The left is beyond parody at this point.
Warriors and wusses
Column by Joel Stein
I DON’T SUPPORT our troops. This is a particularly difficult opinion to have, especially if you are the kind of person who likes to put bumper stickers on his car. Supporting the troops is a position that even Calvin is unwilling to urinate on.
I’m sure I’d like the troops. They seem gutsy, young and up for anything. If you’re wandering into a recruiter’s office and signing up for eight years of unknown danger, I want to hang with you in Vegas.
Please read the whole thing. Once you pick yourself off the floor, let him know how you feel by sending him an email,
thejoelstein@yahoo.com
He’s not alone, here is more sickening moral equivalence from the Kos Crazies,
Traditional America’s biggest enemy: Bush or Bin Laden?
Who is traditional America’s biggest enemy? Honorable, decent, traditional Americans value liberty, justice, freedom, tolerance and accountable government.
Both of these men are opposed to those values. Both of those men have attacked those values. But who is in a position to harm America more?
To date Bin Laden has murdered around 3,000 Americans. Bush has sent over 2,000 soldiers to their deaths for lies and stood by while hundreds of Americans died in the aftermath of Katrina in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi.
But beyond the body count, what harms are they causing. Bin Laden’s terror groups have had a huge economic impact on the west (including America) as money is spent on security. Bin Laden preaches an intolerant and belligerant form of a religion.
However Bush and the Republicans have whittled away basic human rights in America. They’ve stood by as our Health Care system continues to crumble and as the number of poor and at-risk members of society continues to grow.
And check out this poll over at Kos asking who you despise more, Bush or Bin laden.
What a pathetic bunch of losers.
UPDATE: If you thought LA Times columnist Joel Stein was a complete moron before, read this interview he did with Hugh Hewitt today. I have never had less respect for anyone in my life.
The New York Times, like most newspapers, is suffering. Suffering from advertising competition from the likes of Google and Yahoo, but also from their relentless agenda driven journalism that has been so thouroughly exposed by the blogosphere.
I guess Times Select isn’t exactly selling….
N.Y. Times Earnings Plunge on Charges
NEW YORK – The New York Times Co. said Tuesday its fourth-quarter earnings fell 41 percent from the same period a year ago, weighed down by charges for staff reductions and an accounting change. The Times, which also publishes The Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune, earned $64.8 million or 45 cents per share in the three months ending in December, compared to $110.2 million or 75 cents per share a year ago.
The one and only Michael Yon has a completely redesigned blog and it looks great, go check it out, and adjust your bookmarks accordingly.
As I stated last night on the program, Hillary’s plantation comment last week on MLK Day at an all black church was as transparent as it gets. It seems as though Shelby Steele concurs with that assessment that Hillary’s “plantation” comment was “old-fashioned political and racial pandering.” Bubba could get away with it, but Hillary looked rediculous.
While some, like Barak Obama obfuscated Hillary’s statement by attempting to explain what “she really meant,” to Shelby Steele it was obvious:
When political pandering goes awry, it calls you a name. On an emotional level, many blacks will hear Hillary’s remark as follows: “I say Republicans run the House like a plantation because I am speaking to Negroes–the wretched of the earth, a slave people–who will surely know all about plantations.” Is this a tin ear or a Freudian slip, blacks will wonder? Does she really see us as she projects us–as a people so backward that our support can be won with a simple plantation reference, and the implication that Republicans are racist? Quite possibly so, since no apology has been forthcoming.
And to those who will invariably claim that her remarks were no different than Newt’s use of the word “plantation:”
If Newt Gingrich also once used the plantation metaphor in reference to Congress, his goal was only an innocuous one: to be descriptive, not to pander. He was speaking to a reporter, not to a black audience, and he had the good taste to cast himself as a slave who would “lead the slave rebellion.” Thus, he identified with the black struggle for freedom, not with the helplessness and humiliation of the plantation slave. If the plantation metaphor will always be inaccurate and hyperbolic where Congress is concerned, at least Mr. Gingrich’s use of it carried no offense.
At it’s very core Mr. Steele notes that the plantation comment originates from a more profound Democratic tradition of turning black resentment and a sense of grievance into liberal power :
And even Mrs. Clinton’s “offense” would have amounted to very little had it come from nothing more than an awkward metaphor. But, in fact, it came from a corruption in post-’60s liberalism and Democratic politics that profoundly insults blacks. Mrs. Clinton came to Al Sharpton’s MLK celebration looking for an easy harvest of black votes. And she knew the drill–white liberals and Dems whistle for the black vote by pandering to the black sense of grievance. Once positioned as the white champions of this grievance, they actually turn black resentment into white liberal power. Today, Democrats cannot be competitive without this alchemy. So Mrs. Clinton’s real insult to blacks–one far uglier than her plantation metaphor–is to value them only for their sense of grievance.
Dick Morris is a firm believer that Condi is the GOP’s best bet to beat Hillary in ’08. After Hillary’s comments, I believe that Mr. Morris may know what he is talking about.
No one on the current political scene better embodies this Republican advantage than the current secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. The archetype that Ms. Rice represents is “overcoming” rather than grievance. Despite a childhood in the segregated South that might entitle her to a grievance identity, she has clearly chosen that older black American tradition in which blacks neither deny injustice nor allow themselves to be defined by it. This tradition, as Ralph Ellison once put it, “springs not from a desire to deny the harshness of existence but from a will to deal with it as men at their best have always done.” And, because Ms. Rice is grounded in this tradition, she is of absolutely no value to modern liberalism or the Democratic Party despite her many talents and achievements. Quite the reverse, she is their worst nightmare. If blacks were to take her example and embrace overcoming rather than grievance, the wound to liberalism would be mortal. It is impossible to imagine Hillary Clinton’s “plantation” pandering in a room full of Condi Rices.
This is why so many Republicans (including Laura Bush) now salivate at the thought of a Rice presidential bid. No other potential Republican candidate could–to borrow an old Marxist phrase–better “heighten the contradictions” of modern liberalism and Democratic power than Ms. Rice. The more ugly her persecution by the civil rights establishment and the left, the more she would give liberalism the look of communism in its last days–an ideology long since hollowed of its idealism and left with nothing save its meanness and repressiveness. Who can say what Ms. Rice will do. But history is calling her, or someone like her. She is the object of a deep longing in America for race to be finally handled, not by political idealisms, but by the classic principles of freedom and fairness.
Hillary, the titular head of the Democratic party and likely 08′ presidential nominee, has demonstrated how utterly insignificant and unserious the Democratic Party has become. They are a party without any forward looking positive agenda for America. They have been profoundly wrong on the most important issues of our time (i.e. the economy, Iraq and the larger War on Terror, and, as we witnessed last week, judicial nominations). Hillary’s comments demonstrate how desperate the party has become and how little they understand the very people who they claim to best represent.
Shelby Steele hits the proverbial “nail on the head.” Must read.
We are really excited about our expanded time slot and looking forward to spreading our wings and not feeling like we have to talk as fast as the guy from those FedEx ads of the 1980’s
Here is an overview of some of the topics on the table on Pundit Review Radio, Sunday night at 9pm on Boston’s Talk Station WRKO. As always, you can stream the show live and participate by calling 877-469-4322
Hillary’s Plantation Comment has generated much discussion this week. Most of it was critical of Hillary, but still, some tried to defend her.
This episode, on the heels of New Orleans mayor Ray Naggin’s “chocolate city” comments have put the entire issue of race in politics back on the front burner.
More trouble with illegal aliens. In Salem, MA, an illegal who was caught entering the country and was released anyway went on to kill a pedestrian trying to cross the street. What makes this so infuriating is not just the insane ‘catch and release’ policy of the INS, but that this is the second such episode in a year in Salem. The first involved a cop on a traffic detail who was severely injured. Check out the look on his wife’s face when she found out the news. This is the consequence of our inability to deal with this problem.
I Can See Clearly Now
Media Bias isn’t only how the media covers a story. It also involves the stories they chose not to cover, those that do not fit their agenda. As Peggy Noonan said last week in the Wall Street Journal,
Eleven years ago the Democrats lost control of Congress. Then they lost the presidency. But just as important, maybe more enduringly important, they lost their monopoly on the means of information in America. They lost control of the pipeline. Or rather there are now many pipelines, and many ways to use the information they carry.
This week we see a classic example of an issue being covered extensively on the blogs but largely ignored by the MSM. Have you heard about the Barrett Report? Well, there is a good reason why you probably haven’t. It involves corruption at the highest levels of the Clinton administration. Here is an excerpt from the 11-year, $21 million dollar independent counsel investigation that led to The Barrett Report,
At the core of our investigation was the allegation that Cisneros lied to the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the road to his appointment as HUD Secretary, an accusation first leveled by his erstwhile mistress Linda Medlar. The story of Cisneros and Medlar on its face was a personal tragedy for the participants and their families, not in and of itself meriting public scrutiny. It became a problem of national concern when they and their associates decided that Cisnerosâ??s appointment was more important than obeying the laws that are intended to ensure that important government decisions are grounded on full and honest information.
The second part of our investigation was directed at the serious and unsettling possibility that certain high-ranking officials of the Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Service had improperly attempted to shield Cisneros from independent counsel scrutiny for tax offenses.
So, how did the Big 3 Alphabet Soup networks cover the report? Two ignored it completely, and one did its best to downplay it,
But the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News, which had time for some hardly hot news stories, such as a popular restaurant in New Orleans, didn’t utter a word about Barrett’s complaint. ABC’s World News Tonight allocated 35 seconds to Barrett and Cisneros. Anchor Bob Woodruff pointed out how â??Barrett accused Clinton officials of using their power to quote, ‘blunt any effort to bring about a full and independent examination.’â? Woodruff added: â??Critics called Barrett’s investigation ‘incompetent,’ ‘wasteful’ and ‘without merit.'”
This is a case study in agenda driven journalism, if it does not fit their agenda, they chose not to cover it. Thankfully, the blogs and the new media are out there to point these things out.
Wal-Mart
In the second hour (9pm), we will be speaking with a former college classmate of ours who is now Executive Director of WalMart Watch. Andrew Grossman will join us to tell us about his group, what they are trying to do, and their recent success in getting legislation passed in Maryland that,
mandated that large companies like Wal-Mart take responsibility for their workers and spend at least 8% of their payroll on healthcare benefits.
Is this Maryland’s shining moment as WalMart Watch says or is it what the Washington Post described as,
a legislative mugging masquerading as an act of benevolent social engineering.
Here is a good compilation of pro and con commentary on the issue.
Our friend and former guest on Pundit Review Radio, Danny Glover, has a series of articles and interviews in the current edition of the highly influencial inside the Beltway publication National Journal this week. Smartly, the magazine has allowed Danny to publish these stories on his blog which he manages for the magazine, Beltway Blogroll.
Blogs have had a noticeable impact on American society since at least 2001. The September 11 attacks that year motivated many people to start online diaries and many more to start reading them. The attacks and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan also sparked the first “warblogs,” a trend later fueled by the war in Iraq.
But only recently have blogs become a force within policy-making circles. First, the blogs rose to prominence in the media and then in the political arena.
Politicians are rarely on the cutting edge of technology, and that is as true with blogs as it has been with Web sites, e-mail newsletters, and other recent online innovations. Three years after blogs helped force Mississippi Republican Trent Lott out of the Senate majority leader’s office, fewer than 1 percent of his colleagues in Congress have created blogs.
But last year may have been a turning point.
To round things out, Beltway Blogroll has interviewed some of the most influencial members of the blogosphere, including Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit), Henry Copeland of Blogads, Arianna Huffington and Andy Roth of the Club for Growth.
What a great piece of work on the impact, successes and failures of the new media.
For more insight on the role and impact of blogs on Washington politics, you can listen to Danny’s interview on Pundit Review here.
Al Gore is still out there asserting that George Bush has been breaking the law by authorizing wiretaps for suspected Al Qaeada terrorists which he describes as an “impeachable offense.” I kid you not. Excellent article in today’s WSJ by Victoria Toensing a Washington lawyer, who was chief counsel for the Senate Intelligence Committee and deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration.
This article demonstrates how even after 9-11 the Democratic Party still fails to grasp the nature of the terrorist threat that we are facing. If only the liberals were as tough on the throat cutting terrorists as they have been on Bush’s judicial nominees…