What caused the meltdown of the banking system? Was it Texas-Hold'em Poker? According to those new puritans at New York magazine it was--gasp!--television! Worse, horror-of-horrors, it was cable television, and they want this sort of smut and financial pornography banished from the airways:

The real villains here, the truly bad seeds at the heart of this crisis, have gone unpunished thus far and are still in operation. They are Jeff Lewis and Ryan Brown of Bravo's Flipping Out, Armando and Veronica Montelongo of TLC's Flip This House, Kristen Kemp of TLC's The Property Ladder, Kendra Todd of HGTV's My House Is Worth WHAT?, and the TLC, Bravo, HGTV, and Fine Living networks in general. All of them encouraged people to take out massive loans in order to buy and renovate homes and sell them at a profit when, really, most people have terrible taste, and furthermore, are bad at laying tile. These shows are still on! WHY?

But then, there are all sorts of reasons for those on the left to avoid examining some of these root causes:



Back in late December, we noted that the Connecticut Post refused to print emails from readers if they delved too heavily into a particular hometown topic:

"All letters are welcome. But there are code words hidden in some that are signals to stop paying close attention -- "Chris Dodd" and "Barney Frank."

All of which points to a word that the New York Times simply can't bring itself to speak, Ed Morrissey writes:

The Times wants to sell Dodd as a victim of the "moneyed Washington subculture where powerful incumbents are invited to get something wholesale," but that's poppycock. The man who accepts a bribe is no more of a victim than the man who offers it. It takes both to create corruption, and it's hard to find a more bald example of it than this. Dodd oversaw Countrywide as part of his committee chairmanship and understood that when he accepted the two loans for below-market rates and no-points acceptance. Countrywide later went belly-up, costing the nation billions of dollars for its easy-terms lending practices, and Dodd has been among the voices blaming the collapse of the lending markets on poor oversight. Well, he ought to know that firsthand, oughtn't he?

There's more at stake in this refusal to acknowledge corruption, and we have seen it in Barack Obama's Cabinet appointments. He and Congress have excused wrongdoing for Tim Geithner that would likely have resulted in criminal prosecution for others because Geithner supposedly belongs to a rarified elite group of technocrats that the nation can't do without. That stands the rule of law on its head, and put Geithner, Dodd, and others like them beyond the same responsibilities as the rest of us plebes. Dodd, Geithner, and other DC insiders now get a pass from responsibility for their actions simply because of who they know.

Taking sweetheart deals from the industry Dodd oversaw is corruption, regardless of the circumstances. Refusing to pay taxes even after getting reimbursements from one's employer is tax evasion. When we start making up new names for old crimes based on the relative power of the person who committed them, we have ended the rule of law and created an aristocracy.

Exactly. As G.K. Chesterton noted a century ago, "It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem"--or where it began.

If you enjoyed the recent "Picture Kill" edition of our Silicon Graffiti videoblog, which looked at a series of deliberately botched or manipulated stories by the MSM designed to drive a particular agenda or worldview, don't miss Kathy Shaidle's latest piece in the Examiner. Kathy sets the Wayback Machine and the B.S. detector (also known as the A.P. detector) to 1968 for part one of her series debunking the MSM myths of the Only War In History for the boomer era and their journalists.

Amy Ridenour provides a case study of how the legacy media covers global warming:

When University of Washington Professor Eric Steig announced in a news conference and paper published in the January 22 edition of the journal Nature that he and several colleagues had removed one of many thorns in the sides of climate alarmists -- in this case, evidence that Antarctica is cooling -- he received extensive worldwide attention in the mainstream press.

But when a noteworthy error was found in Stieg's research less than two weeks after it's publication, of the mainstream press, only an opinion column in the London Telegraph and a blog associated with the Australian Herald Sun carried the news.

The Stieg paper's release was covered by 27 newspapers, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times, by CNN, by the Associated Press, by NPR and quite a few others (see reviews of the coverage at the end of this post).

After independent analyst Steve McIntyre discovered a noteworthy error in the data, and released his results on his influential blog Climate Audit beginning on February 1, based on a Nexis search I conducted February 6, none of these outlets chose to inform their readers.

Of course, such biased "reporting" followed by much less visible retractions isn't just limited to global warming, but many other pet causes of the left--such as this media meme, to reference but one.

Hey, somebody should do a video about this topic!

Peter Robinson writes, "Every so often a president finds himself standing completely exposed--naked, so to speak--before the political class." Reasonable people (if such a group can be found to debate President Bush's record) can disagree, but Robinson believes that President Bush was first caught with brass exposed in October 2005, when he nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court:

As she began making courtesy calls on members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, word began leaking from the offices of astonished senators that her purchase on even the most basic constitutional case law proved tenuous.

In contrast, Robinson believes that President Obama's fallibility is being exposed much sooner in his administration's tenure:

Permit House Democrats to draft his stimulus legislation? What could Obama have been thinking? Only one answer fits: Obama wasn't thinking.

After the Harriet Miers debacle, Bush quickly recovered the support of Washington Republicans. He nominated Samuel Alito in Miers' place and then returned to his other duties as chief executive. That was that. Nobody ever had Bush figured for a brilliant mind anyway.

In recovering from the stimulus debacle, Obama is unlikely to prove quite so lucky. A brilliant mind is exactly what Obama's supporters in Washington thought he had. Brilliance defined Obama. Brilliance is what Obama was all about. Now we know that he has already made some dumb mistakes.

The glee among Republicans right now is only to be expected. The long faces among Obama's startled supporters in Washington are a lot more telling.

In 2007 and 2008, Obama was given virtually no vetting by a media deep in the midst of a "slobbering love affair," to borrow from the title of Bernard Goldberg's latest book. (Incidentally, Bernie will be a guest on this week's PJM Political show tomorrow on Sirius-XM satellite radio.) He (Obama, not Goldberg) encouraged voters to view him a cipher that they could project onto any and all hopes they wanted. He frequently engaged in messianic rhetoric while campaigning, and seemed to encourage similar responses from his more rabid fans--certainly, he did nothing to tamp down such responses.

Even when he won the election, and the media's comparisons to Lincoln, FDR, JFK, and other presidents venerated over decades or more of history continued, Obama consciously played into them, jetting back to Chicago and taking the train, a la Lincoln, to his inauguration.

What could go wrong once it became time for the least experienced executive in the nation's history to actually govern?

David Harsanyi notes--shocker!--a remarkable dichotomy between Pelosi's comments pre- and post election.

No sex, no drugs, no wine, no women--but ladles of endless pork. Something to be avoided like a cyclone ranger, lest it cause The Vapors: "Lessons From A Stimulus That Failed."

"At least Henry Ford knew how to make a car."

In his best-selling Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

Like the editors of the old Soviet encyclopedias who would send out updates to instruct which pages should be torn out, American liberalism has repeatedly censored and rewritten its own history so that the "bad guys" were always conservatives and the good guys always liberals.

In The American Spectator W. James Antle III writes that you can see this phenomenon at work in Sam Tanenhaus' latest article:

I've been prodded to read and comment on this Sam Tanenhaus essay pronouncing conservatism dead. Tanenhaus is a smart guy who knows quite a bit about the conservative movement, much more than most liberal writers. But I'm not terribly impressed by his eulogy for the right. Uncharacteristically, Tanenhaus makes little effort to understand conservatives on their own terms. Instead we get embarrassingly tendentious liberal cliches like this:

Today, the situation is much bleaker. After George W. Bush's two terms, conservatives must reckon with the consequences of a presidency that failed, in large part, because of its fervent commitment to movement ideology: the aggressively unilateralist foreign policy; the blind faith in a deregulated, Wall Street-centric market; the harshly punitive "culture war" waged against liberal "elites."

This completely airbrushes out the "responsible" center-left's initial support for the Iraq war, the fact that the biggest "deregulation" relevant to banking was signed into law by Bill Clinton, the left's own role in the "harshly punitive 'culture war'" (which side imposed their will on the electorate via the courts?), and of course any distinctions between Bush's crony capitalism meets Sarbanes-Oxley meets bailouts and the laisezz faire wild west of Tanenhaus' fevered imagination.

Read the rest here; related thoughts from Orrin Judd.

Speaking of boomer-era flashbacks, Glenn Reynolds dubs this "Chris Dodd's Modified Limited Hangout"; Mark Tapscott writes that "There are two kinds of journalists in the world":

those who have been been given the idiot's treatment by public officials on a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for public documents, and those who will be.

Believe me, I know because I didn't get inducted into the Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame for nothing (no, really, I am not making that up. Go here if you think only liberals get such honors.).

Now Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sen, Chris Dodd, D-CN, has pulled what has to be an all-time classic evasion stunt against journalists covering Congress and the economic crisis concerning his promise six months ago to make public all of the documents about his sweetheart loan deal with Countrywide Mortgage.

Dodd invited a select few Connecticut reporters to his office in Hartford Monday and gave them a few minutes to view - but not copy - a small selection of documents that he claims proves he did nothing wrong in accepting special treatment from Countrywide that saved him a reported $75,000 in refinancing a couple of loans worth a total of $800,000. The Wall Street Journal called it Dodd's "Peek-A-Boo Disclosure."

How will Beltway journalists respond? Tapscott predicts that they'll happily play along:

My guess is that they will do nothing because Dodd is a Democrat and he will be protected just as they have protected House Financial Services Committee Chairman Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), Clinton administration officials like former OMB Director Franklin Raines, and the many Democrat donors and operators like Mozilo who made millions through their associations with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They forced lenders to lend billions to unqualified buyers, shielded the process from public exposure and accountability and then cried "Wall Street greed" when their Ponzi scheme exploded and the economy tanked.

In other words...

"Vietnam analogies can be tiresome", Evan Thomas writes, before attempting to yoke Newsweek's Man In The White House with the hoariest of all Vietnam cliches (hint, the first letter begins with "Q") that the New York Times is simultaneously attempting to apply as well.

And additionally, as Orrin Judd writes, if you're a liberal Beltway journalist, you don't let the fact that it's a rather sloppy history of the endgame in Vietnam in the first place stop you from using it in the first place.

Besides, Vietnam and Watergate are the two ends of the boomer axis upon which the legacy media rotates, as James Taranto wrote in 2005, in the midst of Newsweek's Koran-in-the-can debacle:

The obsession with Vietnam and Watergate is central to the alienation between the press and the people. After all, these were triumphs for the crusading press but tragedies for America. And the press's quest for more such triumphs--futile, so far, after more than 30 years--is what is behind the scandals at both Newsweek and CBS.

It's also behind the Valerie Plame kerfuffle, which hasn't been properly recognized as a journalistic scandal. The mainstream media accepted uncritically a Democratic partisan's unfounded allegations of criminal conduct within the Bush administration, suddenly discovering that there was no crime only when the ensuing special prosecutor investigation threatened to put two reporters behind bars. (See our February account of the New York Times' evolution on the subject.)

In response to the Koran-flushing debacle, Newsweek has acknowledged only technical problems with its reporting. This follows the pattern of CBS, which commissioned an "independent" report that allowed the network to claim it was free of political bias. In the Plame case, we don't know of any journalistic outfit that's admitted an error; the Times, for instance, still insists baselessly that Plame's "outing" was "an abuse of power."

The problem in all three cases is that news organizations were so zealous in their pursuit of the next quagmire or scandal that they forgot their first obligation, which is to tell the truth. Until those in the mainstream media are willing to acknowledge that it is this crusading impulse that has led them astray, we are unlikely to see the end of such journalistic scandals.

Curious though, that such high boomer-era cliches linger on nearly 40 years after their initial debut, even when there's a president that the legacy media doesn't immediately wish to destroy.

And who better to tell than Allahpundit (trackbacks be upon him) himself, linking to an NPR(!) Webpage: "Shhh: Al Qaeda leadership decimated, complete defeat foreseeable."

Matthew J. Darnell, who edits the "Shutdown Corner" football on Yahoo.com notes that "Matt Millen's NBC commentary comes with a warning label." He links to a Detroit Free-Press article that explains how local TV provided a little extra expository information about the former Detroit Lion during the Super Bowl pregame show:

Every time a certain familiar face showed up on camera Sunday during NBC's Super Bowl pregame show, Channel 4 ran a scroll at the bottom of the screen:

"Matt Millen was president of the Lions for the worst eight-year run in the history of the NFL. Knowing his history with the team, is there a credibility issue as he now serves as an analyst for NBC Sports?..."

Hilarious. But good for Channel 4, not toeing the company line as it sought online comments from viewers on Millen's gig. Or maybe it was just trying to distance itself from NBC's brilliant move.

You can see video of the label in the YouTube clip above. Of course, it's too bad the networks don't inform their viewers with similar warning labels applied to those working outside their sports divisions...

The L.A. Times is shedding jobs; it will soon have 300 fewer people employed not to publish the news.

Meanwhile, CNN isn't afraid to wear its heart on its sleeve, and its biases on its chest, though sadly, it doesn't appear that a "Wright-Free Zone" T-shirt is yet for sale.

In his review of Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man for the Claremont Institute, Jonah Goldberg summarized the New Dealers' attempt to deploy military methods and central planning to nationalize America's economy thusly:

When liberals speak of unity and hope, what they really mean is success. The 1930s and 1960s, unlike the '20s and '50s, were decades when liberals, broadly speaking, were "winning." When you hear liberals bemoaning divisiveness and insisting that we must "get beyond" "labels" and "ideological" differences, what they are really saying is that their opponents should shut up and get with the program. The New Deal's appeal lies in the fact that it was the first time when progressive social engineers had real power without the galvanizing dynamic of a war. The Brains Trusters had spent much of the 1920s complaining "we planned in war," i.e., during World War I; they insisted that they should be allowed to plan in peace as well. The Depression gave them their shot. And that in a nutshell is why supposedly empirically minded and "reality-based" liberals still genuflect to the myth of the New Deal. It is the ne plus ultra of liberal power. Defending the New Deal is the first requirement of liberal power-worship.

Rusty Weiss spots a newspaper cartoonist so close and yet so far from this point, as he equates the passing of the so-called stimulus bill with the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima:

In one of the more insulting comparisons seen in recent memory, Albany Times Union editorial cartoonist John de Rosier does a major disservice to the honorable men who served during the Battle of Iwo Jima, by depicting recent efforts of Democrats to pass a non-stimulating 'economic stimulus plan' as equally heroic.

The cartoon shows Democrats in the role of the Marines featured in the Iwo Jima Memorial, a sculpture based on the famous photo by Joe Rosenthal entitled Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima. The exception to this replication lies in the flag being raised - the Dem's are trying to hoist a 'bailout flag' as opposed to a flag of the United States.

If that weren't insulting enough, the cartoon also shows the Republican Party mascot, the elephant, trying desperately to pull the flag down.

In short, the Democrats are trying to save our nation by heroically raising up the Obama bailout flag, while the villainous Republicans are trying to destroy our nation by stopping their efforts.

Meanwhile, in a brief item on Jonah's own Liberal Fascism book, Frank Wilson, the book editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer writes:

I downloaded Goldberg's book on my Kindle because I was curious about a book that had made it on to the NYT best-seller list without ever being reviewing in the Times or most other papers and because I didn't want to pay the full price for what I suspected might be a screed. I was pleasantly surprised to find it was a well-written historical survey of a set of ideas and how they grew. I was also surprised by what I learned about Mussolini.

As I wrote in my own review of Jonah's book:

Mussolini similarly invented the word "totalitarianism" as a way to describe a cradle-to-grave socialism that would bind all aspects of his nation together. "Mussolini meant it to be appealing to people," Goldberg said. "It was a sales pitch for his kind of government. He meant it as we would use words like 'holistic' today, as sort of covering every aspect of life; everyone's going to be included, everyone's going to be part of the community. No child is going to be left behind. That was the meaning of totalitarianism in its original conception."

Concurrently, the Philadelphia Inquirer seeks to get itself even deeper into bed with government, requesting a bailout from the state's Democratic governor. Needless to say, Il Duce would approve.

Related: The Illustrated Stimulus.

As we noted in February of 2003, during the Pleistocene era of our humble corner of cyberspace, CNN dusted off the Q-word three weeks before the liberation of Iraq began. This week, the New York Times similarly is "Fearing Another Quagmire in Afghanistan" a week after President Obama is in office.

As Jules Crittenden notes:

The real question raised by this article is why a major American newspaper ... currently bogged down in a considerable quagmire of its own ... would want to jump into the quagmire of quagmirism again. But it looks like we may be witnessing a fascinating evolution in which Obama, having adopted a number of key Bush war policies and practices, will be subjected to the same shoddy reporting practices.

Fortunately, the Times has a legendary Pulitzer-winning journalist to airdrop into that far-off land.

(Incidentally, I wonder if the Age of Obama has caused the Times' publisher to revise this sage moment of '60s-minted Radical Chic philosophizing?)

That was then...

"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK," Obama said.

"That's not leadership. That's not going to happen," he added.

This is now:

The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket. There was, however, a logical explanation: Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat.

"He's from Hawaii, O.K.?" said Mr. Obama's senior adviser, David Axelrod, who occupies the small but strategically located office next door to his boss. "He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there."

Huh. You know, when it comes to the weather, folks in Washington don't seem to be able to handle things.

The New York Times: for show trials before they were for them. Maureen Dowd writes:

It's psychopathic to spend a million redoing your office when the folks outside it are losing jobs, homes, pensions and savings.

Thain should never rise above the level of stocking the money in A.T.M.'s again. Just think: This guy could well have been Treasury secretary if John McCain had won.

Bartiromo pressed: What was wrong with the office of his predecessor, Stanley O'Neal?

"Well -- his office was very different -- than -- the -- the general decor of -- Merrill's offices," Thain replied. "It really would have been -- very difficult -- for -- me to use it in the form that it was in."

Did it have a desk and a phone?

How are these ruthless, careless ghouls who murdered the economy still walking around (not to mention that sociopathic sadist Bernie Madoff?) -- and not as perps?

Bring on the shackles. Let the show trials begin.

Just as long as we start with the management who plowed this firm's stock price into the ground over the last five years.

Recently, Charles Johnson and his readers debated if CNN ran faked footage of an attempted resuscitation of a wounded young boy in a Gaza hospital, in a video supplied by a Palestinian stringer. CNN initially pulled their video, and a day later reinserted it into their lineup, claiming:

Responding to accusations that the resuscitation efforts of Mashharawi's brother appeared inauthentic, Martin said that, based on his years of reporting from Gaza, doctors often go through such efforts even with little hope that a patient can be saved.

Charles Johnson responded:

If they really had "little hope" the patient could be saved, they'd be going all out with CPR, which means very vigorous chest compression (it's not unusual to break ribs if it's done right), and ventilation to oxygenate the blood--not delicately touching the boy's abdomen with the tips of their fingers as we see in the video clips.

But if the jury is still out on that clip, let's take a video look at news from this decade that we know conclusively was botched, including:

• The New Republic's Danger Man, Scott Thomas Beauchamp.
• Reuters' Picture Kill fiasco.
• Former CNN chief Eason Jordan claimed US (and Israeli) troops targeted journalists For assassination--but was surprisingly cool about working with Saddam Hussein.
• Hurricane Katrina and the "Echo Chamber in the Superdome."
• Document Dan Rather.
• Jayson Blair.
• And the grandfather of 'em all: Walter "Boom Boom" Duranty.

Keep rockin'--and watch for cameos by Larry Kudlow, Hugh Hewitt, and John Hinderaker!

(If you missed any of the previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, click here and just keep scrolling.)

Update: Welcome readers (viewers?) from Little Green Footballs, VodkaPundit, the Brothers Judd and Danny Glover!

More: Welcome also readers from Pundits Insta and Gateway--and from Dr. Melissa Clouthier.

Allahpundit:

When I was young and naive, I'd have guessed that the media didn't yet have the particulars of this story but were working hard to bring them out. Now I just assume that they know everything already but that the bombshell won't burst until the day after the midterms.

And even then, it will time to play "Name That Party" if the politician in question has a D between his name and his home state's initials.

Keep rockin', MSM!

Noel Sheppard writes:

The Obama economic adviser who doesn't want infrastructure "stimulus" spending to only benefit "white male construction workers" is angry at Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Michelle Malkin for having the nerve to report his racist remarks the mainstream media compliantly boycotted for several weeks.

In an open letter posted at his blog Saturday, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich accused the trio of "manifestly distorting [his] words and pulling them out of context."

The best response to that would be to say, "I claim no higher truth than my own perceptions. This is how I lived it."

As Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters writes, Howard Kurtz, the legacy media's legacy media critic has a blinding flash of the obvious and renames MSNBC "The Obama Network":

In the '90s, many conservatives referred to CNN as "The Clinton News Network" due to its obvious biases towards the 42nd president.

Years later, just days after the inauguration of the 44th president, one of that network's on-air hosts officially labeled MSNBC "The Obama Network."

You gotta love it.

At one point on his Reliable Sources segment on CNN, Kurtz said, "Okay, well then I just want to be clear about it, because MSNBC denies that it has moved to the left, and I think the evidence is pretty strong."

They don't always deny it--it just depends on who's doing the asking.

(And it goes without saying that Kurtz's employers are both in the tank themselves.)

Sherman Frederick, the publisher of the Las Vegas Review Journal writes, "As our president said, it is time to grow up":

There is a growing faction of the American left that seeks revenge more than righteousness.

Intolerant of dissenting views, this faction thinks as comedian Janeane Garofalo does that some members of the opposing political party should be "jailed." Terrorist acts (such as mailing envelopes of white power to Mormon temples because the gay marriage vote in California went the church's way) are seen by this faction as understandable and acts of legitimate political expression.

There is also an ugly racial component to it. We first saw it with Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who said, among other things, that white America had deliberately inflicted black Africa with AIDS.

When the Rev. Wright first hit the national stage, we hardly knew what to make of his irrational and separatist statements. Consequently, we pretty much ignored the substance of Wright's racially divisive rhetoric and focused on it as a day-to-day political story. It made us more comfortable, I think.

But in light of the things we saw at the inauguration, it may be time to revisit the dangers of intolerance and hate -- no matter the color of the person who makes them -- and nip this ugly mean streak in the bud.

He's absolutely right, but he lost me with that last sentence. Nip it in the bud? This isn't exactly a new development: Garofalo's shtick dates back to 2003. The origins of the black liberation theology that fuels Obama's former spiritual advisor date back to the 1960s, not coincidentally, the terrorist heyday of Bill Ayers and other paramilitary Obama supporters. Radical payback for opposing views isn't exactly new, either.

Back in mid-2004 with an election year in full swing, Charles Krauthammer coined "the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release":

The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone quite around the twist. I count one all-star rock tour, three movies, four current theatrical productions and five best sellers (a full one-third of the New York Times list) variously devoted to ridiculing, denigrating, attacking and devaluing this president, this presidency and all who might, God knows why, support it.

How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came 9/11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud's Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

Stripped of his halo, the president's ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally once again human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.

The result has been volcanic. The subject of one prominent new novel is whether George W. Bush should be assassinated. This is all quite unhinged. Good God. What if Bush is re-elected? If they lose to him again, Democrats will need more than just consolation. They'll need therapy.

The media's pressure cooker would pop yet again the following year: as Mickey Kaus wrote at the time, Katrina allowed them to go nuclear on Bush without sounding unpatriotic, unlike their GWOT and Iraq-bashing coverage.

So this isn't exactly a new development in politics--this is merely SOP for the American left.

As President Obama and his fellow Democrats in Congress attempt to ladle copious amount of pork to their cronies disguised as a "stimulus package", it's worth reading Bruce Bartlett's thorough exploration in Forbes of "the role of government in economic recovery", beginning with a short, sharp primer on the makings of the Depression, and then a look at today's economy. Here's a sample:

No one today believes that the Great Depression just happened or dragged on as long as it did because the private sector kept making mistake after mistake after mistake. It only made them and continued to do so because government interfered with the normal operations of the market and prevented readjustment from taking place.

The Great Depression resulted from a confluence of governmental errors--the Fed was too easy for too long in the 1920s, tightened too much in 1928-29 and then failed to fix its mistake, thus bringing on a general deflation that was very difficult to arrest once downward momentum had set in. Herbert Hoover compounded the problem by signing into law the Smoot-Hawley Tariff and sharply raising taxes in 1932.

Unfortunately, Franklin D. Roosevelt misunderstood the nature of the economy's problem and tried to fix prices to keep them from falling--thus preventing the very readjustment that would have brought about recovery. (See this paper by UCLA economists Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian.) He doesn't seem to have ever understood the critical role of Fed policy and mistakenly thought that arbitrarily raising the price of gold would make money easier.

Then, in 1937, just as the economy was starting to build some upward momentum, Roosevelt decided to raise taxes and cut spending, and the Fed suddenly concluded that inflation, rather than deflation, was the main problem and tightened monetary policy. (Note: According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Great Depression was basically two severe recessions--one from August 1929 to March 1933, and another from May 1937 to June 1938--not a continuous downturn.)

The result was an economic setback that didn't really end until both monetary and fiscal policy became expansive with the onset of World War II. At that point, no one worried any more about budget deficits, and the Fed pegged interest rates to ensure that they stayed low, increasing the money supply as necessary to achieve this goal.

It was then and only then that the Great Depression truly ended. As a consequence, economists concluded that an expansive monetary and fiscal policy, which had been advocated by economist John Maynard Keynes throughout the 1930s, was the key to getting out of a depression.

Keynes was right, but many of his followers weren't. They thought that budget deficits would stimulate growth under all circumstances, not just those of a deflationary depression. When this medicine was applied inappropriately, as it was in the 1960s and 1970s, the result was inflation.

Read the rest.

(Via Jonah Goldberg.)

As Amy Alkon notes, when Robert Reich writes, titles such as this emerge from his blog:

How to Create Jobs Without Them All Going to Skilled Professionals and White Male Construction Workers

But then, Reich has always had a way with words, as Jonathan Rauch spotted in a 1997 Slate article when he compared what Reich wrote in Locked In the Cabinet, Reich's memoirs of his days as Bill Clinton's labor secretary, with videotapes and transcripts of the actual events. Reich describes himself, as Jonah Goldberg wrote in Liberal Fascism (where I first discovered Rauch's Slate article), as trapped in a Thomas Nast cartoon, "in constant battle with greedy fat cats, Social Darwinists, and Mr. Monopoly." The actual transcripts and tapes describe a reality that's far more pedestrian.

But then such fantasies of the Reich Stuff make him right at home with Bill Clinton's "meaning of is" postmodernism, Hillary Clinton's fantasy snipers in Tuzla, and also President Obama, who as a candidate similarly misremembered at least one meeting with big business.

John Hinderaker has a lengthy and sober assessment of President Bush's tenure in office. Definitely read the whole thing, but here's the linchpin of the post:

In assessing the pluses and minuses of the Bush administration, one always returns to Iraq. Many think that Bush was too slow to change strategies after sectarian violence erupted in 2006; others think that he deserves great credit for backing the surge and ultimately winning the war. The second proposition, I think, is indisputable, while the first is questionable. I'm inclined to agree with Dick Cheney that it's wrong to suggest that nothing good happened in Iraq until 2007.

With the benefit of a bit of hindsight, it seems to me that Bush's failings on Iraq were mostly political. It was always obvious that the biggest challenge in Iraq would not be felling Saddam, but rather what would come afterward. The ethnic and sectarian divisions in that country were well understood, and many (like me) wondered whether Iraq was really a country that could stay together once its tyrant was deposed. But Bush failed to adequately prepare the public for the tough, ambiguous conflict that was sure to ensue once Saddam was gone.

This failure was especially regrettable since the war, when launched, was not Bush's war but America's. Large majorities in the House and Senate voted to authorize the war, including most leading Democrats. But because Bush failed to prepare the public for the post-major combat stage, the Democrats could plausibly take the view that they had signed on only for the easy overthrow of a dictator. When the inevitable messiness ensued, they double-crossed the President. That was shameful, but it was also foreseeable, and it was enabled by Bush's failure to do the political work necessary to educate the American public.

In the end, the greatest failures of the Bush administration were political. Bush was the first MBA President, and he always seemed to think that results would carry the day. He followed Lincoln, who wrote that if events bore him out, no one would remember his critics, while if events did not bear him out, a thousand angels swearing he was right wouldn't make any difference.

That's fine as far as it goes, but Lincoln went to considerable lengths, sometimes to the derogation of the war effort, to make sure that public opinion in the North stayed with him. And he was, in the event, saved by the victories won by Grant and Sherman.

As John writes, "Bush's great failing was that his focus was almost exclusively on policy, and he was unwilling to pay adequate attention to politics." And its too bad--because had he reminded voters of the continuity on regime change of his administration and the prior one, the bipartisan support this effort had from 1998 until 2002, and the rank hypocrisy of the left's pivot on the issue, he could have done much to prop up the GOP in 2006 and 2008. Not to mention his own poll numbers.









Update: "Good luck to you on your travels, Sir. Be well."

More: "Closed Press."

Allahpundit links to the video below, featuring, as he puts it, "Celebrities moved by new spiritual leader to become better people":

Via the Standard. If ever you doubted that Obamamania is fundamentally a religious movement, at least among nitwits like this, watch and note how few of their pledges are tied to Obama's policy agenda. It's mostly personal pap about smiling more and being a better parent, forms of self-improvement which, it seems, simply couldn't be undertaken until the GOP was out of the White House.

MySpace Celebrity and Katalyst present The Presidential Pledge


Andrew Breitbart asks, "Where Were You Celebrities After 9/11?":

God bless, President Obama. You have my best wishes and all of my best efforts. Even though I didn't vote for you, and disagree with much of your agenda.

But that doesn't mean I will forgive and forget an era of narcissism and petty complaining from the majority celebrity class that began well before Iraq. See "Hollywood, Interrupted" -- my book co-written with Mark Ebner -- which was written before and during the build-up to the Iraq war and before the WMDs weren't found. The public behavior from Hollywood was uniformly deplorable. It's a convenient lie they peddle that they were with us during Afghanistan. They weren't.

The decadence during this period was world class. The clubs raged. The boutique hotels flourished. The parties never stopped. And a precious few stepped up to support the American troops who have been valiantly fighting for your right to do lines off of each other's buttocks at your Hollywood Hills $10 million mansions.

This video is not a sign of desire to serve the country under Obama -- you will not honor this pledge like the rest of us will forget about our New Year's resolutions. This video is a relic of the era of celebrity decadence and boutique anti-Republican activism under President Bush.

It is a sickening sign that you want fast and easy absolution for having comported yourself like ill behaved children for the last eight years. Good luck, President Obama. The rest of you can go to hell.

OK, that's not entirely fair--I know of at least one celebrity who pledged her loyalty to President Bush in the immediate aftermath of 9/11--and her calm demeanor in the years since was an inspiration to us all.

As Jonah Goldberg writes in the L.A. Times, on the campaign trail, Barack Obama was every candidate you wanted him to be. But that's about to change once he actually takes office and begins to govern:

Presidential inaugurations are in many ways the high-water marks of any presidency because they're so full of hope. All things seem possible. The rivalries and backbiting haven't set in yet, at least not publicly. Even the inevitable disappointments over Cabinet picks and White House staffing are tempered by the wide-eyed dreams of an ambitious agenda. Everyone -- or at least everyone who backed the guy -- has that "we can make this the best yearbook ever!" feeling.

Then comes the letdown. No, I don't mean Barack Obama will be a failed president. But even the most successful presidents bitterly disappoint some people, usually some of their biggest supporters. Indeed, they can only disappoint supporters because disappointment first requires confidence and hope. Those who voted against Obama can either have their low expectations fulfilled or be pleasantly surprised.

Many conservatives, for example, had hoped that George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was simply a marketing slogan. They were dismayed to discover he really meant it. In the 1980s, Republican factions were deeply divided in the "let Reagan be Reagan" debates. Everyone heard what they wanted to hear during the campaign and expected the man's presidency to jibe perfectly with their expectations.

Obama's ideological compass is far more difficult to discern than Reagan's or Bush's were. This is why his conservative detractors often called him a cipher. Obama's supporters rolled their eyes despite producing often-contradictory evidence to rebut the charge.

This raises perhaps the most interesting question of the Obama presidency: "What wasn't Barack Obama lying about?"

I don't mean this to be as harsh as it sounds. I'm not talking about what his conservative critics said he was lying about -- say, the true nature of his relationship with William Ayers. I'm talking about issues where his own supporters seem to have just assumed he had his fingers crossed.

Not the least of which is Obama's infamous statement on bankrupting the coal industry, uttered a year ago in the midst of an hour long conversation the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle and then unnearthed by a blogger in the last weekend of the election; the closest anyone remotely associated with the feckless McCain campaign came to delivering an October surprise. After The One's latest flip-flop on this issue, Ed Morrissey wonders if the freshness dating has expired on that statement--but concludes, don't be too sure.

Selwyn Duke looks at the state of manufactured consent at the dawn of the Obama administration:

A common defense of error today is to say, with due indignation, "I have a right to my opinion!" Legally this is true, given that our First Amendment is extant. But as G.K. Chesterton once said, "Having the right to do something is not at all the same as being right in doing it." There is no moral right to an immoral opinion -- nor to one bred of emotionalism unconstrained by reason -- nor to a deceitful one.

More than ever, Americans are realizing that this isn't a sentiment to which the mainstream media subscribes. In fact, with how it shamelessly carried water for Barack Obama during the election, 2008 has been dubbed "the year journalism died" (Sean Hannity is fond of this label). Yet, while such pronouncements make for compelling commentary, nothing could be further from the truth.

The reality is that journalism is alive and well -- outside the mainstream media. As for the latter's journalism, by the third millennium it was not only dead, not only laid to rest, but fossilized and buried under the stratum containing the hula hoop and pet rock. And it would take a Jurassic Park-like effort to reconstitute its DNA and resurrect the ancient beast. Thus, a more accurate statement about 2008 is: It was the year that many more illusions about the validity of mainstream journalism died. Let us now take a look at a media that has made malpractice an art.

Read the whole thing.

"Leading climate expert Jim Hansen" (no relation, as far as we can tell, to a deceased but global warmingly remembered Muppet expert) believes "Barack Obama has only four years to save the world."

Of course he does. But we give Mr. Hanson bonus points for eschewing the leisurely and far overdone bourgeois pace of the ten year countdown--four isn't a number that's picked all that often from the proverbial hat for a doomsday countdown. But in any case, file this one way for election time in 2012 if--and we think the odds are somewhat reasonable here--Mr. Hanson is wrong.

In any case, no final countdown is complete without...

Orrin Judd spots one pundit making essentially the same "American power is on the wane" argument today that he made twenty years ago.

Let he who is without sin cast the first anti-aircraft cannon.

Edward Bernard Glick writes, "One has to wonder whether we would have fought the Second World War if American Leftists then had the defeatist 'war-is-never-an-option' mindset that afflicts so many of them now."

They did--they were simply overruled by Stalin.

(H/T: FR.)

As Don Surber writes, "Dude, here's our recession."

Unemployment hits historically high levels not seen in years--but perhaps not as many years as the Associated Press wishes.

As Ed Morrissey wrote yesterday:

Employers shed over a half-million jobs in December as the year ended in the grips of a full-blown recession. The total job loss for 2008 went over 2.6 million, mostly in the latter half of the year, as prospects for growth look dim indeed. Even with all of that truly bad news, the AP manages to add a little hyperbole:

The U.S. unemployment rate bolted to 7.2 percent in December, the highest since early 1993, as nervous employers slashed 524,000 jobs.

The Labor Department's report, released Friday, underscored the terrible toll the deepening recession is having on workers and companies, and highlights the hard task President-elect Barack Obama faces in resuscitating the flat-lined economy.

For all of 2008, the economy lost a net total of 2.6 million jobs. That was the most since 1945, when nearly 2.8 million jobs were lost. Although the number of jobs in the U.S. has more than tripled since then, losses of this magnitude are still being painfully felt.

Uh, okay, thanks for the no-context context. Job losses in 1945 were catastrophic for a nation of 132 million people. We have over 300 million today, and we have increased the workforce by a much larger factor as women have entered the workplace. Total employment in December 1945 was 39.111 million Americans. Total employment in December 2008 was 138.078 million Americans.

In other words, break out your Stone Temple Pilots, Coverdale-Page, and Pearl Jam CDs and drink in deeply the vibe of 1993.

But give incoming President Obama a few years, and Artie Shaw will safely be back in vogue.

(Via Maggie's Farm.)

Not quite like playing poker with Harry Reid, but still: "CNN Says the Video is Genuine."

150 years of scary headlines on climate ch-ch-changes:

It's the final countdown!

The TV channel with one finger poised on the delete key suddenly has an epiphany, Steve Green writes:

Via Charlie Martin on Twitter comes this admission from CNN's Campbell Brown (video at link): "Obama's lofty ideas lack specifics."

Dude, hope and change. How much more specific does the President-elect need to get? I mean, those were good enough for CNN during the campaign.

CNN declared itself and their candidate an idea-free zone during the election; why start now?

Meanwhile, CNN is trashing the newest citizen journalist heading towards Israel. As a viewer, frankly, I'm not at all sure what Joe the Plumber can tell me about the Middle East. But I do know that hasn't lied to me yet about the Middle East, and that already puts him ahead of at least one TV network.

Harry Reid: "I don't work for Obama."

Obama: Wanna bet?

Yesterday, we mentioned "Pallywood", the perpetual Palestinian propaganda machine. In the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg recently explored "The World's Pornographic Interest in Jewish Moral Failure", which included this excerpt:

Once, in Khan Younis, I actually saw gunmen unwrap a shrouded body, carry it a hundred yards and position it atop a pile of rubble -- and then wait a half-hour until photographers showed. It was one of the more horrible things I've seen in my life. And it's typical of Hamas. If reporters would probe deeper, they'd learn the awful truth of Hamas. But Palestinian moral failings are not of great interest to many people.

One of Charles Johnsons' readers believes he's spotted yet another Palestinian snuff film.

Found via the Corner, the Heritage Institute has produced an eye-opening graphic on unemployment in the 1930s, which notes that FDR's New Deal programs never drove unemployment under 20 percent until the US geared up for WWII. The left have been calling for a New New Deal since at least the spring of 2008 before the economic turbulence of the fall, and Obama is more than happy to oblige and spend a lot more taxpayer funds. It's never worked, but why let history stop you?

Update: It's also worth noting that the economy was "pre-socialized" by President Bush in the last months of his administration. There's often much more continuity in presidents with seemingly disparate policies than first meets the eye.

The above quote from 1962's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance certainly explains how the legacy media operates. Which is why, when James Pethokoukis explains "Why Obama Will 'Own' the Recession", I'm not at all sure that will ultimately be true. If James is right, it will be because a majority voters understand at least the fundamentals of the financial history that Karl Rove outlines in his latest Wall Street Journal column:

Fannie and Freddie are "government-sponsored enterprises" (GSEs), chartered by Congress. As such, they had an implicit promise of taxpayer backing and could borrow money at rates well below competitors.

Because of this, the Bush administration warned in the budget it issued in April 2001 that Fannie and Freddie were too large and overleveraged. Their failure "could cause strong repercussions in financial markets, affecting federally insured entities and economic activity" well beyond housing.

Mr. Bush wanted to limit systemic risk by raising the GSEs' capital requirements, compelling preapproval of new activities, and limiting the size of their portfolios. Why should government regulate banks, credit unions and savings and loans, but not GSEs? Mr. Bush wanted the GSEs to be treated just like their private-sector competitors.

But the GSEs fought back. They didn't want to see the Bush reforms enacted, because that would level the playing field for their competitors. Congress finally did pass the Bush reforms, but in 2008, after Fannie and Freddie collapsed.

The largely unreported story is that to fend off regulation, the GSEs engaged in a lobbying frenzy. They hired high-profile Democrats and Republicans and spent $170 million on lobbying over the past decade. They also constructed an elaborate network of state and local lobbyists to pressure members of Congress.

When Republican Richard Shelby of Alabama, then chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, pushed for comprehensive GSE reform in 2005, Democrat Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut successfully threatened a filibuster. Later, after Fannie and Freddie collapsed, Mr. Dodd asked, "Why weren't we doing more?" He then voted for the Bush reforms that he once called "ill-advised."

But Mr. Dodd wasn't the only Democrat to heap abuse on the Bush reforms. Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts defended Fannie and Freddie as "fundamentally sound" and labeled the president's proposals as "inane." He later voted for the reforms. Sen. Charles Schumer of New York dismissed Mr. Bush's "safety and soundness concerns" as "a straw man." "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," was the helpful advice of both Sen. Thomas Carper of Delaware and Rep. Maxine Waters of California. Rep. Kendrick Meeks of Florida berated a Bush official at a hearing, saying, "I am just pissed off" at the administration for raising the issue.

Read the rest, and check out my recent "In Dodd We Trust?" video if you haven't seen it yet, for some further thoughts and links.

Update: More from Gateway Pundit, including video.

Roger Kimball on "Capgras Syndrome":

Notwithstanding Inauguration Fever, there are signs of unhappiness in Obamaland. Senator Dianne Feinstein, who is just about to begin her tenure as the first-ever female head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is deeply distressed by Obama's pick of Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton's former chief of staff, to head the FBI [Oops: wrong acronym: as a reader points out it was Obama picked to head the CIA: "FBI, CIA, ONI. We're all in the same alphabet soup." --The Professor in North by NorthWest]. "I wasn't even consulted," sniffed Feinstein, dabbing her eyes (I paraphrase). And Obama's choice of the Rev. Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inaugural sent poor Frank Rich into orbit. Reaching for his most opprobrious epithet, Mr. Rich warned that he discerned "a faint tinge of Bush" creeping into the otherwise immaculate reverie that was his image of Barack Obama. Any moment now, I expect an outbreak of Capgras Syndrome to cascade through the ranks of the faithful.

Capgras Syndrome? That's the delusion, named for the French shrink Jean Marie Joseph Capgras, that "a close relative or friend has been replaced by an impostor, an exact double, despite recognition of familiarity in appearance and behavior."

And once the Beatles records are played backwards, who will be revealed as the new Billy Shears, or Billy Campbell, or whoever it was who was supposed to have taken Paul McCartney's place?

As Obama is having lunch today, he might look across the table and ponder this presidential cautionary tale:

Once there was a president who campaigned on hope and change after a period of disillusionment, division, and economic downturn. He was a virtual unknown when the campaign began, a long-shot dark-horse with a brief record in public office, criticized by party-elders for having the self-assurance to believe that he should be president instead of waiting his turn. But people across the political spectrum responded to the candidate's calm candor and thoughtful intelligence--they saw in him a different kind of politician who could heal old divides and make them believe in our democracy again. Armed with a disciplined campaign, he pulled off what Time called "something of a political miracle." Before inauguration day, over 60 percent of Americans believed he would make a good or great president. By March, proposing a far-sighted energy bill and an economic stimulus plan that balanced job-creation with targeted tax-cuts, his approval ratings reached 72 percent. Things fell apart from there. [...]

As former Carter speechwriter James Fallows wrote in 1979, "The central idea of the Carter Administration is Jimmy Carter himself... Hubert Humphrey might have carried out Lyndon Johnson's domestic policies. Gerald Ford, the foreign policies of Richard Nixon. But no one could carry out the Carter Program because Carter has resisted providing the overall guidelines that might explain what his program is."

Behold, the will.i.am of the 1970s:

Max Boot on the New York Times' Bob Herbert and quagmire punditry.

As the denizens of Berkeley celebrate the incoming Obama administration by remembering the aura of the penumbra of a vaguely remembered emotion called patriotism (having long since confused it with nationalism and filed it away under the heading of Scoundrel, Last Refuge Of), Orrin Judd responds, "If you're only 'loyal' when your preference prevails, it is yourself you love, not your country."

See also this lengthy post from Linda Kimball titled "The New Left, Cultural Marxism, and Psychopolitics Disguised as Multiculturalism."

2008: The year of wasted questions:

Tim Graham of Newsbusters looks at the letter that was missing from most media reports of political scandal.

Perhaps the legacy media simply didn't want to risk hurting their chance to be collectivized into a sort of uber-PBS network.

Meanwhile, Tom Blumer explores the other story which quietly dropped off the legacy media's vacuum tube radar: "A Toast to Old Media's--and Old Medea's--Defeat in Iraq."

Related: "Judicial Watch Announces List of Washington's 'Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians' for 2008"

That's the headline of this new post by Allison Kaplan Sommer; think of it as more news that CNN keeps to itself...

(H/T: IP)

"Congrats. The New Republic finally smoked out a hoax! Too bad they can't apply the same standards of veracity and accountability to their own writers when the fit hits the shan."

Old media leaves Iraq as they found it--happily ignoring the big stories that don't fit their template. Until 2003, this meant spinning cheerfully for Saddam Hussein--and in at least one network's case complicit in covering up his crimes. Today, this means ignoring the progress occurring as Iraq makes continued strides towards becoming, as Mark Steyn recently put it, "the least-worst state in that part of the world."

That's going to increasingly leave the coverage of that fragile young democracy to new media professionals such as J.D. Johannes, whose name and coverage of Iraq was last seen being tossed into the memory hole by old media journalist Paul Mulshine in the Wall Street Journal.

Update: Related thoughts from Andrew Breitbart and John Nolte, here.

Michelle Malkin has a "Tale of two presidential workout fanatics"; meanwhile, Ed Morrissey has a tale of two politically-connected religious leaders. In both cases, one story has been met by praise (home run!) the other with derision. What ties these pairs of stories together? "Liberal double standards: It's just how they roll", Michelle writes.

Several of the recent posts here have focused on the surprisingly brief life and quiet death of objectivity in the legacy mass media. Or as Victor Davis Hanson wrote in the last days of the 2008 presidential election, "Sometime in 2008, journalism as we knew it died, and advocacy media took its place."

The replacement is a curiously schizophrenic beast; blending punditry and journalism; turning every newspaper into the Washington Times without the conservative op-eds, every network news department into Fox News without the pro-American populism. Regarding the latter trend, last month Robert Stacy McCain wrote:

The rise of Fox News as the No. 1 cable news outlet has resulted in ideological counterprograming. [emphasis in original--Ed] The success of a conservative news network has had an effect that might be best understood by reference to Newton's third law of motion. At first, there was the "equal effect" -- chastened by Fox's success, most networks sought to rein in their traditional liberal bias. But then, after the 2004 election, the "opposite effect" kicked in. Network executives figured, "Hey, Fox already has a monopoly on conservative viewers. Let's let our freak flags fly and give liberals what they really want." I really noticed this phenomenon during the 2006 campaign, when the media (a) pretended that the contributions Jack Abramoff's clients made to Democrats were meaningless, and (b) presented Mark Foley as the GOP poster boy. The existence of Fox News provides a ready-made excuse for liberals in the media to think of their bias as "balancing" Fox.

But half of the time those on the inside either don't know what's changed, or if they do, won't admit it publicly. (Occasionally a voice in these institutions will come clean and then a successor will forget the earlier admission--or more painfully, his own.)

All of which helps to set the stage for this post by Glenn Reynolds: "Paul Mulshine Blows It."

Update: Don't miss the extended comment by Jay Rosen regarding Mulshine's column, on Fausta Wertz's blog. Jay writes (amongst other things):

We are quite well informed about why the newspaper business is collapsing. The immediate cause: readers are moving to the Net but for various reasons the advertising isn't. Newspapers are stuck with huge capital structures they cannot easily jettison and revenues are falling. No one who writes seriously about new media and citizen journalism is unaware of this. No one in new media, citizen journalism or regular journalism knows what to do about it.

That's not the only reason, though it's a big one; it's an extremely safe assumption that revenues bottoming out are what's driving some of the other reasons old media's hit an iceberg (see above, and Michael Malone's great election-end column at Pajamas HQ), and is a subject we explored in video form earlier this month.

Meanwhile, Jules Crittenden also spots the extreme blurring of the lines between punditry and reporting in old media.

The Telegraph of England has an article titled, "2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved." (Hey does that mean that the earlier 1970s-version of eco-paranoia, man-made global cooling is now back in style?) If so, one reason why is that the Internet makes it possible to go back in time and compare the predictions of the past with the current reality.

It also allows us to find earlier stories where scientists and journalists suggested that their peers in each profession ditch objectivity and play on the understandable fears of laymen. Flopping Aces has a long blog post written by Dr. Tim Ball, former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg highlighting one example of the latter technique from 1989. This is merely an excerpt:

E. R. Beadle said, "Half the work done in the world is to make things appear what they are not." The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does this with purpose and great effect. They built the difference between appearance and reality into their process. Unlike procedure used elsewhere, they produce and release a summary report independently and before the actual technical report is completed. This way the summary gets maximum media attention and becomes the public understanding of what the scientists said. Climate science is made to appear what it is not. Indeed, it is not even what is in their Scientific Report.

The pattern of falsifying appearances began early. Although he works at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Stephen Schneider was heavily employed in the work of the IPCC as this biography notes.

Much of Schneider's time is taken up by what he calls his "pro bono day job" for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He was a Coordinating Lead Author in Working Group II of the IPCC from 1997 to 2001 and a lead author in Working Group I from 1994 to 1996. Currently, he is a Coordinating Lead Author for the controversial chapter on "Assessing Key Vulnerabilities and the Risks from Climate Change," in short, defining "dangerous" climate change." - Pubmedcentral.nih.gov

He continued this work by helping prepare the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) released in April 2007.

Schneider, among others, created the appearance that the Summary was representative of the Science Report. However, he provides an early insight into the thinking when speaking about global warming to Discovery magazine (October 1989) he said scientists need, "to get some broader based support, to capture the public's imagination...that, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we may have...each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective, and being honest." The last sentence is deeply disturbing-there is no decision required.

And that trend very much continues nearly twenty years later--legacy media trade publication Editor & Publisher actually ran an article last year titled, "Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers." My post about it from August of 2007 is found here; for non-subscribers of E&P, the text of the actual article can be read here.

But then, newspapers have gotten over objectivity on virtually all stories, not just climate change--with disastrous consequences.

(Via Maggie's Farm.)

Jonah Goldberg writes:

Steve Clemons' proposed solution to the Caroline problem is to have Obama send her to London as the Ambassador to the Court of St. James. That'd be fine with me, I guess. Though I don't think it's as exciting an idea as he does. I do think it's odd though that Clemons spends so much of his post rehearsing the usual anti-Bush throat clearing while completely ignoring a point that's actually relevant: The media would be obliged to revisit her grandfather's stint in the same job. And that might be embarrassing to the Kennedy clan.

Nonsense--all things embarrassing to clan Kennedy are conveniently airbrushed from history.

CNN's John Roberts can be witnessed between 6:50 and 7:30 point in this edition of Silicon Graffiti doing an amazing aerial 180 worthy of both Tony Hawk and Joseph Stalin--and here with the very definition of a Freudian slip. And yet, he seems surprisingly incredulous when one of October's chief hit and run victims of the drive-by media mocks his objectivity.

Update: Kathy Shaidle observes a revolving door revolving at the White House, as the upcoming Obama administration continues to take shape.

More: "That's a great thing about E. J. -- you don't have to read his columns anymore. You just know he's supporting Obama."

In his 2001 book, The CEO of the Sofa, P.J. O'Rourke wrote:

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 of course, with every new bailout, the Senate is becoming further and further intertwined with the public sector, and doing increasing harm. As Frank Martin noted in a recent post on his Varifrank blog, "This is how it ends. As of right now, the Senate IS the banking system":

You just try prying the banking system from the hands of the Senate now. You want a loan? Sure, lets just check your voting record, lets see what kind of car you want to buy, oh darn its not a certified government "greenmobile", well sorry Mr. Consumer, we can't give you a loan for that new Toyota Dual Axle truck for your ranch, but how about a new Chevy Cobalt Hybrid? Sure thing. Sign right here Mr. Consumer.

SNAP! That's just how easy it is for you to find that you no longer have any economic choices. No banks - then no bank loans. No bank loans - then no economy. In point of fact, your entire economy is now run by just 100 people. 100 people that if most of us were in an elevator and any one of them got on, we would then get off and walk up the rest of the building rather than risk our well being by exposed to their close proximity.

Hence the subject of my newest Silicon Graffiti, which begins with a parody of Charles Schwab's 2007 ad campaign (with a little help from the cartoon plug-in from After Effects CS4) before exploring the auto bailout, and the banking bailout. And the good old days (by comparison), when Congress would look at a giant corporation and decide the best way to break it up, not prop it up. When it was wasn't defaulting on its own debts, of course.

And along the way, a look back at some early warnings from the 1990s, and going even further back, a flashback from Vice President Elect Joe Biden to President Abraham Roosevelt Franklin Washington's early televised fireside chats from the 1860s. And a timely paraphrase of the Bard of Springfield.

This is our 23rd edition of Silicon Graffiti ,which began in January of this year--you can explore the back catalog by starting here and scrolling through. It's a mixed lot, but on the average, we hope our approval rating is on the north side of these numbers.

(Also posted at Right Wing News, where I'm one of several guest bloggers this week.)

Betsy Newmark reminds readers of the other side of Che Guevara:

Like the useful idiots who used to proudly wear their Mao jackets, now we have uncounted millions buying the Che T Shirts, putting up the poster, getting a Che tattoo, and buying tickets to see movies that portray Guevara as simply an idealistic revolutionary out to help the underclass. Actor Benicio del Toro who portrays him in the current film compares Che to Jesus except without that whole turn-the-other-cheek nonsense. It's a depressing commentary on the delusions of idealism that have led so many to idolize this guy and turn their own cheek to the reality of history.

Of course, as Mark Gladdblatt reminds us with a round-up of some of Che's more infamous quotes, the real Che was just a tad less sentimental than his modern disciples:

"In fact, if Christ himself stood in my way, I, like Nietzsche, would not hesitate to squish him like a worm."

Which of course sounds like something your average university Decon 101 professor would say to his freshman class. No wonder radical college professors like Bill Ayers (who emulated Che's actions) and Ward Churchill (who nostalgically emulates Che's poses) think he's Che chic.

Heh.™

James Taranto corrects a moment in the election timeline:

Remember Barack Obama's big race speech back in March, the one that invited comparisons to Lincoln? Neither does anyone else, but it seemed like a big deal at the time. On March 18 The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder did a short item called "Speechwriter of One" (quoting verbatim):

This wasn't a speech by committee... Obama wrote the speech himself, working on it for two days and nights.... and showed it to only a few of his top advisers.

This now appears to have been puffery, at least if the Washington Post has the story right:

One Saturday night in March, Obama called [Jon] Favreau and said he wanted to immediately deliver a speech about race. He dictated his unscripted thoughts to Favreau over the phone for 30 minutes--"It would have been a great speech right then," Favreau said--and then asked him to clean it up and write a draft. Favreau put it together, and Obama spent two nights retooling before delivering the address in Philadelphia the following Tuesday.

"So," Obama told Favreau afterward. "I think that worked."

Favreau is the 27-year-old Obama speechwriter best known for a party photo in which he pretends to grope the right breast of a life-size cardboard cutout depicting New York's junior senator. Harmless frat-boy antics, to be sure, but it does make all the solemn praise Obama got for that race speech all the more hilarious.

(H/T: FTPS)

Found via Mark Hemingway, the New York Times notes that W. Mark Felt, the FBI agent who was revealed in 2005 to be Woodward and Bernstein's "Deep Throat" and played by Hal Holbrook in the film version of All The President's Men is dead at age 95.

Back in 2005 with a movie then in theaters about a powerful Machiavellian ruler corrupted by power that featured performances even more wooden than Robert Redford in mind, Mark Steyn wrote "Revenge of the Felt":

''Revenge of the Sith'' is a marvel of motivational integrity compared to ''Revenge of the Felt,'' the concluding chapter in that other '70s saga, Watergate. Before the final denouement last week, there were a gazillion guesses at the identity of ''Deep Throat,'' but all subscribed to the basic contours of the Woodward and Bernstein myth: that he was someone deep in the bowels of the administration who could no longer in good conscience stand by as a corrupt president did deep damage to the nation. So Darth Throat, a fully paid-up Dark Lord of the Milhous, saved the Republic from the imperial paranoia of Chancellor Nixotine by transforming himself into Anakin Slytalker and telling what he knew to the Bradli knights of the Washington Post.

Now we learn that Deep Throat was not, in fact, Alexander Haig, David Gergen, Pat Buchanan or Len Garment, but a disaffected sidekick of J. Edgar Hoover, an old-school G-man embittered at being passed over for the director's job when the big guy keeled over after half-a-century in harness.

Hmm. Like the ''Star Wars'' wrap-up, ''How Mark Felt Became Deep Throat'' feels small and mean after three decades of the awesome dramatic burden placed upon it. The nobility of the Watergate myth -- in which media boomers and generations of journalism school ethics bores have sunk so much -- seems cheapened and tarnished by this last plot twist.

The best thing I read on the subject in the last few days was a 1992 piece by James Mann from the Atlantic Monthly. He doesn't identify Deep Throat, though he mentions Mark Felt in an important context. But get a load of this remarkably shrewd paragraph from 13 years ago:

''By coincidence, the Watergate break-in occurred on June 17, less than seven weeks after Hoover's death and [FBI outsider] Gray's appointment [as acting director]. The FBI took charge of the federal investigation at the same time that the administration was trying to limit its scope.

''Therein lies the origin of Deep Throat.''

Bingo! Mann also adds: ''Rarely is it asked whether White House aides like Haig, Ziegler, and Garment were the sort of people willing to hold 2 a.m. meetings in a parking garage, or whether they were able to arrange the circling of the page number 20 of Bob Woodward's copy of the New York Times, which was delivered to his apartment by 7 a.m. -- the signal that Deep Throat wanted a meeting.''

With the benefit of hindsight, Mann's observation seems obvious. That's what the spy novelists call ''tradecraft.'' It's the sort of thing spooks and feds do, not White House aides. Why then was it not so obvious for the last three decades?

The answer is that, thanks to All The President's Men, the media took it for granted they were America's plucky heroic crusaders, and there's no point being plucky heroic crusaders unless you've got the dark sinister forces of an all-powerful government to pluckily crusade against. Think how many conspiracy movies there've been where White House aides are the sort of chaps who think nothing of meeting you at 2 a.m. in parking garages, usually as a prelude to having you whacked. In films like Clint Eastwood's ''Absolute Power'' or Kevin Costner's ''No Way Out,'' political appointees carry on like that routinely. That image of government derives principally from the Nixon era.

During that same period, Jay Rosen wrote of "Deep Throat, J-School and Newsroom Religion":

Watergate is the great redemptive story believers learn to tell about the press and what it can do for the American people. Whether the story can continue to claim enough believers--and connect the humble to the heroic in journalism--is a big question. Whether it should is another question.

Felt and many of the other supporting players of Watergate are slowly heading towards the exits. And with the lights about to go out on the legacy media, journalists finally have found a new religion to rally around--but will it be powerful enough to save the old order?

Update: Welcome readers of The Hill's Blog Briefing Room.

Elsewhere on the Web, Ed Morrissey's thoughts on Mark Felt are also worth reading.

As global warming pummels Las Vegas this week, Andrew Bolt lists the "Top 10 dud predictions" from global warming alarmists.

There's only one way to follow all that epic fail--with the ultimate butchered version of "The Final Countdown":

A rather discordant tone struck by the "relatively young and inexperienced" CEO of the Office of President Elect:

Meanwhile, in other dispatches from the Chicago Way, the 24Ahead.com blog spots a little ongoing Stalinizing of Illinois' archives.

Ed Morrissey posts an amusing clip of Joe Scarborough riffing on the instinctive legacy media.

As Jonah Goldberg once quipped, "those who cannot learn from history are condemned to hear George Santayana quoted to them for the rest of their lives"--or this time around, Robert Tracinski from Real Clear Politics:

It looks as if we are going to have to relive all of the mistakes of the 20th century one more time--let's hope it is one last time--before we relearn the big lesson of that century: the moral and material superiority of capitalism and the disastrous consequences of socialism in all its forms.

I thought we had learned that lesson well enough already, but it turns out I was wrong. Given a few decades to recover from the collapse of the Soviet Union--and given an opportunity to take advantage of the ideological confusion and muddled pragmatism of the pro-free-market right--the left is making a serious attempt to reconstitute itself.

And it is not just any variant of the left. It is the Old Left, the mid-20th-century left of public-works giantism, ham-fisted labor union protests, and command-and-control central planning.

By the end of the 20th century, the failure of all of these policies had caused the Old Left to splinter into two groups. The New Left hippies rejected industrial socialism in favor of anti-industrial socialism, adopting environmentalism and holding up a neo-primitive lifestyle as the ideal, while the New Democrat centrists sought a "Third Way" compromise between capitalism and socialism.

But now the discredited Old Left seems to be making a roaring comeback. We can see the signs all around us.

Consider Barack Obama's plan for up to $700 billion in New-Deal-style "public works" boondoggles. It is a good old-fashioned Keynesian "stimulus" based on the premise that you can revive the economy by spreading paper money around at random.

Yet it is now widely acknowledged that the original New Deal did not actually revive the Depression-era economy. Even under Keynes's failed theory, the amount of FDR's spending was not enough to stimulate the economy--and neither is the amount proposed by Obama. But that hasn't fazed the revived Old Left.

Which is why, as early as May, long before the September financial meltdown that paved the way for Obama's victory in November, leftwing politicians were calling for a "New, New Deal": But, as Tracinski notes above, what if the conventional wisdom is wrong about the Old New Deal, and that Risky Tax Scheme, to borrow one of Algore's catch phrases, prolonged the Depression?

I originally produced the above clip, "Mugging For The Camera," back in early April as part of my Silicon Graffiti series of videoblogs, and uploaded it first to my primary video server, where I posted it here and it got a fair chunk of traffic in the Blogosphere. I then uploaded it to YouTube for hosting on my page there.

Last year, one of the subjects of the video, television reporter Rebecca Aguilar, then with Dallas-based KDFW, received a firestorm of attention (here's our post, which links to others) for her badgering tone when attempting to interview an elderly Army vet whose business was robbed on multiple occasions, and fought back. (She was eventually let go by the station.)

In late March, when a TV station in northern California reported in a rather upbeat manner about the bravery of another elderly vet who fought back rather than be mugged, it seemed to be quite a contrast to the report that aired in Dallas.

As part of my Silicon Graffiti video series, I wanted to place those two video clips side by side, as well as include comments made by other journalists and bloggers, such as the proprietors of Breitbart.TV (who are local television vets themselves), and Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com, all of which was clearly within the context of fair use.

On November 18, the page containing the above video was the subject of a DMCA take-down notice sent to YouTube by KDFW. YouTube, quite appropriately, took down the video and sent me a copy of the notice. My wife and attorney sent a counter notice, and after waiting the appropriate time, YouTube restored the content earlier this evening with a note that my account would not be penalized, which means that this won't count against me on YouTube's "repeat offender" list.

As others have noted, YouTube is quick to pull videos whenever there's a whiff of controversy or a dispute regarding them. But I'm glad to see this video back up--to the best of my knowledge, it's the only record available on YouTube at the moment of newscaster Rebecca Aguilar's original report, the others having been removed due to KDFW's objections. (See here, here and here.) But it's also a reminder not to rely on the site as your primary or, especially, your only video host.

At NewsBusters Kyle Drennen spots CBS with their shoe in their mouth:

According to CBS correspondent Richard Roth, in a report on Monday's CBS Early about an Iraqi journalist throwing a shoe at President Bush during a Baghdad press conference, the incident was reminiscent of the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein five years earlier: "Mr. Bush's message of progress was eclipsed in Baghdad by a sign of his unpopularity...The symbolism wouldn't have been lost on Iraqis, for whom shoes can be used to show extreme contempt, as with the footwear beaten against the statue of Saddam Hussein toppled by Marines five years ago."

Of course, in 2002, when Saddam held his last "election", CBS hilariously reported:

(CBS) Iraq declared Saddam Hussein the winner Wednesday - by an 11 million-to-0 margin - in a war-shadowed referendum on his two-decade military rule, sending celebratory gunfire crackling from the streets and rooftops of Baghdad.

The 100 percent turnout, 100 percent 'yes' vote shows all Iraqis are poised to defend Saddam against American forces, the country's No. 2 man said.

"If they come, we will fight them in every village, and every house," said Izzat Ibrahim, vice chairman of Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council, announcing results on what Iraq billed as a people's referendum on keeping Saddam in power another seven years.

"Every home will be a front, and every farmer, every shepherd, every Iraqi, will play his role," Ibrahim said. "All Iraqis are armed now, and by God's will we will triumph."

* * *

CBS News Correspondent Tom Fenton, reports voters going to the polls in Baghdad faced a simple choice - to vote "yes" or "no" - and everyone seemed to be voting "yes."

Whether that's because they love their leader - as many people said they did - or for other reasons, was hard to tell.

A United Nations human rights report says 500 people were jailed in the last referendum after they voted "no."

Some voters went to extremes to make it clear where they stood.

"I love Saddam more than myself," one man told CBS News, as he wrote "yes" on his ballot in blood - his own blood.

Ibrahim, announcing the vote, said all 11,445,638 eligible voters had cast ballots, and all for Saddam.

"Someone who does not know the Iraqi people will not believe this percentage, but it is real," Ibrahim said. "Whether it looks that way to someone or not. We don't have opposition in Iraq."

Iraqi officials said popular outrage at the U.S. threats to Saddam's regime made the turnout and percentage even higher than in 1995, when Saddam received a 99.96 percent 'yes' vote.

Iraqi media compared it to Bush's 2000 election victory, eked out in the Electoral College despite losing to Al Gore in the popular vote.

"The truth of the matter is that he (Bush) won by a fraction of the votes, and this fraction was engineered by sly lawyers' games," said the state-run Iraqi Daily. "Maybe this is one of the main reasons for his hysterical threats on the Iraqi choice!"

Of course. More explorations of the Memory Hole, here.

Meanwhile, Power Line reviews HBO's whitewashed miniseries about Saddam and finds more than a little equivocation:

There is much more that could be said. But let us sum up: HBO and the BBC want us to see Saddam as a family man, a tyrant at home, a dictator at work, who became this way because his stepfather beat him. He was, in this version, an ordinary kind of dictator and this was an ordinary kind of Middle Eastern authoritarian regime run as a family business. The trouble is it was not. Saddam was uniquely brutal in his rise through the Ba'athist Party. His regime sought to eliminate entire groups from the nation. He launched two aggressive wars against neighbouring states. This was not a normal authoritarian regime, nor even a bad one. Saddam was a genocidal dictator who terrorized his own people. This attempt to normalize him is a disgrace.

Saddam became a dictator "because his stepfather beat him"? Moviemakers seem remarkably generous when it comes to forgiving a tyrant's excesses when they can blame them all on a dysfunctional childhood.

More Hollywood forgiveness offered here.

The Business & Media Institute rounds them up; a Tech Central Station column by Arnold Kling from 2006 explains their origins.

In a related vein, Ronnie Schreiber explores "Myths of Organized Labor", memes which also derive from a similar ancestry.

As one of Tim Blair's readers quipped on Friday:

Obama has besmirched the "Office of the President Elect" more than anyone in American history.

In mid-November, When Obama's transition team fired up Photoshop, printed out their mock "Office of the President-Elect" signs and pasted them to Obama's lectern, the media, weary of covering the real president during the final two months of his administration (except when the Florsheims fly, of course) ate it up. Itchy with anticipation over the transition and already used to giving their candidate maximum media exposure (and plenty of cover), they were thrilled to report on his press conferences as if he already was the president--why bother with the stuffy formality of transferring power in January?

And then we all learned how to pronounce the word "Blagojevich."

With a little bit of political jujitsu in mind, this weekend, the RNC responded with this ad:

Hot Air's Allahpundit asks, "Should the RNC have waited on this? No benefit of the doubt during the interregnum, at least?"

In 2000, there was plenty of doubt, and very little of it beneficial, thrown by the out party at their successors during the transition period.

Having established the precedent, why would they think the urge to attack during what was once a calm and orderly transition would cease?

As Christian Toto writes, while Roger Ebert has always been a man of the left, his BDS seems to be getting the better of him these days. In his otherwise appropriately middling review of the Keanu Reeves remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, Ebert opines:

The message of the 2008 version is that we should have voted for Al Gore. This didn't require Klaatu and Gort. That's what I'm here for.

To which Christian replies:

Really? I thought you were here to help the public decide the best way to spend their hard-earned money at their local theater. Maybe that whole "thumb" thing was just a distraction.

Exactly. But Ebert really lets his 1960s-minted BDS flag fly in his review of Frost/Nixon:

Strange, how a man once so reviled has gained stature in the memory. How we cheered when Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency! How dramatic it was when David Frost cornered him on TV and presided over the humiliating confession that he had stonewalled for three years. And yet how much more intelligent, thoughtful and, well, presidential, he now seems, compared to the occupant of the office from 2001 to 2009.

That's not strange, that's what the media does to every Republican president when he leaves office when comparing him to a successor from his same party. Why should Nixon be the exception?

More Ebert:

Nixon was thought to have been destroyed by Watergate and interred by the Frost interviews. But wouldn't you trade him in a second for Bush?

Nahh, I'm not a wage and price controls kind of guy. But that's the great irony of Nixon's presidency, as Tom Wicker of the New York Times wrote in his 1991 biography of Nixon. If the left could have gotten past their hatred of the man, they would found, particularly in his statist warmed over Great Society domestic policies, he really was one of them, to paraphrase Wicker's title--or at least he certainly governed like it.

While Ebert naturally gives the movie four stars, John Nolte provides a bit of much-needed perspective:

Frost/Nixon is a full on respectable, accomplished and intelligent retelling of the now famous series of interviews English television personality David Frost conducted with disgraced former President Nixon in 1977, just a few years after Nixon's resignation. No one can argue a successful stageplay hasn't been transformed into a beautifully shot narrative with two memorable performances by Frank Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost. The film holds your attention and reeks of competence from beginning to end.

All that's missing is a point.

* * *

Frost/Nixon rates as an impressive television movie, but as a feature it lacks a point, any kind of real intellectual curiosity, and, most of all, an ambition to do more than win awards. There's a great Nixon film to be made about this corrupt but fascinating man, but a couple of terrific lead performances won't help anyone remember this one for very long.

Even Ebert circuitously admits that the film is a show about a show about nothing:

[Nixon] admitted what everyone already knew, and that freed him to get on with things, to end his limbo in San Clemente, Calif., to give other interviews, to write books, to be consulted as an elder statesman. Indeed, to show his face in public.

Wait--didn't you start your article by saying that Nixon was "interred by the Frost interviews"? So the interview that interred Nixon freed him to get on with things?

In actuality, the interview was hardly the heavyweight slugfest the movie and its hagiographic critics make it out to be. At National Review, Fred Schwarz goes back to the newspaper reviews of Frosts' interviews with Nixon to see how they played at the time with a media still giddy over their recent victory:

To someone who was around back then, the idea of making a major motion picture about such a notorious fizzle seems bizarre; you might as well write an opera about "The Mystery of Al Capone's Vault." Is this just a case of memory being deceptive? Were the interviews really a landmark of a milestone of a watershed, as the publicists assert? To test this, I looked back at the reception they got in the media of the time.

The show's producers secured lavish advance coverage by giving virtually everyone with a press card some sort of "leak": transcripts, unedited video, production notes, briefing materials, correspondence. The week of the broadcast, Nixon was on the cover of both Time and Newsweek, in that long-vanished era when those publications were considered influential. In the days leading up to the broadcast, the Washington Post ran several solid pages of Watergate transcripts and analysis, flashing back to the glory days of 1973.

After the airing of the first interview -- the only one anybody cared about, since it contained all the Watergate material -- there was far less hoopla. The Post's Bob Woodward, Nixon's erstwhile tormentor, called it "a much-touted television interview which shed little new light on the scandal."

Elsewhere in the Post, Haynes Johnson's analysis dripped with disappointment: "[The former president] proceeded, for the next 90 minutes, to give us all the familiar Nixon responses we have all seen for more than a generation. Those advance reports about Nixon being broken -- or shattered -- or even shaken by the withering interrogation of David Frost are in error. Nixon is in control throughout. He offers little that is new, and less that is of substance." Johnson continued: "Last night's program was billed as a dramatic and historic encounter between Nixon and his opponent, the relentless David Frost. It was nothing of the sort. . . . By the very end of the program, Frost looks as though he's swept up by the Nixon responses. . . . The tables have been turned. Frost had met his match."

The New York Times, in a brief, unsigned "Week in Review" item a few days later, echoed the been-there, done-that theme: "The spectacle was a familiar one . . . he portrayed himself, in typically Nixonian terms and gestures, as a victim of circumstance whose errors sprang from good intentions. . . . No important factual information about Watergate emerged from the interview."

* * *

How did this one-day story suddenly become the most important event since the Civil War? Well, if there's anything the media loves more than overhyping an anti-Republican story, it's overhyping its own importance, so when they have a chance to do both at once, it's no surprise that they get a little too excited.

As I wrote here last year, Frost/Nixon is an attempt to use history, assisted by plenty of dramatic license, to retrospectively turn a loss into a win. By all accounts, Frost/Nixon does a fine job of dramatizing the negotiations and preparation that led up to the interviews. And it's hard to imagine Frank Langella, who plays a Brezhnev-looking Nixon, giving a bad performance. Still, the movie's fundamental premise is just plain wrong.

The trailer says: "In 1974 President Nixon resigned to hide the truth. But one man had a few questions." In fact, Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment; "the truth" was contained in congressional transcripts, court papers, and Oval Office tapes, and the great bulk of it came out before Frost and Nixon sat down for their "historic" clash. Some questions did remain unanswered: Why would anyone bug the DNC? Why didn't Nixon burn the tapes? Where did the 18-1/2 minute gap come from? But Frost never brought these up.

All that his much-vaunted interviews "revealed" was the unsurprising truth that, even in retirement, Richard Nixon was the same Tricky Dick he had always been.

As Orrin Judd concludes in his review of Wicker's biography:

It is perhaps the perfect punishment that Nixon has no one left to defend him now except for the same liberals who were his lifelong enemies. One imagines Richard Nixon spinning in his grave at the very thought of a NY Times columnist penning a 700 page apologia for his life and works, and one smiles.

And as John Nolte writes:

Since 1976's All The President's Men Nixon's become a genre all his own. Take a look.

My personal favorite is Robert Altman's Secret Honor, starring Philip Baker Hall and a half gallon bottle of Chivas Regal, and its Blagojevichian conclusion. (Language warning, but the video clip's here.)

Nixon was still very much alive when the 1984 film was made; while I don't know his response, I'd like think that deep down inside, he very much enjoyed, even a decade after he left office, still being able to cause that embittered a reaction amongst the left.

(And as for Nixon's interviewer? Much like Dan Rather's banishment to the cable purgatory of HD-Net, Frost has also been exiled to his own video Siberia.)

As Jim Geraghty notes, President Elect Obama is currently floating a "Nuclear Umbrella for Israel" proposal.

As Jim writes, the left will have kittens when they find out who first proposed it.

(H/T: FM)

Dissent: It's the highest form of patriotism. But patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

As others have pointed out, two of the most popular cliches among the left form quite a paradox. The Hill reports that Jennifer Granholm, Michigan's Democratic governor called the Senate "un-American" for voting against the auto bailout. (AKA further socialization of the automobile industry.)

Back in late September, during that week's Federal bailout, Rich Lowry wrote:

Pelosi unloads on House Republicans. Why is it always OK for Democrats to call Republicans "unpatriotic"?

Ramesh Ponnuru had the perfect reply: "Because it has no sting."

Over at Commentary's Contentions blog, J.G. Thayer spots "The Death Of An Axiom":

One of the most lasting legacies of Watergate were these words of wisdom: "it's not the crime, it's the cover-up." At the time of Watergate, it quickly became apparent that Richard Nixon was not directly involved in the most egregious offenses committed by his underlings, but when he learned what happened he helped orchestrate attempts to cover up and conceal it. It was for those actions, not some "second-rate burglary," that Nixon was bound for impeachment before he resigned.

But it appears that Barack Obama is well on his way to erasing that decades-old rule.

He also links to this timeline at The Volokh Conspiracy, which notes, "Everything Fits Easily Except Obama's Monday Denial."

Nick Gillespie debunks Che chic in awesome new video from Reason.TV:

I was glad to see this moment from 2005 mentioned--and described as "Wearing a swastika in a synagogue."

Update: If you gnashed your teeth at Nick Gillespie's video look at Hollywood's obsession with terrorist chic, you're really going to hate "'Che' It Ain't So", Kyle Smith's review of Steven Soderbergh's endless encomium to everyone's favorite murderous thug and T-shirt icon. For the rest of us, don't miss it.

The Wall Street Journal notes, "In Chicago, Political Celebration Gives Way to Political Shame:"

The pride that's been surging through this city since Barack Obama's presidential victory last month is showing signs of deflating now that political corruption has returned to center stage in Illinois.

To many residents, the arrest of Gov. Rod Blagojevich for, among other things, allegedly trying to sell the president-elect's vacated senate seat marked an end to the political glow the city has been basking in.

"It was as if Chicago politics had turned a corner and this was a new day," said Sean Kennedy, former president of a student Democrat organization at Loyola University here. "All of a sudden, we get pulled back into reality, and realize nothing in Chicago has changed that much."

Gosh, there's a shocker. Meanwhile, despite being a target-rich environment there's "Not Much Humor in the Blagosphere", according to Yeah Right:

I haven't done an exhaustive search, but I'm pretty disappointed in the lack of funny material online on the Rod Blagojevich scandal. I mean, brazen corruption + lotsa obscenity + awesome name. In my book, that ought to = comedy gold. Perhaps its just that the reality is funny enough that it is stunting the creativity of our nation's funnymen who seem to be struggling IMHO.

One of their links goes to Blagojevich's Gary Hart moment from earlier this week:




Finally, though reasonable people may disagree, looking at Blagojevich's freeze-dried hair, I'd say now we know who Christopher Reeve donated his toupees to.

How much are the media in the tank for Obama? Enough so that they'll happily toss inconvenient articles down the memory hole for him.

This morning, Ann Althouse wrote:

Why am I getting the feeling that the mainstream media will do what it can to obliterate the connection between Rod Blagojevich and Barack Obama?

It's more than a feeling, to quote those sage philosophers from Boston.

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey spots plenty of airbrushing at Obama's Change.gov site.

Over at Commentary's Contentions blog, Jennifer Rubin asks if Gov. Blagojevich is "Crazy or Corrupt?"

Like others, I wondered after reading the criminal complaint whether Gov. Blagojevich isn't just plain crazy. He thinks he's going to spruce up his image and run for President in 2016. He thinks he's going to get the Chicago Tribune to fire a columnist who suggested he deserved impeachment. He thinks he's going to get the President-elect to give him a huge job "in exchange" for a Senate seat. This is wacky stuff -- as if he was caught in a 1950's time warp, or a bad "B" movie. No one, even in Chicago, goes quite this far.

And were the people around him -- his chief of staff and Advisors A and B, not to mention Andy Stern -- similarly addled or were they playing along and humoring a lunatic? It seems peculiar that no one apparently said, "Oh, c'mon Governor. Barack Obama isn't giving you anything." Perhaps there was such a voice of sanity, and we'll hear it at trial.

Although I'm appalled, I'm more intrigued by the mendacity, bordering on insanity. How does some one function in a high office with such a loose grip on reality? And yes, Barack Obama did have some relationship with him, so it would be interesting to know if he ever perceived the governor of his state as a bit delusional. He did support him for governor twice, but perhaps he was duped too and didn't pick up on Blago's personal and mental failings.

The story will come out soon enough. But the most fascinating part is yet to be told -- how someone this unhinged gets to be governor and gets re-elected without anyone blowing the whistle.

Meanwhile, even though I'm pretty sure he'd wouldn't disagree with the second half of Jennifer's equation, Scott Johnson focuses on the first part, here: "Is Blago Nuts?"

Tom Blumer believes he's spotted Obama's equivalent to his Democratic predecessor's Lewinsky statement, here.

Read More »

With the arrest today of Illinois' Gov. Rod "Name That Party" Blagojevich for trying to sell Obama's vacant Senate seat (corruption? In Chicago? I'm shocked!), Exurban League has a photo taken at Obama's upcoming press conference.

Update: While the obvious references are to the Untouchables, Blagojevich sounds far more like Joe Pesci in Scorsese's Casino, with his Tourette's-like four, eight and 12-letter verbal explosions. They've caused quite a run at the asterisk factory at ABC News.

2009: A Smoot-Hawley Odyssey: As we've noted before, two of the four horsemen of the apocalypse could gearing up for quite a ride.

Related: I'm pretty sure this is a sign of the apocalypse as well.

Also Related: " Obama as Lincoln? Obama as FDR? How about Obama as Hoover? Now there's a real story."

The self-lobotomizing effects of political correctness on the media continues, as Patterico explores "An Ongoing Mystery to Our Journalistic Betters:"

Over at The Jury Talks Back, aunursa says that CNN can't figure out why the terrorists attacked a Jewish center.

It's not terribly surprising that they're surprised. I'll never forget how, after a Muslim terrorist shot up a Jewish Center in Seattle, the L.A. Times ran a box on the front page saying that the gunman's motive was a "mystery":

[Click over for page scan--Ed]

The story contained clues, such as the fact that the gunman targeted the Jewish Center after conducting a "cursory Internet search for Jewish organizations." Or the witness who said the man had screamed "I am a Muslim American, angry at Israel!" before opening fire.

I swear I am not making up those facts, or the fact that the L.A. Times declared the gunman's motives a "mystery" in the face of that evidence.

I guess these media types just keep getting mystified.

Of course, it's not just the media who are slow on the uptake these days--with dark satire to spare, Iowahawk writes that Bombay is all just a case of Too Late The Terrorist: "Apologetic Mumbai Killers: 'We Didn't Get the Memo About Obama.'"

With a vocal assist from Vera Lynn, Obama and Hillary Meet Again:

CNN's Jonathan Mann runs through the usual litany of acceptable progressive predecessors (but no President RFK, alas) and asks, "Which hero do we want Obama to be?"

The Americans who are comparing him to those remarkable predecessors are putting a lot of faith in a man they barely know.

Which is a remarkably tacit way for Mann to damn his fellow media men--after all, if Americans truly are "putting a lot of faith in a man they barely know" that constitutes one epic failure amongst those whose job it is to inform them. But then, the modern function of the news media is to withhold information, not disseminate it. Something CNN has been quite good at in some areas--less so in others.

(Via Newsbusters.)

Related: Magical thinking at MSNBC: "Anchor Frets: Why Hasn't Obama's Election Ended Terrorism?"

Victor Davis Hanson writes, "I think Obama may do more for George Bush's reputation than anyone thinks":

Obama is a masterful politician who never has had any real ideology or persona other than his own diversity story and history, youth, and charisma that together allow him to be whatever is politically expedient at the time.

That is, there is a pattern here: public campaign financing, FISA, NAFTA, drilling, nuclear power, coal, guns, capital punishment, abortion, Iran, Iraq, the surge, etc. all were repackaged as the primary and general elections evolved. A community organizing past that once welcomed in a Wright, Pfleger, Ayers, Khalidi, became inoperative lest he meet a McGovern-like fate.

And rather than assess carefully the Bush policies, it made better sense to lump them altogether under the general rubric that Bush shredded the Constitution and, as a unilateral preemptivist, ruined the American brand over seas (while knowing privately that when Obama himself assumed office he would leave alone the homeland-security measures, Patriot Act, FISA, etc. to ensure the continuance of the 7-year hiatus from a major attack, and follow Bush/Petraeus in getting out of Iraq to preserve the unexpected victory).

Likewise, privately Obama knew the meltdown was not Bush's fault per se but a bipartisan miasma a decade in the making, fueled by Wall Street greed, wrongheaded utopian politics, and corruption at Freddie and Fannie--and thus the Bush response was largely to be followed (and this apparently may even extend to not tampering immediately with the existing tax rates.)

The result of all this?

I think we are slowly (and things of course could change) beginning in retrospect to look back at the outline of one of most profound bait-and-switch campaigns in our political history, predicated on the mass appeal of a magnetic leader rather than any principles per se.

No, there is another...

It's fascinating to see a headline pop up in the MSM yesterday that reads, "Al Qaeda's Goal: Cripple Amtrak's N'east Corridor", as I remember blogging quite a bit about that very topic in 2004 and 2005. I wonder if the election of President-To-Be Obama has caused that plan to dusted off by Al Qaeda? Given how spread out the Northeast Corridor is, and how lightly guarded most of it is, it must make for a tempting target to any terrorist.

(Insert obligatory "is this what Biden meant when he recommended loin engirdification last month?" reference here.)

Related: For an intermodal look at another form of transportation at the northeast end of the Northeast Corridor, Jules Crittenden checks in "From The Airport That Brought You 9/11", where the desktop calenders appear to all be stuck at 9/10.

Mark Hemingway links to Barry Ritzholtz, who has crunched the numbers, adjusted for inflation of the financial bailout:

Whenever I discussed the current bailout situation with people, I find they have a hard time comprehending the actual numbers involved. That became a problem while doing the research for the Bailout Nation book. I needed some way to put this into proper historical perspective.

If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars. People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let's give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history.

Mark adds, "The only expenditure that comes close is WWII, and even that cost less."

And speaking of WWII, Jonah Goldberg notes the success of Amity Shlaes and others in reminding the public that the long grind of the Great Depression was made longer by the New Deal. So what's the rhetorical solution? Jonah writes:

As the work of Amity Shlaes and others starts to make much of the "new New Deal" propagandizing ever more difficult, many liberals are now switching to the argument that what we really need is another World War Two, minus the war part of course. Paul Krugman said a few weeks ago that WWII was just a big jobs program. And here's Robert Kuttner on ABC's This Week:

Now, on the question of whether the New Deal worked, Doris Goodwin said to me the other day, don't look at the Roosevelt of 1933, look at the Roosevelt of 1941, 1942.

The New Deal got us halfway out of the Depression, and it was Roosevelt's effort to balance the budget in 1937 that caused the downturn. But in 1941-42, we converted to a wartime footing and unemployment disappeared. And the deficit went as high as 28 percent of GDP. Now, I'm not saying the deficit has to go that high.

But Doris' point was, look at the auto conversion in 1941, 1942, when they shut the lines, they retooled, they started making planes and tanks and produced aircraft and weaponry at a rate the world had never seen. We could do that with fuel-efficient cars as the price of the auto bailout.

This is at best misleading -- and it's also an enormous "never mind" for liberals who've been worshiping the New Deal for 70s years. As Tyler Cowen noted this weekend, much of the gains from the war economy occured before we actually went to war but after we started selling all sorts of materiel to Europe. And the big gains that came after World War II were the result of the fact that Europe had been flattened and needed to buy pretty much everything from America. Investments in green technology are secondary, historical analogies are rationalizations. Kuttner simply wants a massive new industrial policy.

In the Robert Stacy McCain post I linked to over the weekend, in addition to media criticism, he suggested that "conservative spokesmen and Republican leaders in Washington need to find a safe line of attack against the new regime." Comparing the bailout to WWII offers a big ready-made talking point, for whatever few conservatives (if any) left in DC who aren't prepared to sign off on WWII Mark II.

Hey, a trillion here, a trillion there, and sooner or later you're talking about real money.

More from Ace and Robert Stacy The Other McCain (from whom the above ironic headline derives) on that Mark Halperin quote on the media's epic fail--or deliberately ignoring all of Obama's flaws--we explored earlier today.

This quote from Time magazine's Mark Halperin is making the rounds today:

Media bias was more intense in the 2008 election than in any other national campaign in recent history, Time magazine's Mark Halperin said Friday at the Politico/USC conference on the 2008 election.

"It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war," Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. "It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."

First of all, setting aside the Iraq war reference (which I sincerely doubt was an oblique reference to CNN being in the tank for Saddam), how is it a "failure"? A failure implies mistakes, details overlooked, preparations for a test not completed. This was a quite deliberate choice of the media to pick a side and aid it. And historically speaking, picking a side wasn't even that much of a choice.

Of course, it's not like anyone expects the legacy media to still feign objectivity, which is an affectation left over from the early days of the first radio networks of the 1920s and television networks of the late 1940s and early '50s.

But this year's media's bias against McCain, Palin and the GOP in general is a carry over from the 2004 campaign, as I noted in one of my Silicon Graffiti videos:

Near the tail-end of that campaign, one journalist even wrote an internal memo to his colleagues urging them to drop the pretense of objectivity:

It goes without saying that the stakes are getting very high for the country and the campaigns - and our responsibilities become quite grave

I do not want to set off (sp?) and endless colloquy that none of us have time for today - nor do I want to stifle one. Please respond if you feel you can advance the discussion.

The New York Times (Nagourney/Stevenson) and Howard Fineman on the web both make the same point today: the current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done.

Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win.

We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn't mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides "equally" accountable when the facts don't warrant that.

The journalist who wrote that both sides weren't equally accountable and that the media had a duty to help Senator Kerry?

Mark Halperin, then with ABC News.

The Dallas Morning News notes that, as with any historical event fading into the rearview mirror of history, eyewitnesses are becoming scarce. But beyond the immediate events in Dallas, once again, I'll recommend James Piereson's Camelot and the Cultural Revolution as a tremendous look at how Kennedy's death transformed American culture. You can read my review of the book at TCS Daily, and watch Peter Robinson's half-hour interview with Piereson here.

In 1988, Teddy Kennedy famously shouted "Where was George" during the Democrat's National Convention. (To which I think it was P.J. O'Rourke who brilliantly responded: At home, in bed, with his wife, sober.) To the question of "Where is Obama" during the market's current turbulence, David Frum explains "Why Obama is AWOL on the market meltdown":

As happened in 1932, the incoming administration in 2008 has two very immediate and obvious messaging goals:

-Think how many histories of the New Deal open with the nightmare situation prevailing on Inauguration Day 1933: banks closed, breadlines extending around corners, etc. What if FDR had worked with Herbert Hoover to improve conditions starting in December? Would the "coming of the New Deal" (to borrow the title of a famous book) have resonated nearly so dramatically in March?

The persistence of emergency into January will enable the incoming Obama administration to easily enact all its legislation, including legislation unrelated to the crisis --like a big new healthcare plan.

-The worse things look in November and December, the more indelibly the new team can stamp the outgoing team with the stigma of failure. It's urgent for Barack Obama that the Republican brand remain discredited not just for a season or two, but until November 2012.

Times may remain tough for some months to come. The worse Bush looks in 2008, the longer Obama can blame him for the problems of 2009, 2010, 2011... who knows how long?

Democrats campaigned against Herbert Hoover into the 1960s. John McCain campaigned against Jimmy Carter 28 years after the failure of that presidency. George W. Bush will be a Democratic byword for a generation to come -- and if it takes one unnecessarily nasty winter to maximize the impact of the byword, that seems a price that Democrats are more than prepared to pay. Or more exactly: to have Americans and the world pay.

As Mark Steyn is fond of saying:

When the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dumped some of his closest cabinet colleagues to extricate himself from a political crisis, the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe responded: "Greater love hath no man than to lay down his friends for his life."

Obama has simply taken that aphorism to its logical conclusion.

Read More »

Roger L. Simon deconstructs the wire service--but only after revealing his own inner Marxist!

According to the New York Times, (needless to say, take the news with a Pinch of salt), Hillary has accepted the Secretary of State position.

In a way, it's the least she can do. Because let's face it: when you've got a lifetime of experience, and all the boss has a speech that he gave in 2002, he'll need all the help you can deliver!

(Suha Arafat could not be reached for comment.)

As highlighted by the latest Time and Newsweek covers, the incoming Obama administration and its media cheerleaders are attempting to dial back expectations a tad. Obama's no longer God (of course, as Mort Sahl once said, if you're going to identify, identify), he's merely the second coming of Abe Lincoln and FDR. Jonah Goldberg writes, "It's a step down from divine redeemer, but you have to start somewhere":

Lincoln was Lincoln because he fought and won the Civil War and freed the slaves. News flash: That ain't what America is like today -- and thank God for it.

I think Lincoln was just about the greatest president in American history, but I sure don't want to need another Lincoln. Six hundred thousand Americans died at the hands of other Americans during Lincoln's presidency. Lincoln unified the country at gunpoint and curtailed civil liberties in a way that makes President Bush look like an ACLU zealot. The partisan success of the GOP in the aftermath of the war Obama thinks so highly of was forged in blood.

Likewise with FDR. Listening to liberals gush over a "new New Deal" and Obama's call for us to emulate the "Greatest Generation," you'd think they want another Great Depression and World War.

Indeed, liberals have long idolized the 1930s as a decade of great unity. It wasn't. The 1930s was a miserable decade of poverty, domestic unrest, labor strife, violations of civil liberties and widespread fear. If liberals really loved peace, prosperity and national cohesion, they'd remember the 1920s or 1950s more fondly. And yet they don't. Why? Because liberals didn't get to impose their schemes and dreams on the country in those decades. Behind all the talk of unity and bipartisanship and shared sacrifice lies an uglier ambition: power. The audacity of hope behind all this Lincoln-FDR-Obama blather is the dream of riding roughshod over the opposition, of having their way, of total victory.

The Chinese curse and cliche "may you live in interesting times" is on point. Liberals (and a few conservatives as well, alas) seem desperate to live in interesting times. Not me.

"You know what I hope? I hope Obama is another Coolidge or Eisenhower", Jonah concludes. "But I'm not holding my breath."

AP reports that "Al-Qaida No. 2 insults Obama with racial epithet", Rush reminds us that it's deja vu all over again.

As a one critic wrote in 2002:

When a black public person like Harry Belafonte calls another African-American a slave to white masters, you see what I mean. When defenders of feminism call someone who files a sexual harassment lawsuit "trailer-trash," you get the picture. When a gay man can write a column asserting that another man is a "nasty faggot," it's hard to think of how much lower the discourse can get. When liberals denigrate the president as a "boy" or as a "sissy," to quote Maureen Dowd, homophobia doesn't lurk far behind.

I remember a brief interaction I had with one Barbra Streisand long, long ago when the Paula Jones suit had just been filed. I asked Ms. Streisand what she thought of the suit. "Oh, she's just a little kurva," she replied, referring to Jones. That's a yiddish expression for "whore." Charming.

Again, the simple test here is the following: If a conservative had used these expressions, would it have been denounced by liberals? The answer, obviously, is yes. Imagine if George Will had called Colin Powell a "house slave." Imagine if Pat Buchanan had called Barney Frank a "nasty faggot." Imagine if Trent Lott had called Hillary Clinton a whore. Do you think they'd be invited on "Larry King Live" to further elaborate on their comments?

Of course, that was a few Andrew Sullivans ago.

Or--Full Metaphor Jacket:

During Tuesday evening's "No Bias, No Bull" program, Washington Post national political correspondent and CNN contributor Dana Milbank implied, perhaps inadvertently, that the incoming Obama adminstration was like the North Vietnamese advancing on Saigon in 1975. Host Campbell Brown asked Milbank about the "backlog of at least 2,000 pardon applications" to the Bush administration before the president leaves office early next year, and he replied, "Yeah -- it sort of has the feeling of the last helicopter off the embassy roof in Saigon."

To be fair, it's an awfully benign metaphor, since nothing bad happened after we left Vietnam--just ask Tom Harkin.

If you haven't seen it already it, don't miss John Ziegler's new Website, How Obama Got Elected, and this video interview with various Obama voters on election day:

It's a long video, but stick it out until the end, when all of the interviewees reveal where they get their "news"--it's a damning portrait of the legacy media's ability to inform the public, if indeed that's a job that MSM still pays lip service to performing.

More from Newsbusters and Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.

Zombietime proffers a new holiday: Victory in Iraq Day, November 22, 2008:

The moment has come to acknowledge the obvious. To overtly declare a fact that has already been true for quite some time now. Let me repeat:

WE WON THE WAR IN IRAQ
And since there will never be a ticker-tape parade down Fifth Avenue in New York for our troops, it's up to us, the people, to arrange a virtual ticker-tape parade. An online victory celebration.

Saturday, November 22, 2008 is the day of that celebration: Victory in Iraq Day.

What do you need to do to participate? Simple. Just make a post on your blog on Saturday, November 22, announcing that the war is over, and declaring that day to be Victory in Iraq Day. That's it.

If you want to write a short post (or a long essay) analyzing the nature of our victory or cheering the troops for a job well done, great; but if you just want to make a simple announcement of the victory, that's fine as well. Anything will do. Just come and join the celebration to mark the day.

Works for me--especially since we'll never see the folks who were forgainst the Iraq War acknowledge their 180 degree pivot in 2003.

Time magazine portrays BHO as FDR.

John Nolte writes on the New Hollywood Blacklist:

At least once a year we get a new narrative or documentary about the infamous Hollywood blacklist that forced a number of screenwriters out of the business or underground with the use of a pseudonym.

I included clips from a whole bunch of those annual Hollywood perennials in a Silicon Graffiti video back in July, which makes for a great double-feature with John's post. Speaking of which, here's more from John:

Most of these movies hit me as wish fulfillment fantasies with the filmmakers and their stars (George Clooney, Frank Darabont, Irwin Winkler, and on and on and on...) puffing out their chests to stridently declare that if they had been alive then that! never would've happened. Oh, no, they would have put their careers and livelihoods on the line to fight the good fight for the right to hold unpopular political beliefs without fear of retribution.

Well - here - we - are.

And where are you?

As John writes, they're too busy yelling, "Him, over there, He's Spartacus!"

Bill Ayers admits that--surprise!--Obama was, in Ayers' own words, "a neighbor and family friend." Charles Johnson writes that "Whatever you think of Ayers, he played this one smart":

He stayed out of the news until Obama was safely elected, because he knew if he admitted the personal friendship, and expressed his real opinions about radicalizing students, reparations, abolishing prisons, etc., his relationship with Obama would--rightfully--become a major issue in the campaign. And he counted on the media not to investigate him.

And with ABC's post-election softball interview with Ayers now online, you don't need a Weatherman to know that the MSM will blow--especially during a presidential election.

Even as science and common sense continue to dictate that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, Kathy Shaidle spots conspiracy buffs becoming ever more gnostic in their "analysis", obsessions, and, probably not surprisingly, their nomenclature.

Glenn Reynolds notes that "Obama is already preparing his transition, and having his aides read books about FDR in the hope of another 100 days."--but it's worth noting that the cries of a New New Deal came several months before the financial crisis this fall.

Layers and layers of fact checkers can't be wrong! Greg Packer: the man, the myth, the legend is back--and in the New York Times no less.

Still no word on the videotape that the Times is sitting on (at least until after Tuesday), but Martin Kramer respects the L.A. Times' decision--deliberate or otherwise--to stand by the reporting of one of its long-dead correspondents, who dubbed Rashid Khalidi a PLO spokesman back in the mid-1970s.

In an age where the truth is remarkably fungible, that is worthy of commendation. Check out Kramer's footnote, in which if he ponders if the Times on the opposite coast will have similar respect for the writings of their own long-deceased middle eastern correspondent, who also noted that Khalidi "works for the P.L.O." back in 1978.

The above headline comes from an interview back in January (you can hear the audio here), in which Obama said:

The problem is not technical, uh, and the problem is not mastery of the legislative intricacies of Washington. The problem is, uh, can you get the American people to say, "This is really important," and force their representatives to do the right thing? That requires mobilizing a citizenry. That requires them understanding what is at stake. Uh, and climate change is a great example.

You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, uh, you know -- Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I'm capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it -- whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.

Earlier in that same interview, Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle that "If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can--it's just that it will bankrupt them.":





Add that to previous utterances from the left on coal:








And of course, Obama's no big fan of cheap gasoline, either:





And the person who popularized "drill baby, drill?" Mama said knock you out.

As Tom Blumer writes in Newsbusters, put down all beverages before reading this quote from Al Neuharth, extracted from his column in today's edition of USA Today:

In the olden days, some newspapers actually were backed or funded by political parties. Not only did most endorse candidates, but news coverage often was slanted or opinionated.

Now most newspapers try to be fair and objective in news columns.

OK, to be fair, if you define "the olden days" to mean the era before the national radio networks, that's reasonable--and the era that followed, which was centered around a unified mass media, served the American public reasonably well until about 1968. But Victor Davis Hanson writes today, as I noted in an earlier post today, that era was shattered by the rise of the World Wide Web and replaced with a hyperpartisan advocacy media--which isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long consumers know that that's what their getting, and not a continued feint towards objectivity.

An increasing number of journalists understand that. But to borrow from an earlier post, there are those stragglers, such as Neuharth, whom every year sound more and more like the mythological Japanese soldier discovered on a desert island years after World War II ended, who doesn't realize the war's over, and how it concluded.

Amity Shlaes reminds us that yes indeed, FDR's policies prolonged the Depression--or as Mark Steyn wrote at the start of the month:

"Lots of other places -- from Britain to Australia -- took a hit in 1929 but, alas, they lacked an FDR to keep it going till the end of the Thirties. That's why in other countries they refer to it as "the Depression," but only in the U.S. is it 'Great.'"

For most of the 1970s, Archie and Edith sang, "Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again." It took a few decades, but at long last, their wish finally comes true.

Meanwhile, Charles Johnson spots one huge budget-busting proposal from Obama, which is troubling not just for its fiscal excess.

Check out this howler in a piece in CQ Politics titled, "What McCain Defectors See in Obama":

The defectors are a mixed lot, but all represent some brand of recognizably conservative thought. Some like Doug Kmiec, Andrew Sullivan, and Ken Adelman are probably conservatives by anyone's definition, while others are cut partly from an older mold. They bear some resemblance to the moderate Republicanism of the Rockefeller era, but the issues of their time are not the same.

Sullivan is as conservative these days as much as John Kerry was "the right man -- and the conservative choice -- for a difficult and perilous time."

(H/T: Orrin Judd, whose link to Powers' essay is titled, "Inherit The Windbags.")

"There's a wealth of information that would help define Obama just waiting -- and waiting -- for the press to discover", Abraham H. Miller writes, in a piece titled Obama's Chicago Secrets":

But maybe CNN and the rest of the electronic media won't send anyone to Chicago because it is blowing its investigative budget flying reporters to Alaska to explore why anyone would fire a public safety director who refused to dismiss a state trooper who tasered a twelve year old boy -- a trooper who was reported to be drunk while on duty, and who allegedly threatened someone's life. Now, there is a story we all can believe in -- "Troopergate."

Obama gets a pass because nothing is more important to the electronic media than getting Obama elected. Obama gets a pass on Bill Ayers because, at some level, most of the people in the media business can identify with what Ayers did. That's why they won't even mention the Weather Underground's planned bombing of the Fort Dix dance. That's why the name "Diana Oughton," the naïve girl who became Ayers' revolutionary partner and lover and who blew herself up in the Manhattan townhouse bomb factory, is never mentioned in any report on Ayers. This despite Diana's story being well known, as a result of award-winning journalist Thomas Power's book, Diana: The Making of a Terrorist.

Let's face reality: If Bill Ayers had been blowing up black churches and belonged to some neo-Nazi organization, do you think his long-time association with someone who might be the next president would be so cavalierly dismissed? Do you think that Dean Stanley Fish of the University of Illinois would consider penning a letter on behalf of some non-repentant neo-Nazi? Imagine if that neo-Nazi had said: "I did not do enough bombings. I did not kill enough blacks."

The left is so wrapped up in its own high-minded sophistry that it is incapable of distinguishing between being self-righteous and being politically obscene. There is no difference between fascism and communism. They are two sides of the same totalitarian currency. They lead to the same excesses. Yet, communism is palatable to the point of being chic, while fascism is appropriately despised.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was as natural an alliance as one between Britain and the United States. The media's failure to see Ayers as indistinguishable from the terrorists who bombed the Birmingham Church is a poignant and terrible commentary on where journalism -- especially electronic journalism - is today.

Bias exists not only in the obvious such as what we are told and how it is told to us, but also in what we are not told.

As the electronic media plows its resources into examining Sarah Palin's wardrobe and repeats Democratic talking points as news, more important subjects for real investigative reporters are ignored. What was Obama's role in Rezko's pay-for-play scheme? What did Rezko expect in return for the $300,000 subsidy for Obama's Hyde Park mansion? What is Rezko now telling the federal prosecutor?

Also, is it merely coincidental that Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn (Mrs. William Ayers) worked at the same law firm as Michelle Obama? How far back does the relationship with William Ayers go and how close is it? And does the relationship stem from both seeing America through similar ideological prisms, one based on hate, and the other -- as Michelle Obama so clearly articulated -- based on shame?

Don't hold your breath for answers.

Don't worry, the media will apologize for not doing what was once thought of as its job.

After their man crosses the finish line next week.

Back in 2005, Howard Dean told the late Tim Russert that "I will use whatever position I have in order to root out hypocrisy."

This seems like an exceptional place to start.

While my Ministry of Truth video on Monday dealt primarily with the ability to pivot history on a 180-degree fulcrum, as an additional feature, it's worth noting that the modern news media's primary role is not to disseminate information, but to withhold it. Sometimes permanently, or simply holding it back until it won't do much damage to a favored patron, at which point it can be released on page D-17 of the late Friday edition of the paper, in a two or three paragraph article in nine-point type next to the local plumber's advertisement and supermarket coupons.

The drawback to this approach of course, is that if there's a hint that the paper is sitting on a story, it can lead to wild--or who knows?--overly mild speculation about its contents.

All of which is why "2008 is not a year on which honest journalists shall look back with undiluted pleasure."

In the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti videoblog, we visit industrious Outer Party Member Winston Smith hard at work in the Ministry of Truth, and look at how history can be turned on a dime, including:

• The Pivot on the Iraq War.
• Hollywood and the Iraq War.
• All media, all malleable.
• Pivots by Dalton Trumbo and Pete Seeger during World War II.
• World War II revisionism today.
• One man's new found respect for private property and the Chicago P.D.!
• And a homage to the most Kafkaesque secret agent of 'em all. Be seeing you!

This is the 19th edition of our ongoing Silicon Graffiti videoblog series, which began in January of this year; click here for all of the previous editions.

As Power Line notes, over at the once-respect publication The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan has posted (under the same headline) a YouTube video trashing Sarah Palin titled, "Red, White and MILF." John Hinderaker responds:

I don't think there is any precedent in our history for the shameful manner in which the Left has treated Sarah Palin. Left-winger Andrew Sullivan gleefully posted a particularly disgusting example of the phenomenon today; it's a YouTube video titled "Red, White and MILF." Watch it only if you have a strong stomach. If you don't know what "MILF" means--I'm sure most of our readers don't--Google it.

I can remember when Sullivan was a respected journalist, not a gutter smear merchant and borderline pornographer. His descent exemplifies the Left's decline in recent years to a baboon-like level of discourse. The vileness of much of what passes for political "argument" on the Left has to be seen to be believed. The worst impulses of human nature have been not just unleashed, but rewarded. If you haven't looked at web sites like Democratic Underground, Daily Kos, the Huffington Post and Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, you have no idea what the phrase "gutter politics" really means.

Nowhere has the vileness of the Left been more sickening than in its treatment of Governor Palin. It is interesting to contemplate what a semi-pornographic video about Barack Obama, playing on the same sort of prejudices and stereotypes that are so disgustingly on display in Sullivan's video, would look like. Frankly, I can't imagine such a video being made, let alone featured on the web site of the once-proud Atlantic magazine. But on the Left, anything goes--the more slimy and disgusting, the better.

Sadly, that's been true for a number of years now. But from time to time, some have called the left on their actions. Here's a pioneering member of the Blogosphere in 2002 on the dangers of racism, invective and ad hominem attacks emanating from the left:

When a black public person like Harry Belafonte calls another African-American a slave to white masters, you see what I mean. When defenders of feminism call someone who files a sexual harassment lawsuit "trailer-trash," you get the picture. When a gay man can write a column asserting that another man is a "nasty faggot," it's hard to think of how much lower the discourse can get. When liberals denigrate the president as a "boy" or as a "sissy," to quote Maureen Dowd, homophobia doesn't lurk far behind.

I remember a brief interaction I had with one Barbra Streisand long, long ago when the Paula Jones suit had just been filed. I asked Ms. Streisand what she thought of the suit. "Oh, she's just a little kurva," she replied, referring to Jones. That's a yiddish expression for "whore." Charming.

That blogger's name? Andrew Sullivan, oddly enough.

Sarbanes-Oxley? That's strictly for those Joe the Plumber-type suckers in the private sector, writes TigerHawk:

Mark Steyn has more on the hilarious and probably intentional failure of internal controls at the Obama campaign. If it were a public company it would have to disclose a material weakness, and its auditors would wonder whether its "tone from the top" had actually encouraged the practices in question. Fortunately for politicians of all parties, we do not hold government to anything like the same standard of accountability that applies to private businesses with public stockholders.

Reviewing the last weeks of a campaign that seems like it commenced "sometime during your first child's initial year in primary school", Tim Blairadds, "this is just a guess, but it could be that the rules are different for Democrats."

(Video found via Little Green Footballs.)

A half century ago, Marshall McLuhan noted:

The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie. The form and tone of some press styles may make the very concept of truth irrelevant. The most urgent and reliable facts presented in this way are a travesty of any reality.

And that was during the (surprisingly brief) era in which a mass media feigned objectivity--and might have even believed it themselves. McLuhan's observation is even more true these days, as Roger L. Simon writes.

Update: Rick Moran may have caught CNN in yet another fabrication.

Forget the Black Panthers, hobnobbing with High Society on Park Avenue, happily dining on "asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi". Bill Ayers is the workingman's unrepentant former domestic terrorist, and as such has earned longest of long shot third party presidential candidate Dave Burge's coveted support.

(Sirhan Sirhan could not be reached for comment.)

Jonah Goldberg updates a Boomer/Gen-X Saturday morning video chestnut: "The new Schoolhouse Rock cartoon: 'Conjunction: a word that connects a racist attack and Barack Obama'":

This week, an editorial writer for the Kansas City Star denounced John McCain and Sarah Palin for suggesting that Obama is a socialist because he wants to "spread the wealth around." Don't they understand that "socialist" has always been a racist codeword used by bigots like J. Edgar Hoover to demonize black activists like W.E.B. Du Bois?

A couple problems: First, as best I can remember, Marx, Engels, Lenin, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene V. Debs, Norman Thomas, and Michael Harrington do not usually get a lot of attention during Black History Month. Second, as writer Michael Moynihan recently noted, Du Bois wasn't merely a socialist, he was a Stalinist! (Du Bois was not entirely unsympathetic to the Nazis, either.) [Paul Robeson was also pretty keen on Uncle Joe--Ed] Besides, when did "socialist" stop being an anti-Semitic codeword for Jew? Maybe when the left started going batty over "neocons."

I'm pretty sure I received the memo replacing the outdated terminology a while back from the liberal Bletchley Park.

From the department of "Be Careful What You Wish For", in my recent "Bonnie & Nixon" video, I incorporated a little of the audio from Bobby Kennedy's March 1968 speech at the University of Kansas, in which he quoted early 20th century progressive William Allen White's call for violence and upheaval by way of higher education:

"I am also glad to come to the home state of another great Kansan, who wrote, 'If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all their youthful vision and vigor then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.'"

As to bring things full circle (and then some), note who's namechecked on the dedication page of a book authored by a noted '60s rioter and rebel turned academician much in the news recently.

As it did in 2004, the last month of the presidential election increasingly resembles dispatches from the police blotter, rather than a nation of adults carefully weighing whom their commander in chief should be. Here's but a sample of what's going on out there:

• "Overnight, the Republican Party's office on the courthouse square in downtown Murfreesboro was attacked. A large brick with a symbol for anarchy written on it was thrown through a window, taking out the entire glass front."

• "Owner Believes Lexus Vandalized Due To McCain Sticker." (Time to update these T-shirts and bumper stickers.)

• "Video: Code Pink tries to arrest Rove."

• "Angry graffiti messages were spray-painted on the garage of Norm Coleman's St. Paul home overnight and discovered this morning.

  "'u r a criminal resign or else,' was scrawled in black on the side of the yellow garage in the Summit Hill neighborhood."

• Restaurant Offers Free Pizza for [Stolen] McCain Signs.

• "Does Reebok Condone Violence Against Women?"

• "Anti-McCain vandalism hits Maryland: Democrat Displaying GOP Candidate Sign Wakes Up To Find Home, RV, Truck Covered With 'Vote Obama' Graffiti."

• "NEW: Dashcam Video of Palin Protestors: 'With the opportunity of having a national figure in town, civil disobedience is one of the best ways you can get your message across,' she told 11 News." (More video here.)

• "The Hill notes that police departments across the country are preparing for post-election violence."
  

As Peter Wood, the author of last year's A Bee In The Mouth, on anger in America told an interviewer:

For example: "[New Anger involves] deriding an opponent for the sheer pleasure of expressing contempt for other people....New Anger is a spectacle to be witnessed by an appreciative audience, not an attempt to win over the uncommitted....If in your anger you reduce your opponent to the status of someone unworthy or unable to engage in legitimate exchange, real politics come to an end....Whoever embraces [New Anger] is bound to find that, at least in the political realm, he has traded the possibility of real influence for the momentary satisfactions of self-expression."

And clearly we're seeing a lot of those momentary satisfactions of "self-expression", even if the Victorian Gentleman would prefer not to discuss their origins and root causes.

But quote swapping to help your guys and hurt their opponents? Hey, that's all in a day's work for the Obamedia.

As Orson Scott Card writes,"Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper. But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie."

Only one?

Update: Related thoughts from John Hinderaker of Power Line.

Noel Sheppard writes:

Whether it's an example of the host's bias or incompetence, potentially one of the most amazing aspects of Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama on Sunday's "Meet the Press" was that Tom Brokaw didn't ask the former Secretary of State about the success of the surge in Iraq or the Democrat presidential candidate's opposition to this winning military strategy.

Given Powell's critical position in garnering support for the Iraq War, as well as his involvement in Desert Storm many years ago, it should have been essential to any interview dealing with his endorsement of either candidate how he feels the 2007 increase in troops has worked, and what the Senatorial vote on this strategy by his candidate of choice says about that person's foreign policy acumen.

Despite this logic, a full examination of the transcript and video of this almost 30-minute interview identified absolutely no reference to the surge whatsoever, and no questions posed to the former Secretary of State concerning the wisdom of Sen. Obama's position on it.

There's hope and change and audacity in the air! Why would a unbiased objective hard-hitting journalist spoil the good feelings?

(No? Well, we can always blame it on a lack of research due to NBC's budget cuts.)

"George this is of what I'm talking about. This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood who's a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from..."

Back in April, Obama discussed Reverend Wright with Chris Wallace:

WALLACE: Did you talk to reverend Wright recently about his decision to make a series of public appearances at this particular point?

OBAMA: You know, I didn't talk to him about that. I had talked to him after all this had happened, partly because I regretted -- I always regret people who are civilians, essentially, being dragged into these political fights.

And I expressed to him -- I said, "Look, we have very strong differences. I do not agree with the comments that you made. On the other hand, I regret that you have drawn so much attention."

Obama talking about his wife, back in July:

And I've said this before: I would never have my campaign engage in a concerted effort to make Cindy McCain an issue, and I would not expect the Democratic National Committee or people who were allied with me to do it. Because essentially, spouses are civilians. They didn't sign up for this. They're supporting their spouse.

I guess once you move beyond the inner circle, the definition of "civilian" becomes slightly hazier.

Clark Hoyt, the New York Times' ombudsman, writes:

Throughout this election season, most of the thousands of messages I have received about Times news coverage have alleged bias -- bias in headlines, photo selections, word choices, what the newspaper chooses to write about and what it ignores, what it puts on Page 1 and what it puts inside. Most of the complaints, but by no means all of them, have come from the right. Nobody acknowledges the possibility that, because of their own biases, they could be reading more, or less, than was intended into an article, a headline or a picture. Many go a step beyond alleging mere bias to accuse The Times of operating from a conscious agenda to help one candidate and destroy the other.

"It's so obvious who the NYT is supporting for the presidency," said Cheryl Page of Jackson, Miss. "How sad that our media can't just report the news, rather than print their opinions in biased ways." There is a proper place for opinion in The Times -- the editorial and Op-Ed pages -- and there is no doubt that most of the newspaper's regular columnists and its editorial policy favor Obama. It would be a shock if The Times did not endorse him.

But the paper's news coverage is another matter. It is supposed to be evenhanded. I think I've seen bias from time to time, and I think The Times made a serious mistake early this year that gave its critics on the right a lot of ammunition: an article that suggested, but failed to prove, a romantic relationship between John McCain and a female lobbyist. (The Op-Ed page, though independent from the newsroom, added to the problem when it ran an article by Obama without first securing a companion piece from McCain. McCain then offered a rebuttal, but when the paper asked for major revisions, he refused and his supporters cried foul.) But I think the news coverage over a long campaign has been better and fairer than critics would admit.

At least the Times' previous ombudsman was willing to come clean four years ago.

(Hoyt's article is titled, "Keeping Their Opinions to Themselves"--not to be confused of course, with "The News We Kept To Ourselves"--different news agency; different messianic figure being propped up.)

Related: And speaking of what a difference four years makes....

Linking to my April 2005 review of Frederick Taylor's Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, which discussed what a geopolitical football the city of Dresden has been ever since the end of World War II, Canada's Damon Penny notes that a panel of German historians has revised the death toll of the allies' bombing of the city near the end of WWII sharply downward:

For more than 60 years Britain's Bomber Command led by Arthur 'Bomber' Harris has been vilified for causing up to 500,000 deaths in the carpet bombing of Dresden during World War II.

But now, after a four-year investigation, a panel of German historians has said that the true number of dead from the Allied air raids in January 1945 was between 18,000 and 25,000.

They reached the figure after combing through death certificates, hitherto sealed eyewitness reports, registration cards for people made homeless and hospital records.

It now emerges that the high number of deaths from 'Operation Thunderclap' was a myth invented by the Nazis, perpetuated by Communists and re-born in the past decade to serve the aims of ultra-nationalists.

[...]

It suited the Nazi propaganda machine to claim that half-a-million women and children had been incinerated in the firestorm. It helped persuade a struggling population that this was awaited them all unless they fought for Nazism with their last breath.

Then the Communist East Germans perpetuated the myth, mindful that it served their purposes by showing the destructiveness of capitalism and fascism combined.

In the last decade neo-Nazis have sought to keep the lie alive as they praise many of the policies of the Third Reich.

Incidentally, Dresden also makes an appearance near the end of this post on modern architecture and the near universal need amongst the left to start from zero.

While the media are off rummaging through Joe Wurzelbacher's garbage cans to investigate which brand of plumber's tape he uses, and if he has the sales receipt for it, Stephen Green explores "The Hottest Sex Scandal You Never Heard of":

In one of his recent Davenport Mystery novels, author John Sandford claimed -- satirically, it is hoped -- that Democrat scandals are "always about money," and Republican scandals are "always about sex." Except, you know, for Bill Clinton and his dress-soiling ways. John Edwards and his love child. And Mel Reynolds, convicted of having sex with teens. Or Barney Frank and his male prostitute. Or, right now down in Florida, Democratic Congressman Tim Mahoney and...

"Uh... Tim who?" you might fairly ask.

If you haven't heard of Mahoney, it's because our Mainstream Media is in Full Bore Yawn Until It Goes Away Mode. After all, there's an election going on, and what could be less important in a Congressional race than a Congressman who paid off his mistress to the tune of a hundred and twenty thousand smackeroos, and I don't mean on the lips.

"Uh... there's money involved, too?"

But wait, there's more, involving the man who replaced Mark Foley. (Oh, him you remember? Wonder why?) Read the whole thing.

I've already linked to Glenn Reynolds' post on Joe Wurzelbacher, but this quote from one his readers is worth highlighting:

The harassment of Joe the plumber is the singular biggest mistake of the Obama campaign. The MSM is making Joe a martyr. Heck, DKos just published Joe's home address. Obama is now not only a Marxist but a Marxist bully - just another Chicago thug. America roots for the underdog and they will not take this action kindly. If Joe were a hero yesterday, wait a few days.

Obi Wan's line in Star Wars when fighting Darth Vader comes to mind - "Strike me down and I will return more powerful than you can possibly imagine." Americans will realize what happened to Joe could easily happen to them. And they will remember this come November.

Well, some will, but whether or not the politics of plumber destruction will be a game changer remains to be seen, of course. But the dynamics of the story do seem vaguely similar to the memorial for Paul Wellstone in late October of 2002. It was initially planned as a bipartisan memorial to an earnest Minnesota politician tragically killed when his private campaign plane crashed. The "memorial" became in the end, a hugely partisan pep rally, demonstrating for millions the most rapacious aspects of the far left in an election year. The back-to-back attacks by the establishment liberal press and their candidates on two conservative-appearing middle Americans, first Sarah Palin, and now Joe Wurzelbacher similarly demonstrate how craven the left can act when they smell blood in the water.

At least American blood. Terrorist blood should never be shed, of course.

Over the weekend, Michelle Malkin pasted up quite a rogue's gallery of the violent left. John Hawkins provides an equal number of quotes to go along with them.

Just don't expect the Victorian Gentleman to pay much attention.

Everything old is new again! When I was poking through the Truveo video search engine to find B-Roll material for my "Two-Minute Warning" October Surprise edition of Silicon Graffiti a couple of weeks ago, I came across Mary Katharine Ham's first HamNation video from the fall of 2006, in which she outlines the Mark Foley scandal:

Just overdub Mahoney for Foley, change the R to a D, and presto, brand-new video--or same old scandal. In any case, recycling is always a good thing, right?

Update: Shocker! "TV Newsers Who Fawned Over Foley Sex Scandal Ignore Mahoney."

We haven't heard much about the left's 180 degree pivot on the Iraq War in recent months, as the Surge has allowed the situation in Iraq to stabilize to one degree or another, which helps John McCain. But quietly, in the background, old man pivot keeps on rolling along.

A few years ago, when Jonah Goldberg pointed out "the generalized ignorance or silence of mainstream liberals about their own intellectual history", he wasn't kidding!

NewsBusters notes that the "NYT Pulls Misleading Account of Palin Puck Dropping Ceremony" at the Philadelphia Flyers' home game yesterday.

As with these prior fabrications, having a video of the event to cross-check with the reported coverage makes all the difference.

Glenn Reynolds (and no, he's not the subject of the above headline, which I'll get to in just a moment) writes:

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE? So we've had nearly 8 years of lefty assassination fantasies about George W. Bush, and Bill Ayers' bombing campaign is explained away as a consequence of him having just felt so strongly about social justice, but a few people yell things at McCain rallies and suddenly it's a sign that anger is out of control in American politics? It's nice of McCain to try to tamp that down, and James Taranto sounds a proper cautionary note -- but, please, can we also note the staggering level of hypocrisy here? (And that's before we get to the Obama campaign's thuggish tactics aimed at silencing critics.)

The Angry Left has gotten away with all sorts of beyond-the-pale behavior throughout the Bush Administration. The double standards involved -- particularly on the part of the press -- are what are feeding this anger. (Indeed, as Ann Althouse and John Leo have noted, the reporting on this very issue is dubious). So while asking for McCain supporters to chill a bit, can we also ask the press to start doing its job rather than openly shilling for a Democratic victory? Self-control is for everybody, if it's for anybody. . . .

As I've noted before, in The Right Stuff and in subsequent promotional interviews, Tom Wolfe described the press as "the proper Victorian Gentleman":

I'll never forget working on the [New York] Herald Tribune the afternoon of John Kennedy's death. I was sent out along with a lot of other people to do man-on-the-street reactions. I started talking to some men who were just hanging out, who turned out to be Italian, and they already had it figured out that Kennedy had been killed by the Tongs, and then I realized that they were feeling hostile to the Chinese because the Chinese had begun to bust out of Chinatown and move into Little Italy. And the Chinese thought the mafia had done it, and the Ukrainians thought the Puerto Ricans had done it. And the Puerto Ricans thought the Jews had done it. Everybody had picked out a scapegoat. I came back to the Herald Tribune and I typed up my stuff and turned it in to the rewrite desk. Late in the day they assigned me to do the rewrite of the man-on-the-street story. So I looked through this pile of material, and mine was missing. I figured there was some kind of mistake. I had my notes, so I typed it back into the story. The next day I picked up the Herald Tribune and it was gone, all my material was gone. In fact there's nothing in there except little old ladies collapsing in front of St. Patrick's. Then I realized that, without anybody establishing a policy, one and all had decided that this was the proper moral tone for the president's assassination. It was to be grief, horror, confusion, shock and sadness, but it was not supposed to be the occasion for any petty bickering. The press assumed the moral tone of a Victorian gentleman.

And a huge part of that Victorian Gent's daily job is take a rogue's gallery such as this, and make you believe that they're nothing but polite, Ralph Lauren-clad kids just back from playing touch football on the lawn at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port.

Just as it was in 1963, the legacy media's primary role in its twilight years as gatekeeper is to keep news out. Unlike back then, it's not because there isn't enough time or space to report it (bandwidth on the Internet being infinite), but to protect their friends, colleagues, political constituency and their ideology as a whole. And to make their opponents, which prior to the Blogosphere constituted a big chunk of their readership--back when the emphasis was on silent majority--look as badly as possible.

(Jim Treacher boils the schism down to just two words.)

Update: More from Treacher: "I'm going to start calling them the Deathbed Media."

Or is it the other way around? In any case, Maggie's Farm has a terrific video piped in via Outer Party member 6079 Smith W. from the Ministry of Truth.

Since the role of the MSM is now largely to withhold information damaging to itself and the left (but I repeat myself), occasionally news seeps out from some strange sources--such as Bill Maher's late night HBO show:

As odd as it might seem, for the second week in a row, a panelist on "Real Time" actually divulged information about Democrat involvement in the current financial crisis that most mainstream media outlets continue to hide from the public. With stocks cratering, and a serious economic contraction looming, one has to wonder when America's "serious" media will follow suit and expose the truth behind the current crisis.

After all, in 2006, the word "macaca" and solicitous e-mail messages from a little-known congressman were headline news for weeks, and were largely responsible for the Democrats taking back the Senate and the House. Of course, all this attention came despite the misstatement by then Sen. George Allen (R-Virg.) and the behavior of Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fl.) no way threatening the finances of Americans or our very economy.

There is absolutely no question that if Maxine Waters was a Republican that had blocked GSE reform this decade, and was caught lying on national television about campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie, this would be headline and front-page news for days with full-scale coverage of how she and others in her Party were responsible for the current calamity.

Yet, it seems almost a metaphysical certitude that with about three weeks to go before Election Day, the Obama-loving media are going to keep this matter buried long enough to get their candidate in the White House.

Like I said in my recent video, the Two-Minute Warning has sounded, and the legacy media only need about three more weeks to drag their candidate into the end zone.

Jonah Goldberg writes, "The simple, relevant fact is that the more detailed and extensive a plan a president proposes, the less likely it is that it will be enacted":

One basic reason for this -- often overlooked by politicians and the journalists who cover them -- is that presidents don't make laws in our system. Congress does. And Congress usually has plans of its own. Bill Clinton promised health-care reform, and his wife had a plan thicker than the New York City Yellow Pages. Congress never even voted on it.

Much like Obama, Bill Clinton barnstormed the country promising a middle-class tax cut. Once he got into the White House, that got filed under "never gonna happen." George H.W. Bush said "read my lips" about his plan to never, ever, ever raise taxes. It turned out that "never" is a term open to many interpretations.

As Jonah concludes:

I'm not saying that candidates shouldn't have platforms. But voters -- and journalists -- should look at them as mission statements, not the political equivalent of instructions that come with a disassembled bicycle.

The real hints for how to choose a candidate, at least in a general election (as opposed to a primary), reside in the realm of judgment, philosophy, track record and temperament. And, using those criteria, the choice shouldn't be hard at all.

It's also worth revisting Jesse Walker's article from this past April in Reason, which listed FDR's campaign promises as a candidate in 1932. As Jesse notes, what FDR proposed is a far cry from the monstrosities of the New Deal which wound up prolonging the Depression for seven agonizing years. (And would ultimately require something even more torturous--World War II--to jump start the American economy.)

Related: "Who Killed 'Reality'? Who But The Media?"

In a fair world, Harry Reid would be the Piranha Party's first snack (bring plenty of Maalox); but if Dingy Harry does indeed believe that linking Obama to Franklin Raines is racist, then he might want to start by cleaning up the real racists that exist within his party's half of the Senate.

Back in 2005, Howard Dean, another Democratic Senator, told the late Tim Russert that "I will use whatever position I have in order to root out hypocrisy." Dean and Reid certainly have their work cut out for them, eh?

Incidentally, could someone alert CNN that Robert Byrd is a Democrat? One of their Obama cheerleaders journalists seems to have forgotten that recently.

As Jonah Goldberg writes, "The specter of Herbert Hoover is conjured every time there's an economic calamity, large or small":

But you know what? Specters are ghosts. And ghosts aren't real.

The Herbert Hoover of popular imagination was a laissez-faire lickspittle of Adam Smith. But this idea began as Rooseveltian propaganda and endures as the creation myth of modern liberalism.

William Leuchtenburg, possibly the greatest authority on the FDR era, wrote some time ago, "Almost every historian now recognizes that the image of Hoover as a 'do-nothing' president is inaccurate."

After the stock market crash of 1929, Hoover browbeat business leaders to keep wages and prices high. He invested heavily in public works projects. He pushed for an international moratorium on debts. He created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which later became a home for many of FDR's Brain Trusters. Hoover increased farm subsidies enormously.

Some of Hoover's interventions were good but ineffectual. A few were very, very bad and very effective.

In 1932, Hoover in effect repealed Calvin Coolidge's tax cuts, increasing the rates for the poorest taxpayers by more than 100 percent and hiking the top rate from 25 percent to 63 percent. Worse, contrary to his own better instincts, Hoover signed the disastrous Smoot-Hawley trade bill that raised protectionist walls at precisely the moment the world needed trade the most.

Then there's this idea that FDR rode to the rescue, saving the day by untying the American people from the railroad tracks of runaway capitalism. Former Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, now a surrogate for Barack Obama, recently said on NPR: "It's very tempting to always think that the government should just stand back and let the private sector sort these problems out. That's the kind of thinking that made the Depression 'Great.'"

Summers should know better (in fact, I'm sure he does). The Great Depression was not made "Great" by government inaction. Indeed, FDR's New Deal may have been wonderful in some mytho-poetic sense, and maybe some of its reforms can be defended in some broader context, but as an effort to end the Great Depression, the New Deal was a failure. As my colleague Mark Steyn writes, "Lots of other places -- from Britain to Australia -- took a hit in 1929 but, alas, they lacked an FDR to keep it going till the end of the Thirties. That's why in other countries they refer to it as "the Depression," but only in the U.S. is it 'Great.'"

Which is why the great Amity Shlaes reminds us in her recent column that "The stock market crash of October 1929 and the Great Depression were not the same thing". The late Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal titled a nifty economic history of the 1980s The Seven Fat Years. FDR turned the Depression into seven very, very lean years:

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

Read the rest, here.

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt brings it all up to date with the omnious-sounding, "President Barack Hoover."

That's the headline from Newsbusters, hence the quotation marks above. And it's not all that surprising from a six degrees of separation point of view. Walters was was in attendance at Leonard Bernstein's Park Avenue duplex for his infamous 1970 fundraiser for the Black Panthers--and the Panthers and Weathermen were this close.

(And still are!)

As John Dickerson writes in Slate, "The 41st president's run-in with Ponytail Guy left such a mark that it haunted his son throughout his campaigns":

I remember watching a town hall during the 2000 campaign in which George W. Bush consistently refused to call on a man waving from the middle of the crowd like he was trying to flag a rescue plane. Bush pretended not to see him but let on afterwards that he'd seen him and avoided calling on him for fear of creating a moment. In 1996, when Bob Dole was given the chance to attack Clinton's character in a town-hall debate, he demurred, saying the debate should be about the issues.

This year's campaign shows how partisans on both sides go after the journalists who ask questions they don't like. During the Democratic primaries, Chris Matthews, Tim Russert, and George Stephanopoulos were all savaged for the questions they asked and how they asked them. Last week, Gwen Ifill was attacked for a book she hasn't written about a subject she isn't addressing. [Say what?--Ed]

"Real" people (by which I mean people who don't do this for a living) who are asking the questions may be harder to rough up. Or maybe not. On Tuesday night, if Son of Ponytail Guy asks a question, he can rest assured that he will receive a thorough going-over in the blogosphere. So I suggest all prospective questioners Google themselves, make sure they're on good terms with their co-workers, and wipe clean their Facebook page. If they don't--or even if they do--they could become the story very quickly.

Indeed--Michelle Malkin suggests that bloggers carefully check the flora and fauna in the bleachers of tonight's town hall debate. Specifically, the wide array of plant life that's likely to be sprouting up amidst the whichy thickets of the audience.

Update: I was just talking about this post at the top of today's edition of PJTV--subscribers can tune in here to watch. (And if you're not a subscriber--what are you waiting for? Click here!)

Michelle Malkin posits why NBC has yanked one of the few Saturday Night Live sketches that's both funny (at times) and actually pokes fun at the left. (Given the overt biases of both SNL and NBC as a whole, that's no doubt a big part of the reason in and of itself that the clip was pulled from NBC's video site.) And Pat Dollard has uploaded his own copy of the video, here.

Somebody doesn't want you to watch it--isn't that reason enough to click over?

Victor Davis Hanson writes, "On the Ayers matter, there is only one question that matters":

After Ayers wrote his Fugitive Days (2001), and after he told the NY Times (on 9/11 of all dates!) that "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough," and adding when asked if he would do it all again, "I don't want to discount the possibility,'' did or did not Barack Obama continue to communicate at all with him in person and via email?

If so, that belies all his protestations that he was young when Ayers was bombing, or a mere casual acquaintance on boards and community projects. In other words, when the world knew via the New York Times, and a much publicized book tour in 2001, that Ayers felt no remorse about his bombing spree and terrorism, did Obama continue with his association? If so, ipso facto that is proof both of Obama's poor judgement and his later lack of candor in recalling his association with his terrorist-associate.

Jim Geraghty asks a related question: "Could you shake hands with William Ayers?"

Roger L. Simon makes a great observation:

The film Running on Empty was nominated for two Academy Awards for 1988 - one for its young star River Phoenix and the other for its writer Naomi Foner (she won the Golden Globe). I served with Naomi on the Writers Guild Board a couple of years later and we got to know each other pretty well. In those days, we were comrades on the left - more or less - and both "nominated" screenwriters.

Naomi's movie (an original script of hers) concerned life underground for veterans of the Weather Underground-about a couple and their son (Phoenix). Basically, to most of us, it was a fictional version of the hidden marriage of Wiliam Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. But it was more about Bernardine, really, because she was a hugely famous figure on the left for many years, talked of by some as an American version of Spain's La Pasionaria. I did not much care for what she did or said, even then. But I certainly recognized her charisma. And I knew that she was close to crazy. (Read the statements at the Bernardine link about the Tate-LaBianca murders.)

1988 was the same year that Barack Obama entered Harvard Law School. It was highly unlikely he did not know about Running on Empty. It was one of the most talked about movies of the year for serious people, like Ivy League law students. The subject of the film was clearly the ramifications of a life of violence on friends and family. And yet he choose to start his career in politics via Ayers-Dohrn (note the emphasis). And now he denies knowing who Ayers was or what he did. Well... as the saying goes... I lost it at the movies.

Running On Empty came out at the height of my film junky period, when I was subscribing to magazines such as Premiere, England's Sight & Sound and the American Film Institute's glossy monthly house organ, as I recall, each had laudatory articles about the movie, its radical chic plot, and its extremely well-known director, Sidney Lumet. Given the anarcho-authoritarian circles which the young Obama clearly aspired to at the time (one doesn't wind up spending years with Ayers, Dohrn and Wright by accident) he would likely have been infinitely more familiar with the movie than I was.

(Incidentally, the plot of movie, and the timing of the events it portrayed in docu-drama form squares remarkably well with Rick Perlstein's observations on the original radical chic movie, no?)

Kathy Shaidle suggests that the McCain campaign should make Bill Ayers "the hippie O.J.", adding:

It doesn't matter when Obama met up with Ayers, or how many meetings they ever had.

It's about the fact that Ayers went from domestic terrorist to "respected community leader", to the point where Ayers was throwing well attended fundraisers for Obama, and they sat on boards together.

Bill Ayers should never have achieved such respectable positions in the first place.

Bill Ayers should be sitting in jail, not on boards!

But that's how the 1960s Left's reputation-laundering works. Look at Angela Davis, and the convicted felon and torturer who invented (the Marxist inspired "holiday") Kwanzaa and, like Davis, is now a tenured prof.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Ayers was quoted in the New York Times as saying he and his wife only regretted that they hadn't blown up more buildings. People were reminded that Ayers wife praised the Manson family murders.

That story was widely remarked upon for incredibly obvious reasons.

That story alone would make any decent, intelligent person say afterward: "Wow, I better not be seen anywhere near this guy, let alone sit on a board with him or go to his frickin' house. Boy, would THAT ever look bad."

So that means Obama isn't a decent, intelligent person. Period.

He's just another craven, arrogant, Chicago style politician.

The McCain campaign needs to spin this as an anti-hippie, anti-lefty, culture wars story:

Ayers and his wife are dangerous criminals and traitors who got away with it, and are now well off and respected. At least the Rosenbergs got the chair...

Look at how average Americans view O.J. -- make Ayers the hippie O.J.

Ask folks how they'd feel if Charles Mason was a professor now too?

Look:

a guy who has been photographed, as late as 2001, stomping on the American flag is one of Obama's supporters. [Obama served with Ayers on a board during this period, Charles Johnson notes--Ed.]

It doesn't matter if Obama denounces Ayers tomorrow.

It doesn't matter if their connection is/was "tenuous".

Here's what matters:

What does it tell you about Obama and his policies and his worldview that people like Ayers and his ilk are obviously going to vote for the guy?

Do you really want to vote for the same guy that unrepentant, unpunished domestic terrorists vote for?

Yes or no?

Pretty simple, but the McCain camp is blowing it.

Of course--but that doesn't prevent the AP from slagging anyone attacking their candidate and friends.

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey notes another former associate of Obama who openly* called for the US invading Israel:

Power's ultimate aim is to send a massive American or Western force into Israel to stop what Power apparently sees as an Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. She specifically states that the force has to be "massive", not like a Srebrenica- or Bosnia-sized force. Why would it need to be so large? In order to neutralize the Israeli Defense Force, and protect the forces of Fatah and Hamas.

Had Barack Obama kicked her off of his advisory panel (rumored to number 300) after making remarks like this, it could have assuaged fears about his intentions towards Israel. Instead, he invited Power to advise him after making these remarks. She resigned only after calling Hillary a monster and after insinuating that Obama may not retreat from Iraq in 16 months if the ground situation changed -- which Obama later adopted as his own position after the primaries.

The interview ran in 2002, the period when the left essentially went to ground during the culture war in the immediate wake of 9/11, only to explode in often violent protests and bitter rhetoric in 2003 and 2004, which Charles Krauthammer memorably described as "the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release."

Read More »

Steve Green spots a late entrant to a topic I explored in video form back in May:

Update: J.R. Taylor writes, "Thanks for the first Jon Astley reference I've seen in ages..."

Ed Driscoll.com: Internet-based community organizer in an increasingly demassified postmodern world through the collectively remembered flotsam and jetsam of a once unified pop culture!

Extreme Mortman explores "Finger Pointing And Photo Cropping."

As Roger L. Simon writes, the big loser in tonight's debate was the MSM, not the least of which for this textbook example of bias by omission spotted by Ace of Spades:

Did Gwen Ifill Ask a Single Question About Energy?
Update: No Questions on Abortion or Guns, Either

I thought it was only CNN that kept the news to themselves. But much like Winston Smith's Ministry of Truth, these days, it's the legacy media as a whole that are designed to bottle up information, rather than disseminate it.

Update: "Watch for a whole new, severe strain of Palin Derangement Syndrome to begin tonight."

When I first read about Gwen Ifill's enormous conflict of interest between her upcoming book titled, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama and her role as a debate moderator, I was reminded of a passage in James Piereson's book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, on Theodore White, who wrote his first best-selling The Making of the President book after the 1960 election.

As far as the Ifill scandal today, Liz Cox Barrett of the liberal Columbia Journalism Review, (the house organ of "The Media's Ancien Regime", as Hugh Hewitt memorably dubbed the Columbia Journalism School) writes "it stands to reason" that a book titled, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, and due to be published on January 20th, concurrent with the 44th president being sworn in "would sell better if a certain person is inaugurated on that day", and conservative Ed Morrissey agrees:

Yes, it does, as the "Age of Obama" would have no meaning otherwise. Barack Obama has been on the national stage a shorter period of time than John Edwards, who managed to win only one Senate race and no national contests. Obama at least won his party's nomination for President, but has two fewer years than Edwards in office at the national level. What exactly is the "Age of Obama" if Obama loses in November? And how would that impact Ifill's sales?

It's tough to argue with them--but Ifill is far from the first political hagiographer to write a book beginning with the desired electoral outcome and working backwards. See if this passage on Theodore White from James Piereson's book rings a bell:

A Boston native, White attended Harvard, graduating in 1938 as a classmate of Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., though (on White's telling) the two had little direct contact during their college years. Later, in the 1950s, he came to know John F. Kennedy while he (Kennedy) was the junior senator from Massachusetts and White a political reporter for Collier's magazine. During this period, between the mid-1950s and the beginning of Kennedy's campaign for the presidency in 1960, the two met often in Washington, with White gleaning from Kennedy much inside information about the leading personalities in Washington. From these conversations White conceived the idea of writing a book on a presidential election campaign from beginning to end, with an emphasis on the various personalities contesting for the White House.

The challenge for the journalist in executing such a project was to portray the candidates in such a way that the most attractive personality came out on top--though, of course, the writer would have no control over the eventual outcome. As White later acknowledged in his memoirs, he decided to structure the book almost like a novel with its own hero and villain. Given White's friendship with Kennedy, along with his dislike for Richard Nixon, he would (if events worked out the right way) cast the election as a morality play with Kennedy representing the forces of light and Nixon the forces of darkness. When White began the project, his wife wisely noted that "It's probably a good book if Kennedy wins; but if Nixon wins, it's a dog."

White was so in the tank that Jackie Kennedy, through a reccomendation from Bobby, would personally call him to the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport to transcribe the epochal Life magazine article that would forever bind the late JFK's administration and its tragic ending with Camelot.

(Fortunately, the Blogosphere allows voters a chance to actually see the sausage being made, unlike 1960.)

Update: Well, that's a relief: Iowahawk satirically writes, "Ifill Ethics Commission Clears Ifill". But a far greater scandal emerges: why wasn't the vice presidential nominee of his third party candidacy invited to tonight's debate?

More: Another political author, Reagan biographer Lou Cannon weighs in on Ifill's conflict of interest:

Gwen's a friend; of course, she's a liberal. I hold here in high regard and would expect that she will be fair to both sides. My only other comment is that I would never have moderated a televised debate involving Reagan--and never did--because it would have been perceived as a conflict of interest by liberals and conservatives alike even though I think I would have been balanced. But perception is very important.

Of course, the media as a whole lost the perception battle long before the nation got their fill of Ifill Thursday night.

Flash! "October remains the month for political surprises."

Traditionally though the October Surprise was spoken of as a singular event:"Hey--remember when that guy in the seriously redorkulated duck-billed platypus hat leaked Dubya's drunk driving arrest shortly before the 2000 election?" Or the 2003 hit on Arnold Schwarzenegger by the L.A. Times, in which the paper, as James Taranto put it, accused Schwarzenegger of behaving on film sets like Gray Davis supporter Bill Clinton?

As I wrote in November of 2004 though, the Internet seemed to have accelerated both the pace of the news cycle and the sheer number of October surprises:

By the time Halloween rolled around, it felt like daily October surprises: NYTrogate last Monday (and Tuesday, and Wednesday and...); Al Jazeera pulling Osama out of a hat on Friday, 60 Minutes' oldie-but-a-goodie body armor story on Sunday, and I think the Times had some sort of other anti-Bush story on Monday. (The bogus early returns Tuesday afternoon was the final October surprise. But that's a whole other post, as this one is going into extra innings.)

And that was on top of RatherGate, a CBS dirty play that fortunately went awry thanks to a bunch of guys in their umm, pajamas.

Back in 2006, in the wake of multiple hits such as the Washington Post-ginned up Macaca scandal and the Mark Foley scandal, Jim Geraghty wrote:

Could there ever be a better time for the reassuring reappearance of the man who has been in Republican circles longer than I've been alive?

Ladies and gentlemen, my longtime sage source and mentor, Obi Wan Kenobi.

Obi gets straight to the point about the Foley scandal, breaking in the final weeks of the campaign.

"At some point, some Republican is going to come out and say, 'Hey. We've seen this show before, every cycle for the past couple of cycles. Starting in September, there's a bombshell every two or three days for the last six weeks of the campaign, from the AP, from the big three networks, from the New York Times and the Post and Bob Woodward, and it's always in one direction. It's always a bombshell of bad news for the Republicans.'"

Obi doesn't list them, but a right-leaning voter can remember - the infamous fake memos used by Dan Rather, the New York Times' brouhaha over the al-Qaqaa weapons depot, the L.A. Times' story slamming Schwarzenegger, the Bush DUI...

Obi wonders if the voting public is getting inoculated; that late-breaking revelations of scandals about Republicans are becoming too transparent to move voters; that they see these stories as a sympathetic media hawking the wares of the Democrats.

This would be a very timely moment for McCain to do something--for example, a YouTube clip or TV commercial highlighting previous late hits, and let his supporters know that, if the pace of 2004 was any indication, near daily hits will be coming (and already have on his veep nominee). Which would then allow him to say, when the bombs start to drop from the Obama campaign and the media (sorry for the repetition), "You see my friends, I told you this would be starting, just as it does every election cycle." And then, when questioned by the media, simply reply, "Hey, you guys do this to Republicans every four years. Such as..." McCain then fires off the list and adds, "Why should this election be any different?"

But he probably won't. In any case, fasten your seat belts--October's going to be one very bumpy ride.

Live on stage--it's the return of Derek and the Domino Effect!

In case viewers did not understand the concept of a domino effect caused by the financial crisis, on Wednesday's CBS Early Show, co-host Julie Chen offered a visual representation as she declared: "What happens on Wall Street affects all of us on Main Street. It's the classic domino effect." At that point, six giant dominos where displayed in the studio, each one labeled with a different phase of the economic crisis.

Of course, in the early 1970s, when the real Derek and the Dominos were on tour, the media was telling us that domino effects were silly and outdated.

I remember reading a book on Stanley Kubrick that said that the great director wanted a large circular table in the middle of Dr. Strangelove's war room set, so that it would symbolically appear to audiences that the generals and the president were playing a very high stakes game of poker.

Here's a bluff of another sort:

You know where that very important $700-billion figure came from?

Here's a quote from that Forbes story:

"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

They made it up to be sufficiently ginormous to frighten everyone into rapid action.

And it worked.

Not yet.

So Bill Clinton let Osama bin Laden go, but captured Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Now there's an awesome rep for the history books.

The Washington Post says, "Congressional Leaders Announce Breakthrough in Bailout Bill Negotiations":

Congressional leaders and the Bush administration last night struck a historic accord to insert the government deeply into the nation's financial markets, agreeing to spend up to $700 billion to relieve Wall Street of troubled assets backed by faltering home mortgages.

Shouldn't that be "more deeply into the nation's financial markets"? Especially since inserting the government deeply into the nation's financial markets caused all the trouble in the first place.

While change is an ever-accelerating dynamic, some things always remain the same. Whether it's 1960, 1988, 2000, 2004, or this year, the Republican presidential candidate in an election year can invariably count on plenty of CBS from the Tiffany Network.

As the headline on Jim DeMint's blog says, "What Caused The Economic Crisis? Watch This!"

Brent Bozell writes:

It's a shame the roles in this interview couldn't be switched. Palin could have turned around and asked Gibson about his qualifications to lecture our commanders, whether he thinks any war, anywhere, is ever worthwhile. In 2003, he told Larry King "We used to have a little framed sign hanging in our bedroom, my wife and I, that said, 'War is not good for children and other living things,' and I believe that."

Wow--who knew that underneath his size 12 Florsheim double-soled wingtips, Charlie Gibson was such an unrepentant hippie?

Kathy Shaidle quotes from this passage by Ronald Radosh on the Rosenberg's guilt. Kathy also highlights a couple of key sentences by Radosh:

Finally, one more point needs to be made. The Rosenberg's defenders continually fall back on the claim that after all, they were only helping an "American ally." The implication, of course, is that the Soviets needed what we chose not to give them; they were only helping a mutual victory against fascism when the reactionary American government held back weaponry that was rightfully due the Soviets. After all, the Rosenbergs saw the Soviet Union as the vanguard of anti-fascism, and they helped Stalin as the good anti-fascists they were.

There is one problem with that defense. Julius Rosenberg became a Soviet spy and set up his network before June of 1941; in other words, during the years of the infamous Nazi-Soviet Pact, when Stalin aligned his country with Hitler's Germany. He saw himself as a Soviet partisan fighting behind enemy lines on behalf of Soviet Communism. He was, as David Greenglass put it to me, a "soldier for Stalin." Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and their recruits, including Morton Sobell, wanted to do anything necessary for the Soviet cause, before, during and after the war against Hitler. When it came down to it, they were first and foremost Soviet patriots who hid their treachery on phony remonstrations of their love for America.

The Rosenbergs weren't the only Soviet patriots (a.k.a. useful idiots, as Stalin himself put it) making "phony remonstrations" of their own in 1941.

Progress of a sort, from Charlie Rangel: with his latest in a lifetime of ad hominems, at least he's no longer calling a Republican a Nazi.

Are you inexperienced?

I've been showing my students a video on the history of presidential debates that Chris Matthews and Tom Brokaw did in 2004 before the Bush-Kerry debates. It's a fun retrospective of the memorable moments from all the presidential and vice-presidential debates up to then. I was just listening to Matthews and Quayle rehash the Dan Quayle-Lloyd Bentsen debate. Brokaw pointed out that Brit Hume twice asked Quayle a question about what he'd do if he succeeded to the office. Then Brokaw said that he felt that Quayle hadn't really answered the question the first two times and so he asked it again. And it was that third time that led Quayle to point out that he had had the same number of years in Congress that John F. Kennedy had had by 1960. And then Lloyd Bentsen unleashed his devastating riposte that he "knew John Kennedy and you're no John Kennedy."

Of course, Bentsen didn't really know JFK, but he knew that the pre-Blogosphere mass media would happily cover for him. More from Betsy Newmark:

I was just wondering what the chances are that any reporter this year would, in the presidential debates, would ask Barack Obama three times a question about whether he was prepared after three and a half years in the Senate to be president. After all Quayle had had four years in the House and eight years in the Senate in 1988 and people considered him unprepared to be vice president. Yet, Obama with his unremarkable record in the Senate, half of which he's spent on the road campaigning, is not getting that question over and over. And Charlie Gibson isn't asking Obama if he didn't have a moment of pause wondering if he was really ready to be president before he decided to run.

Funny how standards change back and forth, isn't it?

Indeed.^TM

Stuart Taylor writes, "I no longer trust the major newspapers or television networks to provide consistently accurate and fair reporting and analysis of all the charges and countercharges." Me too--but I arrived at that point four years ago.

Exhibit A: Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post. Ed Morrissey writes:

I'm going to start this post by noting that I avidly read Kurtz' media blog, and consider it one of the best continuing analyses of both traditional and new media. I believe that Howard usually tries to approach this task without bias, and mostly succeeds, although he has certainly laid more that a few eggs (and who among us has not?). So when I tell you that Howard is talking out of his hat, I say it with respect and affection.

Why do I say that? His own newspaper has twice reported the relationship between Raines and Obama, and on one of those occasions, Raines was their source:

Read the rest, and then read Cuffy Meigs, who has a video of the "Most Racist Ad EVER ... No, THIS Is ... Wait, THIS One ..."

Finally, Glenn Reynolds asks:

Meanwhile, if Obama is President, will Time regard every criticism of his administration as racist?

No--as long as it's a writer at Time that's making it.

Joel Stein in the L.A. Times in January of 2006:

I DON'T SUPPORT our troops. . . . But when you volunteer for the U.S. military, you pretty much know you're not going to be fending off invasions from Mexico and Canada. So you're willingly signing up to be a fighting tool of American imperialism, for better or worse. Sometimes you get lucky and get to fight ethnic genocide in Kosovo, but other times it's Vietnam.

Today in the Boston Globe, Steve Almond writes, "I have an ugly confession to make: I don't support the troops - at least not unconditionally":

PERHAPS the most insidious byproduct of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has been a reflexive sanctification of the military. To put this in bumper stickerese: Support the Troops.

Well, I have an ugly confession to make: I don't support the troops - at least not unconditionally. When somebody tells me they serve in the military, my first impulse isn't to say, "Thank you for your service!" like those insufferable chickenhawks on talk radio.

My first impulse is to say, "I'm sorry to hear that." Because I am. I'm sorry to know that the person I'm talking to might someday be maimed or killed on the job, or might someday kill someone else. Or refuel a plane that drops bombs on buildings.

I can't see how anyone who calls himself or herself Christian - or human, for that matter - wouldn't be sorry.

The fact that we have an army, that we need an army, is inherently tragic. It's an admission that our species is still ruled by fear and aggression.

As Jeanne Kirkpatrick once said:

Reflecting at a 2002 conference on her early career as a socialist, she said it had been "relatively short." As she read the works of various socialists, she said, "I came to the conclusion that almost all of them, including my grandfather, were engaged in an effort to change human nature. The more I thought about it, the more I thought this was not likely to be a successful effort."

"Human nature has no history", but then neither does much of the left. I'd call it a draw, but that might be using language that's too militaristic for some.

Related: The above "Human nature has no history" quote comes from Professor Glenn Loury, whom you can see discussing Obama and feminism in this new Bloggingheads TV interview.

From the Obama's campaign's latest email to his supporters:

More than 600,000 Americans have lost their jobs since January. Home foreclosures are skyrocketing, and home values are plunging. Gas prices are at an all-time high, and we're still spending more than $10 billion every month on a war in Iraq that should never have been waged.

Obama, back in June:

CNBC's John Harwood: So could the (high) oil prices help us?

Barack Obama: I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment. The fact that this is such a shock to American pocketbooks is not a good thing. But if we take some steps right now to help people make the adjustment, first of all by putting more money in their pockets, but also by encouraging the market to adapt to these new circumstances more rapidly, particularly U.S. automakers...

Or as the president of Fredonia once said, "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others."

(Video of Obama being foregainst high gas prices, here.)

Perception:

Percentage of Americans, according to Gallup, who believe we're in a recession: 38 percent.

Percentage of Americans, according to Gallup, who believe we're in an economic depression: 23 percent.

Reality:

"The second-quarter growth rate for the U.S. economy was revised upward, to 3.3 percent."

Were the preceding two quarters pretty lousy? Yeah, .9 percent in 2008's first quarter and -.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007. But the preceding two quarters, the economy grew 4.8 percent each.

Of course, in politics, as with the legacy media (but I repeat myself), perception invariably trumps reality.

Meanwhile, James Pethokoukis lists four ways to make bad news worse. So invariably, watch for these to begin to be implemented. Obama/Smoot '08!

After the 2004 presidential election, the left started billing themselves as "The Reality-Based Community"--as opposed to those faith-based Christianist God worshipers on the other side of the aisle.

And yet, the left isn't above asking a higher power if He'd be willing to invoke a little smiting of his own from time to time...

(Earlier vlogulations found here.)

As I mentioned on PJTV earlier today, as much I love having 500 channels to choose from via my satellite dish and, according to Technorati, 113 million blogs out there, the amount of information and opinion and the unending pace at which it's cranked out, makes it very easy to lose perspective. In a sense, a cable channel like CNBC, as great as it can be, puts an emphasis on the rapid speed of the financial markets, when for most individual investors, they're far better off (NOTE: THIS IS NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE. CONSULT YOUR OWN FINANCIAL ADVISOR. INSERT OBLIGATORY SEC WARNINGS HERE. POST NO BILLS. DO NOT EAT PASTE, DO NOT RUN WITH SCISSORS.) essentially buying a few decent mutual funds and hanging onto them for a decade or so, rather than buying, selling, and trading like mad.

The above headline comes from a 1979 Business Week cover story which electroplated then current trends and assumed that they would run indefinitely into the future. At the time of its writing, the Dow closed at about 975, in the midst of the last days of the Jimmy Carter administration's stagflation, culminating in double digit unemployment, interest rates, and inflation, as the above ad from that era highlights.

When I was preparing for PJTV today, I came across this PBS article, which quoted from its coverage of "Black Monday", the stock market correction of October 1987. At the time, the Dow was at 2,200, and the dropped 500 points. Note the end-of-the-world tone from 20 years ago, as PBS attempted to attack the economic policies of Ronald Reagan, and perhaps in its collective subconscious, longed for the days of Jimmy Carter--if their writers even remembered the gloom of that period at all. (Of course, a decade later, President Clinton was following the basic concepts of Reaganomics--and essentially bragging about it ("We stand for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn't that great?", presumably much to PBS's chagrin.)

How long will today's economic woes last? Well, check out this CNN article quoting from Alan Greenspan, who goes from stating that Wall Street is in the midst of "a once-in-a-century type of financial crisis"--but then adds:

"Indeed, it will continue to be a corrosive force until the price of homes in the United States stabilizes," Greenspan said. He predicted that would not happen until early 2009, and said the odds of U.S. recession have gone up in recent months.

So despite the doom and destruction tone of the MSM (but then, when is it otherwise, when the GOP is in the White House, particularly during an election year?), I wouldn't start heading for the ledge just yet.

Update: Well, here's one way to liven up an otherwise gloomy day of financial reporting!

Elsewhere: "See me after class."

As Noel Sheppard writes, "Lib Photographer Admits Making McCain Look Sinister for Mag Cover", quoting from the photographer in question, Jill Greenberg:

I am a pretty hard core Democrat. Some of my artwork has been pretty anti-Bush, so maybe it was somewhat irresponsible for them [The Atlantic] to hire me.

No--as long as it's understood that the magazine is taking sides in this election. But then, who isn't these days?

Update: Bumped to top, to include this post from Gateway Pundit, who has a link to Greenberg's homepage, which currently has a rotating series of vile Photoshopped and crudely captioned images of McCain. Now that's dispassionate freelance photojournalism in action!

But more than that, it's also worth flashing back to this April post from Jim Geraghty regarding the far left's meltdown over Hillary Clinton, and this article from last year by Noemie Emery on what was said by the left about President Reagan near the end of his second term. Both of which help to place the burgeoning McCain Derangement Syndrome displayed by self-professed "hard-core Dems" such as Greenberg into sharp perspective, and illustrate that there was nothing out of the ordinary about George W. Bush's presidency to set the left off over the last eight years. He was simply yet another in an endless series of political enemies of the far left who needed to be destroyed. That's valuable governing knowledge for the next Republican (heck, maybe even moderate Democrat) in the White House, whether he's sworn into office this January, or four or eight years hence.

More: Gerard Vanderluen has additional Photoshopped images of McCain that Greenberg has run on her site, along with a press release from Atlantic editor James Bennet:

"We stand by the respectful image of John McCain that we used on our cover, and we expect to be judged by it. We were not aware of the manipulated and dishonest images Jill Greenberg had taken until this past Friday.

When we contract with photographers for portraits, we don't vet them for their politics--instead, we assess their professional track records. Based on the portraits she had done of politicians like Arnold Schwarzenegger and her work for publications like Time, Wired, and Portfolio, we expected Jill Greenberg, like the other photographers we work with, to behave professionally.

Jill Greenberg has obviously not done that. She has, in fact, disgraced herself, and we are appalled by the manipulated images she has created for her Web site of John McCain."

As Gerard writes, "It has been my experience that if you have to get PR to push out statements on a Sunday, you know you are in trouble. Developing..."

The Anchoress compares and contrasts the questions that Charlie Gibson asked Sarah Palin last week, versus the softballs he pitched to Barack Obama in June. And Newsbusters goes four years back into the memory hole, and reviews Gibson's equally softball Q&A with John Edwards.

Jake Tapper (the anti-Charlie Gibson at ABC) explores "The Isotoner campaign":

Like any number of Democratic candidates before him -- Mike Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry -- Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., is once again declaring that he is going to take off the gloves and fight back against attacks from the Republican Party.

This is what you're going to hear from his campaign today, anyway, which is unveiling two new TV ads, including this attack ad against Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

But just so you know -- this is, by my count, the 4th time Obama's campaign has officially or unofficially made such a declaration that Obama will "take off the gloves" and fight back.

That's a lot of pairs of gloves.

The Isotoner campaign, one might say.

Curiously though, once Obama took off the Isotoners, what voters actually received were a glimpse of John McCain's hands, as Ed Morrissey writes:

Earlier today, Barack Obama's campaign released an ad attacking John McCain for not knowing how to send an e-mail. Their crack research team apparently never heard of Google or Lexis-Nexis, but Jonah Goldberg does. He discovers why McCain doesn't use a keyboard -- his torturers made sure he couldn't. The Boston Globe reported it eight years ago:

McCain gets emotional at the mention of military families needing food stamps or veterans lacking health care. The outrage comes from inside: McCain's severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes. Friends marvel at McCain's encyclopedic knowledge of sports. He's an avid fan - Ted Williams is his hero - but he can't raise his arm above his shoulder to throw a baseball.

After Vietnam, McCain had Ann Lawrence, a physical therapist, help him regain flexibility in his leg, which had been frozen in an extended position by a shattered knee. It was the only way he could hope to resume his career as a Navy flier, but Lawrence said the treatment, taken twice a week for six months, was excruciatingly painful.

"He endured it, he wouldn't settle for less," said Lawrence, who rejoiced with McCain when he passed the Navy physical. "I have never seen such toughness and resolve."

Making fun of a war hero's severe injuries -- smooth move, Team O. Talk about computer illiteracy! Doesn't anyone on the Obama campaign know what they're doing? Didn't it ever occur to them that a man who can't raise his arms above his head might have a physical barrier to using a computer?

If this is what happens when they takes the gloves off, maybe they should just keep them on in the future.

While McCain is obviously computer literate on some level, telling the New York Times last year that he reads "Drudge, obviously, everybody watches, for better or for worse, Drudge. Sometimes I look at Politico. Sometimes RealPolitics, sometimes", Glenn Reynolds suggests that his campaign might want to better familiarize themselves with another technology--the video camera:

If I were a candidate, I think I'd bring my own camera to interviews, shoot the whole thing and post the unedited raw video on the Web.

The technology for this is easy - I've got a little Sony HD video camera that records on a chip and fits in a coat pocket or purse - and putting video on the Web is a snap, too.

Of course, the knowledge that this will happen is likely to be enough to keep people honest - but if anything is edited unfairly, the full video will tell the tale. No need to wait for Groundskeeper Willie to appear.

TV journalists won't be happy with this, of course, but it's hard to see a principled basis for objecting.

In the past, the tools for broadcast newsgathering were expensive and specialized, and much of the media's power came from the fact that no one else had them. Those times are long gone, and candidates, and journalists, are going to have to adapt.

Of course, there are risks for candidates, too. A gaffe-prone candidate, or one who's just bad at speaking extemporaneously, might want to present only edited videos to the public - especially if he or she can count on the news media to be generally sympathetic.

But that just makes the whole exercise more valuable to the public, as whether a candidate is willing to make the raw video available would provide a useful data point on whether the candidate is confident - and whether the press corps is in the tank.

I predict, however, that we'll see this strategy adopted soon, quite possibly in this election cycle. The news-media monopoly continues to decay, and technology continues to march on.

Back in 2005, I quoted a passage from Bernard Goldberg's second book on media bias, Arrogance, from the chapter titled "File It Under 'H'"--for hypocrisy:

Read More »

As Ed Morrissey writes:

Yet another stupid Palin smear arises today, on the front page of the Washington Post, no less. Anne Kornblut writes that Sarah Palin linked 9/11 to Saddam Hussein in telling troops departing to Iraq that they would be fighting the same people who attacked America. Perhaps the Washington Post hasn't yet realized it, but Saddam and his regime have long since been dispatched to history:

Hey, it was in all the papers--even the Post!

Considering how the media exploited Katrina "to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq" to "damage Bush politically for a long, long time" as Mickey Kaus wrote in September 2005, there's a fascinating sense of schadenfreude in this story. In late summer of 2005 Kanye West was first dubbed by Time magazine as "the smartest man in pop music" and two weeks later then blurted into an open microphone during a fundraiser telethon for victims of Hurricane Katrina on NBC that "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

Today, West was arrested at LAX:

Hip-hop star Kanye West has been arrested in Los Angeles on charges of felony vandalism after a heated confrontation with photographers at the city's international airport.

West was taken into custody at LAX airport on Thursday after a photographer's camera was reportedly smashed to the ground during the struggle.

According to celebrity website TMZ.com, a still photographer was attempting to take pictures of the rapper at the American Airlines terminal when he was confronted by the star.

According to a TMZ videographer, "West rushed the (photographer) and grabbed his camera. A struggle ensued and the still guy was screaming, 'Police, help!'"

The website reports West took the camera and threw it to the ground, breaking it into pieces.

The videographer reportedly approached West with his camera rolling when the rapper's bodyguard walked up to him, demanding he hand over the camera.

West's assistant allegedly intervened, grabbing the equipment and smashing it to the ground.

West was reportedly stopped by police before reaching security checkpoints in an attempt to board his plane after the confrontation.

He was allegedly restrained by authorities during the initial police investigation, when he discovered the incident had been recorded, shouting, "Give me the f**king videotape."

West and his assistant are being held on $20,000 bail.

Video here.

Incidentally, "Give me the f**king videotape" seems to be quite a timely catchphrase at the moment.

After my appearance on PJTV this afternoon, I heard Glenn Reynolds discussing this New York Times story with PJTV host Allen Barton and Maximum Pajamahadeen Roger L. Simon:

Ever since he was tried and convicted with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on espionage charges in 1951, Morton Sobell has maintained his innocence.

Until now. In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Sobell, who served nearly 19 years in Alcatraz and other federal prisons, admitted for the first time that he had been a Soviet spy. And he implicated his fellow defendant, Julius Rosenberg, in a conspiracy that delivered to the Soviets vital classified military information and what the American government claimed was the secret to the atomic bomb.

Glenn added, "Before my time, but I believe that all right-thinking people believed the Rosenbergs innocent back then. I wonder what other beliefs, widely shared among right-thinking people today, will turn out to be similarly wrong in 50 years?"

Back in late 2005, when there a news item that Upton Sinclair hid knowledge of Sacco and Vanzetti's guilt in order to do his antediluvian Free Mumia impersonation (as I wrote back then), Jonah Goldberg noted:

So which leftwing martyr/icon is left? Sacco & Vanzetti were guilty. The Rosenbergs: guilty. Hiss: guilty. Margaret Mead: liar. Rigoberta Menchu: liar. Duranty: liar. Kinsey: liar. Upton Sinclair: liar. I.F. Stone isn't looking too hot (lied about America often, loved totalitarians, might have taken KGB money).

Martin Luther King Jr. -- small flaws aside -- is still looking good. But Bobby Kennedy is only a useful leftwing hero if you don't look too closely. Ditto JFK. Jesse Jackson's going to look awful to historians.

Who's left?

Hey, there's always John Kerry and Bill Ayers.

Kathy Shaidle calls this post "Unlike any other 9/11 tribute you've ever seen" and a must see. I wish I had seen it before today's PJTV segment.

I just recorded a brief segment for PJTV's September 11th show. I had tons of notes prepared, since I didn't know how long I'd be on, so I'm reprinting some of them here in the form of a blog post on 9/11's impact on the culture war:

9/11 changed the culture quite remarkably, but it did so in ways that may not have been expected. Back in 2004, the great Charles Krauthammer wrote a piece in which he referred to "the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release":

The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone quite around the twist. I count one all-star rock tour, three movies, four current theatrical productions and five best sellers (a full one-third of the New York Times list) variously devoted to ridiculing, denigrating, attacking and devaluing this president, this presidency and all who might, God knows why, support it.

How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came 9/11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud's Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

Stripped of his halo, the president's ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally once again human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.

The result has been volcanic. The subject of one prominent new novel is whether George W. Bush should be assassinated. This is all quite unhinged. Good God. What if Bush is re-elected? If they lose to him again, Democrats will need more than just consolation. They'll need therapy.

The pressure was released during the 2004 election cycle, but when John Kerry lost, it mutated further into a virulent strain that was only fully released after Katrina. As Mickey Kaus very presciently noted, Hurricane Katrina gave the media a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq:

I'm not saying Bush and the Feds don't clearly deserve major grief for not getting today's National Guard aid convoy into downtown New Orleans a couple of days earlier. Some people are probably dead as a result. But the commentators on Washington Week in Review seemed a little too happy when proclaiming this a "debacle" that will damage Bush politically for a long, long time. And I don't think they were happy just because Bush has suffered a blow. I think it's because the hurricane and its New Orleans aftermath at least seemed to solve a big problem for anti-Bush commentators and politicians. Previously, they couldn't grouse about the Iraq War without seeming defeatist (and anti-liberationist and maybe even selfishly isolationist). Even the Clintons never figured a way out of that trap. But nature has succeded where they failed; it has opened up a way out, at least temporarily. Now Bush opponents can argue, in some cases quite accurately, that without the Iraq deployment aid would have gotten to New Orleans faster. And 'if we can [tk] in Iraq, why can't we [tk] in our own South?' They aren't being selfish. They are just asserting priorities! In short, Katrina gives them a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq. No wonder Gwen Ifill smiles the "inner smile."

In a very real sense, 9/11 also created the Blogosphere and the idea of partisan journalism--and I don't mean that in any sort of pejorative sense--which began with Matt Drudge and Fox News in the mid 1990s, and Rush Limbaugh's national radio show nearly a decade earlier, and began to become an increasingly accepted element outside of the conservative media.

In 2004, the New York Times admitted what was obvious to all concerned--that it was a liberal publication; and a year prior, Eason Jordan, then of CNN, admitted that his network had shilled for Saddam Hussein. The pressure cooker that Krauthammer refers to led directly to some incredibly sloppy thinking, such as Dan Rather's MemoGate at CBS, and the rise of MSNBC, an openly hyper-partisan division of an otherwise staid establishment liberal news operation like NBC. This morning, MSNBC nobly ran the videotapes of The Today Showfrom 9/11, when all was chaos and uncertainty except for the two towers and the Pentagon being hit. But yesterday, as Kathryn Jean Lopez noted, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC said:

The television networks were told that the Convention would pause, early in the evening, when children could still be watching, for a 9/11 Tribute, and they were encouraged to broadcast it.

What we got was not a tribute to the dead of 9/11, nor even a tribute to the responders, or the singularity of purpose we all felt. The Republicans gave us sociological pornography, a virtual snuff film.

In addition to hyper-partisanship, 9/11, also fueled (if you'll pardon the carboncentric pun) the rise of environmentalism in the media. Julia Gorin, whom I've interviewed for PJM Political on XM, had a piece in the Christian Science Monitor in 2006 in which she talked about environmentalism as a sort of Freudian displacement for the War On Terror:

Tough language is borrowed from the war on terror and applied to the war on weather. "I really consider this a national security issue," says celebrity activist and "An Inconvenient Truth" producer Laurie David. "Truth" star Al Gore calls global warming a "planetary emergency." Bill Clinton's first worry is climate change: "It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it."

Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can't deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV. Forget the Patriot Act, it's Kyoto that'll save you.

That's why in 2004 we got "The Day After Tomorrow" - so we could worry about junk science that may or may not kill us in 1,000 years instead of the people who really are trying to kill us the day after tomorrow.

While the hawks among us worry about preventing the Armageddon that's coming, our modern-day hippies just want to make sure the planet is pristine when it does. In fact, the more menacing terrorism becomes, the more some people seem to worry about the weather. Scared and unsure how to fight terrorists, they confront "climate change," which only requires spending trillions of other people's dollars on something that may not need fixing or may not be fixable. No wonder some of these people chain themselves to trees - they think money grows on them.
Why are these people so worried about the environment, anyway? It's not like they're living on this planet. Speaking of which, scientists have recently discovered global warming on Mars. See that? Martians need to stop driving those darn SUVs!

Notice that the undercurrent in all the doomsday rhetoric is America as chief culprit in the axis of enviro-evil (just as it is in all the world's turmoil). Having found a warm and fuzzy cause to snuggle up against in this big, bad, scary world, the enviros pick a fight with the one guy they're not scared of: America.

Such displacement also helps to explain the conspiracy theories and "trutherism." For a very long time, ABC had no problem running someone like Rosie O'Donnell as part of their daytime programming, who in the course of five years went from publicly claiming support for President Bush in the early stages of 9/11 to literally telling ABC viewers not to trust what they had just heard on Good Morning America and other news shows.

The events of the morning of September 11, 2001 have changed the culture in ways that few could anticipate that morning, and will continue to do so, no matter who wins in November.

Betsy Newmark suggests perusing this list of foiled terror plots against Americans since 9/11:

Some I'd heard of, but there are quite a few that I was unaware of. And these are just the ones where there was an arrest. We have no idea of how many were foiled without an arrest and a public announcement.

I believe that many Americans have grown to discount the whole idea that there are people out there who want to kill Americans, preferably here in the United States, and would like to orchestrate as massive a killing as possible. We have grown complacent in the seven years since 9/11 and now take the lack of attack as the norm.

While some of these plots might seem like a bunch of losers cooking up some crackpot idea that never would have been successful, remember that, if the 9/11 plotters had been arrested before they took over those airplanes, their plot would have seemed like just some bizarre idea that a bunch of incompetent kooks was dreaming up. Foiled plots might not seem that scary when they're exposed, but just imagine how those plots would have seemed totally different if they hadn't been foiled.

As successful as President Bush's administration has been at foiling terrorist plots, I think part of the complacency amongst Americans can be blamed on a relatively poor White House communications effort. Other than the periods when Ari Fleischer and the late Tony Snow were press secretaries, the White House has been surprisingly mediocre at PR and controlling an overwhelming hostile legacy media, which barring another successful terrorist attack between now and January, may in retrospect be seen as its greatest failing.

...By doing nothing, Cassy Fiano notes, adding that once again, the Dogpile search engine has a simple, tasteful cartoon on its homepage which does remember 9/11, and even adding the symbol that's dread by all transnationalists on Gaia's green earth, the American flag.

But hey, let's be fair. Not every day is the emotional equivalent of Walter Gropius's birthday.

While I've long thought that Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic was one of the most prescient essays on the moral collapse of the post-JFK left, in book form, it comes packaged with another Wolfe essay from 1970 that's somewhat overshadowed by the star power of Leonard Bernstein & Co. But Gerard Vanderleun spots a remarkably timely passage within "Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers", excerpted from a much longer block of the essay quoted by Steve Sailer.

(This video brings even more of that era back home.)

Late last month, the Whiskey's Place blog wrote:

Much has been made by any number of commenters, from Steve Sailer, to John Derbyshire, to Spengler, to Mark Steyn, to in particular, Ed Driscoll, about the pathetic state of popular culture. Blogger Ed Driscoll in particular is fond of reminding us that in popular culture it's always 1968.

Well, to be fair, old media certainly does a pretty good job itself in that department. This NPR article on the Academy Awards of forty years ago has the usual boomer spin on the era, highlighted in this excerpt from Mark Harris, the author of Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of a New Hollywood, talking about The Graduate:

The scenario: Upper-middle-class L.A.; disaffected college grad (played by Dustin Hoffman) is seduced by older woman (Anne Bancroft), falls in love with her daughter (Katharine Ross).

That's not so unusual, Harris says: The idea plays like a mid-'60s sex comedy. But what even the actors didn't realize until shooting began was that the perspective would come from Dustin Hoffman's character.

"Suddenly," says Harris, "the camera head shifted, and this was looking at the Generation Gap from the other side -- from the young side."

Young people -- an audience Hollywood undervalued at the time -- flooded theaters around the country.

"And that's who movies got made for after that," says Harris.

I'll second the emotion that The Graduate is a great picture. But if it indeed opened up the youth market, a lot of grownups decided concurrently right around that same time to check out of the theaters, as Michael Medved (whom I met at The Best Party Ever, just to shamelessly namedrop) wrote when Jack Valenti retired from his role as the long-time president of the Motion Picture Association of America:

Despite his unquestioned eloquence, elegance and charm, Mr. Valenti presided over history's most disastrous decline in the audience for feature films. In 1965, the year before he left the Johnson administration to assume his plush position as chief mouthpiece for the entertainment industry, 44 million Americans went out to the movies every week. A mere four years later, that number had collapsed to 17.5 million.

In other words, some potent, puzzling force drove more than half of the nation's film fans to break the habit of movie going. That same mystical power served to suppress attendance for the next 20 years, with figures on ticket sales remaining flat until they began to rise moderately in the 1990s, reflecting the construction of thousands of new movie screens at multiplex theaters. Most recent figures (from 2003) show weekly attendance today at just over 30 million. As a percentage of the nation's population, however, the numbers on movie attendance remain only slightly improved from the devastating trough of 1970 (10.3% vs. 8.6%) and still vastly lower than the robust box-office years of 1965 (44%) or 1960 (45%).

It's amazing how many movie professionals remain altogether unaware of this long-term decline in film going--or, when informed about the depressing but undeniable figures, wrongly attribute them to the advent of television. TV sets began appearing in living rooms in the late 1940s, of course, and by the time the audience for feature films started its sharpest slump in 1966, the tube had already arrived in nearly all American homes.

Hollywood originally panicked that television would destroy its business by offering for free the sort of entertainment that cost money at the local Bijou, but during the fateful 10 years of the primary TV invasion (1950-60) the audience actually declined 34%, compared with a 60% decline in those nightmarish four years of the late '60s. In later decades, the arrival of the VCR, cable TV and DVD actually corresponded to modest increases in the motion-picture audience, so no theory centered on technological alternatives can solve the mystery of the missing moviegoers.

So what happened 38 years ago to drive millions of Americans away from movie theaters? In 1966, Mr. Valenti's Motion Picture Association of America quietly dropped its enforcement of the restrictive old Production Code that Hollywood studios had imposed on themselves since 1930. Then, on Nov. 1, 1968, Mr. Valenti introduced the "voluntary rating system" that continues in force to this day. As he proudly declared in his farewell address to the industry on March 23 of this year: "The rating system freed the screen, allowing movie-makers to tell their stories as they choose to tell them." That new freedom allowed the profligate use of obscene language strictly banned under the Production Code, the inclusion of graphic sex scenes along with near total nudity and, more vivid, sadistic violence than previously permitted in Hollywood movies.

The resulting changes in the industry showed up with startling clarity at the Academy Awards. In 1965, with the Production Code still in force, "The Sound of Music" won Best Picture of the Year; in 1969, under the new rating system, an X-rated offering about a homeless male hustler, "Midnight Cowboy," earned the Oscar as the year's finest film. Most critics, then as now, welcomed the aesthetic shift and hailed the fresh latitude in cinematic expression, but the audience voted with its feet.

And wouldn't return until Hollywood returned to making apolitical family-safe blockbusters a decade later; as I wrote a couple of years ago:

I have to laugh at the tunnel-vision of the filmmakers of the 1970s (and to a certain extent, Biskind himself, as he chronicles their rise and cocaine-laden fall). Sandwiched between blockbuster crowd-favorites of the 1960s such as Dr. Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music and The Dirty Dozen and then the Star Wars, Star Trek and Indiana Jones movies (not to mention the bulk of Steven Spielberg's first twenty years of filmmaking), they don't understand what an aberration their late '60s to early '70s films were. Much as I love some of the darker movies of the 1970s (such as M*A*S*H, Taxi Driver, Chinatown, and The Conversation), while all of these films were critics' darlings, its always been popcorn fare that's kept Hollywood afloat.

How a slate of leftwing political movies such as Good Night and Good Luck, Syriana, The Constant Gardener, The Interpreter, and Munich could be greenlighted for release last year is beyond me, unless Hollywood in mid-2004 assumed that a Kerry win was inevitable, or after he lost, decided to put the celluloid shiv into Red State audiences. Why anyone thought these films would make money is utterly astonishing. But, to build on Michael Barone's recent op-ed, the Hollywood left is currently as stuck in the 1970s as liberal politicians are.

Not to mention their favorite radio network.

(Back in CA after an incredible week--see above shameless namedropping--regular blogging to resume tomorrow.)

Click here for a snapshot from history of perpetual change.

Greetings From Minneapolis! I have arrived; the convention may now proceed. Unless of course it doesn't.

But if it does (and hopefully that means that Hurricane Gustav's force will have greatly diminished before hitting land), this clip should aired on the Xcel Jumbotron in prime time and referenced by several candidates in their speeches:

Ed Morrissey asks:

This also prompts a question of ethics, which all of us should consider carefully. Should private conversations between politicians get videotaped surreptitiously like this? If so, then perhaps Fowler and many, many others should take better care about having a laugh at the misery of others, even among friends.

Plenty of traditional liberal journalists have turned off the record remarks of politicians and celebrities into major stories. (Which is ultimately part of what earned them their "drive-by media" sobriquet from Rush.) As Roger Ailes noted several years ago:

Jimmy Carter's famous confession that he sometimes had lust in his heart for women other than his wife was uttered to a Playboy magazine journalist as he was leaving Carter's home at the conclusion of the formal interview.

And there are numerous additional examples of such moments, a few of which are described in the above link.

But as is its wont, the Internet amps these sorts of moments not up to 11, but 1100. George Allen's Senatorial re-election in 2006 was sunk by his "Macaca" gaffe, which was part of a coordinated effort by the left to videotape Republican candidates during every possible appearance (and then some), waiting for any sort of gaffe that could be turned into a YouTube clip and exploited by a friendly news organization such as the Washington Post, which ran over 100 stories on Allen's gaffe in the space of about less than three months, in which he apparently mispronounced his campaign staff's nickname of the young mohawk-haired James Webb campaign operative assigned to tape him.

Whatever the explanation, Allen's gaffe, given massive exposure from the Washington Post and other quarters in the MSM ended his senatorial career, which ultimately lost GOP control of the Senate, and sank Allen's presidential ambitions. In its wake, Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos gleefully wrote:

Every appearance by a top Republican official or candidate should be recorded. Every one of them.

All it takes is one "Macaca" incident to transform a race or create one where one didn't exist. As the Montana incident blogged earlier today showed, a video can knock out prospective candidates before they even enter.

And this is no longer about finding one big blunder to put on a campaign commercial. It's about using video and (free) technologies like YouTube to build narratives about opponents, using their own words, at their own events.

A couple of years ago, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

Liberals are geniuses at unleashing social panics because A) it never occurs to them that their motives are anything but pure and B) because they are almost exclusively focused on short term tactics. And yet they are invariably shocked when these moral frenzies come back to bite them.

The "tape 'em all, let YouTube sort it out" philosophy began on the left, but its eventual boomerang was merely a matter of when, not if.

When we last left Team Obama, they were attempting to get the above video banned from TV. (More on that here.) Now they're attempting to smear NRO journalist Stanley Kurtz for attempting to report the story, thereby bringing maximum attention to it, as Ben Smith of the Politico writes:

Barack Obama's campaign hasn't advertised this a great deal this week, but the campaign's "Action Wire" has been waging large-scale campaigns against critics. That includes tens of thousands of e-mails to television stations running Harold Simmons' Bill Ayers ad, and to their advertisers -- including a list of major automobile and telecommunications companies.

And tonight, the campaign launched a more specific campaign: an effort to disrupt the appearance by a writer for National Review, Stanley Kurtz, on a Chicago radio program. Kurtz has been writing about Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers, and has suggested that papers housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago would reveal new details of that relationship.

The campaign e-mailed Chicago supporters who had signed up for the Obama Action Wire with detailed instructions including the station's telephone number and the show's extension, as well as a research file on Kurtz, which seems to prove that he's a conservative, which isn't in dispute. The file cites a couple of his more controversial pieces, notably his much-maligned claim that same-sex unions have undermined marriage in Scandinavia.

"Tell WGN that by providing Kurtz with airtime, they are legitimizing baseless attacks from a smear-merchant and lowering the standards of political discourse," says the email, which picks up a form of pressure on the press pioneered by conservative talk radio hosts and activists in the 1990s, and since adopted by Media Matters and other liberal groups.

"It is absolutely unacceptable that WGN would give a slimy character assassin like Kurtz time for his divisive, destructive ranting on our public airwaves. At the very least, they should offer sane, honest rebuttal to every one of Kurtz's lies," it continues.

Andy McCarthy of NRO describes the results thusly:

The pro-Obama callers on the Milt Rosenberg show are a riot.

In the last few minutes, two called to scald Milt for having Stanley on without having an Obama rep on to give the counterpoint. Milt explains, repeatedly, that he contacted the Obama campaign (he gave the name of the campaign official his producer spoke with) and the campaign -- the HQ of which is about a quarter mile from the studio where the show airs -- declined to come on. They were offered the opportunity to have someone there with Stanley for the entire two hours, and they said no.

Another pro-Obama woman called and, after accusing Stanley of slander but of course not citing anything he said that was slanderous, stated, "We want it to stop." Milt asked what she wanted stopped, and she replied, "It's just not what we believe as Americans." Milt tried again, asking what she didn't believe. She responded that it was someone saying bad things about Barack Obama and, again, we just want it to stop.

Very compelling.

Earth to Obama supporters: no one is claiming guilt by association -- though willful association with an admitted terrorist would be worthy of noting in a presidential candidate. Obama and Bill Ayers had a working relationship. Yet, Obama claimed Ayers was just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and has otherwise minimized the relationship. Aside from the fact that Obama is not telling the truth, which itself is important, the details of the relationship are important. If the press was doing its job, we'd have those details already. Finally, the media's job is being done ... by Stanley. He should be saluted, not smeared. If the Obama campaign has a substantive response, let's hear it. If all they can do is smear a good faith critic, they are strictly bush league ... and it comes as no surprise that their guy thought Bill Ayers was someone worth cultivating.

We're still in the early rounds, but this is playing out remarkably like John Kerry and the Swift Vets all over again. As I wrote right around this time four years ago:

Kerry's massively invented narrative ("swashbuckling Swift Boat lieutenant"--as Steyn describes him--turned brave defender of soldiers' rights) was built to survive the glancing scrutiny (if you can call it that) of a 1972-era media that consisted of three TV networks with half hour evening news shows, and a few liberal big city newspapers, all of which were staffed with journalists more or less largely sympathetic to Kerry's leftist anti-American beliefs.

But between the Swift Boat Vets and the Blogosphere, there are far too many people examining Kerry's story, and his "reporting for duty" edifice has crumbled.

Is that fair? We'll, we're deciding if we want the man to have the key to the most powerful arsenal ever assembled. If he can't survive the scrutiny of the Blogosphere, who James Lileks recently described as an "obsessive sort with lots of time on their hands", is he someone who should be trusted with this power?

The 1972-style media seems to think so.

And a year later, John O'Neill of the Swift Vets gave an interview in which he said:

TAE: Were you surprised when Senator Kerry focused so much on his Vietnam record at the Democratic Convention in late July? How do you account for this when he clearly knew you were out there?

O'NEILL: I think he thought that he had good control over the mainline media, that they were sympathetic, that they would kill the story. And I think he was very confident that was the case with the New York Times and the three major networks and CNN, and that he could intimidate the portions of the media not already friendly to him. And so he thought the story would never come out. That had been his experience over and over again in Massachusetts.

TAE: Everything changed in early August, after your first ad.

O'NEILL: All of a sudden, Kerry and the media were faced with an ad that was actually showing. There was a time when they controlled the entire world of communications. That day is over.

Change the name from Kerry to Obama and the state from Chicago to Illinois, and O'Neill's quote is remarkably timely.

Back in 2004, Kerry's brain trust could at least some ignorance in the difference between old media and new--when RatherGate broke for instance, Mary Mapes of the very Kerry-friendly and very old media CBS later claimed, "Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line."

Four years later, what's the Obama camp's excuse? And as John Hinderaker notes:

Obama's suggestion that it is illegal for a 501(c)(4) entity to fund issue ads that are negative toward him appears ludicrous. Here's the real question, though: if Obama is elected President, will he appoint an Attorney General who will carry out politically-motivated prosecutions like the one he is now demanding? I suppose we can't know for sure, but why wouldn't he? If he demands criminal prosecution of free speech that opposes his political interests when he's a candidate, why wouldn't he order it as President?

Revel in the joy and optimism--the hope and change, you might say--that comes from the audacity of litigation.

Update: Don't miss Mickey Kaus's thoughts on this story as well.

Jennifer Rubin writes, "The conservative blogosphere is agog: what was Barack Obama thinking?"

He took a story largely confined to the internet, (only briefly raised in the primary) about Obama's connection to former terrorist Bill Ayers, put it in his own ad, and then filed a claim trying to force the third-party 527 ad that first brought up the Obama-Ayers connection off the air. In the next 24 hours thousands if not millions of voters who never heard of or didn't understand the extent of the Obama-Ayers relationship are going to get a full education.

That Justice Department complaint is a stunt reeking of abject panic. Really, isn't this just unlimited free publicity for the McCain accusations? In the Right blogosphere there is a mix of amazement and delight. And in case you thought the McCain camp wasn't thrilled by this turn of events, read what Steve Schmidt has to say about it.

It is very hard to figure out the reasoning behind the Obama effort. Perhaps there is a deadly poll or maybe they think they can so skew the coverage as to insulate himself. But for now, it is just plain baffling.

Short of digging up Leonard Bernstein, at this point, there's really only one option left for Obama: start flaying about, yelling, "Make! Them! Stop!"--which is what another presidential candidate was doing right around this time four years ago. As James Lileks wrote back then:

John Kerry wants to be president because he is John Kerry, and John Kerry is supposed to be president. Hence his campaign's flummoxed and tone-deaf response to the swift boat vets. Ban the books, sue the stations, retreat, attack. Underneath it all you can sense the confusion. How dare they attack Kerry? He's supposed to be president. It's almost treason in advance. . . . Inconsistencies are irrelevant, because he's consistently John Kerry. And he's supposed to be president.

And as Tom Maguire writes, "Coming soon--'That's not the Bill Ayers I knew.'"

Obama better make sure he's driving one up-armored bus before he throws Ayers under it.

As I noted on Friday, I'm not sure if Jennifer Rubin's description of Joe Biden, whom she described as "old school as they come and as familiar as a worn-out shoe", was an intentional reference to Adlai Stevenson--a similarly follicle-challenged Democratic senator who 50 years ago would have thought his IQ even bigger than Joe's--even if he couldn't remember to have a campaign aide pick him up a new pair of Florsheims.

Likely it isn't, if only because it's an unfair comparison to Stevenson. Peter Seller's President Muffley, clearly a Stevensonian parody, was, after all, the nominal adult voice of reason in the midst of the chaos of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. But this description from Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism of the late 1950s, complete with its own Stevenson cameo is a reminder that while Obama was originally packaged as some sort of new and novel politician, while conservatives are thought to be old-fashioned, very little actually changes amongst so-called "progressives" and their political goals:

Kennedy's political fortune also stemmed from the fact that he seemed to be riding the waves of history. Once again, the forces of progressivism had been returned to power after a period of peace and prosperity. And despite the unprecedented wealth and leisure of the postwar years--indeed largely because of them--there was a palpable desire among the ambitious, the upwardly mobile, the intellectuals, and, above all, the activists of the progressive-liberal establishment to get "America moving again." "More than anything else", the conservative publisher Henry Luce wrote in 1960, "the people of America are asking for a clear sense of National Purpose."

* * *

Perhaps the best expression of this bipartisan-elite clamor for "social change" came in a series of essays on "the national purpose" co-published by the New York Times and Life magazine. Adlai Stevenson wrote that Americans needed to transcend the "mystique of privacy" and turn away from the "supermarket temple." Charles F. Darlington, a leading corporate executive and former State Department official, explained that America needed to recapture the collective spirit of national purpose it had enjoyed "during parts of the Administrations of Woodrow Wilson and the two Roosevelts" (you can guess which parts). Above all, a reborn America needed to stop seeing itself as a nation of individuals. Once again, "collective action" was the cure. Darlington's call for a "decreased emphasis on private enterprise" amounted to a revival of the corporatism and war socialism of the Wilson and Roosevelt administrations.

"We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we're asking young people to do--don't go into corporate America."

Sixty years ago, a Mr. E. Blair wrote:

In the walls of [Winston's] cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

Just as Orwell's Ministry of Information was more concerned with destroying its namesake product instead of archiving it, today's news media seems much more obsessed with keeping big stories out the news than shining a light on them. (See also: Edwards, John; Ayers, William.) Similarly, Wikipedia occasionally can seem to function as a modern-day memory hole, to borrow from this Hot Air headline.

Over at Newsbusters, they've spotted two examples of Joe Biden-inspired Wikipedia weirdness: first, Biden's 1988 presidential campaign Wikipedia page is worked over, and now an inconvenient year for Biden is quietly moved to where Biden's endorsement of McCain for Kerry's veep in 2004 is less obviously visible.

Related: "Liberal Writer Saw Biden as a Disaster Last Year."

Obama finally makes it official that it is indeed Biden, and instead of pointing out the obvious story here--because that would hurt their candidate--AP simply notes:

Barack Obama named Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware as his vice presidential running mate early Saturday, balancing his ticket with a seasoned congressional veteran well-versed in foreign policy and defense issues.

Obama announced the pick on his Web site with a photo of the two men and an appeal for donations. A text message went out shortly afterward that said, "Barack has chosen Senator Joe Biden to be our VP nominee."

The real story here is that everyone knew hours ahead of time, via the Weekly Standard, hoary old CNN and AP itself, the Blogosphere and Drudge. Instead of hype such as this, reminiscent of the McLuhanesque purple technoprose so common in the late 1990s (he said, having written tens of thousands of words of just that sort of prose himself back then) when the Web was bright and shiny and new:

It's beautiful.

In one fell swoop, by choosing to disclose his vice-presidential pick directly to voters through text messaging rather than revealing his pick through choice leaks to the press, the Obama camp has given us a momentary reprieve from having to watch smirk-faced pundits gloat about "inside scoops" and "my sources tell me." No "scoops" for the Villagers, followed by anti-climactic press conferences to the people as an afterthought. No "special access" to them, no matter how much they clamor. Technology has allowed the Obama camp to keep all, reporter and regular citizen alike, on the edge of their seats.

For today, the talking heads are absolutely powerless and impotent, staring stupidly at the screen, searching for words to make themselves relevant. For once, they finally feel what we have known all along --that they have absolutely nothing to offer outside of what is selectively hand fed to them.

With all this baseless VP speculation, with their special status and access stripped away, the "insiders" are exactly where we are, inside the cone of silence huddled together in unawareness, exuding palpable excitement, and waiting for what will now be truly breaking news for all but a select few in Obama's circle. Welcome, Villagers, to the land of the regular. I know it's unfamiliar territory, but enjoy your stay. I know I certainly will.

I'll bet. If there were any Obamamaniacs relying solely upon their text messages to find out who the Messiah's veep would be, they were the last to know--and as Robert Stacy McCain noted:

Imagine the reactions of those poor saps getting their text messages: "WTF? Dude. Joe Biden?"

Bob Owens puts it this way:

It's got to be disappointing when you discover that the candidate you helped elect into office lied to you. It must be worse to find out he's lying to you, when he hasn't even nailed down the nomination yet.

The anti-climactic feel of it all, a combination of a perfectly routine choice by a guy who was supposed to bring fresh bold unconventional outside the box thinking to presidential politics, coupled with more than a little techno-overreach by team Obama with the text gaffe is the real story.

Which is why it's apparently not worth reporting by AP.

It's official, according to AP, who's reporting, "Obama picks Biden for veep":

Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware is Barack Obama's pick as vice presidential running mate, The Associated Press has learned.

Biden, 65, is a veteran of more than three decades in the Senate, and one of his party's leading experts on foreign policy, an area in which polls indicate Obama needs help in his race against Republican rival John McCain.

The official who spoke did so on condition of anonymity, saying they did not want to pre-empt a text-message announcement the Obama campaign promised for Saturday morning.

A recollection from Clarence Thomas' autobiography sheds some light on the duplicity of Biden the political hack. Meanwhile, Patrick Rufini has YouTube clips of Biden the gaffe machine: "Joe Biden vs. Joe Biden's Mouth", and Biden's non-gaffes could also come back to haunt him, as Jim Geraghty reminds us of those "'Just Words' That Joe Biden Would Like To Forget."

More confirmation from CNN: "Sen. Barack Obama has picked Delaware Sen. Joe Biden to be his running mate, multiple Democratic sources tell CNN"; Hot Air adds, "so much for texting".

My immediate take? It's such an offbeat choice that I'm reminded of this classic Seinfeld episode.

Exurban League's immediate take? Brutal.

Update: I was going to Google around for one my favorite descriptions of Biden's rhetorical excess from Jonah Goldberg, but fortunately, Jonah linked to it himself:

Biden has a not unrare condition in which the gear box that normally regulates the speed of your mouth has been ground down to a nub and so his mouth can rev at great speeds heedless of where his brain intends to steer it. Those flashes from his enormous teeth are really the equivalent of flashing your brights; he's saying "GET OUT OF THE WAY, I CAN'T STOP THIS THING!"

Meanwhile, over at Pajamas, Jennifer Rubin adds:

What a difference a summer makes. Barack Obama began the summer as he began the campaign: the Agent of Change. With the summer drawing to an end, he has chosen a running mate who is as old school as they come and as familiar as a worn-out shoe.

Which instantly calls to mind this image of an earlier generation's liberal senator who heard his own higher calling, and cursed with his own penchant for rhetorical excess which also caused him a fair amount of trouble.

Robert Stacy "The Other" McCain also fires up the Tardis: "Is it still too late for Obama-Eagleton?"

The thing is, Joe is old news. Very old news. And he's got no executive experience. To jerk around the national press for a full week, only to deliver Joe Biden -- this is a disappointment. Imagine the reactions of those poor saps getting their text messages: "WTF? Dude. Joe Biden?"

Earlier today, I heard Hugh Hewitt playing the bellowing trumpet-powered chorus from Jesus Christ, Superstar whenever he mentioned Obama's name. The truest of the true believers, who believe that Obama is Him--and equally infallible--will somehow rationalize the choice. Mysterious ways, indeed.

Even the liberal Snopes Website admits that the Bush #41 supermarket scanner story, as it was reported by the dinosaur media is bogus, and yet, nearly 20 years later, as Newsbusters notes, "CNN's Yellin Perpetuates Discredited Bush Scanner Story."

While Jake Tapper of ABC has done a remarkable job for an MSM journalist at keeping all of the candidates' feet to the fire, "the fine ABC News folks who monitor Tapper's comments", as Bob Owens writes, sound like they're playing the same Chicago rules that the media's favorite candidate abides by as well.

(For my XM interview this week with Bob, click here.)

Having read this article on New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's loony return-of-the primitive proposal to put wind turbines on top of apparently everything in Manhattan, I was about to post the usual bloggerific snark, though Rush and GlobalWarming.org have you well served in that department.

But when I looked up Bloomberg's Wikipedia page, I came across this truly bizarre passage:

Bloomberg has on numerous occasions been accused of sexually harassing men under his employment, which he has denied.[24][25] T. Dan Winger sued Mr. Bloomberg for sexual harassment, alleging that he had made explicit comments about his body and encouraged him to spend time alone with him. The lawsuit was withdrawn in 1999.[26] In 1997, a former Bloomberg L.P. employee who became pregnant while employed filed a lawsuit accusing Bloomberg of saying "Kill it!" and "great, No. 16," a reference to the number of pregnant women in the company.[24] The lawsuit was settled the same year for an undisclosed amount of money.

Somebody clearly has gone in and hacked the genders of those in that passage. "T. Dan Winger" is in all likelihood "T. Diane Winger" with a quick, err snip. I took a screen cap to record the weirdness, which will probably be reversed in the not too distant future.

Just another day at the faith-based encyclopedia.

Found via Orrin Judd, Lloyd Billingsley, who previously wrote "Hollywood's Missing Movies", which featured a plot summary of Total Eclipse, the greatest film Hollywood will never make, has a review of the new hagio-documentary, Trumbo:

Capitalism is evil and America is a horrible fascist place, the argument goes, except for my lucrative studio contract, except for my fat bank account, except for my mansion, my swimming pool, my ranch, and my luxury cars. That's why there were jokes about Robert Rich, one of Trumbo's pseudonyms. Trumbo, who died in 1976, tells those stories here, along with his one-man show of accredited victimhood, in which he gets some help. Former Nation editor Victor Navasky does a lot of the explaining, and his book Naming Names, a defense of the screen Stalinists, is conveniently displayed beside him.

Here is the familiar footage of the 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee hearings on Communism in Hollywood, which foolishly focused on film content. The screen Stalinists were eager to testify but the strategy of defying the committee came straight from the CPUSA bosses. Trumbo is billed as an independent thinker and contrarian, but that didn't extend to Party bosses. When they laid down the law, they were obeyed. As John Huston later discovered, the strategy was all about protecting John Howard Lawson, the Party's straw boss in the studio talent guilds, and like Trumbo, an unpleasant fellow to those of other affiliations, even on the left.

Some studio people were friendly to the committee because the Party, in its heyday, wielded plenty of power in the studios and had made their lives miserable, doing all they could to quash their projects and ruin their careers. Trumbo provides not a hint of that background, nor why the committee came to Hollywood in the first place. It was the result of an investigation of Gerhard Eisler, a Comintern agent whose brother Hanns wrote scores for Hollywood movies. The Comintern isn't even mentioned a single time.

Footage from films such as Papillon and Spartacus shows how much Trumbo imposed the heroes-versus-informers template. He also has a brief role in Papillon as a prison commandant, which is appropriate. The Hollywood Communists maintained silence as Stalin kangaroo courted their fellow writers and artists into the gulag, or just killed them off. Nothing about that in Trumbo, nothing that would threaten his status as the icon of what, in Hollywood, passes for the Greatest Generation.

Trumbo will likely win an Oscar for best documentary, even though it's as much a fantasy as Tropic Thunder. Trumbo's back story and the tale of CPUSA overtures in Hollywood are much more dramatic and action packed, but so far no takers in the dream factories.

I know at least one Blogger who gave it a shot, however:

Traditionally in sports, you don't exactly devote a whole lot of effort in the preseason, lest you risk injury and give away your game plan to other teams early. As I mentioned yesterday, the "Bush cheated!" rumors in 2004 came in October. The "Bush is a racist" card from 2000 that was played in ads that blamed the death of dragging victim James Byrd on then-governor of Texas Bush also came in October, as referenced by the date of this op-ed from the time by Brent Bozell.

Both cards have already been played by Obama this year against John McCain (though virtually nothing would top the smear by the teams playing in 2000), and the conventions haven't even started. Which seems to be either a rookie error, or they're sitting on the mother of all doomsday October surprises.

As far as the McCain cheated! rumor, it seems like a pretty silly one to have Andrea Mitchell float for Obama as (a) the Bush cheated! rumor didn't exactly gain much traction in 2004 and (b) it allows the McCain camp to remind the media of this:

Exit quotation from Team McCain's bruising letter to NBC about how deep in the tank they are for Obama: "John McCain actually requested that he and Barack Obama do the forum together on stage at the same time, making these kinds of after-the-fact complaints moot."

Indeed.^TM

What is it with Democratic presidential candidates and hyperbole?

• Al Gore inventing the Internet and cleaning up Love Canal.


• John Kerry reliving Apocalypse Now.


• Hillary's non-existent Tuzla sniper fire.

And now this, from tonight's debate/interview/conversation/forum/thing:

Obama said the most gut-wrenching decision of his life was to vote against the Iraq War. McCain said it was when he declined an offer to leave a prison camp in Vietnam.

As Dan Riehl writes, "Obama didn't vote against the Iraq War. He wasn't even in the Senate! Am I missing something here? Did he somehow qualify this to make it true? Or was it simply made up?"

True--but he made a very personal decision--even if it didn't count for the record. And it's seared--seared--into his memory!

(Via Hyscience.)

As Power Line noted a week ago, as sexy as the John Edwards story is, the far greater news story is the Russian invasion of Georgia. And the confluence of the stories, and the media malpractice that both stories in their own way demonstrate, provides us with quite an incite into the MSM's collective mindset.

Regarding the latter story, Rush Limbaugh notes, It's a Sorry Day for Our Media:

Ladies and gentlemen, permit me a brief moment for a personal message to Campbell Brown, Suzanne Malveaux, and Ed Henry of CNN. Of course, Suzanne Malveaux asks the president of Georgia, "Have you reached out to the Russians, have you tried dialogue?" And then Ed Henry and Campbell Brown made the ludicrous assertion that we can't do anything because we did something arguably worse by going into Iraq than what Russia is doing in Georgia. So specifically to you, Campbell Brown and Ed Henry, you are journalists. You are people who chronicle the passing of events. You witness these events, and you cover them. As such, your memory ought to be reliable. Iraq was not a sovereign nation. Iraq lost its sovereignty because Iraq invaded a sovereign country called Kuwait. In the ensuing war to kick Iraq out of Kuwait, Iraq lost. They then begged us to stop slaughtering their supposedly invincible million man army as it was retreating to Baghdad, which we did.

As terms of the ceasefire, Campbell Brown and Ed Henry, we resume the right to resume kicking their asses at any point if they did not live up to the terms of the surrender agreement. Shockingly, Saddam Hussein did not live up to those terms and continued in wanton violation of 15 Security Council resolutions. You covered all of this, Campbell Brown and Ed Henry, you covered it all. For you to compare Saddam Hussein to the president of Georgia, a democratic and elected president amongst a free people, if you want to start making comparisons, Putin is closer to Saddam Hussein than Saakashvili. These are our best and brightest trained journalists, ladies and gentlemen, covering the stories and then forgetting that they were even there. I doubt that they forgot. They're just pushing the agenda anyway. They willingly sacrifice their credibility, all in the pursuit of an agenda.

As I wrote back in 2004, when I reviewed Orrin Judd's Redefining Sovereignty for TCS Daily:

The essays that Judd chose for this section illustrate his opinion that America itself has redefined sovereignty so that the right to maintain the governance of a nation now depends on a regime's ability to maintain basic civil rights, and a conform to liberal democratic norms.

Judd notes that the isolationist (or non-interventionist) Right has been quite hostile to this development, "which does of course involve us in the internal affairs of states from Syria to Burma to Somalia to Haiti." However, Judd's selections demonstrate that this is consistent with America's past. Americans after all settled the continent all the way to the Pacific, fought a Civil War at home, and abroad fought Imperialism, Nazism, and Communism successively, all the while requiring other peoples to adopt our own foundational principles.

The media seem to believe their own B.S.: Saddam's winning every election with a 99.96 percent plurality is not a sign of democracy--just ask the Andrew Sullivan of 2003.

"CNN's John Roberts Pushes Obama's 'Similarities' to Eisenhower, Reagan", which is awfully ironic, considering that both presidents were looked down upon by the left during their terms in office--and that's putting it mildly.

Eisenhower, the man who masterminded the D-Day Invasion, was considered a mental lightweight by most establishment liberals. (Recall also Woody's anti-Ike joke at a fictional Adlai Stevenson rally in an Annie Hall flashback.) And of course, Reagan was absolutely despised by the MSM, as Noemie Emery perceptively recalled last year.

But then, this is all part of the full-service effort that CNN's John Roberts has been putting in this year in aid of the Obama campaign; recall his infamous "Wright-Free Zone" moment back in April.

Not surprisingly, I couldn't let the scandal involving John Edwards and Rielle Hunter go without doing a quick Silicon Graffiti on it. The video builds on--and brings up to date--an essay I contributed to the New Partisan in 2005, tying in today's media-created hucksters, with Orson Welles' last completed movie, F For Fake which had just come out on DVD back then. The new SG also quotes (in slightly truncated form), one of my favorite passages from an essay by Umberto Eco:

G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it--he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

Fortunately, the customers seem to be much less credulous these days than those who supply the product.

"Nothing would have more impact on the economy and the price of oil than his election as president," former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young (no relation to this Andrew Young) said. "There would be a boost of 1,000 points on the stock market the first week after he's elected. This would be better than a chicken in every pot."

Thus ushering in a decade of blazing 1.5 percent annual growth!

By the way, note this line from Young:

More importantly, Young strongly believes that the economic future for the United States is inextricably connected to the rest of the world.

"It's technically impossible to be self-sufficient," Young said. "In order to maintain our leadership in a global economy we have to work with the rest of the world. With the transfer of technology, we either lead the world or we get trampled by it."

Obama agrees of course--depending upon which day you ask him.

Special "Gay Ex-Governor Owes Wife No Alimony" edition!

(Via Warner Todd Huston.)

Like Power Line, Roger Kimball also reminds us that the big story yesterday wasn't the John Edwards affair (though what it says about the media has some key repercussions, far beyond Edwards himself), but the Soviets Russians invading Georgia:

The whole drama as the eerie sense of history repeating itself. The London Times today carries an article about "The Revolt in Georgia"--not the one unfolding before our eyes, but the revolt against Soviet occupation in September 1924. The Soviets had initially recognized Georgia's independence in the wake of the First World War, but occupied the country in 1921 and brutally put down the revolt that erupted three years later. At the time, the president of Georgia made an appeal to the League of Nations. The Times reports that although "sympathetic reference" to Georgia was made in the assembly, "it is realized that the League is incapable of rendering material aid and the moral influence which may be a powerful force with civilized countries is unlikely to to make an impression upon Soviet Russia."

That was in 1924. What sort of impression do you suppose the "moral influence" of the successor institution to the League of Nations, the U.N., is likely to have on the uncivilized successor to the U.S.S.R.?

Similarly, Russia's invasion should generate precisely the same intense non-reaction that Germany's mobilization had on English intellectuals in the 1930s.

News from 2004 reaches Tim Rutten!

Old Media Dethroned
Edwards' admission signals the end of the era in which traditional media set the limits of acceptable political journalism.

When John Edwards admitted Friday that he lied about his affair with filmmaker Rielle Hunter, a former employee of his campaign, he may have ended his public life but he certainly ratified an end to the era in which traditional media set the agenda for national political journalism.

From the start, the Edwards scandal has belonged entirely to the alternative and new media. The tabloid National Enquirer has done all the significant reporting on it -- reporting that turns out to be largely correct -- and bloggers and online commentators have refused to let the story sputter into oblivion.

The whole story of the 2004 election was that the gatekeepers were dethroned--the Swift Vets made their case against John Kerry by doing an end-around old media by running their commercials on the Internet, and Dan Rather's case against George W. Bush was demolished in a tidal wave of distributed information sharing, first via Free Republic, which was joined shortly thereafter in the Blogosphere. Both stories demonstrated precisely how Old Media's role as a gatekeeper was dethroned:

Earlier today, Glenn Reynolds reminded us--well, the left, to be precise--of Eason Jordan's admission that he was willing to allow CNN to lie for Saddam Hussein, in order to able to put "LIVE FROM BAGHDAD" on the CNN Chyron. Jordan finally came clean on this propaganda coup for Baathist Iraq in mid-2003 after Saddam fled US soldiers in an op-ed titled, "The News We Kept To Our Selves." Evidently, the L.A. Times thought they kept the news of 2004 to themselves as well.

Ace has a great round-up on the media's stonewalling of the John Edwards story:

OPERATION PROTECT ELIZABETH

Never leave a fellow liberal soldier behind, and never stop fighting until the battle is won. The campaign continues.

"All the News That Doesn't Harm Elizabeth Edwards"

I really can't f***ing believe the media is now deciding whether to report big stories of national scope based on whether someone they like might be distressed by their reportage.

Of course I can believe it; I have to believe it. It's what they're doing, obviously.

I guess the New York Times didn't like Cindy McCain all that much when it reported on McCain's non-affair with his non-paramour.

Should media organizations be required to disclose which people they "like" and wish to "protect," and which people they "don't like" and "don't wish to protect," so that we might know beforehand where their biases may lie?

Seems like a bona fide conflict of interest, more so than many others. If the media is in the tank for Elizabeth Edwards, we need to know that, in order to properly evaluate their coverage of her husband.

But the classic showstopper is this moment from MSNBC's David Shuster, in which he feigns shock at the John Edwards' staffers are covering for his boss, and actually has the chutzpah to admit that he followed their advice on not covering the story:

More from Ace:

The media has two jobs here, which I've been seeing all day.

Job One: Reassure the public you knew all about this and are hardly surprised, because you don't want them to think you're so out of the f***ing loop this snuck up on you. So everyone's in "Oh, of course I knew, it was all so obvious!" in-the-know cool-kid mode.

Job Two: The trickier one-- attempt to explain how it can be you knew all about this but didn't report it, or bother to do the minimum threshold of follow-up. Bear in mind, the National Enquirer is a small outfit. When they assign three or four people to a story, that's a substantial fraction of their entire component of reporters and photographers.

It's nothing for a network news organization to assign three or four people to a story -- they've got hundreds of unpaid interns chomping at the bit to do something besides edit and fetch coffee, for God's sakes. So even if they didn't want to send a reporter, they could have sent a dozen recent graduates out there to get the story... which they would have gotten. This was not exactly a Phillip Marlowe murder mystery here.

Note that Job One and Job Two are basically impossible to square in any satisfactory manner. But they're quite righteous and smugly self-complimentary about both.

In this video, David Shuster lets everyone know he knew allllll about this way before the Iowa primary, but failed to report on it -- or, apparently, follow up at all-- because "credible sources" within John Edwards' camp assured him the story was garbage and that he'd be embarrassed to report it.

"You're only as good as your 'sources' are," Shuster says. Well, Dave, your sources are apparently shit, buddy, and you're so f***ing credulous, stupid, or in the tank you deem them "very credible." So I guess you're not that good, eh?

Unable to let it stand there -- with David Shuster looking pretty bad -- he goes on to say how goshdarn angry he is about being lied to by his very credible people/crochet club buddies.

It's their fault, you know.

Which is odd.

Edwards' people were just doing their job. They did their job well.

It was Shuster who failed to do his job.

Why are they to blame? They never held themselves out as disinterested parties or objective observers. They're supposed to be invested in their client's/friend's future.

Shuster was temporarily suspended by MSNBC, seemingly on orders of Hillary Clinton's campaign, after his "pimped out" remark; nobody should be surprised that he, or MSNBC as a whole, spiked a story based on another Democrats' threat.

The undernews finally floats over the top, as ABC News reports, "Edwards Admits to Sexual Affair; Lied as Presidential Candidate" Lionel Hutz a liar? Say it ain't so, Homer!

John Edwards repeatedly lied during his Presidential campaign about an extra-marital affair with a novice film-maker, the former Senator admitted to ABC News today.

In an interview for broadcast tonight on Nightline, Edwards told ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff he did have an affair with 42-year old Rielle Hunter, but said that he did not love her.

Edwards also denied he was the father of Hunter's baby girl, Frances Quinn, although the one-time Democratic Presidential candidate said he has not taken a paternity test.

Edwards said he knew he was not the father based on timing of the baby's birth on February 27, 2008. He said his affair ended too soon for him to have been the father.

So is this enough to get his speaking slot at the Denver convention reinstated, or will he still be considered toxic in a couple of weeks?

Note this element in the ABC story:

A former campaign aide, Andrew Young, has said he was the father of the child.

According to friends of Hunter, Edwards met her at a New York city bar in 2006. His political action committee later paid her $114,000 to produce campaign website documentaries despite her lack of experience.

Edwards said the affair began during the campaign after she was hired. Hunter traveled with Edwards around the country and to Africa.

Edwards said his wife, Elizabeth, and others in his family became aware of the affair in 2006.

Edwards made a point of telling Woodruff that his wife's cancer was in remission when he began the affair with Hunter. Elizabeth Edwards has since been diagnosed with an incurable form of the disease.

When the National Enquirer first reported the alleged Edwards-Hunter affair last October 11, Edwards, his campaign staff and Hunter vociferously denounced the report.

"The story is false, it's completely untrue, it's ridiculous," Edwards told reporters then.

He repeated his denials just two weeks ago.

Edwards today admitted the National Enquirer was correct when it reported he had visited Hunter at the Beverly Hills Hilton last month.

At this point, the spin that currently puts the story in the best possible light for Edwards is that, as Allah writes, "Rielle Hunter is his lover--but the kid is not his son. Er, daughter." And as the ABC article notes, "A former campaign aide, Andrew Young, has said he was the father of the child."

This sounds more like behavior more at home with a rock group on tour passing a favored groupie from musician to musician than (presumed) adults trying to position their man to run for the most powerful office in the land.

Mickey Kaus will--very safe to say--have more on this story; for our interview last week with Mickey on XM Satellite Radio, click here.

Special big city jailed mayoral edition.

(Big--but rapidly shrinking--city, incidentally.)

Texas Monthly performs some heavy duty airbrushing on LBJ's record.

Special antisemitic edition.

It must be list day in the Blogosphere--at Pajamas HQ, Victor Davis Hanson has a list of "Obama's Ten Commandments". And enjoying VDH's post is no doubt a sure sign--one of 25!--that you might be a racist.

And speaking of lists, Byron York wonders if a recent David Letterman Top Ten list that referenced John Edwards may have gone AWOL--or never aired in the first place.

There's a hint of disappointment lurking in the subtext of John McCain's recent videos highlighting just how in the tank the MSM are for Obama; as Michelle Malkin quipped, "Hell hath no fury like a Maverick spurned". And while McCain may have initially counted on the media's support, he really should know better. While the media loved Maverick in the 2000 primaries--at least compared to that Bush guy--and for iconoclastic quotes afterwards, when presidential elections start in earnest, the MSM knows which party they're backing--and they're not afraid to let you know as well.

The latest edition of our Silicon Graffiti videoblog, v-cast, Internet TV show, or whatever the kids are calling these things this week begins with this moment at the conclusion of the 2000 election and goes all the way to 2004's grizzly aftermath, and beyond. With a few surprises along the way...

(Previous editions of Silicon Graffiti can be found by tuning in here.)

The initial seeming near-blackout on the John Edwards scandal in the overculture notwithstanding, the American media aren't the only ones with gaping memory holes: Canada's CBC News profiles Syed Soharwardy, with nary a mention of this minor bit of unpleasantness.

(Via Kathy Shaidle.)

Related: Ezra Levant asks, "Is turn-around fair game?"

Over at Pajamas Media, Bridget Johnson tolls the death knell for L.A.'s newspaper industry.

We looked at the technological reasons why the newspaper industry is sinking in a recent Silicon Graffiti video. But L.A.'s a unique situation: if only the town's chief industry lended itself better to big, juicy stories that sold newspapers--or if only there was a big hot breaking scandal going on in the town that the town's biggest paper could sink its teeth into!

Oh well--clearly, it must be hard generating news in such a sleepy, backwater locale.

Deceiver.com has a screencap and a link to Reille Hunter's Website, which is a hoot:

Looks like there are two Americas: the America where not-John-Edwards'-babymama Rielle Hunter has erased her web site from existence, and the America where someone else has put it right back up.

Actually, it's not America--the URL is the Egyptian mirror site for the San Francisco-based Internet Archive Wayback machine, but still, click over for the graphics, stay for the sweet, new age chakra!

(Via the crystalline blogging of Australia's Tim Blair.)

Update: Welcome Deceiver readers! Take a look around; hopefully you'll like some of what you see.

Late Update (8/8/08): Edwards begins to come clean--er, so to speak--click here for details.

So can you immanentize the eschaton through the Force?

"I am the father of our Star Wars movie world--the filmed entertainment, the features and now the animated film and television series," (George Lucas) says. "And I'm going to do a live-action television series. Those are all things I am very involved in: I set them up and I train the people and I go through them all. I'm the father; that's my work. Then we have the licensing group, which does the games, toys and books, and all that other stuff. I call that the son--and the son does pretty much what he wants." He laughs. "Once in a while, they ask a question like 'Can we kill off Yoda?', things like that, but it's very loose.

"Then we have the third group, the holy ghost, which is the bloggers and fans. They have created their own world. I worry about the father's world. The son and holy ghost can go their own way."

Pretty biblical stuff from a guy whose original idea was to portray communist North Vietnam in a favorable light...

Remember the bad old days of Kremlinology, when analysts would study who was airbrushed out of Soviet photos to see who was out of power?

Greg Pollowitz notices--for some reason known only to the L.A. Times and don't you dare read anything into it--a curious update of the photos of potential veep candidates by the Times.

Mickey Kaus's ongoing victory lap takes him to the virtual studios of PJM Political this week.

John McCain? No--Osama bin Laden!

Osama bin Laden wanted to introduce himself to America with an ABC television interview months before al Qaeda bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa, the interviewer testified on Tuesday.

Former ABC correspondent John Miller, testifying at the first Guantanamo war crimes trial, also recalled comparing bin Laden with U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt as he made small talk during filming of the May 28, 1998, interview at an Afghanistan mountain hideout.

It was a rare opportunity for an American journalist, and Miller detailed a movie-thriller route to get to bin Laden, complete with multiple plane flights in Pakistan, a nighttime border crossing into Afghanistan, and muzzle flashes from automatic weapons at an al Qaeda checkpoint.

"You are like the Middle East version of Teddy Roosevelt," Miller, who is now the chief FBI spokesman, told bin Laden in a selection of the interview tape screened for the trial of bin Laden's driver, Salim Hamdan.

Michael Moore and Brian Williams could not be reached for comment.

In that Orwellian L.A. Times sense of the word, of course.

Last night, when I was wading through background material about John Edwards for my interview today with Mickey Kaus for this week's PJM Political on XM Satellite Radio, I noticed something odd about Edwards' Wikipedia profile--there's no mention of a rather high-profile scandal that's orbiting directly above him, which seems pretty odd; Wikipedia pages are rather notorious for often being the first to be updated when news or a scandal breaks. And they definitely have news of Bob Novak's health scare, which broke earlier today. And today, instead of silence, there's this at the top of Edwards' profile there.

So why the Edwards embargo?

(Oh--did I mention I'm interviewing Kaus on Edwards this week? Tune in here on Wednesday; it will be more informative than this interview, I assure you.)

Sounding a bit like the Bud Lite "Real Men of Genius" commercials, The Columbia Journalism Review salutes you--the men of...Real Journalism!

Today's front-page piece in The New York Times about Congressman Charlie Rangel's rent-control boondoggle--he has four rent-controlled apartments in Manhattan, including one that serves as a campaign office--is a clear illustration of what separates a real journalist from the thousands of pretenders who take great pleasure in denigrating the embattled MSM.

The very existence of the piece makes the case. We don't typically find such stories on blogs, in part because most "citizen journalists" don't have a professional journalist's DNA. They too often pursue personal agendas, or partisan ones. There is evidence that this is changing--the citizen journalists at places like Off the Bus and the Chi-Town Daily News strive for journalism that is intellectually honest--and that is a welcome change indeed. Journalism--however flawed--is built upon the ideas that public servants should be held to a higher standard, that the powerful must be checked when they abuse that power, that the public has a right to information that the powerful would rather keep hidden.

Except of course, when gatekeepers are perfectly happy to keep things quiet:

From: "Pierce, Tony"

Date: July 24, 2008 10:54:41 AM PDT

To: [XXX]

Subject: john Edwards [sic]

Hey bloggers,

There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair. Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations. So I am asking you all not to blog about this topic until further notified.

If you have any questions or are ever in need of story ideas that would best fit your blog, please don't hesitate to ask [sic]

Keep rockin, [sic]

Tony

(Found via Steve Boriss.)

At least in this geographical context. But Scott Johnson of Power Line quotes a key passage from Obama's "Sermon to the Germans", and Rush Limbaugh's response. First, Obama:

People of Berlin, people of the world, this is our moment. This is our time. I know my country has not perfected itself. (cheers) At times we struggle to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people, we've made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions.

Here's an excerpt of Rush's take:

"We haven't perfected ourselves." You know, that's a key phrase, by the way, is one of the things that drives liberalism is the fact that they think people and institutions can be perfected. They think they can be perfect.

Obama's discussing the use of government to achieve the perfection of man in Germany? Now that's audacity.

England's Daily Mail reports, "Genocidal Napoleon was as barbaric as Hitler, historian claims."

Why, there's a direct line from the French Revolution to the unending bloodshed of the 20th century? Somebody should write a book about that!

More names thrown under the bus--or is it under the ego? Charles Johnson points out that the Gipper's name was never uttered by Obama while speaking in Berlin, and John J. Pitney Jr. notes another name not spoken:

Between 1804 (during the fight against the Barbary Pirates) and 2004 (during Iraq), the United States held nine presidential elections in wartime. Only two of these elections--1952 and 1968--produced a change in party control. Both times, the winner was a Republican who ran on national-security experience, and the loser was a Democrat who seemed more dovish.

Obama can claim no executive or military experience. The last president to have neither was Warren G. Harding. By a two-to-one margin, Americans think that McCain would do better as commander in chief.

And so Obama came to Berlin to build up his image on national security. If only appearances matter, then he did himself some good. The substance of his remarks was different. He credited the 1948 Berlin Airlift to international cooperation. "It was this spirit that led airlift planes to appear in the sky above our heads," he said, as if some global vibe called aircraft from the vasty deep. Actually, it was Harry Truman. As Elizabeth Spalding recounts in The First Cold Warrior, "At first, Truman was almost alone in thinking that an airlift would work as an effective response to the Soviets."

Truman made a tough, risky decision. That's what presidents do. Obama did not acknowledge this point. He didn't even mention Truman's name.

On the other hand, as Ann Althouse suggests, "Surely, if he'd been there in 1948, he would have said the Berlin airlift is hopeless. He thought the surge was hopeless."

As others have noted, all that Hope and Change and Audacity hides an awfully grim and pessimistic worldview.

Update: And perhaps it's being reciprocated in kind: CNN's Amanpour 'Surprised' by Lack of 'Euphoria' After Obama Speech."

Over at the The Weekly Standard's blog, John McCormack writes, "Obama Thinks It Would Be 'Inappropriate' to Meet with U.S. Troops in Germany."

Yes, best to avoid entirely the risk of repeating this moment four years ago from another tyro nominee.

Still though--forget it, he's rolling.

The Obama Berlin speech versus "We Are The World"--see if you can identify which line comes from which!

(And the latter certainly worked out well for all concerned, of course.)

Mickey Kaus explores "Edwards and the agony of the MSM", beginning with his paraphrase of a Business Week article on John Edwards by Jon Fine:

Fine notes that "Edwards isn't considered a likely vice-presidential candidate by the press." That's true. But he is a likely Obama cabinet official. Many Dems would like to see him as Attorney-General. That's what's at stake in the love-child coverage. The Enquirer has killed him as a VP candidate. But if the MSM goes into full "protect Elizabeth" mode the damage might yet not quite be enough to stop his confirmation by a Democratic Senate next year. "Protect Elizabeth" = "protect A.G. John."

After a long list of MSM outlets that fail to report the story, Mickey quotes Jim Treacher:

"Which story gets a bigger audience: A story the blogs run with but the mainstream news ignores, or a story the news runs with but the blogs ignore? I'm thinking the news comes out ahead, but just barely. And at this rate, not for much longer."

And it's not like such an MSM bottleneck on a story that everyone knows the basics of hasn't happened before. As Tony Blankley wrote in late August of 2004:

Mark the calendar. August 2004 is the first time that the major mainline media -- CBSNBCABCNEWYORKTIMESWASHINGTONPOST L.A.TIMESNEWSWEEKTIMEMAGAZINEASSOCIATED PRESSETC. -- ignored a news story that nonetheless became known by two-thirds of the country within two weeks of it being mentioned by the "marginal" press.

It was only after a CBS poll showed that Kerry had lost a net 14 percent of the veteran's vote to Bush -- without aid of major media coverage or substantial national advertising -- that the major media outlets began to lumber, resentfully, in the vague direction of the story. And even then, they hardly engaged themselves in the spirit of objective journalism.

According to Editor and Publisher, the respected voice of official big-time journalism: "Chicago Tribune managing editor James O'Shea tells Joe Strupp the Swift Boat controversy may be an instance of a growing problem for newspapers in the expanding media world -- being forced to follow a questionable story because non-print outlets have made it an issue. "There are too many places for people to get information," says O'Shea. "I don't think newspapers can be gatekeepers anymore -- to say this is wrong, and we will ignore it. Now we have to say this is wrong, and here is why."

Now, there are two revealing statements there. First, it is odd to see Mr. O'Shea, an official, credentialed seeker of truth, complaining about "too many places for people to get information." He sounds like a resentful old apparatchik glaring at a Xerox machine in the dying days of the Soviet Union.

The second noteworthy statement is the hilarious complaint that they can no longer merely think a story is wrong and ignore it: "Now we have to say this is wrong, and here is why." It apparently escaped his thought process that if he hadn't yet investigated the story, it might not be "wrong." A seeker of truth in a competitive environment might have phrased the sentence: "Now we will have to report it to determine if it is right or wrong."

As Blankley wrote, August 2004 may have been the first time the undernews bubbled straight to the surface, but obviously, it will be far from the last.

Your blood-pressure raising moment of the day courtesy of Eyeblast.tv; remember when the left debated whether or not scenes such as this actually happened in the late 1960s?

AMC's Mad Men series is filled with poke-the-viewer-in-the-ribs moments where characters in a TV series set in 1960 are smoking and drinking like, err, mad--even with their kids around, and on the way, in the case of one pregnant character who smokes like a chimney. And yet somehow, we all managed to survive such a stone knives and bearskins culture. So I have to laugh when a celebrity gossip site, full of photos of Hollywood actresses in various stages of undress and occasionally in various stages of acts that would have caused the boys in the Hayes Office to go into complete myocardial infarction in 1960, has a puritanical headline such as this: "Britney Spears in a Bikini is Smoking... In Front of Her Kids."

Gosh--I know I'm shocked.

Something else the characters in Mad Men wouldn't be the least surprised by, because they had a millennium of history and common sense to go by: "Social stigma drives some women to remove tattoos."

And as usual, the L.A. Times, where history and culture are always in the present-tense, is surprised by (a) a topic that Theodore Dalrymple was writing about nearly a decade and a half ago and (b) your grandmother understood 50 years ago.

(Via Conservative Grapevine.)

"We don't see a need to improve upon our credibility by, say, putting the audio on the web."

--Der Spiegel, which according to Patterico, helpfully rewrote Iraqi PM Maliki's remarks for "clarity."

Related: "Photo Ops and 'Fake Interviews': Obama's Excellent Overseas Adventure."

"Some of us have a theory that he might once have been a president of the United States, but that he did something horrendous, so that all records, everything was wiped out about him. There is nothing in history books. There are no pictures on stamps or money."

Unlike the fellow in the video archives that Woody's asked to identify in the above clip from Sleeper, it seems increasingly unlikely that John Edwards will ever be president. But Mickey Kaus wonders if the Ministry of Information will quietly toss Edwards' file down the memory hole to avoid the potential risk of doubleplus ungood malreported prolefeed:

Will this be the first presidential-contender level scandal to occur completely in the undernews, without ever being reported in the cautious, respectable MSM? That's always seemed an interesting theoretical possibility--a prominent politician just disappears from the scene, after blogs and tabloids dig up dirt on him, but nobody who relies on the Times, Post, network news or Mark Halperin has the faintest idea why.

Didn't the MSM already do that to the 1970's-era back story of Edwards' running mate in 2004?

"Despite all the hype over Obama's religious outreach, a new Pew survey indicates Obama actually has slightly less support from evangelicals than John Kerry had at this point four years ago."

Audacity--how bitter is thy aftertaste!

Michael M. Bates writes that back in print regarding former Senator Max Cleland is "a liberal myth, one still being circulated by the New York Times":

"Obama's Lobbyist Policy Excludes Cleland" was posted last night on the New York Times's "The Caucus" blog. It relates that former Georgia Senator Max Cleland was disinvited from a Barack Obama fundraiser because the decorated war veteran is now a registered lobbyist.

The piece ends with:

As a surrogate for Senator John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign, Mr. Cleland often got marquee billing at campaign events, even landing a coveted speaking role at the Democratic National Convention. He lost his bid for a second term in 2002 after a Republican television advertisement depicted him as unpatriotic.

Fortunately, we have YouTube--we can fact check your Sulzberger!

Bates goes on to quote Michael Crowley in the liberal e-zine Slate:

Most famously, Chambliss ran a vicious ad on Cleland's homeland security votes featuring images of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. In the popular liberal mythology, the ad disgustingly questioned Cleland's patriotism. "To this day I am motivated by--and I will be throughout this campaign--the most craven moment I've ever seen in politics, when the Republican Party challenged this man's patriotism in the last campaign," John Kerry has said.

But that's not what happened. The ad, though sleazy in its use of Osama and Saddam, didn't question Cleland's patriotism. It questioned his political courage and judgment. It focused narrowly on his behavior in office and his actual votes against the Homeland Security Department. With images of Bin Laden and Saddam flashing onscreen, a narrator declared that, "As America faces terrorists and extremist dictators, Max Cleland runs television ads claiming he has the courage to lead." The ad then listed Cleland's votes against the Homeland Security Department and said he was stalling "the president's vital homeland security efforts." It concluded: "Max Cleland says he has the courage to lead, but the record proves Max Cleland is just misleading."

Unfortunately, Cleland did a lousy job of responding to such attacks. As he was pummeled on national security--clearly the issue of the day as war with Iraq neared, Cleland stuck to stale Democratic themes like Social Security. Occasionally, Cleland and his supporters counterattacked, but they were ineffective.

Evidently, the Times is counting on its readers not to simply search for the video themselves--but of course, why Timesperson Michael Falcone couldn't do that himself and embed a link or the actual video is also a reasonable question.

Christian Toto, who appeared yesterday on PJM Political, reviews Trumbo for Pajamas Media, "the new crockumentary", as the Drunkablog accurately dubs it, on blacklisted "Hollywood Ten" writer Dalton Trumbo, while quoting from Ronald Radosh:

There is a lengthy sequence in which Donald Sutherland reads from Trumbo's 1939 antiwar novel, Johnny Got His Gun. Nowhere do we learn that Johnny, touted by the Communists during the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and serialized in their newspaper, was withdrawn from circulation by Trumbo when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Literally overnight, the Communist party's peace campaign ended and was replaced by calls for intervention against Hitler.

Accordingly, Trumbo censored his own book, took the plates from the publisher, and let it go out of print. But the novel, which had gotten good reviews, was still popular, and readers wrote to Trumbo to find out where it could be found. Not satisfied that his book was no longer available, Trumbo--fearing, undoubtedly correctly, that many of those letter-writers were isolationists, and some even pro-fascist--invited the FBI to visit him at home in 1944, and turned the letters over to the agents. He informed on Americans who only wanted to read his own novel! . . .

That's a topic I also mention in my recent Silicon Graffiti video:






Meanwhile, on his blog, Christian writes that Glenn Beck has come up with a rather novel way to begin to break the new Hollywood blacklist.

It's victim politics a-go-go! First up in an interview in GQ, Mark Penn (whom the magazine describes as "her beleaguered chief strategist") shares some thoughts on why Hillary lost:

...Look, there’s no question that the Obama campaign took comments that could not in any way, shape, or form in an objective reality be seen as racist, and they told surrogates to characterize them that way. And I think that was the… And not only that, but when you look at who was making the comments, people who devoted their lives, you know—President Clinton was there in Little Rock—who devoted their lives to kind of repairing the breach racially in this country, it was doubly, it was really doubly unfair and troubling.

All of which is awfully rich coming from someone associated so closely with the couple that brought you the politics of personal destruction. But Rich does have a point, and Obama's surrogates have found a new target--those white racist reactionaries...at the limousine liberal Manhattan magazine that dubbed Bill Clinton the first black president a decade ago:

Myrlie Evers-Williams, 75, the widow of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, told an NAACP luncheon group Tuesday that political spin masters and the news media are painting the Obamas as unpatriotic and dangerous radicals. She said the attacks are serious enough to use the term lynching, even though that usually refers to racially-motivated killings.

Evers-Williams, a chairwoman emeritus of the civil rights organization, said New Yorker magazine’s recent cover is an example. The magazine’s cartoon cover shows a turban-clad Barack Obama bumping knuckles with a gun-toting Michele Obama as an American flag burns in a fireplace…

“As I watch the political scene unfold, I realize there is more than one way to lynch someone,� said Evers-Williams. “I look at the picture of the New Yorker and to me that was subtle, political lynching. You can call it satire if you want.�

While his surrogates and supporters patrol the old media, Obama himself takes on those upstarts on the right:

GLAMOUR: An AP poll shows that while the positive ratings on Michelle are higher than those of Cindy McCain, her negative ratings are higher as well. I’m curious about how as a husband that makes you feel. Does it mystify you? And what do you want to say to those Americans who don’t know the woman that you know?

SENATOR OBAMA: It’s infuriating, but it’s not surprising, because let’s face it: What happened was that the conservative press—Fox News and the National Review and columnists of every ilk—went fairly deliberately at her in a pretty systematic way…and treated her as the candidate in a way that you just rarely see the Democrats try to do against Republicans. And I’ve said this before: I would never have my campaign engage in a concerted effort to make Cindy McCain an issue, and I would not expect the Democratic National Committee or people who were allied with me to do it. Because essentially, spouses are civilians. They didn’t sign up for this. They’re supporting their spouse. So it took a toll.

Which is of course, yet another page from the Clinton playbook: it's hard to think of any potential first ladies prior to Hillary in 1992 being used as campaign surrogates; as late as 2003, Howard Dean's wife basically stayed home while he campaigned.

No wonder television's comics are afraid to make sport of Obama, despite his myriad flaws, not the least of which is buying into his own messianic press clippings. Fortunately, there is one iconoclast willing to say that the emperor-to-be is bereft of his Burberry suit.

That's the question that David Frum asks:

During the Enron collapse of 2002, the public and the media were persuaded that Enron was somehow a Republican scandal, based on little more than senior management's history of contributions to the Republican party.

The ties between the Fannie Mae debacle and the Democratic party are much more intimate than that. Senior Democrats chosen for their political connections - James Johnson, Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick - took tens of millions of dollars in compensation out of the company. The ties between the Obama campaign and Fannie Mae are especially intimate: not only did Johnson head Obama's veep-vetting operation, but we learn in this Washington Post article that the campaign that Raines is advising Obama on the mortgage crisis! Well, he should know. Let's just hope the Obama operation is able to keep Raines away from the accounting side of things. Even the amazing Obama fundraising operation could not afford that!

More seriously: Here is potentially the largest financial disaster in American history. The American taxpayer stands to lose billions; Democratic insiders have extracted tens of millions. If Enron was a party scandal ... what is this?

The offramp to Schumerville?

"At rare intervals, there appears among us a person whose virtues are so manifest to all, who has such a capacity for relating to every sort of human being, who so subordinates his own ego drive to the concerns of others, who lives his whole life in such harmony with the surrounding community that he is revered and loved by everyone with whom he comes in contact. Such a man Dalton Trumbo was not."

--Ring Lardner Jr., at Trumbo's memorial service in 1976.

Back in 2006, Mark Steyn noted that "Hollywood prefers to make 'controversial' films about controversies that are settled, rousing itself to fight battles long won."

You can see that dynamic--or lack thereof--at work in the new documentary Trumbo that's hitting the art house circuit this summer on screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. It's a look at the Blacklist and McCarthyism of the 1950s that's brave and daring--a cutting edge triumph of dissent and free speech! ...As long as you're willing to discount the dozen-plus movies on the topic that Hollywood has made since the mid-1960s.

In contrast, did Hollywood produce or distribute any anti-Soviet Union films during that same time period? Not too many, needless to say; but we'll also look at the few that qualify--if only tangentially. Along the way, we also look at the convoluted real-life history of Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun novel, which as Orrin Judd described in his review, is as byzantine a story as anything Trumbo wrote for the silver screen.

Those are the topics we explore in the latest edition of our Silicon Graffiti video blog. It takes its title from an earlier article by Steyn, back when he reviewed the play that toured a few years ago starring Nathan Lane as Trumbo for the New Criterion. For our previous forays in videoblogging, tune in here.

Update: Andrew Breitbart looks at the new Hollywood blacklist: "Mr. Spielberg, tear down this wall!" And Glenn Reynolds links to Total Eclipse, the greatest film you've never seen.

Gary Condit, conservative? Mark Hemmingway catches the Washington Post in yet another round of Name That Party:

The Washington Post has a been putting out lengthy special report out on the Chandra Levy case. Here's how they describe Gary Conditin in today's installment:

They met at hotels and inside his fourth-floor, turn-of-the-century condo at the top of Adams Morgan, an eclectic neighborhood of ethnic restaurants, offbeat shops and jam-packed nightclubs near the National Zoo and Rock Creek Park. It was not a typical neighborhood for a conservative congressman from a right-leaning agricultural district. [Emphasis added]

Now reading that, would you get the impression Condit was a Democrat?

Only if you're a New Yorker subscriber.

Chris Matthews has an exceptional idea, as Newsbusters notes: Matthews Worries 'Right' Will Turn New Yorker Cover into T-Shirt."

Capital idea, Chris! In an age where brand synergy is all, I'm sure the fellas at Those Shirts and the legal bean counters inside the New Yorker's offices could work out a licensing agreement that would be mutually beneficial. Considering how much the Manhattan-based print media have been suffering financially, I'm glad to see that Matthews is always on the lookout for ways to increase their revenues through carefully selected cross-promotional opportunities.

Seriously though, it's amazing, isn't it? A decade spent comparing President Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Rush Limbaugh, and more recently wishing that fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton would snuff it is all perfectly fine, but the left is positively apoplectic when their own firing squad turns circular.

(Which actually happens with surprising regularity.)

While Charles Johnson has spotted a serious example of fauxtography, and is thus only receiving belated, grudging acknowledgment from the Jurassic media, Ann Althouse looks at fauxtography's lighter side, and asks, "Why is it so hard for a magazine to shoot a decent celebrity cover?":

Some shocking examples of uglification here. My theory is that magazine editors want professional models and are annoyed to by the fact that celebrity faces on the cover help circulation so much that they can no longer do what their aesthetic sensibilities tell them is right. Thwarted, the wreak their revenge. It's passive aggression.

And speaking of fauxtography's lighter side, one of the house bloggers at Yahoo's music blog spots "Jennifer Hudson's Slim Chance" and asks, "Is it just me, or does Jennifer Hudson look, um, DIFFERENT on her debut album's cover?"

I've seen this movie before: a summer of tabloid news stories and killer sharks. Hopefully the ending won't be as terrifying as the first go around.

Greg Pollowitz writes that Obama's gaffes, flip-flops, and triangulations have convinced the all-knowing final arbiter of all-things conservative that "Santa Claus does not exist."

Of course, Sullivan concluded his brief but very public fling with conservatism back in 2004, when he endorsed a senator who, by the way, served in the Navy during Vietnam as "the right man - and the conservative choice - for a difficult and perilous time."

Hmmm: Senator, Navy man, Vietnam vet. If only Sullivan could find such a candidate running for the White House in 2008!

Update: Related thoughts from Ann Althouse.

"California is making it mandatory for cars to be labeled with global warming scores, figures that take into account emissions from vehicle use and fuel production."

"I remember watching the Nixon-Humphrey presidential race on TV. A friend of mine who spoke German and English translated for me. I heard Humphrey saying things that sounded like socialism, which I had just left."

In 2004, John McCain defended fellow Senator John Kerry against the exceedingly well-deserved attacks by the Swift Boat Vets and related groups. But in the world of Washington, no good deed goes unpunished; and even the Associated Press has to laugh (check out the second paragraph quoted below) at the turn of events involving their candidate's latest surrogate to take a shot at McCain's military service:

John Kerry says Republican John McCain doesn't have the judgment to be president.

If that's the case, then it's probably a good thing McCain rejected overtures from Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, to form a bipartisan ticket and run with Kerry as his candidate for vice president.

Kerry had no kind words his Senate colleague Sunday, accusing McCain of poor decision-making on everything from backing tax cuts for the wealthy to making support for continuing the U.S. military presence in Iraq the centerpiece of his presidential campaign.

"John McCain ... has proven that he has been wrong about every judgment he's made about the war. Wrong about the Iraqis paying for the reconstruction, wrong about whether or not the oil would pay for it, wrong about Sunni and Shia violence through the years, wrong about the willingness of the Iraqis to stand up for themselves," Kerry, who supports Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, said on CBS' "Face the Nation."

"If you like the Bush tax cut and what it's done to our economy, making wealthier people wealthier and the average middle class struggle harder, then John McCain is going to give you a third term of George Bush and Karl Rove," the Massachusetts senator added, echoing an Obama campaign talking point.

Kerry later said the McCain of 2008 isn't the McCain he courted in 2004.

"John McCain has changed in profound and fundamental ways that I find personally really surprising, and frankly upsetting.

And Kerry is expert in changing in profound and fundamental ways, that millions of Americans found surprising and frankly upsetting.

McCain has built his famous "Maverick" reputation by building bridges across the aisle, to the point where numerous conservatives wonder which party McCain owes his allegiance to. How does he view these blue falcon attacks, now numbering at least a dozen if not more, on his military record? Did he expect them as part of business as usual in Washington?

Kerry was apparently surprised when his post-war anti-American actions from the early 1970s were questioned in 2004. (Scroll down to the bottom of the page of this Newsweek postmortem from immediately after the 2004 election to Kerry's apoplexy when Charlie Gibson questioned him about his infamous early-1970s ribbon toss.) I'd be curious if McCain, who was a POW in Hanoi during Kerry's Winter Soldier days, is equally surprised.

In early May, about a week after their anchors and reporters gushed that Rev. Wright had hit--in Soledad O'Brien's words, "a home run" with his nationally-televised speech to the NAACP in Detroit, only to then have his performance erased from the record books by the league commissioner, CNN anchorman John Roberts, in a moment of hard-hitting unbiased journalistic integrity foreshadowed by Saturday Night Live, assured Obama that his network was now a "Wright-Free Zone."

And the Washington Post is happy to expand that zone: "WaPo Addresses Obama's Faith -- With NO Wright?"

Well, it's not like Obama titled a book or anything after one of his former pastor's sermons...

John Nolte, on his Dirty Harry's Place film blog, spots Roger Ebert making quite an interesting analogy in his latest review, which revisits Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous Triumph of the Will:

Try to imagine another film where hundreds of thousands gathered. Where all focus was on one or a few figures on a distant stage. Where those figures were the object of adulation. The film, of course, is the rock documentary “Woodstock” (1970). But consider how Michael Wadleigh, that film’s director, approached the formal challenge of his work. He begins with the preparations for this massive concert. He shows arrivals coming by car, bus, bicycle, foot. He show the arrangements to feed them. He makes the Port-O-San Man, serving the portable toilets, into a folk hero. …

By contrast, Riefenstahl’s camera is oblivious to one of the most fascinating aspects of the Nuremberg rally, which is how it was organized. Yes, there are overhead shots of vast fields of tents, laid out with mathematical precision. But how did the thousands eat, relieve themselves, prepare their uniforms and weapons and mass up to begin their march through town? We see overhead shots of tens of thousands of Nazis in rigid formation, not a single figure missing, not a single person walking to the sidelines. How long did they have to stand before their moment in the sun? Where did they go and what did they do after marching past Hitler? In a sense, Riefenstahl has told the least interesting part of the story.

Wow, who knew that the famously leftwing Roger Ebert was such a fan of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism?!

But such a comparison is ultimately futile: Freddie Mercury and Queen weren't even bandmates when Woodstock occurred in 1969, and they were history's first fascist rock and roll group--just ask Rolling Stone.

Iraq had a nuclear program? Who knew! (Well, other than the Israelis in 1981, and all of these folks, but nevermind that):

The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program, a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium, reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.

The removal of 550 metric tons of "yellowcake", the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment, was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam's nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.

Joe Wilson could not be reached for comment.

Ivan Osorio quips:

My friend Tom Palmer says that whenever he sees somebody sporting a Che Guevara t-shirt, he likes to ask the wearer, “That’s a great t-shirt; do you have the entire collection?” The wearer usually responds either with a blank stare or by asking Tom what does he mean, to which Tom then responds: “You know, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot…”

Now I can happily say that the disgusting Che is in the right company in at least one type of merchandise. The photo below was taken recently by a friend in vacation in Italy.

Wnat's the photo? Well, as Ivan asks, "Would they also have Castro rum and Stalin vodka?"

(Via Tim Blair, who notes, "Che may finally have liberated someone, but he’s still mixing with the wrong crowd.")

At least until the tail end of the first decade of the 21st century, World War II always seemed like pretty settled history to me; but it's obvious that the Second World War--particularly the conduct of the Allies--is being reframed by a surprising number of groups. As Victor Davis Hanson wrote last month:

Questioning the past is a good thing, but rewriting it contrary to facts is quite another. In the latest round of revisionism about the Second World War, the awful British and naive Americans, not the poor Germans, have ended up as the real culprits.

Take the new book by conservative pundit Patrick Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. Buchanan argues that, had the imperialist Winston Churchill not pushed poor Hitler into a corner, he would have never invaded Poland in 1939, which triggered an unnecessary Allied response.

Maybe then the subsequent world war, and its 50 million dead, could have been avoided. Taking that faulty argument to its logical end, I suppose today a united West might live in peace with a reformed (and victorious) Nazi Third Reich.

On the Left, novelist Nicholson Baker’s nonfiction title, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, builds the case that the Allied bombing of German cities was tantamount to a war crime.

Apparently there was no need to, in blanket fashion, attack German urban centers and the industry, transportation, and communications concentrated within them. From Baker’s comfortable vantage point, either the war was amoral or unnecessary — or there must have been more humane ways to stop the flow of fuel, crews, and equipment for the Waffen SS divisions that invaded Europe and Russia.

In the luxury of some 60 years of postwar peace and affluence — and perhaps in anger over the current Iraq war — Buchanan and Baker and other revisionists engage in a common sort of Western second-guessing. The result is that they always demand liberal democracies be not just better and smarter than their adversaries, but almost superhuman in their perfection.

That's the theme of a new mini-series written by moderate historian Niall Ferguson, but aired on the otherwise typically liberal PBS, as Adam Buckman notes in an article whose subtitle says it all: "PBS Show To Argue Allies As Bad As Nazis":

MEMBERS of the Greatest Generation - especially those with weak hearts - might want to steer clear of an upcoming PBS documentary that suggests the Allied victory in World War II was "tainted" and questions whether it can even be called a victory.

Moreover, the documentary, titled "The War of the World: A New History of the 20th Century," asserts that the war could only be won by forming an unholy alliance with a dictator - Joseph Stalin, who was as brutal as the one they were fighting, Adolf Hitler - and by adopting the same "pitiless" and "remorseless" tactics practiced by the enemy.

The three-part documentary is a companion to the best-selling book, "The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West" by Harvard and Oxford historian Niall Ferguson. The one-hour Part One of the documentary premieres Monday night at 10 on Ch. 13. The other two parts air the following two Mondays. World War II is the focus of Part Two.

His thesis: Instead of looking at the 20th century as having been disrupted by two world wars with periods of relative peace before, between and after them, it is more appropriate to view much of the history of the century as a continuous bloody conflict that was interrupted occasionally for a few short, exhausted catnaps of relative calm.

It is an illuminating viewpoint, and Ferguson does an effective job tying all of the century's mass deportations, enslavements, ethnic cleansings and genocides together so that you can't help being won over to his view that the violence of the 20th century was virtually never-ending.

I think Austin Bay once quipped to me (and possibly wrote about the theme in a column as well) that you could make a pretty good case that the First World War didn't actually conclude until 1991, (and arguably, not even then) so that's not an unreasonable point, though as Buckman notes:

But it is Ferguson's revisionist view of the tactics applied by the Allies in World War II that is likely to raise the hackles of those who have always believed in the "necessity" of bombing German and Japanese civilians, culminating in the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to end a war we did not start.

"I think it's very hard for those who have imbibed the idea of a 'great generation' that what the Allies did to defeat the Axis was in some measure to adopt totalitarian tactics," Ferguson says in a Q&A on PBS's Web site.

Sort of a Liberal Fascism, to coin a phrase originally spoken, favorably, three quarters of a century ago by the same author also who inspired the title of Ferguson's miniseries, which Dorothy Rabinowitz reviews, and in an essay titled "Forget the Good War", adds:

Russian troops had liberated Auschwitz, yes, but we're reminded that Stalin had imprisoned and murdered millions. Does this mean the liberation of Auschwitz was nothing? A good question with no answer. Mr. Ferguson is content to have delivered another in his long stream of accusatory ironies and contradictions, all in support of the claim that the morally tainted Allied armies should not be credited as liberators.

The Americans and British had adopted the totalitarian techniques of their foes, Mr. Ferguson contends in a series of arguments ranging from the strange to the simply inflated. Japanese combatants kept fighting to the very end, he explains, because they feared the cruelty of their American captors. Undoubtedly some American troops were guilty of killing Japanese prisoners. In this film's version of events, the slaughter was wholesale. By way of support Mr. Ferguson summons testimony from Charles Lindbergh -- pro-Nazi icon of American isolationists. He proceeds to reminds us that Lindbergh had complained, in the 1940s, that Americans thought nothing of killing Japanese prisoners. Noteworthy to be sure -- the first and last time, perhaps, that the world was privileged to hear Lindbergh express outrage over the commission of atrocities.

The catalog of Mr. Ferguson's stranger arguments is too long to go into, but here's a hint -- don't miss the part about Kursk, the greatest of all tank battles. Here the U.S. seems to stand accused of providing material help that made it possible for the Russians to prevail. Were the Germans supposed to win? Mr. Ferguson doesn't say, but the question hangs in the air -- for good reason.

Meanwhile, regarding Pat Buchanan's new book, at Pajamas HQ, Sheryl Longin writes:

The left is currently the home of some of the worst forms of cultural relativism, but let us not forget that the right houses its own equally dangerous revisionist historians who attempt to use their false history to influence current events. Now is not a time when America can afford to be fuzzy with the truth. Facts are facts. Ideology blinds people. We forget that at our own peril.

But in the afterward of Liberal Fascism, titled, "The Tempting Of Conservatism", which documented several examples of how the modern right is also susceptible to fascism, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

In the 1990s liberal anger about Buchanan’s “right-wing” fascism reached a fever pitch. As Molly Ivins wrote in response to Buchanan’s 1992 Republican National Convention speech: “It probably sounded better in the original German.” The irony here is that Buchanan was actually moving to the left. For years Buchanan’s opponents called him a crypto-Nazi for his defense of Ronald Reagan and the GOP. In reality, the only thing that kept his fascist instincts in check was his loyalty to the GOP and the conservative movement. After Reagan and the Cold War, Buchanan abandoned both in a leftward search for his true principles.

Buchanan calls himself a “paleoconservative,” but in truth he’s a neo-progressive. During the 2000 election he denounced free marketeers and flat taxers, saying that they spent too much time with “the boys down at the yacht basin.” He came out in favor of capping executive pay, in support of higher unemployment benefits, and against any kind of free-market Medicare reform and backed a “Third Way” approach to government activism. Buchanan’s neo-Progressivism has even caused the onetime Reagan aide to rail against the social Darwinism of the free market.

And Buchanan's magazine, despite its American Conservative sobriquet, is pretty darn cozy with the far fringes of the American left, and it appears that World War II is yet another issue where Pat and the far left, both then and now are remarkably simpatico.

Could Hollywood beckon next?

Update: Did Pat cook the books? "Busted!... Nazi Sympathizer Pat Buchanan Accused of Plagiarism, Hacked Quotes & Wrong Dates."

Claudia Rossett sifts through the Memory Hole and recovers a classic headline from the prehistoric Walter Duranty era of the New York Times. Of course, it's not like things have changed all that much in the Pinch Sulzberger era...

Hillary's taking things away--such as YouTube clips and negative ads attacking Obama--for the common good of her rival's campaign:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has scrubbed all negative ads from her campaign Web site and YouTube page, leaving visitors with only the warm and fuzzy moments from her bid for the presidency.

Gone are the attack ads accusing Sen. Barack Obama of insulting Pennsylvanians, ducking debates and making misleading assertions about gas prices. In their place are some of the campaign's best and most positive ads and multiple "Hillary I Know" testimonials that have a shelf life should the former first lady ever run again.

The whitewashing took place quietly in the past few days as Mr. Obama cut his former rival a check to help relieve her campaign debt and as the Clinton family moved to fully embrace Mr. Obama as the presumptive Democratic nominee.

"She's no longer campaigning for president," said Clinton spokesman Mo Elleithee. "She's focused on her work in the Senate, campaigning for Senator Obama and other Democrats."

Mr. Elleithee said the videos probably are archived.

We can only hope--or the sexist evil conservative MSM that's completely in the tank for Obama will have won!

Fortunately, between copies of the more outre clips downloaded and archived, and blog posts quoting them, it's quite likely that Hillary's brave, quixotic efforts during the Operation: Chaos-extended primary season will not have been in vain.

And it wouldn't be the first time that video evidence from an earlier internecine struggle in the primaries benefited the opposing party in the general election through a minor act of political jujitsu.

Late last year, when I reviewed Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism for the New Individualist magazine, I wrote:

Goldberg does yeoman’s work researching and documenting material that the American left had consigned to the memory hole since 1945. By the 1970s, this pre-World War II past was considered hermetically sealed by liberals. As Goldberg writes, Ronald Reagan, a former FDR backer, was attacked in the Washington Post as late as 1981 for correctly pointing out the favorable lip service that he remembered being paid by FDR’s brain trust to Mussolini.

For this week's edition of PJM Political on XM Satellite Radio's POTUS '08 channel, I interviewed Ben Wattenberg about his new book, Fighting Words: A Tale of How Liberals Created Neo-Conservatism, due out next week. In it, amongst numerous other anecdotes of his life behind the scenes in Washington and in front of the cameras at PBS, Wattenberg mentions one example of the Gipper discussing--quite accurately--his recollections of one intersection of LF and the New Deal on his PBS series back in 1981.

Wattenberg writes:

I must offer here a word of sympathy for the oft-battered members of the press. I, too, have experienced the thrill of the chase. In 1981, my ex-AEI colleague Dave Gergen was on Ronald Reagan’s White House communications staff. I got a one-on-one interview with President Reagan for my weekly documentary program Ben Wattenberg at Large. I ran through many of his views and policies: his optimism, his conservatism, the federal budget, the role of the federal government in relation to the states, Cuba, El Salvador, the Soviet Union, the safety net, and more.

But not long into the interview I asked him about his support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression years. Here are some excerpts of what he said, and the reaction I had:

REAGAN: I have known [FDR’s] sons for years. I know their own conversations about what he believed. I think [FDR] always thought that the things that were being done were in the nature of medicine for a sick patient. But people attracted to government and to government positions in those years, in many instances, did not view the medicine as temporary. If you remember, I was assailed during the campaign for saying that many of the New Dealers actually espoused what today has become an epithet--fascism--in that they spoke of how Mussolini had made the trains run on time....

ME (in my head): Bing!

REAGAN: They saw in what he said he was doing—a planned economy. Harold lckes [FDR’s secretary of the interior] said that what we are striving for was a kind of modified form of communism.

Me (in my head): Bing! Bing!

REAGAN: I don’t really believe that was really in Roosevelt’s mind. I think that, had he lived, and with the war over, we would have seen him using government the other way.

What was I binging about? It was not about Reagan’s views of the New Deal or Harold Ickes. It was about a news story for our program. I knew that Mussolini and Communism would be newsworthy. If I hadn’t been wired for television I think I might have jumped out of my chair and given Reagan a big wet kiss.

Sure enough The Washington Post ran:

Reagan Still Sure
Some in New Deal Espoused Fascism

President Reagan remains convinced that many New Deal advisors to President Franklin D. Roosevelt espoused fascism and spoke admiringly of Mussolini’s Italian Fascist regime...

It is an idea Reagan first voiced in 1976 and has repeated several times, most recently in an interview with Ben Wattenberg to be broadcast on the Public Broadcasting Service Friday night.

Publicity for a television program in the competing print media is very hard to get. There are so many television programs...

And so many books, but Wattenberg's Fighting Words is great read, as Wattenberg discusses his journey from writing speeches for LBJ to becoming a pioneering neoconservative. Look for my interview tomorrow, when PJM Political airs in its new timeslot on XM's POTUS '08 channel #130--1:00 PM EDT/10:00 AM PDT. We'll put the podcast version up later tomorrow as well, here.

Wesley Clark steps in it, Ed Morrissey writes:

After decades in the news business, Bob Schieffer may have thought he’d heard it all — until yesterday on Face the Nation, when he interviewed Wesley Clark. Clark came as a surrogate for the Barack Obama campaign and attacked John McCain’s military service, saying that he was “untested and untried”. After Schieffer pointed out that McCain commanded the largest naval air squadron, had honorably endured over five years of torture as a POW in Vietnam, and had been on the Senate Armed Services committee since Obama was in college, Schieffer asked how Clark could claim that McCain was “untested and untried”. Clark stunned him with this answer:

Jim Geraghty notes that Clark's slur is one of eight attacks on McCain's military service by surrogates of the Obama campaign:

Is anyone else sensing a sharper edge to Team McCain since Wes Clark became Democrat Number Seven and Rand Beers became Democrat Number Eight in speaking critically of John McCain's service in Vietnam?

"Mr. Beers' remarks are part of a pattern of Obama supporters attacking John McCain's military service, and a reminder of why it's what Sen. Obama, his supporters and his campaign actually do that matters most," McCain spokesman Brian Rogers tells ABC News. "Sen. Obama speaking out against these attacks isn't really relevant — either his supporters aren't hearing him or they don't believe his words."

It's really nice that Obama said today that "no one should ever devalue that service, especially for the sake of a political campaign." It's also meaningless if everyone else in the Democratic party ignores him. Barack Obama doesn't have total control of the actions and words of every surrogate, but after the eighth instance, without any major consequence beyond a spokesman saying that Obama "rejects" the surrogate's statement, it starts to look like a deliberate and cynical good cop/bad cop routine. Let's see the candidate himself calling out his supporters by name. Let's see some heads rolling — was Samantha Power's declaration that Hillary was a "monster" really that much worse? (Team McCain ditched Cunningham over using Obama's middle name.)

As Orrin Judd noted on Sunday, "The poor Democrats still think John Kerry lost because his service to his country was attacked, rather than his disservice."

We looked at a few of the previous attacks on McCain's service in a mid-May edition of Silicon Graffiti:

In a related development, John Hinderaker spots a pair of attempts to make these attacks seem bipartisan:

Politico--and still more the anonymous Yahoo News headline writer!--know that attacks on McCain's service by the Obama campaign and other Democrats are poisonous and likely to backfire. So they are trying to give the Democrats cover by creating the misleading impression that these disgusting smears are somehow bipartisan.

Read the rest, complete with a screen capture of Yahoo's headline.

P.J. Gladnick flashes back to 1968 and Apocalypse Then:

Today is the official publication date of The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment by Paul and Anne Ehrlich. The release of this book was timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the publication of Paul Ehrlich's once exceedingly popular "The Population Bomb" in 1968. If you expect to see much about either of these books in the mainstream media, you are in for a big disappointment. The MSM is avoiding the whole subject of Paul Ehrlich and his apocalyptic "The Population Bomb" like the plague nowadays. The reason is probably because it might draw embarrassing attention to the fact that apocalyptic visions, despite their popularity at one time such as the current global warming alarmism, are usually proven to be flat out wrong. Such was the case with Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb" which the Intercollegiate Studies Institute ranked as one of the 50 Worst Books of the 20th century due to its many errors.

Gladnick quotes from a Brothers Judd review of Ehrlich's book that's also well worth your time.

It's yet another not-so-final countdown!

A member of the LinkedIn social networking Website spots some possible Obamabrushing going on:

"I was beginning to think LinkedIn was on to something, that is until this weekend.

The Obama ad that ran like a legitimate “Question” and members respond with “Answers”. That is the case in point. All was fine, until certain answers were removed when those answers didn’t agree with the Obama campaign positions.

I don’t care which side of the political isle one is on. Had McCain done the same thing, I would equally protest. That act proved to me that Obama is afraid of the 1st Amendment to the Constitution."

W. Strouse and I agree, K von Hopf

What are your thoughts? If you are running for the highest position in the land and representing all Americans, should you censor responses to your posted question? Or, are you just out to win the vote?

I guess they haven't gotten that memo that Obama's morphed from Mr. Hopenchange into a full-on Machiavellian electoral ninja. In any case, his campaign's Website administrator has been deleting Samizdat blogs left and right (err, actually left and more left, to be specific), so why not airbrush his LinkedIn page as well?

Or, maybe they just thought Faye Dunaway looked smokin' hot brandishing a .38 snubnose in her cashmere sweater and beret.

Making the rounds to promote his new book Nixonland, Rick Perlstein tells Reason:

reason: You like to mix cultural history with political history. Bonnie and Clyde is one of the central texts in the book.

Perlstein: My theory is that Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left, much more important than anything written by Paul Goodman or C. Wright Mills or Regis Debray. It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys—you cannot underestimate how strange and fresh that was.

The 1967 release of the movie certainly coincides with the period where traditional liberalism and the far left began to merge; not coincidentally, this was also the period where traditional morality began to break down. The next year would be 1968, a year the left is alternately trying to recreate, or is permanently trapped in, or both. Mick Jagger's lyrics to the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" called the philosophy of the day "heads is tails", and whereas liberals once worshiped science and progress, they soon found themselves admiring the Black Panthers and William Ayers' Weatherman group, and tossing both modernism and hope for the future under the bus.

1968 was also the year that, only a few months before his death at the hands of a young radical, Bobby Kennedy told a college audience:

"I am also glad to come to the home state of another great Kansan, who wrote, 'If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all their youthful vision and vigor then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.'"

Orrin Judd reviews Perlstein's book here, and makes a great observation, which dovetails perfectly into Perlstein's Bonnie & Clyde reference and the breakdown of the mid-1960s in general:

I'm only in the early stages of reading Friend Perlstein's book but am struck by a potentially fatal flaw in his thesis that's implied in the review above. With his expected honesty, Mr. Perlstein initially identifies Nixonland as the sort of Red America that the Adlai Stevenson eggheads found themselves stuck in ad unable to comprehend in the 50s. That this part of the metaphor endures--is indeed a seemingly innate part of the culture--is reflected not just in his own essays about contemporary politics but in books by his friends and fellow Brights, like Thomas Frank's unintentionally hilarious, What's the Matter with Kansas.

On the other hand, the sort of violent divisiveness that he associates with Nixonland rather conspicuously developed at the exact time that Richard Nixon was not a central part of the national political scene. Inner-city riots, assassinations, student demonstrations, radical Left terrorism--all of these social plagues arose during the Johnson/Great Society years, the pinnacle of the Left's ascendancy. Even the initial violent reactions were led by Democrats--like LBJ sending federal troops into Detroit or Mayor Daley breaking up protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention. If anything, as Mr. Douthat suggests above, the return of Richard Nixon --a liberal Republican--in 1968 might be seen as an attempt by American voters to restore the social calm and consensus of earlier eras. Richard Nixon, at least in his final incarnation, should probably be considered an effect of the social breakdown of the Liberal 60s, rather than a cause of anything much.

As president, Nixon was no conservative, particularly in his domestic governance, which much more of an extension of LBJ than any sort of warm up act for the Gipper. (And Nixon's poor handling of the economy directly paved the way for the disastrous Carter years, which spawned the economic trainwreck that Reagan and Paul Volker would miraculously right.) But to the America of 1968 that didn't think that Bonnie & Clyde "were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys", no wonder both Nixon's association with the relative calm of the Eisenhower years (at least in comparison with what was to come afterwards), and his promise of law and order sounded remarkably appealing. In that sense, perhaps Nixon's entirely unplanned timeout from the national scene during the mid-1960s wound up serving him remarkably well.

(Perlstein quote found appropriately enough here.)

James Taranto writes:

Could it be that Obama is planning to pivot? That is, what if he goes to Iraq and declares upon his return that he has been persuaded that the surge has made a difference, that things are going much better, and that he is now convinced victory is both possible and crucial?

On the downside, he would risk alienating those among his supporters who crave defeat in Iraq, either for ideological reasons or out of sheer hatred for George W. Bush.

But on the upside, it would show political courage and open-mindedness, two qualities his supporters are eager to ascribe to him but so far on the basis of evidence that is somewhere between scant and nonexistent. Those who do want America to win in Iraq would no longer have to vote against Obama for that reason. As for those who want defeat, where would they go? By their lights, John McCain is even worse; he voted for the war to begin with. So, oddly enough, did the Libertarian nominee. Unless you count Cynthia McKinney or Ralph Nader, Obama would still be the best "antiwar" candidate on the ballot.

We've long been skeptical of the Obama hype, but if he is smart and bold enough to adopt a sensible position on Iraq, we will have to admit there is more to him that we've given him credit for.

On the other hand, it would give his opposition a chance to remind voters of his party's original pivot:

As Mark Steyn wrote last year, "The ecochondriacs mean it: This'd be a pretty nice planet if we didn't live here."

Which is the theme of M. Night Shyamalan's new film, The Happening. The center-left New Republic and center-right Wall Street Journal don't always agree on the issues of the day, but neither publication is in doubt about how the repugnant that theme looks when it's played out on a 30-foot high screen at the local shopping mall's multiplex.

In TNR, James Kirchick, the author of headline quoted above writes, "the mere existence of the human race is a cause for great shame" in Shyamalan's film:

As with most of Shyamalan's films, The Happening has an intriguing plot: centuries of human pollution has prompted nature to retaliate against us by form of a noxious gas released from trees, plants, grass -- it's never really clear. The toxin is first emitted in Central Park, smack dab in the middle of one of the most densly populated places in the United States. First, victims lose their critical faculties. Then they freeze. Then they killl themselves. From New York City "The Happening" spreads all along the east coast, from Boston to Washington. Shyamalan leaves little to the imagination in depicting man's nature-inflicted suicide. We see a woman stab herself in the neck with a hair pin. A man runs himself over with a lawnmower. On can't help but leave the theater thinking that Shyamalan derives a sick, masochistic pleasure in showing the deaths of all his bit characters, hopeless rubes are these human beings. They drove their SUVs for too long and had a big carbon footprint and now they're going to pay.

After 90 minutes of this, the culling of humanity ends. We catch a brief television news segment in which a scientist warns us that what the Northeast just experienced was akin to a terrestrial occurrence of oceanic "red tides." The earth warned us, but thankfully we get another chance to amend the errors of our ways. Like the end of An Inconvenient Truth, we're left with some hope that environmental catastrophe is not a foregone conclusion. Buy a plug-in car. Use public transportation when available. Turn off the light when you leave a room. An unoffensive, and indeed positive message. The second to last scene depicts the female lead waiting nervously in her bathroom to read the results of a home pregnancy test. To her delight, she is with child. Her husband comes home, they embrace. Humanity soldiers on. What a warm feeling after so many scenes of horrific death.

But Shyamalan is obsessed with conceits at the expense of every other aspect -- the script, character development, and most importantly, good taste. He lives by the conceit, and, in this case, dies by it. After the pregnancy scene, the screen goes dark and we find ourselves in Paris, the Jardin des Tuileries to be exact. It's eerily reminiscent of the film's opening, with two men walking, engaged in pleasant conversation about their plans for the evening. A gust of wind! One of the men starts to stutter. People freeze. Screams. Mon Dieu!. Roll credits.

This isn't just radical environemntalist fare; it's perverse and anti-human. Shyamalan cuts immediately from the natural joy of pregnancy to its consequence: mass, nature-inflicted murder. It's not carbon output, styrofoam cups or the clearing of the rain forests that so angers Mother Earth and, thus, her self-appointed human spokesman. It's us.

Meanwhile, in the Wall Street Journal, (found via Dirty Harry's new film blog) Joseph Rago notes, "We have arrived at a strange moment in American pop culture when movie-goers spend two hours in the theater being informed that we all deserve to die":

In a recent interview, Mr. Shyamalan, best known for "The Sixth Sense" (1999), said that "The Happening" is intended to "wake everybody up" and "get back to the correct relationship with nature."

Obviously it isn't Hollywood's first environmental disaster flick. Think of 2004's "The Day After Tomorrow," where all it takes is the CO2-induced obliteration of the East Coast for Dennis Quaid to learn how to be a better dad. But catastrophic climate change in that movie was a simple plot device that could be replaced easily enough with, say, space aliens. "The Happening" is honest-to-Gaia green agitprop: Like the Lorax, Mr. Shyamalan is speaking for the trees.

Environmentalism's seam of misanthropy traces back to John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club in 1892, and probably to Thoreau. We're just another species, the thinking goes, or would be had our iniquities not made us unworthy of a place in the ecosystem. The existence of Homo sapiens is an affliction and cause for profound shame.

Today the position persists along the fringes of the "deep ecology" movement, where adherents can still be found chanting, "Four legs good! Two legs bad!" But the message also has some mainstream appeal: A best-selling book last summer was "The World Without Us," in which science journalist Alan Weisman gleefully imagined how nature would respond if man abruptly went extinct and how great it would be for the planet. "The Happening" merely takes this misanthropy to its logical extreme.

Of course, most mainstream greens limit themselves to nagging on behalf of Mommy Nature. Yet amid the much ado about global warming, the people problem is asserting itself with a neo-Malthusian vengeance. Almost every element of modern life is reducible to carbon. Like it or not, a higher population leads inexorably to more anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ranks demographic proliferation as a "driver for emissions." British environmental minister Hilary Benn -- most recently spotted endorsing carbon rationing cards as a set of new sumptuary laws -- notes with approval that "family planning is the ultimate carbon offsetting scheme." Even though Paul Ehrlich's "population bomb" has been defused again and again, Jeffrey Sachs, Jared Diamond, Bill McKibben and others have come to similar conclusions.

Since population control led to such PR disasters of the late 20th century as mass forced sterilizations under Indira Gandhi and China's one-child policy, it makes people queasy. Instead, the greens, when not plumping for massive carbon tax-and-regulation schemes, focus on behavioral alterations -- like taking public transit or installing the correct light bulbs. The weight given to consumer-driven change, however, means that the people problem can't help but seep out into the culture at large. Having kids is the most carbon-intensive choice most people will ever make.

Not surprisingly, more than a few of the recent handbooks for "green living" recommend thinking seriously about children. The Sierra Club says that the ideal number is two. Messrs. Weisman and McKibben say it's one. Mr. Shyamalan seems to think it's zero. It can't be long before we're being offered another helpful "tip": Kill yourself.

But that's already occurred. In mid-2006, Tammy Bruce, amongst other pundits and bloggers, reported a speech given by Dr. Eric R. Pianka, a University of Texas evolutionary ecologist named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist by the Texas Academy of Science. In mid-2006, the academy enthusiastically cheered upon the conclusion of this speech:

Professor Pianka said the Earth as we know it will not survive without drastic measures. Then, and without presenting any data to justify this number, he asserted that the only feasible solution to saving the Earth is to reduce the population to 10 percent of the present number.

He then showed solutions for reducing the world's population in the form of a slide depicting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. War and famine would not do, he explained. Instead, disease offered the most efficient and fastest way to kill the billions that must soon die if the population crisis is to be solved.

Pianka then displayed a slide showing rows of human skulls, one of which had red lights flashing from its eye sockets.

AIDS is not an efficient killer, he explained, because it is too slow. His favorite candidate for eliminating 90 percent of the world's population is airborne Ebola ( Ebola Reston ), because it is both highly lethal and it kills in days, instead of years. However, Professor Pianka did not mention that Ebola victims die a slow and torturous death as the virus initiates a cascade of biological calamities inside the victim that eventually liquefy the internal organs.

After praising the Ebola virus for its efficiency at killing, Pianka paused, leaned over the lectern, looked at us and carefully said, “We've got airborne 90 percent mortality in humans. Killing humans. Think about that.”

With his slide of human skulls towering on the screen behind him, Professor Pianka was deadly serious. The audience that had been applauding some of his statements now sat silent.

After a dramatic pause, Pianka returned to politics and environmentalism. But he revisited his call for mass death when he reflected on the oil situation.

“And the fossil fuels are running out,” he said, “so I think we may have to cut back to two billion, which would be about one-third as many people.” So the oil crisis alone may require eliminating two-third's of the world's population.

How soon must the mass dying begin if Earth is to be saved? Apparently fairly soon, for Pianka suggested he might be around when the killer disease goes to work. He was born in 1939, and his lengthy obituary appears on his web site.

When Pianka finished his remarks, the audience applauded. It wasn't merely a smattering of polite clapping that audiences diplomatically reserve for poor or boring speakers. It was a loud, vigorous and enthusiastic applause.

Pianka's Wikipedia entry notes:

The host of the speech, the Texas Academy of Sciences, has released a statement stating that "many of Dr. Pianka's statements have been severely misconstrued and sensationalized."

Much like Reverend Wright would later be, it seems. This is a variation on the "botched joke" do-over the left claims for themselves whenever a Kinsley-esque gaffe of an unusually potent nature occurs. But as Tammy Bruce noted at the time, two years before Shyamalan's new movie, such eco-doomsday thinking isn't all that unusual:

I have been arguing for years now that the destruction of humanity, literally, is the actual agenda, conscious and unconscious, of Leftists worldwide. They have become progressively ugly and hateful politically and otherwise because they hate themselves and consequently project that hate, as Malignant Narcissists do, back onto humanity as a whole. Their frustration at the rejection of their agenda (history at least has taught us something) that they bother less and less with sugar-coating their nihilistic rage.

Now playing at a theater near you!

Related: "Phil Bowermaster On Fear Of The Future." And Rand Simberg adds:

Hey, how about if we save the earth by migrating into space?

Somehow, I don't think they'll like that, either.

Maybe that explains this.

Following up on our post featuring a strangely vegetating Lou Dobbs yesterday, here's Lou, then and now:

(From Eyeblast.TV.)

The Nashville Post's "Post Politics" blog notes that "Harold Ford, Jr. Throws Former Campaign Manager Under The Bus":

It was a long curious day for the Tennessee Democratic party yesterday. Divisions in the party were exacerbated when John Rodgers of the Nashville City Paper reported the words of Tennessee Democratic Party state executive committee member Fred Hobbs on Barack Obama:

“I don’t exactly approve of a lot of the things he stands for and I’m not sure we know enough about him,” Hobbs said when asked why he thought Davis wasn’t endorsing Obama. “He’s got some bad connections, and he may be terrorist connected for all I can tell. It sounds kind of like he may be.”

Adding insult to injury, Beecher Frasier, Chief of Staff to Democratic Congressman Lincoln Davis of Tennessee’s rural and conservative 4th District, was portrayed in the same article as saying he didn’t know for sure if Obama was “terrorist connected” but assumes he’s not.

The Tennessee Democratic Party almost immediately sent out a release rebuking Hobbs. Beecher Frasier, later in the day, released a statement setting the record straight asserting that “no one in their right mind, including me, believes Senator Obama has ties to terrorism.”

William Ayers could not be reached for comment.

Back in the summer of 2001, Jonah Goldberg did something that almost no one who utters the acronym ANWR in hushed, reverent tones has actually done. He visited there:

I suspect that the majority of Americans who oppose oil exploration in ANWR would agree with me if they saw it firsthand. Indeed, they would probably agree that if America had to be struck by an asteroid, this would be the ideal impact point. Of course, I am not talking about ANWR's beautiful mountain vistas, the ones cooed over by cable-news hostesses. Not only is that stuff legally protected from oil exploration, it is far, far away from anywhere the oil companies want to drill-i.e., the thousands of football fields' worth of bog and marsh.

Today, he reminds us that it's still waiting to be put to use:

Sen. John McCain said this week he would not drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for the same reason he “would not drill in the Grand Canyon ... I believe this area should be kept pristine.”

Pristine means unspoiled, virginal, in an original state.

One wonders how pristine the Grand Canyon can be if it has roughly 5 million visitors every year, rafting, hiking, picnicking, and riding mules up one side and down the other. Campfires, RVs, and motels that do not conjure the word “virginal” ring around large swaths of it.

This isn’t to say that the Grand Canyon isn’t a beautiful place; it inspires awe among those who visit it. ANWR (pronounced “AN-wahr”) inspires awe almost entirely in those who haven’t been there. It is an environmental Brigadoon or Shangri-La, a fabled land almost no one will ever see. That is its appeal. People like the idea that there are still Edens “out there” even if they will never, ever see them.

Indeed, if Americans could visit the north coast of Alaska, as I have, as easily as they can visit the Grand Canyon, the oil would be flowing by now.

ANWR is roughly the size of South Carolina, and it is spectacular. However, the area where, according to Department of Interior estimates, some 5.7 billion to 16 billion barrels of recoverable oil reside is much smaller and not necessarily as awe-inspiring. It would amount to the size of Dulles airport.

Question for McCain: Has South Carolina been ruined because it has an airport?

Most of the images of the proposed drilling area that people see on the evening news are misleading precisely because they tend to show the glorious parts of ANWR, even though that’s not where the drilling would take place. Even when they position their cameras in the right location, producers tend to point them in the wrong direction. They point them south, toward the Brooks mountain range, rather than north, across the coastal plain where the drilling would be.

As James Lileks notes, who'd have thought that, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, that America would remain in such stasis when it comes to energy independence:

It’s not that we cannot produce any more oil; you suspect that some are motivated by the belief, perverse as it sounds, that we should not. We should not drill 50 miles off shore on the chance someone in Malibu takes a hot-air balloon up 1000 feet and uses a telephoto lens to scan the horizon for oil platforms. Also, there are ecological concerns. (The ocean is a wee place, easily disturbed.) There’s something else that may well be my imagination, but I can’t quite shake the feeling: high gas prices and shortages of oil make some people feel good. This is the way it has to be. Oil is bad. Cars are bad. Cars make suburbs possible. Suburbs are the antithesis of the way we should live, which is stacked upon one another in dense blocks tied together by happy whirring trains. So some guy who drives to work alone has to spend more money for the privilege of being alone in his car listening to hate radio?

Good.

Yes, I know, projection and demonizaton and oversimplification. But this is true: there’s a side of the domestic political structure that opposes expansion of domestic energy production, be it drilling or nukes or more refineries.

And speaking of that "hate radio":

[The MSM] called you the maverick! But guess what? Now you're not a maverick. Why, you're Bush 3! That's like the worst thing a maverick could be called, is Bush 3. Get ready, Senator. This is only the tip of the iceberg of all the ammo they have aimed and trained on you. Here's what I'm hoping, ladies and gentlemen. I'm hoping at some point relatively soon McCain gets ticked off enough about this that he comes to his senses on the issue of energy independence in this country. Do you realize that if you look at any poll out there taken of the American people, they want energy independence? They want drilling for our own energy supplies. They want nuclear. They don't want all of this Kyoto stuff. They don't want taxes to go up. They don't want the price of gas to go up even a penny by 60 some odd percent, if the purpose of the increase is to fight global warming. They want cheaper gasoline, and they know how to get it. This is an issue. It is an issue made to order.
Now, McCain has changed his mind on a couple things. This would be a goody. This would be a huge one. Somebody could get to Senator McCain and say, Senator, you want to win this election? You want to contrast who you are with Senator Obama and the leftists in the Democrat Party? Here's your issue. "Drill here. Drill now. Energy independence." Start now and get on this, and I'm telling you, he would see a miraculous thing happen in his campaign. But I don't know who can tell him these things. It's just a sitting duck.

And it's one that another senator, who may be looking to overcome what Ace accurately described as a Kinsley-esque gaffe of the first order might also be looking to exploit if he wanted to (a) get to the right of McCain on one key issue very quickly, JFK-style (Mr. President, we cannot afford a domestic oil gap!), and (b) simultaneously generate a pretty nifty Sister Souljah moment with his enviro-stasis base.

Will it happen? Probably not, but the first man who heads north to Alaska and hops on a podium in front of a phalanx of legacy journalists and an armada of cable and network cameramen in the middle of that Vast Pestilential Wasteland and does an about-face on the issue has a damn good chance of winning it all in November.*

Who wants it bad enough that he's actually willing to accede to the wishes of the American public?

Read More »

Quick--who wrote this?

Even though Vietnam was a divisive war that is not yet resolved in the national consciousness, Mr. McCain can appeal to all sides. He is an inspiration to many veterans and conservatives [...] At the same time, many who opposed the war can nonetheless support the man because of his personal ordeal ...

This broad appeal is unique, especially because it is based on suffering rather than concrete battlefield accomplishments. [...] But a closer look brings deeper insight into why most Americans have come to hold this defining experience in such great esteem. [...]

But if there is insight into Mr. McCain's leadership style, it is with the question of how he worked to normalize relations with Vietnam. To his credit, the man who is so often criticized by opponents for divisiveness succeeded in working across the widest imaginable spectrum of interests in order to bring the Vietnam War and its aftermath to a full resolution. At the same time, as in his dealings with other issues, like campaign finance reform, his relentless pursuit of a solution to the normalization question and the singularity of his approach left a trail of bruised egos and avowed revenge seekers. [...]

And he created a perception in some circles that he would reach over allies to work with enemies by allying himself to Senator John Kerry, who once headed Vietnam Veterans Against the War, as well as providing political cover for President Clinton when normalization was announced.

In fact, these actions may be one reason for the rather surprising statistic that shows George W. Bush running as well among veterans as Mr. McCain himself. But the fact is, Mr. McCain succeeded, and he took the country with him. Yes, he used his prisoner of war credentials to their full impact. Certainly he could have been smarter and more respectful of the travails of others, and more conscious of buttressing his supporters as he reached out to his adversaries. But he took on the most contentious diplomatic issue of our time and pursued it to a satisfactory conclusion.

Resolving this issue may not show John McCain's ability to unite disparate groups, but it is certainly testimony to his ability to lead.

Read More »

Yesterday, I wrote, "Congressman Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) gets busted by the Internet Immortality Thesis". The Scranton's Times-Tribune agrees:

U.S. Rep. Paul E. Kanjorski is getting a first-hand lesson in the hazards of the digital age.

For the second time in a month, a clip on the wildly popular video-posting Web site, YouTube, is earning him election-year attention he’d probably rather avoid.

The clip shows him apparently pushing down on the video camera of a man trying to question him about the Iraq war.

The man’s identity, known on YouTube as truthaboutkanjo, remains unknown. An attempt to reach him Wednesday via YouTube’s message system proved unsuccessful.

“I may have overreacted when this person stuck a camera in my face. But I feel like it was one of those ‘gotcha’ moments in politics, and my comments were misrepresented,” Mr. Kanjorski, D-Nanticoke, said in a statement.

I don't know--I'd say the congressman was misrepresented pretty accurately, myself.

Congressman Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) gets busted by the Internet Immortality Thesis:

(Via Freedom's Watch; a related look at Kanjorski's efforts to build a bridge to the 1930s, here.)

At the moment, Obama is pivoting towards the center (which for him is admittedly a long, long drive), and attempting to purge the memories of his rhetoric necessary to woo the far left during the primaries, not to mention the memories of his former associates. Fortunately, the Blogosphere doesn't forget.

Elsewhere, Rachel Lucas explores the "Two Minutes Hate: Jew-bashing on the official Obama site."

Finally, this conversation isn't helping Michelle's children.

Related: "Impeachment: Just Do It".

Olbermann ranting last night about President Bush? Try The Atlantic complaining about President Reagan in 1987:

"Nineteen eighty-seven is Year One of the post-Reagan era. The problem is, Ronald Reagan is still in office. The revolutionary regime has outlived the revolution. Reagan himself is a lame duck, his effectiveness depleted and his popularity squandered."

As Noemie Emery did last year, Matt Lewis also reminds us that Big Media hated Reagan then as much as they hate President Bush today. And this was in era when they were the media: no Fox, no Web, no Drudge, no Blogosphere, and Rush was just setting up shop.

"Obama's catch-phrase is 'Change you can believe in.' Maybe it's time to start asking who Obama has in mind when he says 'you.'"

Meanwhile, Noel Sheppard asks--and I think he already knows the answer as well as you and I do--if the MSM will report this story.

As Charles Johnson writes:

If you aren’t familiar with the story of John McCain’s capture and torture by the North Vietnamese, I highly recommend this article at US News, a reprint of McCain’s first-person account originally published in 1973: John McCain, Prisoner of War: A First-Person Account - US News and World Report.

I was generally familiar with what happened to McCain, but have gained an enormous respect for him after reading this article.

Needless to say, RTWT.

In the Washington Post, Ari Fleischer responds to the allegations made by former bungling White House press secretary turned Soros-affiliated stereotypical bungling BushCo critic Scott McClellan that the press, as Fleischer writes, "failed to aggressively question the rationale for war. As someone whose duty it was to assume the position of a human piñata every day in the briefing room, I only wish Scott were right" The whole thing is well worth your time, including the conclusion:

I hope I don't ruin the careers of tough reporters by agreeing that they were tough, but Charlie Gibson and David Gregory are right. The press did ask the hard questions, repeatedly. Based on the CIA's conclusions, many of the president's and my answers turned out to be wrong, but you can't blame the press for either the CIA's reporting or decisions reached by the president. It's important to recognize that regardless of the outcome of the war in Iraq -- an outcome still being written -- the press didn't cause it to happen or otherwise enable it.

Usually, retired press secretaries don't object to a little outbreak of internal press controversy. Sometimes we even enjoy it. But no amount of revisionism should be allowed to erase the historical record on this.

Historical revisionism by the left in the post 9/11 period? That's never happened before!

Last year, James Lileks produced an MP3 of NBC radio's original coverage of D-Day. It makes for quite a contrast to this look at how today's CNN would cover the events of 64 years ago:

And Roger Kimball adds:

Here’s the news report, sent to me by a friend some while ago:

June 6, 1944. -NORMANDY- Three hundred French civilians were killed and thousands more wounded today in the first hours of America’s invasion of continental Europe. Casualties were heaviest among women and children.

Most of the French casualties were the result of the artillery fire from American ships attempting to knock out German fortifications prior to the landing of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops. Reports from a makeshift hospital in the French town of St. Mere Eglise said the carnage was far worse than the French had anticipated and reaction against the American invasion was running high. “We are dying for no reason,” said a Frenchman speaking on condition of anonymity. “Americans can’t even shoot straight. I never thought I’d say this, but life was better under Adolph Hitler.”

The invasion also caused severe environmental damage. American troops, tanks, trucks and machinery destroyed miles of pristine shoreline and thousands of acres of ecologically sensitive wetlands. It was believed that the habitat of the spineless French crab was completely wiped out, threatening the species with extinction.

And while parody news reports are always fun, we know how one new media giant is covering D-Day's 64th anniversary:

I've always enjoyed Google logos for commemorating important dates. Today they're commemorating Diego Velazquez's birthday with a cute takeoff on Velazquez's famous painting, Las Meninas.

While I wouldn't want to detract anything form Velazquez, but, of all the events in world history that have occurred on June 6th, isn't there one that perhaps stands out?

You stay classy, Google.

Update: Jennifer Rubin adds:

How many Americans know about Tarawa, a true debacle in which the U.S. suffered 3000 casualties, or know the basic facts about the Battle of the Bulge where over 19,000 Americans were killed? Not enough.

Some basic historical literacy might provide Americans with some perspective on our current war and some understanding that even in the greatest triumph, mistakes, horrid mistakes, are made and yet through enormous bravery and determination we can persevere. At the very least we might have an appreciation for the enormity of the sacrifices needed to destroy fascism in the 20th century.

Instead, there's a new ongoing revisionism that appears to be slowly gathering steam to disgrace those efforts.

Charles Johnson writes, "How many times can he get away with using this line?"

Obama issued a statement saying he was “saddened,” adding, “This isn’t the Tony Rezko I knew, but now he has been convicted by a jury on multiple charges that once again shine a spotlight on the need for reform.”

As Charles notes:

It wasn’t the Rev. Wright he knew either, or the Father Pfleger he knew, or the William Ayers he knew, or the Samantha Power he knew, or the Robert Malley he knew, or the Trinity United Church he knew ...

I could go on, but I think you get the point.

It's all just a little bit of history repeating...

Related: Meanwhile, the Exurban League looks to the future:

June 1, 2010
"Like Press Secretary Olbermann said, it's all about my superior judgment..."

Duty now for the future of Obamatopia!

See Dubya has a nifty new video on change...that's not so much of a change, with a soundtrack courtesy of Shirley Bassey (hence the above title). Someone should redo her Goldfinger theme:

Ohbaaaahma.....He's the man, the man with the radical friends!

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey spots some more history repeating, with someone infinitely less exciting than a SPECTRE villain: Mario Cuomo, whom Obama may have borrowed the boilerplate for his latest speech. And speaking of which, James Lileks writes:

“John McCain has spent a lot of time talking about trips to Iraq in the last few weeks, but maybe if he spent some time taking trips to the cities and towns that have been hardest hit by this economy -- cities in Michigan, and Ohio, and right here in Minnesota -- he'd understand the kind of change that people are looking for."

Right here in Minnesota? Hardest hit by this economy? What is he talking about, exactly? Is this a specific reference to a specific plight faced by specific towns, or a boilerplate remark about the dire lives of people trapped in the Bittervilles that dot the strange outlands?

Read the rest--and tune in tomorrow to PJM Political on XM, where James will have further thoughts on the topic.

Dean Barnett writes, "We went through similar times in the early 1990’s. The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union crumbled and we won the Cold War. Yet it was beyond the typical liberal’s ability to acknowledge that Ronald Reagan had anything to do with these accomplishments":

What bin Laden said about the strong horse and the weak horse was right. And he and his minions don’t look like the strong horse running for their pathetic lives in Waziristan for years on end. The Islamic world has watched as al Qaeda has become the weak horse. President Bush deserves credit for fighting the war with the steadfastness he has. Remember, it was less than four years ago when John Kerry implored us to fight a more sensitive war on terror. Somehow I doubt sensitivity would have had the same impact on the Jihadists as the predator drones that now fill their skies.

I’ve never been reticent about pointing out the Bush administration’s shortcomings. Its spendthrift ways, its elevation of unqualified lackeys to positions of importance, its longtime adherence to ineffective tactics in Iraq, its inability to communicate…I better stop – I could go on all day. My point is that the Bush administration has been a flawed vehicle, and I’ve never shied away from saying as much.

But President Bush is on the verge of winning the big ones. It will be no small thing if he has shown and mostly secured the path to victory in Iraq and in the War on Terror before leaving office. It will drive the left crazy and as was the case with Reagan, it will take liberals decades to admit it, but Bush will strut back to Crawford a big winner.

Few remember that Abraham Lincoln spent years running a dreadful war effort presided over by the ineffective likes of George McClellan and Joe Hooker. And those who do remember such things view them charitably, as Lincoln got things right by the end. If President Bush does wind up also having gotten the big things right, something that seems increasingly likely, the enormous successes of his administration will dwarf the failures in history’s eyes.

As the American Thinker wrote a couple of years ago, paraphrasing the slogan of another president whom history has judged far more kindly than the harsh chattering classes of his time, "Give 'em hell, George."

CNN helpfully airbrushes Obama's Memorial Day "fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience today" gaffe for him.

Meanwhile, an equally-obliging MSNBC runs interference for Father Pfleger, much as CNN has done for Rev. Wright.

How many points would Newsweek's Evan Thomas say the media is worth to their candidate this time around?

Dan Rather* in 2001:

Bill O'Reilly: I want to ask you flat out, do you think President Clinton's an honest man?

Dan Rather: Yes, I think he's an honest man.

O'Reilly: Do you, really?

Rather: I do.

O'Reilly: Even though he lied to Jim Lehrer's face about the Lewinsky case? :

Rather: Who among us has not lied about . something?

O'Reilly: Well, I didn't lie to anybody's face on national television. I don't think you have, have you?

Rather: I don't think I ever have. I hope I never have. But, look, it's one thing

O'Reilly: How can you say he's an honest guy then?

Rather: Well, because I think he is. I think at core he's an honest person. I know that you have a different view. I know that you consider it sort of astonishing anybody would say so, but I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.

-Fox News's "The O'Reilly Factor," May 15, 2001

But that was then, this is now, and the President no longer has a D after his name: "CNN’s Wolf Blitzer to McClellan: Is President Bush ‘A Serial Liar?’"

Read More »

Michael Ledeen writes, "It's been a bad day for the Dems' efforts to rewrite history":

First Obama gets caught inventing American armed forces in Poland at the end of World War II, and then Zbigniew Brzezinski and William Odom give us this bit of puffery in the WaPo: "The United States would have a better chance of success (with Iran) if the White House abandoned its threats of military action and its calls for regime change."

It's a hoax. This White House ( I say with great regret) has NEVER called for regime change in Iran. On the contrary, this administration has constantly said that they want a change in behavior, and have not advocated a change of regime. Indeed, back when, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage actually said that Iran was a democracy, and his boss, Colin Powell, loudly announced he didn't want to get involved in "Iranian family squabbles."

And aside from "well informed journalists" and other self-proclaimed insiders, no one I know of, this side of Norman Podhoretz (NOT a high ranking official of the government), has threatened military action against Iran either, aside from the age old vanilla language "nothing off the table."

This nonsense gets published and debated, as if there were anything to debate. Meanwhile we might remind ourselves that Odom and Brezezinski served a president named Carter, who refused to sign a "no first use" promise with regard to nukes, with the Soviet Union. So it was fine to have it on the table then, but bad now.

Related thoughts on Obama and Brzezinski from Jennifer Rubin.

As Ken Shepherd notes, the media has become increasingly lax on reporting on Obama's miscues precisely during the period when he began to gather momentum as the DNC's increasingly presumptive nominee:

Barack Obama's penchant for gaffes is hardly anything new, but as the Illinois Democrat has come closer and closer to becoming the official Democratic presidential nominee, it seems the mainstream media have become less and less likely to note his gaffes. A cursory Web search finds a few instances of the mainstream media picking up on Obama gaffes in 2007, when Sen. Clinton was well ahead of Obama in the polls and was widely expected to be marching towards coronation in Denver.

"Obama's gaffes start to pile up" read the headline for a March 28 Lynn Sweet column [in the Chicago Sun-Times]. March 28, 2007, that is.

Of course, this is far from the first time the MSM has collectively backed off on reporting on their candidate's gaffes once he became the nominee. As far as old media was concerned, Kerry was just another guy, to borrow one of Bill Parcells' favorite phrases, about someone who's a competent team player but no athletic superstar, until he locked up the nomination and became untouchable.

Related: "Obama camp on Auschwitz: Sorry, he meant Ohrdruf".

More: And he meant it when he referenced Auschwitz (back then he referred to a grandfather, not an "uncle" as he did yesterday) previously in 2002, I'm sure.

"Media Coverage [Of Economy] Was More Upbeat at Start of the Great Depression"--Of course, that was right around the time that FDR was campaigning as a sort of Jurassic libertarian, which illustrates how radically narratives can change over time.

But then economic coverage is far from the only example of old media's having undergone a post-1960s hardening of the attitudes. As Orrin Judd recently wrote, "What Actually Remains Of Nixonland...is just a press corps that treats everyone like the enemy and, therefore, fails at the basics of its profession."

Was Obama's uncle part of the Russian brigade that liberated Auschwitz...or, far more likely, has Hillary just been out-Tuzla'ed by Obama (or his speech writers)?

And will Hillary, looking for a way to put her own recent gaffe behind her, take advantage of the opportunity she's just been handed?

Update: Jim Geraghty writes:

If the MSM would either A) be more forgiving of Republican officials who they don't like or B) be a little tougher on Democratic officials they do like, the world would be a better place. In this case, I don't think Barack Obama is deliberately lying, or trying to pull a fast one. It sounds like a family "legend" in which the specific horrors of war witnessed by his uncle are mistaken as the years go by. It happens, and Obama only deserves the lightest of metaphorical slaps on the wrist for it. But it would help if his fans in the press actually paid attention to what he says.

Exactly. More at Hot Air.

More: Charles Johnson writes:

Jim Geraghty thinks Obama wasn’t really lying here; it was just another gaffe.

But what kind of “mistake” is it to make up an (apparently) nonexistent uncle, and attribute heroic actions to this nonexistent person that they could not possibly have performed? And what kind of person would give a speech to veterans on Memorial Day—and make up a phony war story?

Definitely not just a gaffe; rather, a deliberate attempt to invoke the name of Auschwitz for political gain.

Charles adds that "This digression into fantasy was apparently not in Obama’s prepared speech".

Today's gaffe by Obama is rather small potatoes (though the quick airbrush work immediately afterwards by his campaign staff is noteworthy), but since the media reports all gaffes made by Republicans, and few from Democrats (expect for those Democrats who are the current year's apostates), it seems fair game to point it out, particularly in an election year.

Much like 2004, the starboard side of the Blogosphere is once again doing the work that was expected of old media, even if they never were as objective or fair to both sides as we imagined they were.

Update: Hugh Hewitt adds:

It is difficult not to conclude that Senator Obama has developed his reputation as a powerful orator and skilled politician in a protected media environment and in races against candidates that were deeply flawed.

Not to mention some rather unique turns of history.

The Sundries Shack adds, "After this campaign, I swear, I don’t want to hear one more person crack wise about Dan Quayle ever again."

In the interim, an article idea for someone with some time and a flatbed scanner: Last year, Noemie Emery wrote a terrific Weekly Standard article that opened up the memory hole and reminded us that despite the grudging admiration of the Gipper upon his passing, how much the vast majority of elite journalists hated the Gipper in the last couple of years of his administration. Similarly, I'm hoping that someone will go through the op-eds of 1988, and upload to the Internet a sampling of the the gallons of ink spilled back then over how inexperienced Quayle was, simply to be veep, even though at the time he had more years in the House and Senate than Obama has today.

Related: What is best in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the fermentations of the Obama!

Jon of the Exurban League reminds Olbermann fans, "How soon they forget":

Just one month ago, Olbermann referred to the assassination... of Hillary.

On Olbermann's April 24, 2008, program, guest Howard Fineman was discussing the delegate math with Our Hero, stating, "some adults somewhere in the Democratic party to step in and stop this thing, like a referee in a fight that could go on for thirty rounds. Those are the super, super, super delegates who are going to have to decide this."

To which Olbermann replied, "Right. Somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out."

Let's roll the tape.

And while one expects Night of the Long Knives-style rhetoric from Olbermann, who violates Godwin's Law with seeming impunity on a regular basis, he's not the only person in the media to have similar assassination porn fantasies regarding Hillary. As Mark Steyn writes, "The modern Democratic party is like Islam: You're either a believer or an apostate", and Hillary, like Joe Lieberman before her no longer This Year's Model, is now very much in the latter camp.

Update: Along with a link to Hillary's earlier assassination fantasy in a March interview with Time, Matt Murphy (the one who's with the Judd Brothers, not the Blues Brothers) digs another classic Billary moment out of the memory hole: "considering that she has repeated the sentiment, it's amusing to recollect that her husband drew a direct connection between talk radio and the Oklahoma City bombings on less evidence than this."

Hillary obama rfk
by dollarsandsense123

She manages to weave a strange flashback to Bobby Kennedy's assassination in '68 into a reason--I think--for her to stay in the race.

And speaking of Kennedy conspiracy theories, this is probably as good a place as any to link to Peter Robinson's terrific multi-part video interview this week with James Piereson, whose Camelot and the Cultural Revolution last year did a superb job of not only debunking the conspiracy theories regarding JFK's death, but also explaining why they developed in the first place.

Update: Bumped to top; video found via John Stephenson who writes, "So, is the final nail in her political coffin? I vote yes!"

More at Hot Air.

Related: I reserve the right at some future point to revise and extend my earlier remarks:

As "Dirty Harry" of Libertas writes, "Expect a lot of this":

Variety’s Todd McCarthy makes a pre-emptive move (I thought liberals didn’t believe in that?) against conservatives in his pan of Steven Soderbergh’s attempt to Lawrence-of-Arabia the mass-murderer Che Guevera:

…and presents American and Latin American authorities so exclusively as cardboard mouthpieces of imperialism and abusive dictatorships, respectively — that some conservative political commentators might work themselves into a lather over it.

You see, any rise of indignation over a $60 million, five-hour attempt to further t-shirtify a sworn enemy of the United States responsible for the murder of at least 600 innocent people (that we know of) is purely knee-jerk lathering on our part. Oh, and we should also avoid any lather over the fact that Che’s psychotic crimes failed to find a few minutes in a 300-plus minute film:

This structure very conveniently elides the period wherein Che, as effective co-head of Castro’s Cuban government, presided over mass executions, the persecution of homosexuals, the ruination of the island’s economy, the ill-fated alliance with the Soviet Union, and so on.

Sadly, I’ve yet to read any review, good or bad, that registers any frustration whatsoever over Soderbergh’s decision to skip the murderous parts of Che’s life.

Think about it: Todd McCarthy’s in more of a lather over our possible lather than Che’s actual crimes or Soderbergh’s glossing over of them.

"Hannah Arendt had it right", Pat Moynihan once told an interviewer. "She said one of the great advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive."

Power Line looked at Hollywood's 2004 attempt to whitewash Che (Hollywood seems to alternate each year between films inflating the peccadilloes of the blacklist with films whitewashing the real horrors of Che and Castro) in a post titled the "Motorpsycho Diaries".

Howard Kurtz spots vile commenters on Michelle Malkin's blog responding to Ted Kennedy's recent brain tumor announcement--but fails to notice an even worse level of vitriol amongst the far left commenters on the blogs of his print employer, the Washington Post.

And it's not the first time Kurtz's partisan blindspot in this area has occurred.

More at Michelle's Hot Air Website.

Taking a cue from a post by Tom Maguire of the Just One Minute blog, and following up on my weekend post on Sen. Tom Harkin, I look at the ongoing attempts by the far left to delegitimize Senator John McCain's service in Vietnam, several of which have come from the same people who told us that another ex-Navy officer, who, by the way, served in Vietnam, was the man to vote for in 2004. As Tom wrote on Thursday:

Times contributer Matt Bai will have a long NY Times magazine entry this Sunday. Apparently it is an upscale attempt to Swiftboat John McCain (You know I use that term mockingly) by de-legitimizing his wartime experience. My advice to Attack Dems intent on this path - have fun storming the castle!

And just yesterday, as I was putting this video to bed, Ed Morrissey spotted yet another example of what seems to be a trend, coordinated or not.

(Earlier Silicon Graffiti videos can be found here.)

The Washington Post reports on the most spectacular merger news since the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central combined forces (which certainly worked out just swell for all concerned):

Top fundraisers for Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have begun private talks aimed at merging the two candidates' teams, not waiting for the Democratic nominating process to end before they start preparations for a hard-fought fall campaign.

Wow, just like that, huh? I thought all of Hillary's voters were bigots. And all of Obama's, sexists. And that while Hillary has "a lifetime of experience", all Senator Obama has for political experience is a single speech he gave in 2002. But in contrast to the second coming of the Messiah, Hillary was the personification of Michael Corleone, Glen Close in Fatal Attraction and Richard Nixon all rolled into one.

Nowhere is talk more cheap than politics, but doesn't the left get whiplash riding out all those 180 degree pivots?

Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) in August of 2004:

On Monday the Iowa Senator lashed out at Dick Cheney, claiming the Vice President had no right to criticize Mr. Kerry's policies for the war on terror because Mr. Cheney had a deferment back then: "When I hear this coming from Dick Cheney, who was a coward, who would not serve during the Vietnam War, it makes my blood boil."

Tom Harkin, this week:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s family background as the son and grandson of admirals has given him a worldview shaped by the military, “and he has a hard time thinking beyond that,” Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Ia., said Friday.

“I think he’s trapped in that,” Harkin said in a conference call with Iowa reporters. “Everything is looked at from his life experiences, from always having been in the military, and I think that can be pretty dangerous.”

Harkin said that “it’s one thing to have been drafted and served, but another thing when you come from generations of military people and that’s just how you’re steeped, how you’ve learned, how you’ve grown up.”

A McCain spokesman said Harkin’s remarks were offensive and showed that Democrats are out of touch with Americans’ values.

“Senator Harkin’s comments are an affront to the many thousands of Iowans who have served our country so valiantly for generations,” said spokesman Jeff Sadosky. “This sort of attack shows just how out of touch Democratic leadership has become with the values that have made our country so great.”

And of course, back in 2004, Harkin was caught performing major puffery on his military record:

In 1979, Mr. Harkin, then a congressman, participated in a round-table discussion arranged by the Congressional Vietnam Veterans' Caucus. "I spent five years as a Navy pilot, starting in November of 1962," Mr. Harkin said at that meeting, in words that were later quoted in a book, Changing of the Guard, by Washington Post political writer David Broder. "One year was in Vietnam. I was flying F-4s and F-8s on combat air patrols and photo-reconnaisance support missions. I did no bombing."

That clearly is not an accurate picture of his Navy service. Though Mr. Harkin stresses he is proud of his Navy record -- "I put my ass on the line day after day" -- he concedes now he never flew combat air patrols in Vietnam. . . .

Mr. Harkin's Navy record shows his only decoration is the National Defense Service Medal, awarded to everyone on active service during those years. He did not receive either the Vietnam Service medal or the Vietnam Campaign medal, the decorations given to everyone who served in the Southeast Asia theater. "We didn't get them for what we did," Mr. Harkin says. "It's never bothered me."

In 2005, Howard Dean claimed, "I will use whatever position I have in order to root out hypocrisy." He might want to start by getting his own house in order before going on the road.

Related: Gateway Pundit: "Phony Hero Blasts Real Hero"; more from Don Singleton and Glenn Reynolds.

Update: Just came across this on YouTube; it's a clip of John McCain appearing on Des Moines' WHO radio last July, when on-air talent Jan Mickelson played him Tom Harkin's comments from earlier that month, recorded on the floor of the Senate:

And if we leave, there will be a bloodbath in Vietnam. All of the people who supported us will be slaughtered in the streets. Well, it didn't happen.

Watch for McCain's "Oh My God" reaction immediately afterwards--and understandably so. Of course, just to bring this post full circle, look who tacitly agreed with Harkin.

Update: Harkin plays a big role in my latest Silicon Graffiti video:

Andrew Malcolm of the L.A. Times writes that he's just witnessed "Obama's Sniper Tale":

Is this another Bosnian sniper incident, where a Democratic candidate for president describes a scene involving some personal courage, but later videotape shows that maybe perhaps it wasn't really quite all like that exactly?

Sen. Barack Obama, the leading Democratic candidate for his party's nomination, is very fond of telling receptive audiences the story about how last May he walked right into the automotive lion's den of Detroit and told those industrialists they were going to have to shape up, change the way they do things and start making more fuel-efficient vehicles to protect our environment.

"And I have to say," the straight-talking Obama tells his chuckling followers, "that when I delivered that speech, the room got really quiet. [Laughter] Nobody clapped."

Well, in honor of Obama's return campaign visit back to Michigan this week, someone -- perhaps Republicans, perhaps someone closer to home politically -- assembled videotape of Obama's oft-told tale and spliced it side by side with videotape of that actual Detroit speech.

You'll never guess what. The room wasn't quiet at all. Obama, in fact, got a loud round of applause. And at the end of his address the camera's view of him at the podium is partially blocked because the audience of local businesspeople and automotive executives was rising to give him a standing ovation.

There were no departure ceremonies after the speech because of sniper reports. Far too dangerous for that. It was all he could do then to duck his head and just run for the vehicles. See for yourself below.

While the comparison to Hillary's Tuzla dash into fantasy is one way to look at this, given the setting, it reminds me of the imagined fables of another figure associated with the Clintons: Robert Reich, and a story that Jonah Goldberg tells in Liberal Fascism, based on a Slate article from 1997.

In "Robert Reich, Quote Doctor", Jonathan Rauch reviewed Reich's memoirs of his Clinton years, called Locked in the Cabinet:

Locked in the Cabinet, Robert Reich's new memoir of his years as labor secretary in the Clinton administration, is an engaging policy memoir: insightful, often witty and, what's most unusual for wonk kiss and tells, easy to read, partly because it's told in long stretches of well-written dialogue that add up to scores of novelistic scenes of Washington at work. The book reads like good fiction. Unfortunately, some of it is.

Call me old-fashioned, but I've always believed that there is something special about quotation marks. Whatever is between them, in nonfiction, is supposed to reflect accurately words that some real person actually said. Now, "accurately" leaves room for quibbling, and a memoir will be understood by most readers to be offered on an "as remembered" basis. Reich says, in his prefatory note, that he jotted notes to himself, "usually late at night," and then consolidated them to make the book. People know that Reich is not a reporter, and will adjust their expectations accordingly. Fair enough. Maybe he has a good memory.

So, much like Obama's speech above, Rauch went to the tape to compare what Reich describes with what actually happened, and noticed a slight descrepancy between, as Jonah would describe it, the "Thomas Nast cartoon world" where Reich "is in constant battle with greedy fat cats, Social Darwinists, and Mr. Monopoly", a world that Obama seems to live in as well based on his above reminiscences, versus that shared consensual hunch we call reality...as documented on videotape:

Or, perhaps most striking of all, consider a set piece in which Reich speaks to the National Association of Manufacturers. He describes himself as being ambushed by cigar-chomping capitalists who hiss at him so loudly that he has to yell to be heard. "They plan to carve me up into small pieces," he writes. "There isn't a lady in the room. All men, in dark suits. They've finished lunch. Some are smoking cigars. Others are quietly smirking, ready for the kill." His speech over, Reich is lambasted by a "John," and Reich's answer elicits an eruption of "Wrong!" "Bullshit!" and "Go back to Harvard!" As Reich speaks, the audience hisses so loudly "that I'm not sure anyone can hear me." The cigar smoke, he says, "is making my eyes water. I feel dizzy." He says, "We're in a boxing arena, John's the champ, and the crowd is loving every minute." Finally, the meeting over, he races "out the back exit before they can pummel me."

As it happens, the meeting was a breakfast, not a lunch. The NAM says the attendance list shows that a third or more of the people present were women (including the NAM representative with whom I spoke). If anyone actually was inclined to light up a cigar after breakfast, he would have been breaking the NAM's no-smoking rule, according to an association representative (who, like another witness I talked to, saw no cigars). Most important, a transcript of the meeting shows a respectful Q and A session, in which none of the comments attributed to "John"--nor any like them--were actually made.

One would hardly expect a roomful of corporate reps to hiss, boo, and shout "bullshit" at a sitting U.S. labor secretary. Sure enough, the transcript shows nothing nastier than sprinkled applause and laughter. I asked Richard Boyd, the professional court reporter who transcribed the session, whether his transcript might have omitted hisses, boos, and imprecations. "I never witnessed anything like that with Robert Reich or anybody else at a NAM meeting," he said. "I'm absolutely certain I would remember it." Reich portrays himself as the little guy standing up to a roomful of abusive capitalists--pure Hollywood. Again, don't take my word for it; click here.

I asked Reich what was going on in each of these cases. In reply, he pointed to his Note to the Reader: "I claim no higher truth than my own perceptions. This is how I lived it." He said that his notes accurately reflected how he felt and what he perceived. In the three cases cited above, he felt varying degrees of hostility. "I am not representing the book to be anything other than it is, which is my account of my experiences, my perceptions, what I saw and heard around me," he said. "That's all I can say."

In effect, Reich is saying that he's not writing journalism or history. He's writing ... well, what? He elides the very distinction between history and myth, memoir and novel, reality and perception. The problem is that those are real people he misquotes, real history he rewrites.

Steve Wasserman, a former Random House editor who now edits the Los Angeles Times Book Review, points out an irony: Books are often viewed as better sources for history than newspapers, but newspapers, which are generally much more careful than the average publishing house about such niceties as checking quotes, are often the more reliable source. Reich's memoir, if that's the proper word for it, is now ensconced between hard covers and will be read for years to come as part of the historical record. That is a shame. Quote me.

That's one benefit of the Internet age: while an experience can be seared--seared!--into our brains, more and more, it's also being uploaded to YouTube, allowing us to verify, before trusting.

Kate of the Canadian Small Dead Animals blog, who is actually vacationing in Beijing this week, writes that "Watching CCTV coverage of the massive Chinese quake aftermath (as best I can, considering the language gap) one can't help but notice how 'sanitary' the images are":

While there's plenty of footage showing collapsed buildings and roadways, crushed cars and landslides, the "rescued" quake victims dragged from the rubble before Chinese television cameras are uniformly limp, dazed, and amazingly clean. If one were of a suspicious nature, one might suspect there was some staging going on.

There also seems to be a lot of footage of soldiers moving supplies around in an orderly, efficient manner.

It seems all very reassuring, as I'm sure was intended. There is no question that the death toll will be both staggering and under-reported.

A totalitarian regime papering over its country's ongoing crises during an Olympic year? Maybe I should have called this post, "Recreate '38".

Roger Kimball writes, "much that we associate with 'the Sixties' really had its origin in the 1950s", observations that societal critics as disparate as Alvin Toffler and Diana West each mentioned to me when I interviewed them. While some on the left will tacitly make that point when pinned down, it isn't internalized in how the left views history, because it undermines much of the "the most important decade of the 20th century" narrative of the 1960s, as someone who did one too many tabs of lysergic acid diethylamide in the waning years of that decade once claimed.

More from Roger:

What Allan Bloom said in comparing American universities in the 1950s to those of the 1960s can easily be generalized to apply to the culture as a whole: “The fifties,” Bloom wrote, “were one of the great periods of the American university,” which had recently benefitted from an enlivening infusion of European talent and “were steeped in the general vision of humane education inspired by Kant and Goethe.” The Sixties, by contrast, “were the period of dogmatic answers and trivial tracts. Not a single book of lasting importance was produced in or around the movement. It was all Norman O. Brown and Charles Reich. This was when the real conformism hit the universities, when opinions about everything from God to the movies became absolutely predictable.”

[Rachel Donadio, writing in the New York Times Book Review] is chiefly interested in reminding us of the febrile cultural animation of the late Fifties. What she doesn’t say is, but what we can no see clearly with the wisdom of hindsight, is that the ideas of the Beats contained in ovo nearly all the characteristics we think of as defining the cultural revolution of the Sixties and Seventies. The adolescent longing for liberation from conventional manners and intellectual standards; the polymorphous sexuality; the narcissism; the destructive absorption in drugs; the undercurrent of criminality; the irrationalism; the na‹ve political radicalism and reflexive anti-Americanism; the adulation of pop music as a kind of spiritual weapon; the Romantic elevation of art as an alternative to rather than as an illumination of normal reality; the pseudo-spirituality, especially the spurious infatuation with Eastern religions: in all this and more the Beats provided a vivid glimpse of what was to come.

Indeed, the chief difference between the Beat Generation and the Sixties was the ambient cultural climate: when the Beats first emerged, in the mid-Fifties, the culture still offered some resistance to the poisonous antinomianism the Beats advocated. But by the time the Sixties established themselves, virtually all resistance had been broken down. It was then that the message of the Beats gained mass appeal. Reaction to the Vietnam War probably did more than anything else to enfranchise their antinomianism, though the introduction of the birth-control pill certainly did a great deal to further the cause of the sexual revolution, a prime item on the agenda of the Beats. In short order, the unconventional became the established convention; the perverse was embraced as normal; the unspeakable was broadcast everywhere; the outrageous was met with enthusiastic applause.

And as a refresher on the disastrous outcome of where all that inexorably led, I can't recommend enough this essay by Myron Magnet from the new issue of City Journal.

Update: When Peter Hitchens claims "The real issue for the 1968 generation has always been their right to have fun, however much it costs other people", that's true to a certain extent, but it ignores that neo-puritanism that quickly followed, as Rich Lowry observes:

The freedoms fought for in the student revolt soon curdled into the opposite: free speech became speech codes; sexual liberation became the regime of sexual harassment; civil rights became quotas. Meanwhile, Mark Rudd and a fringe of the New Left spun off into the Weather Underground, which took the destructive spirit of the campus protests to its logical conclusion in a campaign of terrorist bombings. Jonah Goldberg reminds us in his book "Liberal Fascism" that the radical left committed roughly 250 attacks from September 1969 to May 1970.

If the academics gave in, another segment of the parents resisted. They were the Nixon voters, reacting against the disorder and cultural radicalism with which liberalism became identified. Republicans held the White House for 28 of the next 40 years, and the alternative history of the 1960s is the rise of the right. Even now, with Barack Obama dogged by his association with former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, the Democratic Party's challenge is to free itself from the taint of 1968.

Good luck.

This just in from Salon--"Reagan didn't completely suck":

In "The Age of Reagan," liberal historian Sean Wilentz reckons with the enormous, ongoing influence of the teflon president.

The Age of Reagan? Say, now there's a title that rings a bell!

At Pajamas HQ, Kathy Shaidle, who blogs at Five Feet Fury, has an article-length review of Daniel Flynn’s A Conservative History of the American Left:

The Left boasts enthusiasm and energy to spare, but its inability to learn from the past is its fatal flaw. As Flynn explains in the book’s introduction, “because of the suspicions of tradition inherent within radicalism, [the Left] largely ignores that past.” After all, visionaries “preoccupied with the triumphal future cannot pause to learn from the mistakes of the past.”

This refusal to check the rear-view mirror is reflected in the Left’s compulsion for coining extravagant, inapt, and frequently offensive historical analogies: these days, every conservative leader is “Hitler”, every war is “Vietnam,” and every petulant protester is the new “Rosa Parks.”

As Flynn points out to devastating effect, the sheer stupidity of such comparisons should, by rights, be enough to cripple them as rhetorical devices; alas, widespread historical illiteracy and an aversion to criticizing “protected” identity groups render healthy mockery almost impossible.

Read the whole thing; as Kathy notes, Flynn’s book sounds like it would make an exceptional double-feature alongside Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, which itself is a potent centennial history.

Update: I should add Benjamin Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn't Help to make the above titles into a pretty nifty troika.

As Obama tacks back to the center-left, the New York Times goes right along with the flip-flop; Walter Duranty could not be reached for comment.

While I'd call it an attempt at airbrushing, Ace has a much more colorful--and appropriately scatological--description.

Yet another Hillary supporter uttering quotes that would be right at home at the MRC--in this case, Hillary herself!

ABC News' Eloise Harper reports: An adoring group of more than 1,000 people greeted Sen. Hillary Clinton and her daughter today at a fundraiser in New York City. She thanked them for their support and later told the group that she is going to finish the nominating process.

"I want you to know how grateful I am for your support and how much you have sustained me throughout this campaign," she said. "But it has been a joy. Now I know that may be hard to believe, but if you just take the advice that I give to my own mother, and that is: Just turn off the television."

Hillary and her supporters are complaining that the media is in the tank for the candidate further to the left than she is. But hey, remember six years ago when her husband's former vice president was saying this?

And speaking of vice-presidents, at this rate, how long before Hillary or her supporters start calling the media--which kept their presidency alive in the 1990s--nattering nabobs of negativism?

Astonishingly, via the Huffington Post:

We may now understand why Barack does not wear a flag lapel pin. He's afraid that Bill Ayers will stomp on him.

Heh. You know, some blogger should make a video exploring all of that ancient Radical Chic rhetoric coming home to roost.

Just to follow on from my post from this morning, here's yet another article that would easily have fit in on Newsbusters, except that its chief source of quotes is a liberal who is complaining about the partisan nature of CNN's political coverage:

When Clinton supporter Lanny Davis appeared on CNN during primary night, shortly before 10 p.m., there was a peculiar exchange with host Anderson Cooper.

Cooper: Lanny, let me start off with you. We haven't heard from you tonight. Your take on Barack Obama's speech earlier?
Davis: You haven't heard from me tonight. And I'm not sure — I’m not sure you want to hear from me tonight but —
Cooper: We heard from Paul Begala. This is your big chance.
Davis: Well, actually, I don't think we heard very much from Paul Begala. We did hear an awful —
Cooper: All part of the conspiracy against Hillary Clinton, I suppose.

During the Election Night broadcast, there was palpable tension between Davis and CNN reporters and panelists on camera — and apparently, with producers off camera.

Looking back, Davis said by phone this afternoon, he considers it “the worst experience I ever had on television.”

What bothers Davis most is that CNN is the network with which he’s had the longest relationship, where he’s maintained close friendships through the years, and that he's always considered middle-of-the-road in its coverage. But in his opinion, CNN has not treated Hillary Clinton fairly in the ’08 race.

Formerly special counsel to President Bill Clinton, Davis admits wholeheartedly to being a partisan and strongly supports Clinton against Obama.

So what happened on Tuesday night?

Davis, by his account, was invited to appear on the CNN panel in New York but declined because of a family commitment — his son’s baseball practice in Maryland. Instead, he opted to participate by remote from the network’s D.C. studio.

He was instructed to arrive around 8:30 p.m., he said, in order to take over the pro-Clinton position once Paul Begala left. So Davis left the baseball practice early in order to arrive at the studio on time, but he didn’t make it on air until almost 10 p.m.

A CNN spokesperson said that Davis was scheduled to go on-air at 9pm, but CNN didn't go to him or any commentator during Sen. Obama's speech in the 9pm hour, just as no commentators were on-air during Sen. Clinton's speech later the same night.

Davis said he told a producer several times before getting on-air that he wanted to offer a counterpoint to CNN’s panel, which he thinks is too pro-Obama.

Regarding the panel's make-up, Davis said that he believes Gloria Borger, David Gergen, Donna Brazile and Carl Bernstein are all tougher on Clinton than on her rival. And he maintains that Roland Martin is definitely a “partisan for Obama.” (Martin has not official endorsed Obama and is not labeled as such on the network,)

According to a post found via Protein Wisdom and Hot Air, Martin is apparently quite a partisan for Reverend Wright, in any case.

More from Davis:

Regarding CNN’s competitors, Davis said that MSNBC is “shameless about their bias toward Obama,” and Fox has been the fairest — which is saying a lot coming from a self-described member of the Democratic Party’s left wing.

“Fox, no matter how much you might criticize an ideological bent, in this campaign, they have been religiously middle-of-the-road, point-counterpoint,” Davis said.

And that’s what Davis said he expects from CNN, the network where he’s had “the longest history, best friends, and most respect.”

And that's the rub, isn't it? Like most in old media or who orbit closest to it, they don't object that it's partisan anymore--they're merely upset when it's stacked against their politician.

Good question. Let's ask Bill Ayers next time we see him, or any of these folks.

(H/T: IP)

Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos", which featured voters from one party crossing over--perfectly legally--to vote in the other party's primary elections. The resultant furor from Democrats has led to unintentionally hilarious comparisons to"radio broadcasts that incited violence in Rwanda and Kenya". And journalists from the original Blue State chiming in (translation here). And even former presidential candidates saying stuff like this:

David Plouffe and a series of big gun endorsers are holding a conference call to stress the scale of last night's victory.

"He clearly did more than he had to and she did not achieve what she had to," said Senator John Kerry.

Both Plouffe and Kerry stressed the importance of the Limbaugh Effect.

"Rush Limbaugh was tampering with the primary," Kerry said "If it was not for Republicans taking Democratic ballots, he would have won," he said of Obama.

So we won't be reading any articles like this in 2012, right?

Of course we will. But the spittle-flecked hypocrisy generated this year when the Florsheim is on the other foot will be fun to look back on when we do.

Tim Graham looks at Tim Russert, spin-meister:

Drudge focused the World Wide Web on Tim Russert's arrogant "Arise, Sir Loin of Beef" declaration that the Democratic race is over and "no one's gonna dispute it." The first words out of Russert's mouth this morning on NBC were "I cannot find an objective Democrat who does not think this race is over."

Tim Russert is a Democrat, but not an "objective" one. This declaration is spin, not reality, especially when we know the Clinton Chutzpah Express can avoid the "reality" obstacles that cause every other political family to call it quits. I don't recall Russert telling the country that the Clinton presidency was "over" in 1998, and that only the Clintons didn't realize it, that "no one's gonna dispute it."

Regardless of where political reality lands, what people should see in that Drudge clip and the NBC clip this morning is Tim Russert asserting himself as President of the News. People should see that this is an intensely political press that calculates every word it says and every story it covers and every poll it commissions. Russert and his colleagues don't want to just observe. They want to run the country. They want to have the power to make and break presidents. They want to tell the people to follow their robotic orders and deeply drink of the "conventional wisdom" they manufacture. "Objective" is not an adjective to them; it is a noun. Their objective today is to clear the path and get the Democrats back in the White House.

Compare Russert's firm, Kent Brockman-like The Race Is Over statement with the endless interjections and biases from a fellow MSM'er when he couldn't believe the race was over in 2000.

The Black Panthers and Weathermen (aka Weather Underground) were anarchistic paramilitary far left groups from the late 1960s, whose ties crossed at least once in 1970. They're resurfacing again though in a surprising place: each has been referenced via Barack Obama's presidential campaign, particlarly the latter group. Back in February, the Politico's Ben Smith noted:

In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district's influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they're better known nationally as two of the most notorious--and unrepentant--figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.

Now, as Obama runs for president, what two guests recall as an unremarkable gathering on the road to a minor elected office stands as a symbol of how swiftly he has risen from a man in the Hyde Park left to one closing in fast on the Democratic nomination for president.

"I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers' house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress," said Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, of the informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn. "[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor."

Obama and Palmer "were both there," he said.

Obama's connections to Ayers and Dorhn have been noted in some fleeting news coverage in the past. But the visit by Obama to their home--part of a campaign courtship--reflects more extensive interaction than has been previously reported.

And Tom Maguire also uncovered another connection:

The Obama/Ayers soundbite is this: Obama and Ayers (a professor of education) worked together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge for several years in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to reform Chicago's public schools. The extent of their relationship is not clear, since Obama has been opaque on this topic both in a televised debate and at his website. However, Ayers was instrumental in founding the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and Obama was the group's first chairman, so there is something being concealed there.

And it's not like Hillary Clinton is without sin in this department, herself.

(Earlier Silicon Graffiti videos can be found here.)

One great thing about election years in the post-9/11 era: the MSM really isn't afraid to let it all hang out. As Kathryn-Jean Lopez noted last week:

CNN's "news" coverage on Sunday night went out of its way to be as unfair and unbalanced as possible. They aired Wright live. During the fiery speech, Wright plugged CNN "anchor and special correspondent" Soledad O'Brien and "long-term friend" CNN analyst Roland Martin. Both O'Brien and Martin appeared on-air after the event, discussing how funny and effective Wright was. As they explained to viewers how to understand Wright's infamous "God damn America" comment, evening anchor Rick Sanchez insisted viewers keep watching replay after replay and apology after apology for Wright. "I would imagine the people watching [on TV] would say, 'Wow, I didn't realize the guy had two masters degree and a Ph.D. I didn't realize he spoke five languages.'" And that changes "God damn America" for you, doesn't it? That appears to be CNN's hope. O'Brien continued raving about the speech, "It was very funny. It was hilarious at times." And in the morning, O'Brien was back, calling Sunday night a "homerun" for Wright.

Which you can watch here. As I wrote shortly afterwards, the media will have to go into backwards-reverse-somersault Olympic-level fip-flops to go from gushing over Wright to tossing him under the bus.

And here you go! The CNN anchor who interviewed O'Brien for her "home run" moment last Monday, is today telling Obama that his network is a "Wright Free Zone".

In the tank? Just a tad.

Late Update: You can see both O'Brien's "home run" moment and CNN anchor John Roberts' subsequent "Wright-free zone" line starting at about 6:50 into this edition of our Silicon Graffiti video blog.

Just as Jack Torrance was trapped in the Overlook Hotel for all eternity, Stephen King appears to doomed to relive "Jon Carry's" gaffe from 2006.

Need to raise your blood pressure in a hurry? Just check out the photo that Marathon Pundit found of Bill Ayers--in whose home Obama launched his first political campaign in 1995--dancing on top of a crumpled American flag.

(Via Hot Air.)

Via Hot Air, comes this devastating snippet from the 1992 documentary on the Clintons' victory in 1992, The War Room. As Ed Morrissey writes:

And suddenly, Crackerquiddick is on the other foot. This looks like it came from The War Room, a documentary about the first Clinton presidential campaign, although I don’t recall the scene. Regardless, there can be little dispute about the people in the video being Carville, Stephanopolous, and Kantor.

What makes this worse is that Kantor gives that creepy, sotto voce whisper while saying this, knowing how bad it sounds but obviously unable to stop himself from saying it. Neither Carville nor Stephanopolous challenge Kantor, at least not in this clip. All three appear to agree that Indiana voters are worthless for Democrats even when they supported Clinton.

This isn’t quite as bad as Obama’s comments in San Francisco in a couple of respects. Hillary isn’t saying this, and it was 16 years ago, not six weeks ago. However, the disgust for the white working class comes through much more clearly in this video, and the fact that it comes from a former Clinton Cabinet official and current adviser makes it all the more compelling.

Indiana voters go to the polls in less than a week. Will they figure out which campaign despises them less?

Kantor counterclaims:

Mickey Kantor, who served as campaign chairman during Clinton's 1992 run for the White House and says he has offered help and advice to Sen. Clinton, insisted that the tape was a fraud and that he was exploring legal steps against the individual who posted it online.

"I've never used that word [the n-word] in my entire life, ever, under any circumstance, ever," an angry Kantor told The Huffington Post, citing his and his parent's work fighting for civil rights. "I have listened to [the video] and so have you. You can't tell what it is I'm saying in that second sentence, you can't decipher that."

But as Byron York notes, "I will agree that the n-word part in the second sentence is hard to make out on the video. But the "those people are s—t" part in the first sentence seems pretty clear."

The Internet Immortality Thesis comes into play once again, as someone clipped out this scene, captioned it, and uploaded it to YouTube--but it's obvious that Kantor knew that D.A. Pennebaker's documentary crew was filming him at the time.

Update: Doctored clip? Scroll to the bottom of Capt. Ed's post for updates.

More: Watching the longer version of the War Room clip that the above scene comes from, the audio of Kantor’s muffled whisper doesn’t sound at all different, so I don’t think the sound was doctored (fast-forward to about 4:35, when Kantor enters). But the caption is very likely a complete fabrication.

So, as Ed asks, who wrote it and uploaded the clip?

Last Update For Now: As you can see, the clip has been pulled. As Glenn Reynolds wryly notes, "I was hoping for change"; these sorts of dirty tricks aren't going to change the sentiments from those on the left who don't support "Mr. Getalong"--no matter which side this actually came from.

Perry de Havilland:

The prime motivation of government is...to be in government. Making the country a 'better place' comes a distant second.

Or as a Mr. E. Blair wrote 60 years ago:

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?'

By the way, for a real "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia" experience, check out the backwards-reverse-somersault Olympic-level fip-flops that Obama-worshiping journalists such as CNN's Soledad O'Brien (no relation, presumably to the fellow quoted above) performed between Sunday night and Tuesday, when new orders came in from the Ministry of Yes We Can.

Related: May Day 2008: A Day Of Remembrance Of The Victims Of Communism.

(H/T: IP)

With the reemergence of Rev Wright back into the limelight he so dearly craves, the name Bill Ayers has been pushed back into the underground a bit. But this story is a reminder of why his relationship to Obama matters as well:

During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up "a gentleman named William Ayers," who "was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol and other buildings. He's never apologized for that." Stephanopoulos then asked Obama to explain his relationship with Ayers. Obama's answer: "The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn't make much sense, George." Obama was indeed only 8 in early 1970. I was only 9 then, the year Ayers' Weathermen tried to murder me.

Much more here, from Ed Morrissey.

Given how easy it now is to find previous Final Countdowns, just once, I'd love to see the next Final Countdown met with some skepticism from the press: Mr. Gore/Erlich/Danson/DiCaprio, etc., why should we believe you, when there have been so many earlier doomsday predictions that have never come to pass?

(H/T: TB)

Related: Via Small Dead Animals, Canada's Lorrie Goldstein opens up an even more recent memory hole:

Dear Globe and Mail and Toronto Star:

For 15 months, I've been saving your respective front pages from the glorious weekend of January 27-28, 2007, when you simultaneously declared your mutual jihads against man-made global warming.

I knew they'd come in handy some day and now, they have.

Indeed, it seems like only yesterday I awoke to my Saturday, January 27, 2007 Globe to be greeted by the hysterical, front-page headline "Welcome to the new climate," under a politically correct green masthead, declaring at the bottom: "We want action. We're ready for sacrifices."

Not to be outdone, the Star a day later had its own World War III, front-page headline, "State of denial: Do the skeptics of global warming have a hidden agenda?" -- in the finest traditions of "do you deny beating your wife?" journalism.

And now, here we are, just 15 months later and isn't it great you both have exactly what you wanted -- skyrocketing gasoline prices and about-to-skyrocket food prices -- since as we both know, hitting energy-hogging Canadians in their pocketbooks is the only way to make them reduce their evil greenhouse gas emissions hard and fast.

Or as it's been dubbed in States, the Pelosi Premium.

With Al Sharpton threatening to "close this city down", Michelle Malkin asks, why is Al "still welcome in polite society?"

As I wrote just this past week, linking to my article on the topic from a few years ago in The New Partisan:

From politicians such as Al Sharpton, Robert Byrd and John Kerry to artists such as Michael Moore and Philip Johnson, it's amazing what you can get away with in your salad days as long as you emerge with the right politics afterwards.

Michelle writes, "Some readers wonder why I continue to write about the Sharpton-MSM lovefest. Why? Because the enablers deserve to be held responsible and shamed publicly until they stop."

Since the modern MSM has not a molecule of shame in their collective nervous system, I'm not sure if that's possible. Besides, as Mark Steyn notes, it suffers from an enormous moral inversion:

In a scrupulously politically correct age, it's not offensive to organize a "Kill the police!" demo or to preach that the government invented Aids in order to perpetrate an African-American genocide. You can pull that stuff and still be part of respectable society, hanging out with presidential candidates and whatnot. What's grotesquely offensive is the chap who's insensitive enough to point out such statements and associations.

Which is never more obvious in an election year, just as we saw in 2004, when it was the Swift Vets who were demonized by the media for pointing out John Kerry's 1970s-era anti-American demagoguery, not the man actually made those remarks.

The MSM once had a monopoly on the past. Today, with that control broken, they get quite cross with whomever points out a leftist's otherwise grandfathered radical chic past.

Update: Which may be why, as people abandon the MSM's top down control of information, we've entered "The 'Golden Age' of Web news".

The wheels of progress grind exceedingly slowly at Newsweek, but eventually, the magazine grudgingly catches up with conservative thought: First this week, Eleanor Clift nods in tacit agreement with everything Republicans said about the Clintons in the 1990s.

Shortly thereafter, Michael Hirsh runs an article there titled, "How the South Won (This) Civil War". That was a theme that Michael Graham, a southerner currently transplanted to New England, described six(!) years ago, in a book with much less bitter tone (actually, it's quite a funny read) called Redneck Nation. Its subhead also notes..."How the South Really Won the War".

Let's do the time warp again!

Update: Speaking of time warps, Glenn Reynolds flashes back to November of 2004 and notes, "Jeez, they used to at least wait until after they lost the election to start this talk."

David Freddoso writes, "Republicans are jumping on Nancy Pelosi for getting the price of gasoline wrong by nearly a dollar in an interview":

I argue today that this is less significant than the fact that her promise to bring down gas prices was already a lie the moment she first uttered it. Pelosi isn't failing to do something about gasoline for lack of leadership or a plan, but because lower gas prices undercut a hugely important plank in the Democratic platform.

Higher gas prices are an essential part of creating economic disincentives against carbon pollution — that's the entire point of cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, and other proposed Global Warming fixes. In fact, today's high prices are already leading to greater conservation. Democratic complaints about gas prices are for election years — that's all they ever were.

Unlike Mrs. Pelosi, the more honest San Francisco Democrats will actually admit to that.

Jim Geraghty explores Barack Obama's radical ties with former Weatherman (and I don't mean in the Willard Scott sense) Bill Ayers who, like the fellow that Wretchard linked to on Wednesday, hasn't changed his worldview a jot since 1968, other than no longer literally putting his Semtex where his mouth is.

Geraghty writes:

The problem for Obama isn't that his ties to Ayers are so close (that we know of so far). Ayers hosted a party that was, effectively, the first fundraiser for Obama. They served on the Woods Foundation board together, and he spoke on some panels. That's not as close a relationship as with, say, his mentor Jeremiah Wright, but it's a lot closer than most Americans will ever come to a person who set bombs in public buildings.

But what is really revealing about this mess for Obama is that when asked about it, the candidate reacted with a mix of surprise and indignation that we haven't quite seen since, "I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again: I did not.. have... sexual... relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." Recall, Clinton's finger-wagging tone wasn't striking just for the audacity of the lie, but for the barely-suppressed outrage; Bill seemed genuinely offended that anyone could accuse him of such a thing.

In the case of Obama, he clearly felt that George Stephanolopous asking about this was completely out of bounds. That no one in their right mind could possibly be concerned, disgruntled, or disapproving of associating with someone like William Ayers. As Obama insisted, this is just a professor who lives in his neighborhood.

But the average professor who lives in the neighborhood didn't set bombs, even a long time ago.

Obama could have easily said, "I met Ayers and worked with him briefly, but I don't like him. I don't have any use for those who set bombs, or those who enthusiastically praise the acts of Charles Manson" (as Bernadine Dohrn did). But he didn't. In this whole set of circumstances, Obama felt that Stephanopolous was the one out of line.

Meanwhile, Tom Hayden, last seen bemoaning the growth of capitalism in Vietnam, notes that Hillary has plenty of radical chic baggage of her own.

John Hawkins writes:

Isn't it funny how the whole "chickenhawk argument" was such a oft-discussed, "crucial" point back in 2004, but today, now that the shoe's on the other foot, not a liberal soul who was making that argument seems to think it has the least bit of validity any more?

That's a topic we've also explored here a few times recently.

Glad to see the fraternity of American wartime pilots is so tightly bonded:

Let me tell you what I would say to John McCain: neither of us is an expert on national defense. It's true that you went to one of the service academies but you were in the bottom of the class. It's true that you were a pilot in Vietnam, that you were shot down and spent most of the war in prison and we all sympathize with that and honor you for your courage. But you and I both had these battle experiences, you as a Navy fighter plane, I as an army bomber. I am not going to criticize your war record and your knowledge of national security but I don't want you criticizing mine either.

If I'd be allowed just one little dig at Senator McCain, since he gave me. I would say, 'John, you were shot down early in the war and spent most of the time in prison. I flew 35 combat missions with a 10-man crew and brought them home safely every time.'

With the latter paragraph, McGovern enters--not all that surprisingly--John Kerry Vietnam Mobius loop territory, as McGovern is implying that McCain could have done more to win a war that McGovern explicitly ran against, comparing, at one point in his '72 campaign, North Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh to George Washington.

Ace explains "Why Bill Ayers Matters":

As Allah snarked earlier, How come Bush's TANG records weren't similarly "tangential' as the left now claims of every character issue involving Barack Obama?

This may be obvious but it has to be said, and perhaps said repeatedly, until the left acknowledges it.

Either terrorism is a grave moral sin and unforgivable legal crime or it is not, guys. You cannot continue differentiating between "good terrorism" and "bad terrorism."

As I touched on a few years ago in The New Partisan, from politicians such as Al Sharpton, Robert Byrd and John Kerry to artists such as Michael Moore and Philip Johnson, it's amazing what you can get away with in your salad days as long as you emerge with the right politics afterwards.

Related: Dick Morris explores "Hillary's Terrorist Ties".

Cuffy Meigs does the job that old media used to claim to do.

Update: More here (and note the accompanying photo) on what is likely to be a bottomless well. But Glenn Reynolds' readers note that John McCain hides a radical affiliation of his own:

"Hasn't McCain had a long association with former Klansman and fellow Senator Robert Byrd?"

As Glenn writes, Heh.^TM

HuffPo: "Gingrich: Left Wing Of The Democratic Party 'Admires' American Terrorists".

Leonard Bernstein, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could not be reached for comment. If we want to expand the list to Democrats who admire foreign terrorists, we can add Ramsey Clark, Jimmy Carter, Patty Murray, Ward Churchill, Michael Moore, "Pinch" Sulzberger, Chrissie Hynde, Oliver Stone, Margaret Cho and John Kerry to the list as well.

John Stephenson has more.

Related: "What Will Karl Do?"

More: "A Timeline Of Crime For Obama’s Buddy William Ayers".