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."

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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 fr