil,” he huffs. “I didn’t spend six years in Evil Medical School to be called ‘mister,’ thank you very much.”
This is how I feel when I’m referred to as a “blogger,” sometimes with a political qualifier like “liberal” or “conservative” attached. I’m a reporter. I’ve been a reporter since high school. Like a lot of other people, I lucked into some reporting jobs that took advantage of the speed of the web — thus, I blogged. And I left the Washington Post because I was intoxicated by this medium and the privileges of reporting. The leak of my private e-mails wouldn’t have been possible 10 years ago; but then, neither would have my career been possible.
Let’s go back to the start. I started in journalism in a fairly typical manner, by discovering how much I liked writing articles and doing interviews at my high school paper. I chose to go to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. It was there that I became editor of the campus’s weekly conservative paper, and became plugged into the campus conservative journalism network.
Yesterday I had the displeasure of reading Gregory Ferenstein’s column, “Why the web benefits liberals more than conservatives.” Ferenstein’s thesis is that liberal ideological characteristics facilitate Internet success, while the opposite is true for conservatism. Frankly, his entire piece is based on assumptions without evidence. Ferenstein states:
From…the million-strong Barack Obama Facebook page to the huge audience of the Huffington Post, liberals have been the dominant political force on the internet since the digital revolution began.”
Ferenstein avoids the most important reason for this phenomenon: Age. Younger people dominate the Internet, and younger people are more liberal by significant margins. So, Ferenstein could replace the phrase, “Liberals have been the dominant political force on the Internet since the digital revolution began,” with “Young people have been the dominant demographic on the Internet since the digital revolution began.” They have the same meaning.
He continues:
Research…suggests that the reason behind this imbalance may be the liberal belief system itself.
Liberals, the research finds, are oriented toward community activism…and feature user-generated content. Conservatives…are more comfortable with a commanding leadership and use restrictive policies to combat disorderly speech in online forums.
Tea Party Patriots, rejoice! With enemies like Michael Kinsley, who needs friends?
Read between the sneering lines of Kinsley’s May 18th column in The Atlantic and you may just find an unintended love-letter to the very Tea Party Patriots he so desperately would like to torpedo. In fact, Kinsley’s blindness to the movement’s power is a proxy for the entire Democratic party’s colossal blindness to the tsunami about to drown it out of office this November.
Kinsley’s sneer begins with the headline: “My Country, Tis of Me.” (Because no party ever acts in its own self-interest.)
The overarching purpose of Kinsley’s Tea Party obituary is the left’s standard 3M approach: moralize, marginalize, minimize. It’s done through a series of disinformation volleys. Here are Kinsley’s primary distortions.
The Tea Party Is Right-Wing.
Kinsley launches his first Scud: “The right-wing populist Tea Party movement has politicians of both parties spooked.” The most important word in this sentence is “right-wing.” The Winston Group’s three surveys conducted from December to February showed that while 57% of the Tea Party are Republicans, four in ten are Democrats and independents. The majority of the Tea Party is right-wing, but it is far from monolithic and hence representational of more than a fringe right segment of the country. (more…)
Marc Ambinder poses this question in his April 23 article in The Atlantic : “Have Conservatives Gone Mad? “
Ambinder lays blithe and, according to no less a source than himself, undeniable claim to the liberal journalism’s monopoly on political veritas, identifying “the most trenchant and effective criticism of President Obama” coming “not from the right, but the left.” On the other hand, he asserts, “mainstream conservative voices are embracing theories that are, to use Julian Sanchez’s phrase, ‘untethered’ to the real world.”
Before examining that assertion, let’s list a few more of Ambinder’s pronouncements about the journalistic right.
The base itself seems to have developed a notion that bromides are equivalent to policy-thinking, and that therapy is a substitute for thinking. It is absolutely a condition of the age of the triumph of conservative personality politics, where entertainers shouting slogans are taken seriously as political actors.
Well, thank goodness he laid that to rest. Q.E.D. Still, if therapy really is a substitute for thinking, Ambinder should consider changing his surname to Freud. (more…)
This piece, by Andrew Ferguson in Commentary, isalmost too easy, but it sure is fun. Did the little furry mammals tuck into the dinosaur eggs with so much gusto?
The tiny corner of the New York Times empire where David Barstow works is called the investigative unit. The name has an impressive urgency to it, like the title of a TV spin-off—CSI: Times Investigative Unit. You can imagine guys in Weejuns and khakis getting a hot tip and springing into action, yanking their tweed coats off the backs of chairs and shouting something irreverent and ironical over their shoulders as they bolt for the newsroom door.
Perhaps a new “torture memo” has been leaked; maybe a politician has committed an act of creative accounting on Supplement B (3) subpart vii of his financial-disclosure form. Or maybe a large number of Americans way out there in the land beyond the Bronx have been caught holding political opinions that are dangerously bizarre. TIU is on the case.
These strange-thinking Americans, loosely roped together as the Tea Party movement, sent David Barstow on his most recent investigation. His assignment lasted for five uninterrupted months and bore literary fruit, with a 4,500-word front-page story on February 16. “Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right,” the headline read—aptly enough, for a premonitory suggestion of bombs going off just over the horizon rumbled through Barstow’s story. To the astute Times reader lingering with the paper over breakfast, the hints were unmistakable.
There was the dateline, for one thing: Sandpoint, Idaho. The reader might rub his chin?.?.?.?-Sandpoint? Vaguely familiar…rings a bell…let’s see…Wait! God Almighty! Yes, that Sandpoint, notorious 15 years ago as the home of gun-slinging Randy Weaver and his Ruby Ridge survivalist compound, the headquarters of the Aryan Nation group of gun owners, a hothouse of gun-owning militias and paramilitary groups with their guns?.?.?.
James O’Keefe has to be destroyed in some way. And the best way you can attack an effective conservative in America today is to call him a racist. In the past year the tactic has been used against Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Andrew Breitbart, Bill O’Reilly, Scott Brown, the entire Tea Party movement and, all those who oppose President Obama’s health care scheme (the last charge was leveled by none other than a former President).
So, I suppose James O’Keefe should have expected this attack, but it doesn’t make it any easier to take. Thanks to a deceitful and malicious agenda from the likes of Max Blumenthal, Salon.com and the George Soros funded-John Podesta created-Media Matters for America, the myth of James O’Keefe as a racist has been put forth on the internet and linked to and repeated over and over without any real regard for the truth or normative human decency. His name and reputation have been raped. And like all of those men watching Jodie Foster get assaulted in the film The Accused, the establishment media have sat back and watched. They are as guilty of the rape for not doing anything to stop it.
O’Keefe is the young man who along with Hannah Giles created a sensation last summer with his undercover investigative series exposing a disturbing lack of concern at various ACORN offices over the suggestion of prostitution and sex slavery. ACORN and their enablers/apologists in the media have made several attempts to rationalize and minimize the images and words we all heard on O’Keefe’s videos. (more…)
Is this the new face of the Republican Party? A contender in 2012? Or the male version of Sarah Palin?
In a 24/7, horse-race handicapping, ADD, MSM culture, it’s never too soon to start speculating, is it? So let’s beat them to the punch as we await the great Health Care Showdown and get your thoughts here.
Last year I had written a piece for the American Thinker and I went to that site to read the comments posted. Next to the article was an ad that showed a video of Sen. Chuck Schumer saying that “the American people don’t care,” about what he called those little “porky amendments.”
Something flew all over me and I felt it was time to become more activist than simply writing a column that preached to the choir but did not reach the average New Yorker who continued to vote in parasitic corrupt politicians.
I bought a domain calling it ChangeNYin2010.com and posted that Schumer video, as well as another one featuring Charlie Rangel cursing out a reporter asking him about his ethics violations: (more…)
It’s not exactly surprising to see a writer for the Apparatchik Press — er, the Associated Press — compose an in-the-tank item sympathetic with the Obama administration.
But Ben Feller’s unlabeled analysis Monday morning (“Obama’s challenge: Anger is replacing hope”; saved here for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes) is so over the top and totally backwards that it may merit its own place in the journalistic Hall of Shame.
Feller’s fantasizes that the problem Obama faces is not that his policies and proposals are unpopular. No-no-no. Instead, the president merely has to overcome a “complex communications challenge” to deal with the growing anger out here in the real world and get people over his side.
I’ve been scarce of late, with a lot of recent travel, then this past week crashing on a book the cite-check, dashing out for a magazine interview you won’t believe so I’ll see if it goes to print before mentioning it, and guest-hosting for G. Gordon Liddy. Instead of staying for the G-Man’s Tuesday show I had to bail and head back out to the country, as I would have been trapped in D.C. as opposed to at home by that latest installment of winter deluge that is, apparently, precisely what scientists have been predicting as a result of global warming. Even though severe winters returned a few years ago once we began cooling. More on that momentarily.
But before heading out after Monday’s show I sat in a cube at Radio America and worked on a chapter, while someone for some reason had MSNBC on a cube over. Really loud.
That was an experience, my first with the new, openly loony MSNBC (I’ve far too little time to waste watching revved up versions of broadcast media I abandoned years ago, as I had been informed was the case and which proved to be an understatement). It had a certain comical quality to it, if heavy-handed and fevered amid the collapsing of their hopeychangey candidate and his signature issues, Scott Brown, Sarah Palin having just looked out to see her shadow and another six years of tormenting them, and now severe winter weather. (more…)
The most infuriating thing about our mainstream media is the utter ignorance of their so-called “journalists.” When little miss anchorwoman, Katie Couric, interviewed the president last Sunday on his sudden, desperate invitation to Republicans for ideas on healthcare reform, he told her this:
I want to look at the Republican ideas that are out there. And I want to be very specific. ‘How do you guys want to lower costs? How do you guys intend to reform the insurance markets so people with preexisting conditions, for example, can get health care?’
Ms. Couric was so ignorant of the past year-long healthcare debacle that she offered no challenge whatsoever to this latest whopper by President Obama. If she had known the issues — which is the job for which she is supposedly paid $14 million a year, or $300,000 per week — then she would have immediately challenged the president with the fact that very specific ideas from Republicans have been on the table – in writing – since early last summer.
Over and over again, the president and his “people” go unchallenged on every whopper they tell. Either our MSM is a bunch of ignorant boobs, or they are, once again, indulging their penchant for left-wing ideology. Whatever the case, their coverage of the president on his healthcare-reform shenanigans has been nothing short of disgraceful.
Doing the job, our MSM refuses to do – for whatever reason — here is the other half of the story on healthcare reform efforts: (more…)
Despite repeated, uxorious, absurdly one-sided endorsements from the liberal media, the February 4 vote on President Obama’s year-old nomination of “darling of the left” Dawn Johnsen to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) has mercifully been postponed. The OLC, whose main duty is to defend the president’s authority in wartime, also advises intelligence and counterterrorism agencies.
Johnsen endeared herself to Obama and his followers by fervently urging during the presidential campaign, at Slate, that we “restore our nation’s honor” by condemning the U.S.’s “past transgressions” and rejecting “Bush’s corruption of American ideals.”
This – in particular, Johnsen’s zealous stand against the Bush Administration’s counterterror policies on matters such as interrogation methods as well as against its alleged excessive secrecy – resonated powerfully with anti- anti-terror progressives.
Slate contributor Glenn Greenwald, for example, effusively hailed Johnsen’s call for national breast-beating and purification, praising her nomination as “Obama’s best yet, perhaps by far.” When the Democrats first began to lag in mustering the votes to approve the nomination, Greenwald took umbrage: (more…)
During his recent State of the Union speech, the President issued a call for civility in America. Forget the fact that he once made a joke about Special Olympics kids and his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel recently even called his fellow liberals “f-ing retards.” The President sounded good when he scolded America for its negative tone. Oh, he also attacked Las Vegas again:
You don’t go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage. You don’t go blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you’re trying to save for college.
As a long-time Las Vegan and a parent of a special-needs child, I sometimes wonder if the President of the United States of America is out to get me. I’m not the paranoid type, but I’m fitting all the profiles that he likes to attack. Thank God Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman gave the president what for over his most recent attack on my city:
He’s not our friend. I don’t know about Nevada, but Las Vegas, he’s sure not our friend. He has a real psychological hang-up about the entertainment capital of the world.
Everybody says I shouldn’t say it, but I’ve got to tell you the way it is. This president is a real slow learner. (more…)
Who had the line of the night? Was it Obama’s condemnation of the Supreme Court, Justice Samuel Alito mouthing of the words “that’s not true,” or was it this instant classic from MSNBC’s most gaffe-prone host?:
This time last year, two proud and powerful citizens of the world stood at the pinnacle of victory. Barack Obama was being inaugurated as President of the United States. Both on the campaign trail and in his inaugural address, Obama proclaimed the start of his “remaking America” revolution.
George Soros had finally managed to back, promote and land a winner. Their joint venture – Obama’s 2004 bid for the U.S. Senate — had paid off in the ultimate jackpot: the presidency.
Soros, the instigator and funder of various “velvet revolutions” in smaller countries, seemed convinced that all he needed to bring the U.S. into submission to a global government, stripped of her sovereignty, was a “citizen of the world” president to replace the all-American president, George W. Bush. Soros has openly referred to the “bubble of American supremacy” and has berated our lone-superpower position as bringing much more harm than good to the “global family.”
Soros explained his early support of Obama, telling Judy Woodruff in May 2008, “…Obama has the charisma and the vision to radically reorient America in the world.” When Woodruff queried Soros on whether it might be a concern that Obama lacked experience to lead in this dangerous time we live in, Soros responded, “…this emphasis on experience is way overdone…” (more…)
Bo here, the conservative dog in the White House. I’m in the Oval Office with Barry and the boys while they decide on a strategy for the State of the Union speech. They can’t make up their minds. Big surprise, huh?
It’s been quite a week here since the Massachusetts senate race, all of them whining and moaning like a litter of pitbulls finding out they’ve just been sold to Michael Vick. Barry, of course, has been hardest hit. A retiree in Pompano Beach, Florida, gets bit by a sand flea, and Barry is hardest hit.
Still, the Scott Brown victory was a genuine blow to the faithful. Barry thrives on self-delusion, so the team here firehoses him with flattery non-stop. The One. The Lightbringer. Captain Smooth. Except for Rahm, the only guy who can tell Barry the truth. The only one who actually enjoys telling Barry the truth. Teleprompter Jesus. President Fist Bump. Harry Reid’s Immaculate Negro. Barry doesn’t appreciate it, but Rahm doesn’t care. Anyway, Scott Brown’s election really shook the place up. I was there. I smelt the fear…
“Now what?” Barry kept saying as he flipped through the channels looking for good news. “Now what?”
On CNBC, Norah O’Donnell woodenly read the latest vote tallies, mascara running down her cheeks like Chuckie the killer klown. Keith Olbermann was in the background, loudly vomiting into a waste basket. (more…)
On my Twitter account, I follow a few hundred mainstream media-types (keep the enemy closer, right?), and unless I've missed it (and I hope I have), not a single one has spoken out in defense of Roland Martin. Not one. How scary is that. The politically correct Groupthink...
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