Year: 2011

Why Does Eric Alterman Hate Pioneering Gay NY Times Columnist Frank Bruni?

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If you want a perfect example of how the Left pushes for more liberal press coverage, this is it: Eric Alterman accuses new-minted New York Times columnist Frank Bruni of being too soft on Bush.

It is not good enough for Alterman that Bruni is, and always has been, a reliably liberal member of the press corps. No, in Alterman’s universe, the job of reporters is to act as partisan attack dogs against Republicans. And so if Frank Bruni doesn’t fulfill that Alterman-approved role, he will be treated as the enemy.

There is something vaguely totalitarian in this attitude, and I think it is not an accident that the target of Alterman’s bullying is The First Gay Columnist in the Whole Dadgum History of the New York Times™.

Dave Weigel: ‘Hey, You Know Who’s Doing Pretty Good? Herman Cain.’

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Our boy Dave takes a look at the Gallup numbers and notices that the Hermanator has zoomed up in the GOP 2012 pack without benefit of much previous national media exposure, and despite the generally dismissive attitudes of such pundits as Karl Rove, Charles Krauthammer and Michael Barone. Here are the numbers:

Mitt Romney . . . . . . . . 17%
Sarah Palin . . . . . . . . . 15%
Ron Paul . . . . . . . . . . . 10%
Newt Gingrich . . . . . . . 9%
Herman Cain . . . . . . . . 8%
Tim Pawlenty . . . . . . . . 6%
Michele Bachmann . . . . 5%
Jon Huntsman . . . . . . . . 2%
Gary Johnson . . . . . . . . 2%
Rick Santorum . . . . . . . 2%

A couple of caveats about this poll: First, it’s nationwide, and there is no such thing as a nationwide primary. Secondly, they polled Republicans and “Republican-leaning independents,” whatever that means.

All caveats considered, however, this poll is the latest indication that pundits who have been dismissive of Herman Cain are making a serious mistake. If Tim Pawlenty is a “first-tier” candidate, you cannot now deny Cain is “first-tier,” too.

Dick Morris says Herman Cain “blew me away” at a Wisconsin Tea Party rally and, even though Morris doesn’t think Cain can win, he admits that he’s got “magic” and says he can’t be counted out.

Isn’t it time you joined the online grassroots army at Citizens for Cain?

ADDENDUM: Permit me to remind you exactly how early I foresaw the potential of Cain’s campaign. It was less than two weeks after the election last year and, at the end of a very long post on November 13, I included the clip of Herman Cain’s June speech at the SRLC in New Orleans. He ended that speech by making a plug for a possible “dark horse” campaign in 2012, and I wrote:

Say what you will about Mitt Romney, at least he’s got some meaningful private-sector experience. But if you want a successful businessman for the 2012 GOP nomination, how about a dark horse? . . .
Yeah: Herman Cain. Having backed a few can’t-possibly-win underdogs in the past couple of years — I went all-in for Rubio when he was 35 points down — I’m taking a long, hard look at that dark horse. It might not be the “pragmatic” thing to do, but I’m thinking a few “blogospheric demagogues” might be in a mood to really bust some balls for 2012.

Perhaps some analysts have overlooked the extent to which the Cain campaign is an anti-establishment ball-busting operation. There are a lot of grassroots conservatives who are sick and tired of having the GOP establishment and the elite pundits pick their candidates. If Cain could somehow win the nomination, he would owe the Republican establishment exactly nothing.

Heh. Heh. Heh.


Is Governor Palin Running in 2012?

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Earlier this month, Fox News ended its contracts with GOP presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. The network also reportedly delivered an ultimatum to Mike Huckabee that he, too, must decide: Either give up his Fox show or disavow a 2012 presidential run.

When Sarah Palin chose then to continue her contract with Fox, I deduced that she had decided not to be a candidate in 2012. Three weeks later, however, observers have started chattering over several signals that Palin may decide to jump into the race soon. Jim Rutenberg and Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times summarize the developments:

Sarah Palin is fortifying her small staff of advisers, buying a house in Arizona — where associates have said she could base a national campaign — and reviving her schedule of public appearances. The moves are the most concrete signals yet that Ms. Palin, the former governor of Alaska, is seriously weighing a Republican presidential bid.
While it is by no means clear that she would be willing to give up her lucrative speaking career and her perch as an analyst on Fox News to face the scrutiny and combat that would come with her entrance into the race, she is being pressed by supporters for a decision and has acknowledged that time is running out.

The biggest news is the forthcoming pro-Palin documentary, The Undefeated, and the news that the movie will premiere in Iowa — well, well, well.

NBC’s team analyzes the question of who would be helped or hurt by a Palin candidacy. Their conclusion that it would spark a rally to Mitt Romney by the GOP Establishment, desperate to stop Palin at any cost, is probably sound. The original “Palin Twibe” activist, Lisa Graas has her own analysis of the impact.

The latest polls show Romney and Palin virtually neck-and-neck among GOP voters. The problem for Palin now is that Romney has been virtually running since 2008, and that the primary field is now crowded by other candidates who’ve spent the past seven months lining up staff and volunteers in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and other states. The longer she waits, the slimmer the pickings would be when she finally does get in (if she does). Scott Conroy of Real Clear Politics appeared on CBS to discuss the possible Palin campaign:

Doug Brady notes the dismissive attitude of CBS’s Jan Crawford, “a now-familiar mainstream media narrative that’s as predictable as it is delusional.” This narrative — that Palin is damaged goods who would be a certain loser against Obama in 2012 — can only be disproven in one way: By Palin getting into the campaign, winning the GOP nomination, and getting elected in November 2012.

The question, then: How badly does Palin want to disprove that narrative?

Beating Women Drivers?

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Strange news from Saudi Arabia:

A campaign has been launched on Facebook calling for men to beat Saudi women who drive their cars in a planned protest next month against the ultra-conservative kingdom’s ban on women taking the wheel.
The call comes as activists are demanding the release of Manal al-Sharif, a Saudi woman who was jailed for defying the ban.

This is crazy. If you ban women from driving, how is your wife supposed to go buy you more beer during the football game?

Sex, Jokes and Politics: Why $15 Million Won’t Buy Traffic Like Ace of Spades

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“All politics all the time gets boring after a while. . . . Even a stone political junkie cannot subsist on a 24/7 diet of politics. The occasional joke, the occasional hot babe, the occasional joke about a hot babe — it’s a safety valve to make sure we don’t become humorless right-wing clones of those Democratic Underground moonbats.”
— Rule 5(b), “How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog in Less Than a Year,” Feb. 15, 2009

Soros-funded Media Matters for America has 90 employees and an annual budget of $15 million, and gets about 650,000 “unique visitors” per month. The annual budget at Ace of Spades HQ is unknown, and its “employees” are just a bunch of part-time goofs, but they get about 3 million hits per month.

Tuesday afternoon, I got a sample of the awesome power of Ace’s traffic when he linked my post about Christina Hendricks, temporarily overloading the servers and producing about 5,000 visits in the span of three hours. What would traffic have been like, if the servers hadn’t overloaded? Dunno. But that surge was as impressive as Christina Hendricks’s cleavage an Instalanche.

Why is Ace’s traffic so awesome? He explains:

Very often I get criticized for running funny or trivial stories, or going off-message. There is a contingent of folks who want their political sites doing nothing but relentlessly messaging. . . .
They seem to make the error of not realizing that for a message to be effective, first, it must be read in the first place.
And being a little idiosyncratic and random and funny and goofy helps with that. Whether the Seriousness Brigade realizes that or not. . . .

You should read the whole thing, if you want to understand why all-politics-all-the-time unnecessarily limits readership.

It’s interesting to note that Rush Limbaugh gets the same kind of complaints that Ace gets. Every time Rush talks about golf or the NFL, some listeners call in and demand that he “stick to the issues.”

Absolutely. “Stick to the issues”! Because I know you’d rather read about Tim Pawlenty’s ethanol policy than to see a buxom young blonde in lingerie, right? Continue reading Sex, Jokes and Politics: Why $15 Million Won’t Buy Traffic Like Ace of Spades →