When news broke that ABC would air the first “live interview” with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld since 2006, I determined to tune in. The host was George Stephanopoulos, the setting was Good Morning America (GMA), and the topic was Rumsfeld’s recently released memoir, Known and Unknown.

On paper, everything seemed harmless: the Navy Captain and political figure who embarked on his career in public service while Dwight Eisenhower was president, became a Congressman in his own right, held the post of Secretary of Defense in both the Ford and George W. Bush administrations, and served in various capacities for Nixon and Reagan, was going to sit down and talk about what he’d experienced through decades of service to the nation he loved.

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Every now and then, strange things happen over at MSNBC…

David Corn’s not used to be on the receiving end of the famous Matthews mouth. Expect stranger things to come as we approach the fateful date of Nov. 2.

Oh, the hypocrisy, the hypocrisy.

In an interview with Jorge Ramos, Univision’s anchorman, California congresswoman Loretta Sanchez, who replaced the great “B-1 Bob” Dornan, discusses the tough November election she faces.

Incredibly, Ms. Sanchez gets her full-blown xenophobe on as she airs her concerns.

At the 2:20 mark she states (and kudos to this blogger for doing the original translation as the interview is in Spanish):

“ … the Vietnamese and the Republicans are — with an intensity — trying to take away this seat, this seat that we [Democrats] have done so much for our community, take away this seat from us and give it to this Van Tran, who’s very anti-immigrant and very anti-Latino.” (more…)

As the November mid-term elections draw near, race arsonists’ political distractions are seen in full action.  Facing defeat at the polls, the Left is desperately resorting to its only remaining trick.

With different styles and brands of utopian-driven influence — from the dependent welfare state of the American Democratic party, the socialism of Marxist/Leninists’ Workers’ Paradise, the Open Society of Soros’ idol Karl Popper, or any of the current collective salvations of social justice — examining the tactics as they occur is an enlightening exercise.

On Sunday’s This Week, President Obama’s defacto spokesman, V.P. Joe Biden, was sent to poison the well. Host Jake Tapper asked, “The NAACP had a convention in the last week, and they passed a resolution saying that elements of the Tea Party are racist. Do you think elements of the Tea Party are racist?”

The presidential reply is as follows:

Well, the truth is that at least elements that were involved in some of the Tea Party folks expressed racist views, you saw that on television. But, I don’t think — I don’t — I wouldn’t characterize the Tea Party as racist.

There are individuals who are either members of or on the periphery of some of their things, their — their protests — that have expressed really unfortunate comments. And, again, it was all over TV, all over your network, you know? A black Congressman walking up the stairs of the Capitol.

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*** 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…)

This is how low “profiles in courage” in Massachusetts’s U.S. Senate representation has fallen, and how bad the media-leftist complex has gotten. Today’s Washington Post carries an homage by columnist E.J. Dionne to Sen. John Kerry’s “passion” to push an “energy bill.”

The absurd, offending sentence is “Which brings us back to Kerry, who in a talk with me made no apologies for his eagerness to get an energy bill.” Well. Yes. He’s eager to tell you how his cap-and-trade global warming bill is an energy bill, rebranding it after pollster Stanley Greenberg instructed Democrats that “cap-and-trade” and “global warming” weren’t selling, and they had to rebrand it as “energy”.

Which calls into question the breathtaking courage, passion, etc. This is Kerry’s second cap-and-trade global warming bill just this Congress. After the first floundered, he came out muttering about how mean it is to describe the bill as cap-and-trade — the central component of both is cap-and-trade, of course — on the grounds that “I don’t know what cap-and-trade means” (he said that, incidentally, just after the Greenberg memo urging such abandonment). (more…)

Brunei, Afghanistan, Nepal, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam
Published: 08 June 2010

A Gurkha Idea

Among the more interesting coalition forces fighting in Afghanistan are the legendary Nepalese Gurkhas. Trained and fielded by the British, as they have been since colonial days, Gurkhas are a fascinating admixture: today, they are elite soldiers used to traveling the world. But many of them grew up barefoot and poor in remote and primitive mountain villages in the high Himalayas—places that closely resemble parts of Afghanistan, geographically and culturally. Forefathers of some of today’s Ghurkas fought in the Afghan region during earlier wars. Gurkhas understand impoverished life in a harsh environment, though Nepal has enjoyed material progress in recent decades that is mostly unrealized in Afghanistan. Unlike forces from Europe or America, who often regard Afghanistan as an outpost of 13th Century life, Gurkhas can provide a link between primitive Afghan standards of development, and the possibilities for progress, with insights and connections that might elude most Westerners. (more…)

The best war journalist of our time has been kicked out of Afghanistan and the media could not care less.

Let the administration boot Helen Thomas out of her seat in the front of a White House press conference and there would be outrage.  Remove Jonathan Karl from the Capitol and media would revolt. Kick Andrea Kremer off Sunday Night Football and there would be pandemonium.

And yet nobody in the media seems to have much of a problem with Michael Yon being removed from the front lines by Obama/General McChrystal. Yon has openly stated the problems in Afghanistan right now and how we could lose this war, unless changes are made. He has been critical of the current rules of engagement that have put our troops in danger and could actually make this war like the Vietnam that the leftist media claimed it was early and often when Bush was president (it’s strange you don’t hear those comparisons from them anymore). (more…)

Sometimes you just can’t believe your eyes. Read this sentence from today’s Politics Nation (“Blumenthal Camp: Vietnam Issue Behind Us”) and then ask yourself if you or the “ Democratic strategist” is the crazy one:

“This [how Richard Blumenthal handled his Vietnam whopper-gate crisis] ended up being a textbook case in crisis management,” said a Democratic strategist who was involved in the effort.

Of course, the strategist gets the Blumenthal Badge of Bravery for having the courage to withhold his name. Gutsy. But what about that “textbook case of crisis management?” What does a textbook case consist of exactly?

Well, first you trot out the human shields at your press conference, in this case a passel of the very veterans you’ve offended by that harmless, oft-told tall-tale about your combat days in Nam. Next, you work in the “take full responsibility” line. That’s merely apology code for “Hey, I’m holding this embarrassing press conference—that’s responsibility enough. Now will you all just leave me alone?” Third, you never really say you’re sorry—because that would be an admission of guilt, and guilt is campaign kryptonite. (more…)

Did we just hear Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal try to blame local journalists for his ‘misspoken’ words about his Vietnam war record? When Blumenthal was asked at Tuesday’s press conference why he didn’t correct published accounts of his Vietnam service, he said:

There were a few articles, not many. I am responsible for my own statements….I can’t be responsible for all the articles, I may not even have seen them. ….sometimes journalists do make mistakes.

Cr: Chion Wolf

Really?  Sure, journalists get quotes and background wrong from time to time but civil servants, who are in the public eye like Blumenthal, often call right away to demand a correction. In fact, that’s just what our A.G.’s press staff usually did with me – even when I wrote the quotes exactlyas he said them during phone interviews. Case in point: (more…)

The question has been asked here before but it bears repeating. Where were the Connecticut media for 20-some years while the state’s attorney general asserted repeatedly (and falsely) that he had served in Vietnam? Why did it take an out-of-state newspaper to expose the reality that Dick Blumenthal had only served stateside in the Marine Corps Reserves after several draft deferments?

Blumenthal has enjoyed some of the most adulatory press of any public official in the state. And he is assiduous in seeking coverage. It has been said before that, unless Chuck Schumer is visiting, the most dangerous piece of real estate in Connecticut is that little space between Blumenthal and a TV camera.

Inasmuch as he’s always been acutely aware of his public image, how could such a man stand idly by while media outlets printed flattering information about him that he knew was inaccurate? How could he, in his own words at yesterday’s press conference, “misspeak” about his service “on a few occasions” and the news media let him get away with it? Most of those “occasions,” by the way, were gatherings of veterans’ groups. (more…)

Don’t you wish all politicians on our side were like this guy?

Sure to make the weenie Left feel “threatened.”

Makes you want to shout, “Sir, yes sir!”

Connecticut attorney general Dick Blumenthal, running for “Tammany” Chris Dodd’s U.S. Senate seat, wants you to know he’s proud of his service in the United States Marine Corps. Who said he wasn’t? Note also the disgraceful use of veterans as human shields.

WARNING: Classic liberal weaseling and “misspeaking” ahead.

By the way, despite his statements to the contrary, he did not serve in Vietnam.

What else has he been lying about?

Hard to know what to make of this piece by Eliott C. McLaughlin — except, of course, that it pretty much sums up the state of journalistic thinking in the MSM these days, which includes a reflexive disdain for constitutional principles it disagrees with while trying to be “fair and balanced.”

Experts: Angry rhetoric protected, but can be disturbing

Here’s how it begins:

Letting disgruntled citizens vent is important to national security, experts say, but some messages emanating from angry Americans in recent weeks have pressed the boundaries of free speech.

Important to national security?  Free speech is important for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that, since John Milton’s Areopagitica essay, it has been the basis of all the liberties of modern democracy. And what, exactly, are the “boundaries of free speech” in a society whose Constitution states, in the First Amendment, that “Congress shall make no law.. abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”

Politicians have reported slurs as well as threatening letters and phone calls. Congressmen have reported vandalism to their offices. One said he was spit on. Another said his brother’s gas line was cut after a Tea Party member posted his address online.

Tea Party leaders denounce the threats and deny involvement, pointing to fringe elements — not Tea Party members, per se, but groups with degrees of overlapping ideologies.

But the angry rhetoric is not isolated to fringe groups. Both mainstream liberal and conservative camps have joined the chorus, and while some of the language sounds threatening, most of it is protected.

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One must at least credit NBC’s Chuck Todd with one virtue.  He is utterly transparent.

When real “journalist” Todd – Chief White House Correspondent for NBC News and the co-hose of The Daily Rundown — gave this impish put down of what he calls, “Drudge-Driven Journalism,” his resentment, fear and school-boy petulance could not have been clearer to any sentient observer.

Such a pity, really.  A grown man reduced to whining in front of the White House makes his viewers so embarrassed for him that it’s painful to watch.  He should have saved all that peevish poppycock for Al Gore, the inventor of the internet.  For, in reality, the saving grace of journalism today – the only thing that gives these leftist buffoons in the MSM even a tiny shred of credibility – is the internet’s check and balance on their politically driven narratives.

Their animus is usually aimed at the Drudge Report because of the number of hits.  It’s Drudge’s numbers that drive the most powerful wedge between these MSM indoctrinated monkeys parading as journalists and their monopoly on the “truth.”  And all it takes is a single flashback to know why all the hacks associated with the once-august MSM fear “Drudge-Driven Journalism” – down to their quaking toes in their manure-muddied Gucci’s.

Flashback:  Dan Rather, 60 Minutes Wednesday, September 8, 2004. (more…)

On Tuesday, March 23, a symposium will convene in Laurel, Maryland on “Climate Change and Energy Imperatives for Future Naval Forces.”  Sponsored by Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory and the US Navy, it will include roundtable discussions on a variety of topics to include: potential effects of global climate change, temperature increases, and reduction of sea ice, melting glaciers, desertification, deforestation, water and fuel shortages, rising sea levels, and forced population migrations.  Alarming topics all, events that, should they happen, are the stuff of nightmares, of an environmental apocalypse, even the end of humankind.

They are also the boilerplate propaganda of anthropogenic global warming fanatics that have been so humiliated by exposés of their contrived science, they are frantically trying to stem the tide of public outrage, so much of their evidence has been debunked.  Manipulations of research data to support warming fabrications have been too systemic for their claims to be taken seriously any longer.  As the nation endures mammoth snowstorms and low temperatures, and as record low temperatures are being set across the globe, one wonders if it will take glaciers on Al Gore’s front lawn for them to see the fallacies of their ideology-driven “science.”

True to form, the media is publishing articles claiming the warming is causing the cold.  “Global warming” has morphed to “climate change.”  Their outrageous journalistic acrobatics would be hilarious were they not so pitiful.  Time Magazine has a doozy entitled: “Snowstorm: East Coast Blizzard Tied to Climate Change” and apparently the citizen rabble are not buying it.  One need only read the comments to this article on line to see what the peasants in fly-over-country think of press delusions. (more…)