In the latest issue of the New Yorker, in a piece called “Intolerance,” Lawrence Wright compares me to the radical Danish imams who incited the Islamic world to riot over the cartoons of Muhammad that appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Ironic, isn’t it, when we are so tolerant of a fatal ideology, and worse, a subversive, dangerous media is shilling for our mortal enemy.

Wright reports that the Danish cartoons were published without incident. This is true. I posted about the cartoons at my website AtlasShrugs.com in October 2005, before the international riots over them began. But then he goes on to erroneously state that the extremist Danish imams to whom he compares me are the ones who ginned up the ummah. Not so. These imams did create false cartoons that were more inflammatory than the ones in Jyllands-Posten in order to give some heft to their incitement to murder, but it was the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a global international body, that initiated the cartoon jihad in December 2005.

And as for his equation of me with these imams, patriots and freedom lovers across the world have not set Muslim embassies on fire and slaughtered non-Muslims, as Muslims did when they rioted and rampaged through various countries. How dare Wright make such an ugly and false comparison. (more…)

Frank Rich’s column in the New York Times opinion section this weekend was at the very least two things: Lies and the rehashed work of another writer. But it was also a third thing and that third thing was cover for his buddy in the Oval office and for the hard-core left-wing agenda he’s trying to force down our throats. Rich lent that cover by desperately trying to discredit “the Tea Party “as a funded-from-the-top, sham of a movement. The truth is, though, that “the Tea Party” is not funded by shadowy, rich right-wingers. It isn’t funded at all in most cases.

First of all most of what Rich wrote was but rehashed words from Jane Mayer’s slam against the Koch Brothers of New York. Three quarters of what Rich penned really came from Mayer’s New Yorker piece on the philanthropists. So, big demerits for Frank Rich for simply appropriating Mayer’s piece.

But the real point of Rich’s piece was to pile onto Mayer’s slanted attack piece with some echoed slams against the Tea Party movement in order to discredit it all. The conspiracy-minded Rich is desperate to make the movement seem like a marionette show with rich “sugar daddies” funding it and controlling it from the top. (more…)

Rebecca Mead on Breitbart’s “Empire of Bluster.” Read the whole thing and make up your own mind. An excerpt:

Conflict also has the useful function of driving traffic to his sites. Breitbart.com is currently looked at by an average of 2.4 million people a month, according to Quantcast.com.

Breitbart considers himself an accidental cultural warrior. “I am not as partisan as people think I am,” he told me, calling himself eighty-five per cent conservative and fifteen per cent libertarian. His conservatism fails him on issues such as the legalization of prostitution, and he sometimes tilts toward favoring gay marriage. “But, when the entire media is structured to attack conservatives and Republicans, there is a huge business model to come in and counterbalance that,” he said.

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The MSM is usually quick to tut-tut about the sexual peccadilloes of public figures, especially if they’re conservatives or Republicans — Mark Foley, whoever you are or were, come on down!  But when the frisky Lothario turns out to be a Democrat, they’ll either defend him to til the last dog dies (Bill Clinton, take a bow!) or just ignore the story altogether (smile for the cameras, John Edwards).

Occasionally they get into a little hot water in the love department themselves.  Never mind for a moment the vast interlocking network of media biggies sleeping with their sources — say hello, Bianna Golodryga, currently the fiancee of Obama Administration budget director Peter Orszag, who’s just been tapped to co-host the weekend edition of ABC’s Good Morning America — we’ll get to them another time.  But it does seem that the late Abe Rosenthal’s “elephants” rule has long since passed into history, along with Abe himself.

Now comes CNN legal analyst and New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin, who years ago wrote a notable book on the O.J. Simpson case and hasn’t done much of anything since, except, well,  this.  From the New York Daily News:

Baby drama! CNN star Jeffrey Toobin offered Casey Greenfield money for abortion: sources

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According to the current edition of the New Yorker, magazine, Beverly Hills billionaire Haim Saban donated $7 million to the Democratic National Committee for its new headquarters shortly after former president Bill Clinton personally lobbied the president of Brazil to approve a private business deal that netted Saban $1.5 billion in capital gains.

Describing the 2001 sale of Saban’s Fox Family network to Disney, which brought the Egyptian-born Saban — a dual citizen of Israel and the U.S. — $5.3 billion, author Connie Bruck writes:

Because Disney and Fox Family operated internationally, the deal required regulatory approvals from many countries. “Brazil could have been a deal-breaker,” Chernin recalled. In a confidential memorandum written on October 1st, Fox Family’s attorneys in Brazil explained that the deal would have to be reviewed successively by three government bodies; from past experience, the attorneys estimated that the process would take between six and eight months, which would push the deal past the deadline, at the end of October. Disney refused to close without Brazilian approval. Both sides retained counsel for the anticipated litigation.

“Haim said, ‘Let me make a phone call—maybe I can get something done here,’ ” Chernin told me. “He was extremely helpful in getting Clinton to help. Clinton called the President of Brazil.” Matt Krane [Saban's former laywer and tax adviser] recalled how Saban described to him what had happened: “Saban had called the Fox Family attorney in Brazil and asked, ‘How long will it take?’ It was months. He said he asked the lawyer, ‘Who is your finance minister?’ The attorney understood, and he said, ‘There is no political pull available in this process.’ Saban called Bill Clinton and asked, ‘Can you help me?’ ” Soon afterward, the approval came through.

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Sure, it’s a silly question.  Still, it’s nice to see the lapdogs of the Democrat-Media Complex finally ‘fess up to an act of malfeasant journalistic cheerleading on a scale never before seen in this country.  From Newsbusters:

Two prominent journalists appeared on Friday’s Good Morning America and casually admitted that Barack Obama has received glowing coverage from the press. Former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor Tina Brown announced, “No, [Obama] got the best press known to man. Let’s face it.”

Howard Kurtz, host of Reliable Sources on CNN and a Washington Post columnist, corrected, “in the history of civilization.” The liberal Brown quickly agreed, “In the history of civilization, incredible.”

Well?  Did he?

Not so long ago, writers, editors, concerned world citizens and deep thinkers of all kinds were consumed with the idea of a coming global catastrophe that seemed implacable and virtually unavoidable. When it comes to covering today’s debates on global warming, we might want to take a step back and recall this earlier, somewhat chillier 1980s obsession with the fate of the earth – that is, of course, The Fate of the Earth, the title of a three-part series by Jonathan Schell first published in The New Yorker, then republished as a popular book by Alfred A. Knopf in 1982.

Jonathan Schell

This influential series was all about the unstoppable, world-ending consequences of nations (especially the United States) clinging to their nuclear weapons. The fate of the earth, according to Schell, was to be nuclear annihilation, human extinction, the end of all life. Game over. You’re dead. We’re all dead. Your children are dead. Your dog’s dead. Your children’s children won’t exist. Finito.  It was a very popular idea at the time, much discussed at cocktail parties, sidewalk reefer breaks, and editorial meetings. Schell had caught the ear of the culture.

(To judge by this piece in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times by Schell’s older brother, Orville, pessimism seems to run in the family.) (more…)