Category: American Spectator

Revolving Doors: Freire Exits Examiner, Joins NMS; Klein Exits Spectator, Joins Examiner; Hot Air Is Hiring (Not Me)

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One of the things that has always amazed me about D.C. is how frequently young people change jobs here. You go to a cocktail reception and run into a think-tank guy you met at a reception six weeks ago: “Hey, how are things at [name of think tank]?” And he says, “Oh, I’m at [name of consulting firm] now.” So you say, “Oh, I know so-and-so who works there.” And the guy says, “No, she left. She’s working for [name of congressman] now.”

It’s a constant career merry-go-round and, apparently, the rule of this job-hopper game is: “He who has the most employers on his resume, wins.” And so anybody inside the Beltway who works anywhere more than two years is considered a loser.

Which is why, less than two years after former American Spectator managing editor J.P. Freire joined the Examiner, he’s gone:

J.P. Freire, associate editor of the Washington Examiner‘s Commentary section, is leaving his post for a gig at New Media Strategies (NMS). At NMS Freire will flex his news knowledge as a senior communications strategist. . . .
Freire has held his position with the Examiner for nearly two years. He was previously the managing editor of the American Spectator magazine.

J.P. is a smart guy who, a couple years ago, expressed a great truth in saying that what conservative journalism needs is fewer Bill Buckleys and more Robert Novaks — which is to say, more reporters and fewer pundits. And to replace Freire, Tapscott brings in brilliant young American Spectator staffer Philip Klein to fill the opening:

Philip has been Washington correspondent for the American Spectator for several years and before that was a reporter at Reuters in New York City. At both Reuters and the Spectator, Philip displayed the kind of detailed, thorough writing and reporting that will make him a key member of the Commentary staff.

Phil is a wonk. The guy loves policy like a squirrel loves nuts. Yes, he is a reporter and a very good one, but in his heart of hearts, the guy is about policy, not politics. (His writing on the health-care debate was some of the best stuff out there.) Knowing Phil as I do, I’m prepared to make a bold prediction: By summer 2012, Phil will be working as a policy guy for a GOP presidential campaign and, if Republicans take back the White House, will join the new administration, either in the speechwriting shop or as a policy assistant.

Now, finally, to something I mentioned at the bottom of a post last week:

NEW JOB
HotAir.com – Writer
Description: HotAir.com is seeking a third writer to join the current duo of Ed Morrissey and Allahpundit. HotAir is the largest conservative blog, has a readership of over two million readers a month and is cited daily by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Bill Bennett and pundits across the airwaves and online. Blogging at HotAir is the perfect opportunity for a writer with a quick wit and a nose for news. Competitive salary commensurate with experience plus full benefits. Please send inquiries to [email protected] or fax to 703-247-1257, Attention: Jonathan Garthwaite, General Manager.
Added 03/08/11.

Running a “help wanted” ad for such a plum job is extremely unusual. Notice, by contrast, how Tapscott filled the Examiner opening vacated by Freire’s departure almost instantly after Freire’s departure became known, and with a staffer from the same magazine where Freire had formerly been managing editor.

Most openings like that, you see, are never advertised, but are instead filled by friends recommending friends to their friends.

Therefore, from my perspective, this cattle-call ad can have only one meaning: The proprietors of Hot Air don’t consider me “a writer with a quick wit and a nose for news.”

Otherwise, why the ad? They could have just called me and said, “Hey, want a job?” Putting out the cattle call like this is therefore tantamount to a public declaration that nobody at Hot Air is interested in “the ugliest girl on the cheerleading squad.”

Meanwhile, at least two people have asked me to recommend them for the Hot Air job, but given this evidence of what extremely low regard the proprietors have for me, I suppose that a recommendation from me would hurt more than it would help.

So, if any of my friends are interested in appling for that job, pretend you don’t know me. If you think it will help you get the job, just say the word and I’ll be happy denounce you as a candy-ass RINO.

Because that’s what friends are for.

I Don’t Hate Trains

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“What, exactly, do Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians have against trains? Seriously, what?”
— David Weigel, Slate

Few things — not even the threat of a coffee shortage — bother me quite so much as what I call the Existential Theory of Liberalism:

Everything that exists must be subsidized by the federal government; ergo, to argue against government subsidies for something is to advocate the abolition of that thing.

The Existential Theory of Liberalism can be seen in action whenever any conservative proposes reducing federal expenditures for, say, the National Endowment for the Arts, and is therefore accused by liberals of being “anti-art.” By the same token, if you criticize the federal Department of Education, you are “anti-education,” and if you oppose using taxpayer dollars to fund embryonic stem-cell research, you are “anti-science.”

(Don’t attempt to use this trick against liberals, however, or you will discover that turnabout is not fair play: If you accuse liberals of being “anti-religious” because they oppose prayer in public schools, they will then accuse you of being a fanatical theocrat who wishes to “impose your beliefs” on others. Of course, liberals routinely use government subsidies to impose their beliefs on the rest of us: “stimulus” grants for gay pornography, anyone? Liberals fervently believe in sodomy, and therefore insist that taxpayers foot the bill to promote their favorite pastime, but I digress …)

When my buddy Dave sent me his train story from Slate — and you really should read the whole thing, which isn’t all bad — I felt obligated to reply by e-mail:

I don’t hate trains. I also don’t hate windmills, ethanol, “All Things Considered” or any of the other things that are subsidized with federal tax dollars because there is not enough market demand for them to be otherwise economically viable. It is an error of logic to conflate opposition to subsidies with “hate” for the thing subsidized.
I do, however, admit to hating Auburn University, “performance artists” and the United Nations, all of which get federal subsidies.
— RSM

Meanwhile, Philip Klein has an article at The American Spectator about the recent epidemic of train-mania among liberals:

“Within 25 years, our goal is to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail,” President Obama declared in his State of the Union address, making it the most ambitious element of his vision for “winning the future.”
Invoking national pride, Obama mused that “America is the nation that built the transcontinental railroad, brought electricity to rural communities, constructed the interstate highway system.” Sadly, he lamented, the U.S. now lags behind Europe, Russia, and China in modern transportation infrastructure.
If the nation met his goal for high-speed rail adoption, he said, “This could allow you to go places in half the time it takes to travel by car. For some trips, it will be faster than flying — without the pat-down. As we speak, routes in California and the Midwest are already under way.”
To most Americans, the passing reference to California was likely an afterthought, lost amid all the dreamy rhetoric of rebuilding the nation. But upon closer inspection, the state’s proposed high-speed rail system serves as a perfect example of the gap between the promise of transformational liberalism and the reality of big government. Taxpayers everywhere should pay attention, because the project has already been granted $3.2 billion in federal funds, mostly through Obama’s economic stimulus package — and its backers hope to gobble up billions more over the next decade.
The $43 billion transportation project to link Los Angeles to San Francisco with a bullet train by 2020 would be considered grandiose during the plushest of times, yet it’s being pursued during an era when governments at all levels are mired in deep fiscal crises. The plan has been subject to a series of scathing reports by independent analysts, raising concerns about everything from its cost estimates to its business model. The University of California at Berkeley has questioned its lofty ridership projections. And even the Washington Post has editorialized against it.
Although voters in the financially strapped Golden State approved a ballot measure in 2008 authorizing up to $9.9 billion in bonds to build the rail system, the project has encountered a lot of opposition as it has progressed. Several cities are suing to prevent the trains from tearing through their downtowns. Farmers are worried that the tracks will carve up their land. Some environmental groups normally predisposed to supporting high-speed rail have turned against the proposed route, fearing its effects on undeveloped areas. When the High-Speed Rail Authority announced that the initial section of the line would be built in the state’s less inhabited Central Valley region, many were puzzled as to why they didn’t begin by connecting large cities with more potential riders. As a result, critics dubbed it the “train to nowhere.” . . .

You must read the whole thing, because it was written by Philip Klein, who is Jewish. If you don’t read it, that means you hate Jews.

Oh, wait. I’m sorry. I unexpectedly lapsed into thinking like a liberal for a moment, which reminds me of another patented trick of Liberal Logic™ — the Just-Like-Hitler Theory of Republican Policy.

We’ve recently seen this employed in Wisconsin, where GOP state legislators passed a bill to limit the power of government-employee labor unions, resulting in this predictable accusation: “Republicans hate unions! You know who else hated unions? Hitler!”

But as usual, no fair turning this trick against liberals, although it would be pretty easy.

I mean, c’mon: How did Hitler use trains? To ship Jews to death camps!

No wonder Phil hates trains . . .

Sorry, Charlie

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The Trainwreck Called Charlie has taken up entirely too much of my attention lately, but at least I got an American Spectator column out of it:

Celebrity psychiatrist Dr. Drew Pinsky described Sheen’s condition as a “psychiatric emergency,” most probably the manic phase of bipolar disorder (also known as manic depression) and requiring hospitalization: “He’s in an acute manic state right now.… Notice how he goes from thought to thought and they are sort of disconnected? That’s acute mania.” . . . Pinsky’s concerns were echoed by others in Hollywood who have dealt with mental illness or addiction issues, including actor Gary Busey, who said Sheen is in a “tailspin,” and Tom Arnold, who accused those close to Sheen of exploiting his problems.
Perhaps the biggest of Sheen’s problems is that he has succeeded so well by exploiting his own reputation as the baddest of Hollywood’s bad boys. . . .

Please read the whole thing, which is 1,200 words long. Frankly, it would be easier to write 50,000 words about the “fricking rock star from Mars” than to boil down his catastrophic collapse into a single column.

Excuse me for reiterating what seems to me the most inarguable evidence that Charlie is completely batshit insane: He went from being married to fabulous beauty Denise Richards — the mother of his two adorable daughters — to shacking up with no-better-than-7-on-the-10-scale Natalie Kenly and Rachel Oberlin who, as porn performer “Bree Olson,” was winner of the 2008 “Best Anal Scene” award.

OK, you may say, looks aren’t everything. True enough, but is there any level on which Charlie’s skanky “godesses” could be, as he claims, such triumphant conquests as to make his lifestyle the envy of every man in Hollywood? He’s the highest-paid star in the history of television, and the best he can do is a couple of low-rent bimbos like that?

Dude, if that’s “winning,” what does “losing” look like?

Ohio Unions, Ohio Thugs, Ohio Police

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From the Columbus Dispatch:

The volatility surrounding the collective-bargaining debate spilled into the night Wednesday when police were called to a German Village restaurant after a group verbally accosted a gathering of Senate Republicans.
After the vote on Senate Bill 5, seven Republican senators, including President Tom Niehaus, R-New Richmond, grabbed dinner at the Easy Street Cafe. As the lawmakers neared the end of their meal, a group of five to 10 union supporters angry about the passage of the bill hours before burst into the restaurant and began shouting. . . .
“It was planned,” LaRose said. “They gathered as a group and waited until they had about 10 people before they caused a disturbance.”
When the group burst into the restaurant, the woman, Monica Moran, deputy director of public affairs for SEIU District 1199, raised her hands in the air, yelled “Can I have your attention?” and then shouted “something nasty,” LaRose said. Soon after, the rest of the group of men and women joined in with a chant.
“They stormed through my dining room,” said George Stefanidis, owner of the Easy Street Cafe. “I told them they had to leave, and they wouldn’t.”
Stefanidis said he called 911 when the protesters refused to leave. LaRose said there was pushing and shoving with the restaurant staff. . . .

Read the whole thing. We should scarcely be surprised that socialists have no respect for personal privacy or property rights. It is disturbing, however, to see police making common cause with such lawless thugs:

When Ohio’s state Senate voted 17-16 Wednesday to approve S.B. 5, Frank LaRose became a target in the latest battle over government-employee unions. Not that LaRose is a stranger to battles — the 31-year-old is a former Army sergeant and decorated Iraq War veteran. But the fight over S.B. 5, which would limit the power of public-sector unions in Ohio, gave the freshman Republican state senator a baptism by fire into the world of political combat. After he voted in favor of the bill, once of the fiercest salvos was fired in a message posted Wednesday on LaRose’s Facebook page.
“Funny thing about cops, they hold a grudge,” said the message from Mike Piotrowski. That caught the eye of a group of College Republicans from the University of Akron who had supported LaRose in last year’s election, which the GOP candidate won by a decisive 57%-43% margin. The students quickly discovered that Piotrowski is a lawyer for the Ohio Fraternal Order of Police, and complained that his message could be seen as a threat toward LaRose. Piotrowski denied intending to threaten the senator, but in a reply to one of the students, the lawyer snarled: “You don’t know what you are talking about. When Republicans talk about ‘Union Thugs’ they may as well be calling people the n-word.”
This was the latest provocation in the increasingly bitter confrontation between public-sector unions and Republican state officials. . . .

Please read the whole thing at The American Spectator.

OMFG: Zeitgeist Is ‘Right-Wing’?

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It’s the liberal Rorshach test — show them an inkblot and liberals scream, “Blame conservatives!”

Loughner’s Conspiracy-Fueled Rampage
Has Origins on the Fringe Right
Now, you don’t have to believe that Sarah Palin purchased the gun for Loughner and whispered in his ear about targets to believe that the rhetoric on the far, far right played a role in amping up the paranoia of a mentally unbalanced man. In fact, one of the shooter’s friends focused on a movie that echoes many of the themes on the fringe right as extremely important to shaping Loughner’s worldview. . . .
Zeitgeist in particular has echoes of anti-Federal Reserve theories popular with the John Birch Society.
The more you read by Loughner, or the more videos you see from him, they reflect these beliefs very strongly.

Someone needs to send David Dayen for counseling. He’s as obsessed with the “far right” as Loughner was with Bush-hatred:

“His anger would well up at the sight of
President George W. Bush, or in discussing what he
considered to be the nefarious designs of government.”

Permit me to observe that it is possible to be conservative — not “far, far right” or “fringe right” — and not be a huge fan of George W. Bush. Bruce Barlett certainly is no Bush fanboy, and there are many others within the conservative mainstream who would endorse Bartlett’s critique of the Bush administration.

But you see it’s “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” with the likes of David Dayen. Conservatism can be condemned for anything and everything Bush did — despite the many conservative voices that proclaim, as does Bartlett, that Bush was not really conservative — and yet, when it serves their purposes, they’ll condemn conservatism for “fringe” beliefs of people who’ve never had any active association with the mainstream conservative movement. This resembles a fallacy that we might call The Nixon Syllogism of Liberal Argument:

  • Nixon was a Republican;
  • Nixon did bad things;
    and therefore
  • Republicans are never to be trusted.

Liberals have these ironclad mental associations of “right-wingers” with various pre-demonized political scapegoats and the trick, in any debate over contemporary issues, is to conjure up these negative associations to say that today’s conservative personality is analogous to the scapegoat, be it Nixon, Joe McCarthy or George Wallace.

The argument begins with the conclusion — conservatives are bad — and all that is necessary is to adduce “evidence” to prove it. Anything at all will suffice as “evidence,” and liberals will ignore a mountain of information that doesn’t fit the conclusion in order to scream about the irrelevant molehill that they insist “proves” their point.

And if you don’t buy their argument, your disagreement merely reinforces their point: Conservatives are close-minded bigots and therefore, bad people.

This kind of circular reasoning is, of course, not actually reasoning at all. It’s tautological, an expression of partisan prejudice, and it does no good to enter into debate with such people. They’ve got their minds made up, and all you can say to them is, “I disagree. You’re wrong and you’re not going to persuade me.”

I’m not arguing with David Dayen with any idea that he’s going to have a Road to Damascus moment and recognize his errors. He’s too far gone for that. Nor is there any need to “preach to the choir.” This is merely another object lesson in how to confront the counterfactual and irrational mentality of the Left. (See, for example, yesterday’s encounter with liberal blogger Don Millard who pushed a discredited “Blame Palin” meme.)

The object of the argument in such a case is not to convert the fool to wisdom. Rather, it is to expose his folly for the benefit of those who encounter the argument not as participants, but as spectators. And speaking of which, here’s my latest column at The American Spectator:

Divided into three parts, Zeitgeist begins with a half-hour assault on Christianity as a myth. The film asserts that Jesus is “a literary and astrological hybrid… a plagiarization of the Egyptian sun-god Horus.” This is a thesis promoted in a series of books, including The Christ Conspiracy (1999), by author D.M. Murdock, who writes under the pen-name “Achyra S.” Murdock served as an adviser on Zeitgeist, and the film’s popularization of her “Christ-myth” ideas has brought it to the attention of Christian writer James Patrick Holding of Tektonics Ministry. He notes that many viewers of Zeitgeist claim it has “shown them the truth for the first time,” and that it evidently appeals to those “disaffected with the status quo.” Holding said Zietgeist “also seems to have appeal among what I call ‘fundamentalist atheists’ who are deeply hostile to Christianity.”
Deeply hostile, indeed, as the film tells viewers: “Christianity, along with all other theistic belief systems, is the fraud of the age.” This idea of fraudulent mythology is then carried over into the film’s second segment, about the 9/11 attacks: “A myth is an idea that, while widely believed, is false. In a deeper sense, in the religious sense, a myth serves as an orienting and mobilizing story for a people.”
“They do not want you to think too much.… You had better wake up and understand that there are people guiding your life, and you don’t even know it,” says one of the film’s “experts,” anti-Masonic conspiracy theorist Jordan Maxwell, near the end of Zeitgeist, after the narrator has denounced “the stupefying downward slide” of American education. A few minutes later, while images including Jesus Christ, Bill O’Reilly and Saddam Hussein flash across the screen, the narrator says: “The last thing the men behind the curtain want is a conscious, informed public, capable of critical thinking, which is why a continually fraudulent zeitgeist is output via religion, the mass media and the educational system.” . . .

Go read the whole thing. I’ll have more about Zeitgeist later. For now, I consider it sufficient to say that a film which cites purveyors of anti-Masonic kookery and relies upon New Age authors as sources to attack Christianity is definitely not conservative. And anyone who thinks otherwise needs to have his head examined.

When in Doubt, Blame Palin!

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#BlamePalin became a sarcastic Twitter hashtag yesterday. Among other things, I blamed her for Auburn’s game-winning field goal against Oregon. Also, my four-day streak without an Instalanche.

Liberals have made Palin their all-purpose scapegoat, the demon-figure whose existence relieves them of the burden for coming up with rational explanations of why bad things happen. The evasion of responsibility being a key policy goal of liberalism, you can understand why she’s become so valuable to them.

Blaming Palin is, in this regard, a lot like blaming racism — excuse me, I meant, “raaaaacism!” — for every ill afflicting American society. This never-ending finger-pointing search for scapegoats is the topic of my latest American Spectator column:

The deranged man had been steadily going downhill. His bizarre anti-social behavior and angry outbursts had caused him to be suspended from college classes. He spiraled downward into a vortex of madness and nursed a weird political grievance until finally he went on a murderous rampage with a 9-mm semi-automatic pistol, killing six people and wounding more than a dozen others.
But nobody blamed Sarah Palin or the Tea Party for this bloody crime, because it was December 1993, and the deranged gunman was Colin Ferguson. And his killing spree didn’t happen in Arizona, but on New York’s Long Island Railroad, where he opened fire in a train full of rush-hour commuters.
The remarkable parallels between Ferguson’s mass murder and Saturday’s shootings in Tucson include not only the choice of weapons and the number of victims killed, but also the fact that in both cases, liberals downplayed the idiosyncratic motives of the gunmen and immediately seized upon both crimes to advance their political agenda. . . .

You should read the whole thing. But if you don’t, I’ll just blame Sarah Palin. Everything is her fault now.

SHOCKING REPUBLICAN SCANDAL!

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Expect that kind of reaction from the media whatever Republicans do in the 112th Congress. My latest American Spectator column:

Even before they were sworn into office, Republican freshmen in the 112th Congress had already shocked the political press corps in the nation’s capital.
A group of the incoming GOP representatives scheduled a fundraiser with country singer LeAnn Rimes as the star attraction and this event was treated by Politico reporters Ken Vogel and Marin Cogan as the biggest scandal since Teapot Dome.
How dare those Republicans try to raise money to get themselves re-elected?
This kind of ginned-up controversy typifies the political double standards that suffuse the work of America’s political journalists. Anything can be portrayed as scandalous as long as it involves Republicans, because the GOP is presumed to be The Party of Wrong and Evil. Yet no Democrat’s words or deeds, not even the most heinous crime, can ever qualify as evidence that the Democratic Party is anything but a force for all that is Good and Right. . . .

Read the whole shocking thing.

How dare Republicans host a concert by notorious bikini-wearing Leann Rimes? There are even scandalous rumors that Republicans may keep their promise to repeal ObamaCare. Shocking!

The Bold, the Brave, the Wrong

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American Spectator associate editor W. James Antle III rang out the old year by highlighting his most misbegotten predictions of 2010:

4. Christine O’Donnell is a no-hoper in the primary. I wasn’t confident enough in that one to make the prediction publicly, but I did dissuade an intern from writing a piece that took her ability to beat Mike Castle seriously. Oops! Though in my defense, it was before she caught on with conservatives nationally — the prerequisite for a successful Tea Party challenge this year.

Heh. Smitty was one of the first bloggers to spot the O’Donnell juggernaut, and I spent three days in July shadowing Team Christine at the Right Online in Vegas. Still, when I traveled to Dover for Primary Night coverage, I went there secretly expecting Castle to squeak out a win.

O’Donnell’s upset win in the GOP primary seemed to me such a miracle I thought it would provide the kind of Cinderella-story momentum that would carry her to victory in November.

That didn’t work out so well. Nevertheless, no regrets.

What I can’t understand, however, is why my buddy Jim Antle would “dissuade an intern from writing a piece that took her ability to beat Mike Castle seriously.” What’s wrong with doing a serious story about a long-shot underdog?

If you surrender to that kind of “inevitability” thinking, then front-runner status becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, doesn’t it? Besides which, it’s possible to do a story about an underdog that takes his candidacy seriously while at the same time acknowledging the long odds against him. Maybe that kind of reporting is beyond the skill level of an intern, but it can be done.

Good political reporting shouldn’t always be about jumping aboard the front-runner’s bandwagon, and ought not be dependent on anyone’s prediction of the outcome. Because sometimes the front-runner doesn’t go the distance, and sometimes the winner is a dark horse.

I’m just sayin’ . . .