Happy Halloween!
And no, sadly, that's not my Darth, err dog.
(Time permitting, watch for additional posts tonight underneath this one.)
Will Kerry's gaffe hurt him in 2008? And over at the temporarily reborn Kerry Spot, Jim Geraghty wonders how it impacts the competition on the other side of the aisle in the Senate:
But if this Kerry thing dominates the last week of the campaign, a big reason is going to because the Media's Favorite Republican refused to provide cover to Kerry. Instead, as Byron reports, he's body-slamming Kerry. Hard.When Maximum Pajamahadeen Roger L. Simon last appeared on the "Blog Week In Review" podcast, he quipped that the 2008 presidential election begins the day after the midterms. In actuality, Kerry's blunder and McCain's response may signal the start of it right now.If 2006 turns out to be a not-that-bad year for Republicans, and this story is credited with being a crucial late factor, then McCain - who already has a lot of Republicans owing him favors for helping them out on the campaign trail - is probably going to get a lot more conservatives saying, "You know, McCain might not be such a bad party man after all..."
Update: More 2008 impact: John J. Miller writes, "This year's campaign already has dashed the presidential hopes of George Allen. I suspect that he won't even run". Actually, if he wins next week, I think he still might run, but he'll probably be too damaged to win the nomination. But who knows? Nobody suspected that Kerry would be the last man standing in his party's presidential race, during the Dean-obsessed fall of 2003.
Mark Steyn once called Mickey Kaus "the thinking conservative's thinking liberal", and I'd nominate Tammy Bruce and Nat Hentoff to that list as well. They both have some thoughts on the current poor state of the ACLU, which John Stephenson would probably agree with.
Update: While this post is primarily about Hugh Hewitt's three hour interview with ABC's Mark Halperin, it dovetails remarkably well with the Hentoff and Tammy's thoughts above.
Handing a nice midterm bon-bon to the GOP, John Kerry steps in it. But then, he's an old hand at this stuff.
Over the weekend, I noted that Lynne Cheney and Bill O'Reilly each asked their interviewer the question; Kerry's major gaffe allows every Republican up for reelection a chance to ask it of the person he's running against.
Update: Charlie Rangel also lost it recently, but then that's nothing new, either.
Meanwhile, Dean Barnett puts all the pieces together:
Democrats must be cursing that damn Karl Rove. How does he do it? From where in the black depths of his soul did he conjure the idea of putting a microphone in front of John Kerry’s mouth during the last week of a campaign season? We all know the truth now, and it is incontrovertible: Karl Rove is one magnificent bastard!In a more serious mode, Dean adds:
John Kerry thinks his service in Vietnam four decades ago means his every comment and action should be beyond reproach. It doesn’t work like that. Ask Duke Cunningham.He's also still counting on the 1972-era media to cover for his gaffes. It doesn't work like that these days, either.
Update: Not surprisingly, retired Col. Austin Bay, whose weekly podcast I produce, isn't very happy with Kerry's remarks; read the whole thing.
Blogcritics has undergone a dramatic facelift. Click here for the new look; click here to peruse my occasional contributions to the site, which date back to its humble start back in 2002--a millennia in Blogosphere time!
I have an election preview with Jonah Goldberg, the editor-at-large of National Review Online, and Steve Hayward, the author of The Age of Reagan, over at TCS Daily.
(Only a handful of Klingons and Cylons were harmed in the making of this podcast.)
Fans of the original 1968 version of The Producers will remember Dick Shawn's classic turn as Lorenzo St. DuBois--"But my friends call me L.S.D.!" I can understand why Stanley Kubrick tossed this audition tape into the trash when he was prepping Full Metal Jacket...
... But man, if I was redoing The Producers, this is the man to do L.S.D.!
My TCS Daily piece on Hollywood's implosion was excerpted in the Washington Times' "Culture Briefs" section today.
And from the omega to the alpha: the electronic hobbyist magazine Nuts & Volts is running a "Tribute to the Tube" this month, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of the vacuum tube. As part of that, they asked me to write a profile of David Sarnoff, the man who launched commercial radio in the 1920s, before starting a television network of the same name a couple of decades later, called NBC. The article isn't online, but you can find it at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble.
Wolf Blitzer gets the same blackface treatment that Michael Steele and Joe Lieberman have already been tarred with. As Allah writes, "Not for any particular reason. It was just his turn":
I guess they’re speaking racism to power now.Once you've set the bar for ideological purity high enough that even Bruce Jenner couldn't pole vault over it (or Joe Lieberman, and Wolf Blitzer, to bring this rather strained analogy back on target), there will always be apostates to be punished.It’ll happen again. What’s interesting is how the betrayed allegiances at which they direct this delightful little metaphor seem to grow broader each time they use it. Gilliard mocked Steele for betraying black liberal Democrats; Hamsher mocked Lieberman for betraying liberal Democrats; Billmon mocks Blitzer, as near as I can tell, for betraying liberals. You could do a Venn diagram of their logic here. But at this point, who’s left?
I don’t know, maybe it won’t happen again. Maybe they’ve simply run out of apostates.
I agree with so much of what Judith Weiss of Kesher Talk has written in her post about an article in yesterday's New York Times titled, "The Elephant In The Room", that I'd end up quoting the entire piece. Instead, just click over, and read the whole thing.
Update: In a somewhat related post, Glenn Reynolds describes what happens when the concepts Judith discusses get ramped up to 11. Or maybe 111.
This article in the Denver Post (H/T: OJ) sounds much like the piece I wrote for TCS Daily last week, except that the screen size is quite a bit smaller. But, then, just like the movie industry, so is the content, these days:
They're not firing, they're "rightsizing." They're not cost-cutting, they're inventing fabulous user-generated programming.At least until Hollywood says, "You f***ed up--you trusted us", as Universal's lawyers recently said to viral fans of the cult series-turned-cult movie, Firefly.In the euphemistic world of network TV, executives make cutbacks sound like boldly progressive new ventures. The fact is, nobody knows whether today's cutback will yield tomorrow's creative, fantastically successful breakthrough program.
Last week NBC slashed jobs and put an end to expensive early-evening dramas, alerting viewers that, in the future, we should expect "Deal or No Deal" rather than "Friday Night Lights" in the 7 p.m. time slot. Cheaper to produce and more reliable in the ratings, quiz shows are one economical answer to NBC's current woes.
Wait - it gets cheaper.
The networks are launching do-it-yourself video sites, inviting amateur filmmakers to contribute content. They hail these new ventures as the wave of the techno-future.
Fox's "On the Lot," due early next year from Mark Burnett and Steven Spielberg (online at thelot.com), offers would-be filmmakers the chance to work with the master. NBC-bound "It's Your Show," backed by Carson Daly (itsyourshowtv.com), offers cash prizes for the best homemade videos.
CBS is inviting user submissions to its "channel" on YouTube, hoping that partnership will strike gold. Eventually this may go beyond audition tapes for the next "Amazing Race."
Late-night host Daly recently talked about his online experiment, which eventually will be reshaped into a primetime show for NBC. Cashing in on the popularity of YouTube, Daly's "It's Your Show" is the viral video equivalent of "America's Funniest Home Videos," intended to entice amateur videomakers. Complete with a helpful production tool kit, it picks up where lonelygirl15 and lip-synching videos leave off.
"It's a sharing portal, but it does come with some structure," Daly said on a telephone conference call. The network provides a laugh track, for instance, sound effects, cartoon footage, music and a production framework. The tool kit can be applied to whatever mini-masterpiece contributors choose -from "Operation Grandma," where contenders teach a senior how to use new technology, to faux magic tricks pulled off with video editing.
Most appealing to the NBC brass is the fact that the content is practically free (not counting the weekly $1,000 award and a $100,000 challenge), because it's user-generated. The most expensive part of the whole enterprise must be the lawyers' fees for vetting copyright and clearance issues.
Fox's outlay is steeper: The winner gets a $1 million development deal at DreamWorks. Sixteen contestants will be split into teams and given resources to produce a short film. Each week they'll focus on a different genre (comedy, drama, romance, sci-fi) with a studio executive and a film critic among the judges, "American Idol"- style. The result could be a TV show rather than a movie, in which case 20th Century Fox TV has the rights.
Daly's gig is more modest. "The content will define the nature of the TV show," he said. Judging by the submissions online, that means a range from dumb to dumber.
The most popular challenge Daly's site has offered so far is called, "We shut up and you show us how it's done." Industry experts are convinced that air of turning over control to users is crucial. If you believe the hype, entertainment won't flow from a top-down hierarchy anymore; in the future, it will be up for grabs. Let a thousand stu- pid-pet-tricks bloom.
Just wait until audiences figure out that it takes more than a cellphone and a cute idea to create entertainment that can be sustained beyond two minutes.
Previously in this vein, NBC staged a contest for promotional spots for "The Office." The results were "genius," Daly said. In the same way, "It's Your Show" pushes tie-ins to various NBC Universal properties, to keep the corporate business in the forefront.
"Soon everybody's going to be videomaking," Daly predicted. He thinks viral video production will be a teenage rite of passage, like driving a car.
But then that's far from the first time that the software producers in Southern California have been at war with the products created via the hardware and software producers in Northern California, of course.
Tim Blair wonders where have all the boaters gone, long time passing:
“This,” reports the Sydney Morning Herald, “is a picture of Sydney’s future. Rising sea levels will submerge or threaten billions of dollars worth of property, both public and private, by 2100.” Take a look at the Spit Bridge now, and as the SMH imagines it may appear following 94 years of global warming:Something tells me Tim's readers will have plenty of them. In the meantime, this is further proof that Fire Make Sea Gods Angry!Where have all the boats gone? Isn’t it a quality of boats that they float, thereby making them invulnerable to rising sea levels? Is a rise of less than one metre, upon which the SMH’s projection is based, somehow capable of submerging all those sea craft? Did the owners of these vessels set sail for higher ground? Are yachts banned under our future Islamic government? We need answers!
Apparently, as long as the nightly burning of Citroens and Peugeots by local "youths" remains at 200 cars or less, and only one woman receives burns covering 60 percent of her body when the bus she's traveling in is torched by a Molotov cocktail, France can be said to be “relatively calm"--at least by her interior minister. And the AP reporter who takes it all down blindly to write an article bursting with cognitive dissonance.
But then, so is France itself.
In a recent post, Tammy Bruce (whose radio show I visited on Friday) wrote, "If you're ever at a loss wondering what the Left has in store for the Western world, just look to our cousins across the pond". She was referring to England, but as long as French bureaucrats look at 100 to 200 cars a night going up in flames as the definition of “relatively calm", it's applicable there as well.
The dead have arisen--and they're still not voting Republican! (Sorry Bart.)
Maybe Harold Ford can chart the eschatological implications of this development...
Update: Or maybe we could ask Joel Stein of The L.A. Times for his take.
Two, two, two great pundits in one: Mark Steyn reprints a 2002 essay which elaborates on Mickey Kaus's thoughts on the relationship between welfare and terrorism:
The rise of the anti-immigrant parties in France, Belgium, et al. is supposedly due to crime. It's true there seems to be a lot of it over there. You're six times more likely to be mugged in London than in New York. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea has a worse crime rate than Harlem. In the Los Angeles Times, Sebastian Rotella was perplexed: 'As crime has dropped in the United States in recent years, it has worsened in much of Europe, despite generous welfare states designed to prevent US-style inequality and social conflict.'Read the rest.'Despite'? Try 'because of'. In December in this space, I lent my support to Mickey Kaus, the thinking conservative's thinking liberal, who advanced the theory that welfare causes terrorism. Among the examples I cited was Zacarias Moussaoui, the socalled '20th hijacker', who became an Islamofascist nutter while living on welfare in London. What else is there to do all day? Go down the pub? Lie on the floor listening to Capital FM? If you're putting in a ten-hour grease-monkey shift at Fat Dave's Auto Body, you're too wiped out to wipe America out. But in the fetid public housing of London, Paris, Frankfurt and Rotterdam the government will pay you to sit around the flat all day plotting world domination.
It's a scheme worthy of a Bond villain:flood high-unemployment Europe with unassimilated low-skilled young men, whom the state is obliged to put on welfare just to keep them from rioting, and hey presto, your enemies will be funding their own downfall - ON HER MAJESTY'S SOCIAL SERVICE. Say what you like about that so-called 'American Taleban', John Yoko Ashram Fonda Country Joe and the Fish Walker Lindh, but at least his loopy Marin County parents put him through terrorist training school on their own nickel and not at the taxpayers' expense. At the moment, alongside the ranks of Europe's terrorist welfare queens, Jihad Johnny has the distinction of being the West's only private-sector Islamabaddy.
It's gradually beginning to dawn on US Europhiles that the Continent has done everything the American Left has wanted for years and it doesn't seem to be working out.
Lynne Cheney and Bill O'Reilly each ask their inquisitors (oh wait, that's Hugh Hewitt, never mind), err, their interviewers the same basic question: do you want us to win in Iraq? And that's a question that should be asked of every pundit. As much as Rush and other talk radio hosts beat up President Clinton for his seemingly annual foreign policy excursions (Somalia and Iraq, which he inherited, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, et al), I don't recall ever hearing Limbaugh say that he didn't want America to win these conflicts. Contrast that with Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan's more infamous utterances, or Keith Olbermann's.
Letterman apparently waffled when O'Reilly asked him; Wolf Blitzer responded thusly to Lynne Cheney:
The answer, of course, is we want the United States to win. We are Americans. There’s no doubt about that. You think we want terrorists to win?Good thing Ted Turner and Eason Jordan are no longer running CNN, or Wolf would be in hot water over every sentence in that short statement.
Incidentally, Wolf might run it by CNN's senior editor for Arab affairs, and see if she agrees with him.
In her latest op-ed, Peggy Noonan writes:
In the Republican base, that huge and amorphous thing, judgments are less tough, more forgiving. But there too things have changed.He didn't? Maybe I'm not following the point that the nearly always astute Noonan is trying to make, but wasn't Compassionate Conservative pretty loudly discussed and debated during the 2000 election--and beyond?There remains a broad, reflexive, and very Republican kind of loyalty to George Bush. He is a war president with troops in the field. You can see his heart. He led us in a very human way through 9/11, from the early missteps to the later surefootedness. He was literally surefooted on the rubble that day he threw his arm around the retired fireman and said the people who did this will hear from all of us soon.
Images like that fix themselves in the heart. They're why Mr. Bush's popularity is at 38%. Without them it wouldn't be so high.
But there's unease in the base too, again for many reasons. One is that it's clear now to everyone in the Republican Party that Mr. Bush has changed the modern governing definition of "conservative."
He did this without asking. He did it even without explaining. He didn't go to the people whose loyalty and support raised him high and say, "This is what I'm doing, this is why I'm changing things, here's my thinking, here are the implications."
Pontius Pilate: the original postmodernist. Great catch by Mark Judge, found via Instapundit.
This Michael Lewis profile of Bill Parcells is a throwback to the good old days of the New Journalism--it's the sort of detailed, live with the subject seven days a week meaty profile that Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe regularly cranked out in their heyday. And it's proof that the New York Times and its writers are still capable of doing good work during those increasingly rare instances when they don't have an ideological axe to grind.
Ian Schwartz on the Dixie Chicks:
They insult their audience, insult the President, blame Free Republic, and still wonder why people don’t like them. Emily Robison chimed in and blamed–*gasp*–corporate America for ordering local music stations to stop playing their music. When will these dolts understand that they caused their own downfall? Not Christian “fundamentalist” Christians, not Free Republic, not corporate America.So they want to consider themselves "transgressive", and attack the same targets that everyone else in Hollywood and the rest of show biz have attacked since Calvin Coolidge was president, and yet whine when they face a backlash?
This is an interesting new trend though: when entertainers were attacking President Reagan back in the 1980s, I don't remember them slagging their audiences as well. Maybe because it's not exactly the best way to build sympathy for your cause. And maybe because audiences didn't have the tools to fight back then.
Just ask Mary Mapes.
Update: Mary Katharine Ham adds, "They're so oppressed that they're getting segments on primetime cable news shows! Man, it's rough being silenced".
Heh, indeedTM.
Hey, no fair stealing my shtick! But still, he's got a point:
EMI Music Chairman and Chief Executive Alain Levy Friday told an audience at the London Business School that the CD is dead, saying music companies will no longer be able to sell CDs without offering "value-added" material.Actually, let's flip that around: how 'bout packaging some content with your additional material? There's a reason why awards shows such as the Grammys are perrenial ratings losers."The CD as it is right now is dead," Levy said, adding that 60% of consumers put CDs into home computers in order to transfer material to digital music players.
EMI Music is part of EMI Group PLC (EMI.LN).
But there remains a place for physical media, Levy said.
"You're not going to offer your mother-in-law iTunes downloads for Christmas," he said. "But we have to be much more innovative in the way we sell physical content."
Record companies will need to make CDs more attractive to the consumer, he said.
"By the beginning of next year, none of our content will come without any additional material," Levy said.
Cathy Seipp has some ideas on how to resuscitate the moribund L.A. Times, none of which will be listened to, of course, guaranteeing its fish-wrapping status for years to come:
A TV writer and former magazine editor I know, for instance, once told me he cancelled his L.A. Times subscription to get USA Today instead, which really seems pretty crazy. He added that he just wants the following three questions answered when he reads his morning paper: 1) How are the Dodgers doing? 2) Rain today? 3) What’s on TV?If you're an editor who can't grasp that fact, it's time to come out of the cocoon.“Those are the only three answers I want from American journalism,” he noted. “USA Today is perfect.”
Another complaint I’ve heard about my favorite paper is that it’s a mere tabloid compared to the Gray Lady. A few days after the 2003 recall election, for instance, even some insiders complained (off-record, of course) that with its investigation into the Arnold Schwarzenegger groping stories, the paper had become a dirt-digging tabloid.
But actually, I’d say L.A. could use a real tabloid, like the honestly biased New York Post, especially during free-for-all media events like the recall. Stories would run sooner, and with snappier headlines. During the recall, for instance, Times headlines often managed to be both typically dull and remarkably condescending, what with their habit of regularly referring to Schwarzenegger as “Actor” — “Actor Names Economic Team,” “Actor’s Team Sprints…,” and (my favorite) “Davis, Actor Go Head to Head.” That the stories themselves dug up dirt wasn’t the problem.
Then there’s the constant hand-wringing about mainstream media objectivity, which always strikes me as beside the point as well as impossible. A few years ago, for a story on blogging, I interviewed Washington Post associate editor and senior correspondent Robert Kaiser, co-author of a ponderous book about the media called The News About the News.
“I read things I think I should know, not other people’s opinions about what I should know,” Kaiser harrumphed, explaining why he doesn’t read blogs. But every single thing we read in the paper, including hard news, is the product of other people’s opinions about what we should know. Problems happen when those in charge believe in their own objectivity so much that they no longer know even that one simple fact.
Update: Related thoughts, here.
Well, now that I have your attention, the latest Pajamas "Blog Week In Review" podcast discusses Kinky Friedman, and other third party Texas gubernatorial candidates, along with Joe Lieberman's third party run in Connecticut.
By now, you've probably seen this clip of Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney winning the battle of the soundbite with an absolute windbag of a reporter. If not, click on the YouTube window to watch:
Romney's being touted as a presidential candidate in 2008--and who knows who will still be standing by the time the Republican National Convention rolls around that summer. But Mitt's certainly taking a chip off the block of another former governor who ran for the White House in 2000...
Newsbusters has some thoughts on Howard Kurtz's profile of NBC Baghdad correspondent Richard Engel in the Washington Post:
First, NBC anchor Brian Williams claimed Engel "is the most agenda-less person I've met in our business." Then Engel declared "I think war should be illegal...I'm basically a pacifist." The story included no critics of Engel's reporting, but praise from Williams and CBS colleague Lara Logan, and Engel's mother.Remember when reporters weren't tripping over themselves to tell you their biases?Williams asserted that Engel's reporting was fearless against annoying media critics: "In an era of instant media criticism, he calls balls and strikes in the middle of a war zone," says NBC anchor Brian Williams. "He is completely unbothered by any Web site that may have problems with his reporting while he's over in Iraq dodging bullets....He is the most agenda-less person I've met in our business, I think, in the past 20 years."
Does it sound a little like Williams is saying Internet media critics should shut up and go fight in Iraq before they can have an authoritative opinion? It's certainly easy for Engel to seem unbothered by critics in a Post story that never asks a media critic of any stripe for an opinion. Here's the context for Engel's declaration of pacifism:
Why does he stay? When NBC made Engel its Middle East bureau chief over the summer, he agreed to a new contract and moved to the relative calm of Beirut. Days later he found himself covering a fierce war between Israel and Hezbollah -- and was suddenly reenergized. This, for better or worse, is what he does. Not that Engel necessarily approves of military conflict."I think war should be illegal," he says. "I'm basically a pacifist."
In an article titled, "Less dream, more factory" and subtitled, "H'w'd steels itself for a perfect storm", Variety reports:
Hollywood woke up last week to the fact that it has become Detroit.It's worse than Detroit! And yes, that's a movie reference. I love movies, and I'm not at all happy to write stuff like this, but the industry largely brought their woes upon themselves.
Layoffs are rising as the global conglomerates demand higher returns. Contentious negotiations loom as guilds and unions feel they are being shut out of the growing world of digital distribution.NBC Universal said it will cut operating expenses by $750 million this year and eliminate as many as 700 jobs. Those disclosures riveted attention on one ineluctable reality:
Having lived in its own economic cocoon for a generation, the media and entertainment community is facing the reality that it's just another industry [You don't say!--Ed] and that its artisans must expect to be treated accordingly.
UPI reports, "Communist Party eyes '08 Russian elections":
Moscow, Oct. 26 (UPI) — Russia's Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov wants to replace Vladimir Putin as president.Hey, they only killed tens of million people the first time around. But they'll get it right this time!Although elections won't be until 2008 and the party has not selected its candidate, Zyuganov says he has 100 percent support in the party.
Zyuganov said the Communist Party was gearing up now because if support, and the political apparatus, weren't secured now, "it would be difficult to count on success in the presidential election," ITAR-Tass said.
The Communist Party said it hoped for 20 percent support in next year's parliamentary election, the Russian government news agency said. Zyuganov said party leaders hoped for results that would change "the voting configuration in parliament," ITAR-Tass said.
The Communists will rally and march in Moscow Nov. 7, ITAR-Tass said. That date marks the October Revolution (under the old calendar) that brought down the tsar in 1917. Officially it has been replaced by a Day of National Unity Nov. 4. The party also will participate in events marking the 100th anniversary of Leonid Brezhnev's birth on Dec. 19.
Can't say I blame them: "South Koreans having 'terror sex' after NK nuke test".
"At every turn the chance to show contempt for the host trumped the desire to convince to the audience, and that made it 90 minutes of bone-saw grinding."--James Lileks' gobsmackingly accurate description of Andrew Sullivan's appearance on Hugh Hewitt's show on Wednesday.
Via a couple of recent quotes from George Lucas, I toll the funeral bell for the movie industry as we know it, in an article over at TCS Daily.
(Yes, an old school-style article from yours truly with words and everything at TCS, not one of them new-fangled podcasts that I've been specializing in over there as of late)
Well, actually, I still am disgusted, but I'm not at all surprised (or amused) by the details in this item on the main Pajamas page:
Melanie Phillips nicknames the BBC “The British Bigotry Corporation” as one of her readers sums up the BBC television show called Spooks: “The main plot involves a group of ruthless Mid-East hijackers who take over a London embassy and shoot people every hour. They turn out (of course) to be Jews in disguise.”On her own blog, Phillips writes:
Only a few days ago, people were taken aback to read the brazen admissions of bias made by BBC bigwigs at their ‘impartiality’ seminar. But this is much more than political bias. This is deep, culturally embedded, venomous bigotry. Yet to my knowledge there has been no inquest at the BBC, no expressions of concern by staff, no sign of life from the Governors. Astounding.Sadly, it really isn't, these days. But it is further proof that Europe is indeed partying like it's 1939.
Google...what's that?
The Democrat former mayor of New York offers some advice on Iraq along with his election predictions for November. And speaking of which, sorry for not much posting on Tuesday--I'm puting together a podcast which also contains some election predictions from a couple of popular journalists/pundits whom I interviewed for TCS Daily; watch for this to go up fairly soon.
Paxety Pages notes an interesting--if possibly 100 percent coincidental--connection between the sniper in CNN's infamous video last week videotaped from his POV as he shot an American soldier, and John Muhammad and John Lee Malvo, the DC snipers of four years ago:
The general said during the CNN show that he had been called on to look at the video to see what could be learned about the terrorist tactics. He, like the original reporter, commented on the video, and the sniper round, being fired from a vehicle. The general said that the shooting was from a hole in the trunk of a vehicle.If they have, that's an uncomfortably literal definition of Tom Wolfe's "Media Ricochet" meme.We've heard of that tactic before - right here in the United States.
* * * Large numbers of people in this country seem to be invested in the idea that the United States has not been attacked by Muslim terrorists since September 11, 2001. Conservative Republicans want to believe that the Bush administration is protecting us - liberal Democrats don't want to believe we are in danger at all. The DC Snipers show that we have been attacked, and that we can be in grave danger.
Now, American soldiers are being shot in the same manner as American civilians were being shot down four years ago. Is shooting from a hole in the trunk of a vehicle a common terrorist tactic? Or have Middle Eastern terrorists learned from American ones?
When Nancy Pelosi was quoted over the weekend as saying, "Impeachment is off the table", my immediate thought was: not if John Conyers is still in Congress. He and others on the left proposed impeaching President Reagan seemingly every year of his administration. Byron York writes:
At the very least, Conyers’s well-laid groundwork points to a potential conflict between him and Pelosi. She might say impeachment is off the table if Democrats are elected, but we haven’t heard any such declaration from Conyers himself. And what would he say? After all, impeachment is something he’s had in mind for a very long time.Read the rest.
Here's a poser from James Taranto's latest Best of the Web column:
Who wrote the following passage?Maybe this is further proof that they're virtually objective..."Bush's fellow Republicans applied a rubber stamp to much of his conservative agenda the past six years, including tax cuts that went largely to the rich."A. Bob Herbert
B. Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman
C. John Kerry's speechwriter
D. Ayman al-ZawahiriIf you're a regular reader, you're already familiar with the trope: The answer is none of the above. It was written by Thomas Ferraro, a "reporter" for the Reuters "news" service.
Last week, I linked to a Rich Galen essay on how November could see loads of Al Gore-style lawsuits launched to contest close elections. John Fund picks up the theme at Opinion Journal.
Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad helps sell more books for Mark Steyn--or at the least, provides him with endless material for his next article on global demographics.
Back in June, Carl Azuz, CNN's senior editor for Arab affairs said, " Well, I think for one, terrorism for one person is a freedom fight for another", echoing the famous quote of Stephen Jukes, global news editor for Reuters shortly after 9/11.
Michelle Malkin explains why CNN is terrorism's favorite PR contact in its Rolodex, in her latest Vent.
When you call The Left Bank, a Bay Area of chain of high end French restaurants, and they put you on hold (as I found out today when I made a reservation), a recording of a woman with a beautiful Gallic accent says, "Bonjour, and thank you for calling! In France, good food is a right. That's why here at the Left Bank..."
I'm not up on the current state of government benefits in France, so who knows--maybe truffles and foie gras really are the right of every Frenchman on the dole. (After all, you can work up quite an appetite after a hard day's night of torching Citroens.) But found via TCS, The Christian Science Monitor asks some great questions: If healthcare is a human right, as the average New York Times reader thinks it is, then why isn't food? And what would happen if it were?
Read the whole thing--but pour a nice glass of Lillet Blonde on the rocks before you do.
OK, I'm convinced--everyone is on Karl Rove's payroll. This quote by "Speaker Expect" Nancy Pelosi (as Mickey Kaus dubs her) is too much:
"The gavel of the speaker of the House is in the hands of special interests, and now it will be in the hands of America's children."I couldn't have said it better. If Republicans are about to dip into their campaign funds and unleash a barrage of new TV ads, that's one quote that should be put into wide circulation.
Of the Senate, P.J. O'Rourke once famously wrote that "The founding fathers, in their wisdom, devised a method by which our republic can take 100 of its most prominent numskulls and keep them out of the private sector where they might do actual harm". But increasingly, that's becoming a quote with bicameral applications. And perhaps infintely more so in a few weeks.
Michelle Malkin asks, "Why is Ward Churchill smiling? Because he is still employed by the University of Colorado and collecting a publicly-subsidized paycheck." Read the rest here.
Gosh, what a shocker! While The New York Times can't stop telling people how biased to the left it is these days, who knew the BBC would feel the urge to come clean as well?
(Via LGF)
In his 2002 book titled Reagan's War, Peter Schweizer wrote:
On repeated occasions, according to numerous Soviet accounts, [Jimmy] Carter encouraged Moscow to influence American politics for his benefit or for the detriment of his enemies. Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin recounts in his memoirs how, in the waning days of the 1980 campaign, the Carter White House dispatched Armand Hammer to the Soviet embassy. Explaining to the Soviet Ambassador that Carter was "clearly alarmed" at the prospect of losing to Reagan, Hammer asked for help: Could the Kremlin expand Jewish emigration to bolster Carter's standing in the polls? "Carter won't forget that service if he is elected," Hammer told Dobrynin.Did Ted Kennedy also try to throw a presidential election involving Reagan by going to the Soviets? Bryan of Hot Air writes:According to Georgii Kornienko, first deputy foreign minister at the time, something similar took place in 1976, when Carter sent Averell Harriman to Moscow. Harriman sought to assure the Soviets that Carter would be easier to deal with than Ford, clearly inviting Moscow to do what it could through public diplomacy to help his campaign.
Even when he was out of office, Carter still tried bitterly to encourage Moscow to do damage to his enemies during an election. As Dobrynin recounts, in January 1984 the former president dropped by his residence for a private meeting. Carter was concerned about Reagan's defense build-up and went on to explain that Moscow would be better off with someone else in the White House. If Reagan won, he warned, "There would not be a single agreement on arms control, especially on nuclear arms, as long as Reagan remained in power."
There’s a new book on Ronald Reagan making the rounds, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. Its author, Paul Kengor, unearthed a sensational document from the Soviet archives. That document is a memo regarding an offer made by Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts via former Senator John Tunney, both Democrats, to the General Secretary of the Communist Party, USSR, Yuri Andropov, in 1983. The offer was to help the Soviet leadership, military and civilian, conduct a PR campaign in the United States as President Ronald Reagan sought re-election. The goal of the PR campaign would be to cast President Reagan as a warmonger, the Soviets as willing to peacefully co-exist, and thereby turn the electorate away from Reagan. It was a plan to enlist Soviet help, and use the American press, in unseating an American president.It certainly rings a bell. (In addition to Carter, it's also reminiscent of his fellow senator from Massachusetts' Winter Soldier moment. But that shouldn't be too surprising.)Think about that.
Update: Our podcast with Kengor can be found here.
Interesting Newsbusters post by Tim Graham:
Cindy Sheehan became an instant liberal-media celebrity when she held a vigil outside President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas and demanded to meet with him (a second time) over the death of her son Casey in Iraq. But is the liberal media only about creating the legend and leaving the negative details out? MRC's Justin McCarthy reported that on Wednesday's "Fox and Friends," Melanie Morgan and Catherine Moy, authors of the book American Mourning, said they found Sheehan was paid by John Kerry's campaign in 2004 to speak out against President Bush. Said Morgan:But it's a safe bet that they will."We have Federal Election Commission documents. I mean we went to an extensive research, we followed the money, that's how you always figure out what's going on...We found that John Kerry and Michael Moore personally recruited Gold Star family members just within days and sometimes even at the funerals of their sons to come and work for the campaign in order to undermine the candidacy of George W. Bush at the time. It was shocking and, and really offensive behavior and that's exactly what happened to Cindy Sheehan who we tracked down. She went on the payroll of John Kerry's campaign within days after her son's death as well as her daughter Carly. Ultimately, there was a split between the two because she felt that John Kerry wasn't radical enough and didn't have an anti-war agenda that matched hers."
The authors also appeared on Tuesday's "Hannity & Colmes" to make their charge:"It was John Kerry's political campaign, John Kerry personally, along with Michael Moore, went to Cindy Sheehan just days and a couple of weeks after the death of her son and asked her to make a commercial for him.And they did the same thing, political operatives, they asked the other families."This is a pretty explosive charge for the rest of the Sheehan-promoting media to ignore.