Category: Media Bias

‘Ed Schultz With a Smaller Rack’

Posted on 39 Comments

The title quote is how Ace of Spades describes Contessa Brewer, whose eight-year career at MSNBC has come to an inglorious end. Ace reminds us of one of her highlights:

BREWER: “Joining me now to talk about this and the nation’s real problem of joblessness, the Reverend Al Sharpton. What’s your reaction to hearing someone say, you know, when it comes to income inequality, all’s well, a rising tide floats all boats?”
JESSE JACKSON: “Uh, I’m Reverend Jesse Jackson.”
BREWER: “Right. You know, I’m so sorry. The, uh, script in front of me said Reverend Al Sharpton. I’m looking at your face. I know who you are, Reverend Jackson. We all do. I’m sorry.”

But wait, I’ve got one even better, courtesy of Mark Finklestein at Newsbusters:

REP. MO BROOKS (R-ALA.): During the six years [Obama has] been in Washington, our accumulated national debt has increased by more than 50 percent. And what has President Obama’s response been now, and as a senator? To increase spending even more — not to cut it, but to increase spending even more. Two years as a freshman senator, the debt goes up $400 billion because of deficits. Two years when he’s in the majority of the United States Senate, it goes up $1.8 trillion dollars –”
BREWER: “But congressman –”
BROOKS: “– and now it’s $2.8 trillion while he’s president.”
BREWER: “You’re simplifying the issues that were on the plate of the nation at that point. I mean, we were looking at going . . . reverting into a depression at that point. Everyone, the Fed chairman –”
BROOKS: “Oh, I disagree that we were going into a depression, but go ahead.”
BREWER: “Do you have a degree in economics?”
BROOKS: “Yes, ma’am, I do — highest honors.”

BTW, Mo Brooks didn’t get his economics degree from some third-rate school. He graduated summa cum laude with a double major in economics and political science from Duke University. Contessa Brewer, who got her degree in broadcast journalism at Syracuse, was four years old in 1978 when Brooks added a University of Alabama law degree to his credentials.

So now Mo’s still a member of Congress and Contessa’s just gotten the boot from the world’s least-watched cable news network.

Economics, y’know.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

UPDATE II: Amid the comments at AOSHQ, a link to this clip from the Stephanie Miller Show (via Scared Monkeys and Radio Equalizer) in which Brewer expresses her disappointment upon learning that the May 2010 Times Square bomber was a Muslim:

Chris Matthews: Exceptionally Idiotic

Posted on 12 Comments

I’ve been sitting here with MSNBC on my office TV and have twice today seen a particular “Lean Forward” promotional spot in which Chris Matthews uses the phrase “American exceptionalsm” in a way that is both wrong and tendentious.

Strangely, this MSNBC spot isn’t available on YouTube, and some Birthers have claimed it was taken offline because Matthews appears (they say) to be granting the possibility of Obama’s foreign birth. That’s too conspiratorial for my taste, but yet it is remarkable that this ad is still running regularly without being available online. WorldNetDaily describes the ad:

“Sometimes I think the critics of the president are just clearly unfair when they say he doesn’t love this country,” says Chris Matthews, anchor of MSNBC’s “Hardball” program in one of the “Lean Forward” ads directed by Spike Lee.
“And here’s a guy of mixed background, and he said ‘Only in this country, my country, is this story possible.’ I think that was the greatest testament to American exceptionalism. I don’t think that you can say that in Japan or in China. You can’t go these countries and become Chinese.”
Then while pointing to the White House in the background, Matthews concludes by saying, “And look where he is.”

The first objection is this: Which critics are saying Obama “doesn’t love this country”? Can Chris Matthews produce a list of such people, with relevant quotations? But if Obama’s critics are saying this, isn’t the accusation in some sense fair?

“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” Obama told a cheering crowd on Oct. 29, 2008. If he loves America so much, why the need for fundamental transformation? How can you, on the one hand, be a patriotic believer in “American exceptionalism” and then expect people to cheer when you proclaim you are intent on “fundamentally transforming” America? There is a discordance between these two ideas.

Beyond that, however, Matthews seems to have a mistaken notion of what the phrase “American exceptionalism” actually means. Quoting Wikipedia:

American exceptionalism refers to the theory that the United States is qualitatively different from other states. In this view, America’s exceptionalism stems from its emergence from a revolution, becoming “the first new nation,” and developing a uniquely American ideology, based on liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism and laissez-faire. This observation can be traced to Alexis de Tocqueville, the first writer to describe the United States as “exceptional.” Historian Gordon Wood has argued, “Our beliefs in liberty, equality, constitutionalism, and the well-being of ordinary people came out of the Revolutionary era. So too did our idea that we Americans are a special people with a special destiny to lead the world toward liberty and democracy.”
The specific term “American exceptionalism” was first used in 1929 by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin chastising members of the American Communist Party for believing that America was independent of the Marxist laws of history “thanks to its natural resources, industrial capacity, and absence of rigid class distinctions.”

So if we accept the Wiki etymology of the phrase, it was Tocqueville who first wrote of the “exceptional” qualities of our nation, and this proved an obstacle to the ambitions of Stalin, who shrewdly perceived how “American exceptionalism” (and our citizens’ widespread belief in American exceptionalism) hindered Communist aims toward this country.

That isn’t what Matthews is talking about in the MSNBC promo, however. What he is talking about is one of the favorite themes of open-borders multiculturalists, who like to speak of America as a “propositional nation” — i.e., referencing Lincoln’s descripion in the Gettysburg Address of America as a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” According to advocates of the “propositional nation” theory, the key to American citizenship is whether one accedes to this egalitarian formula.

One can (and many have) criticized the “propositional nation” thesis, but my point is that Matthews has managed to conflate this idea with “American exceptionalism,” so that merely by the fact of being sired by a Kenyan — “mixed background,” as Matthews puts it — Obama becomes a symbol of that exceptionalism.

All of which is sort of an aside to the question of why MSNBC, which purports to be a news network, seems to have devoted itself to a politician’s re-election.

The Pappas-Palin Drama

Posted on 49 Comments

Last night I wrote a post at The American Spectator entitled, “Dear Governor Palin: Please Call Me,” an attempt to clear up a misunderstanding of an incident that transpired Friday while Sarah Palin was at the Iowa State Fair.

While the governor has not yet called, I have spoken to people familar with the situation who are aghast at how the Daily Caller’s Alex Pappas, Politico and the Spectator‘s Quin Hillyer have misinterpreted the incident. One of the people to whom I spoke was Michelle McCormick of Iowa for Palin, who was with the governor at the time she called Pappas to dispute a headline (which, it turns out, was from Fox Nation, not from the Daily Caller) suggesting that Palin had endorsed Mitt Romney.

Now, let’s get one thing clear up front: McCormick is among many Palin supporters who believe that she is going to announce a 2012 presidential campaign within a matter of weeks. I have gone on record as rejecting that belief as a delusion. However, there are enough people telling me not to rule out the possibility — and some of those are swearing up and down they definitely know she will run — that I’m beginning to question whether I’ve completely misread the tea leaves. So . . .

A headline appeared online suggesting that Palin had endorsed Romney, and Palin decided to personally intervene to correct the record. That much of the Palin-Pappas tale is true, and I think it may be highly suggestive that she is indeed seriously considering an entry into the 2012 field. What is false about the developing media version of the Palin-Pappas narrative, according to McCormick and others, is three things:

  1. Governor Palin did not personally dial up Pappas’s number. She asked around among her aides if anyone knew how to get in touch with Pappas. One member of her advance team, Jason Recher, had Pappas’s number, called him and then handed the phone to the governor.
  2. Governor Palin did not summon a Politico reporter to listen in on the call. Palin was in the middle of a gigantic crowd of people at the Iowa State Fair, and her half of the conversation may have been overheard by others. There was no way, amid the press of the throng, that anyone outside that swarm could have been summoned at all, and the idea that Palin would be doing favors for a Politico reporter is ridiculous.
  3. Governor Palin wasn’t screaming angrily at Pappas. Again, Palin was in the middle of a crowd, which was quite noisy, and if her voice was loud, it was because she was trying to make herself heard amid the hubub.

After the conversation was over, and Palin realized that the misleading headline wasn’t Pappas’s fault, she asked one of her aides to contact Pappas and apologize for the mistake. Pappas says that the aide did not actually apologize, but I have no idea what was said in their conversation, so I can’t speak to that. But Palin’s supporters are furious at Pappas for “whining” (note the quotation marks) about the incident, and incensed by Hillyer’s characterization of Palin’s behavior as that of a “difficult diva.”

Now the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin has jumped on the dogpile, accepting Hillyer’s characterization of the incident as gospel, and what is being lost amid all this unnecessary drama is the actual political news value: Sarah Palin is serious enough about a 2012 presidential bid that she evidently considered it an urgent matter to knock down any suggestion that she had endorsed another candidate.

UPDATE: Let me direct a word or two toward some of the people who are saying that it would be crazy for Palin to get into the 2012 field at this point, and impossible for her to win, if she did.

First, I’m inclined to agree, which was why I was willing to declare last night that anyone who still believes Palin will run is suffering from a True Believer delusion.

Second . . . eh, not so fast, buddy.

Dan Riehl is about the last person on earth I’d accuse of being a True Believer, and yet his own reading of tea leaves leads him to think that Palin is absolutely serious when she says she’s still considering a 2012 run. Knowing Dan like I know Dan, I consider that highly significant.

Furthermore, many people who are disparaging Palin’s chances are supporters of one or another of the current GOP candidates, and some of them are conspicuously aboard the Rick Perry bandwagon. But let me point you to a Tweet that Tony Lee of Human Events sent yesterday in which he suggests we may now learn how much of Perry’s victory over Kay Bailey Hutchison in last year’s GOP primary was due to Palin endorsing Perry. And then there’s some guy predicting that Perry’s campaign will “self-destruct” within a month.

For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been hearing from people who say that Perry is a lot weaker candidate than Perry’s supporters imagine. We will wait and see about that. There have also been people telling me that they expect the Bachmann campaign to “implode,” and we’ll wait and see about that, too.

But if Bachmann does implode, and/or the Perry machine proves to be less than the unstoppable conservative juggernaut it has been hyped up to be, then the GOP field could develop a vacuum of the kind that nature proverbially abhors. So it may be that Palin is preparing a contingency plan for a campaign just in case such a scenario develops.

If the mood strikes her and the opportunity seems right, she could announce her candidacy on short notice and then quickly mobilize such a contingency organization. The money from tens of thousands of small donors would come flooding in and at that point I, for one, would be unwilling to wager $20 against her chances of being the Republican nominee when all is said and done at Tampa next summer.

Should Sarah shock the world by running in 2012 and confound conventional wisdom by winning the nomination, there are many who contend that she could not possibly beat Obama in the general election. Yet those would be the same people who now say she won’t run at all, so why should we believe their forecasts then, after she will have already twice proven them wrong, first by deciding to run so late, and then by winning the nomination against their advice?

UPDATE II: Stacy Drake at Conservatives for Palin also communicated with Michelle McCormick to set the record straight. I am loath to blame my friend Quin Hillyer for this kerfuffle — he’s a Southern hothead like me, and perhaps too prone to quick judgments — while Alex Pappas is, after all, a recent University of Alabama graduate whose youth might excuse his unfortunate part in the drama. What I don’t understand is why other reporters aren’t seeing this as I do, namely as a tiny yet tangible clue that Palin is seriously considering a 2012 run.

Iowa Notebook: Romney Coming to Town; Pawlenty and the ‘Plausible Chance’ Trick

Posted on 22 Comments

DES MOINES, Iowa
Mitt Romney will be the featured guest at a “Road to the White House Republican House Party” in Des Moines this evening. That starts at 5 p.m. and then at 7 p.m. Tim Pawlenty has a rally in Ames. It’s a 45-minute drive from Des Moines to Ames, so as long as I leave the Romney event by 6, I’ll have plenty of time to get to the Pawlenty event. So those are my campaign events for today. ABC News notes Romney’s long absence from Iowa:

Romney has not spent the summer attending an endless series of campaign events like many of his fellow contenders (he’s been concentrating on fundraising) and he’s taken heat for staying a little too above-the-fray on important national issues. (He didn’t take a position on the debt ceiling deal, for example, until the last-minute.)
He’s also largely avoided the highways and dusty country roads of Iowa that candidates like Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Herman Cain have been crisscrossing for weeks. Romney’s last visit to Iowa was in May.

If you want know why Americans hate journalists, look no further than this story by Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman in Politico:

He’s spent a seven-figure sum and the bulk of his time on the campaign trail courting the Iowa grassroots. Operatives call his expansive Iowa organization the best in the state.
As the only mainstream Republican candidate actively competing in the Ames straw poll — thanks to Mitt Romney’s decision to skip the event and Rick Perry’s presidential race slow-walk—Tim Pawlenty may never have a better opportunity to break through in the 2012 campaign than this Saturday.
With so much firepower behind Pawlenty and so few candidates who have a plausible chance at coming out ahead, Hawkeye State politicos say Ames will be a potentially campaign-changing test of the Minnesotan’s strength.
But if Pawlenty fails to deliver, it will be a grim — and possibly fatal — omen for his underfunded presidential bid.

Who anointed Burns and Haberman with the authority to declare which Republicans are “mainstream” and “have a plausible chance”? Is it their place to decide that, e.g., Michele Bachmann is not a “mainstream Republican” and therefore doesn’t “have plausible chance”? There will be many thousands of Iowa Republicans at the Ames Straw Poll who will cast their ballots for candidates who evidently don’t merit the “mainstream” sobriquet which Burns and Haberman consider themselves uniquely fit to bestow.

And this “plausible chance” trick would not be nearly so insulting if we didn’t know in our hearts — and we do know it, don’t we? — that both Burns and Haberman (like practically everyone else at Politico) voted for Obama in 2008 and intend to vote for Obama again in 2012, so that we have partisan Democrats telling us which Republicans are “mainstream” and “plausible.” Meanwhile, here’s the lead of my latest column:

DES MOINES — Tim Albrecht likes to tell a joke about an Iowa Republican being asked whether he’s going to support a certain presidential candidate in the Ames Straw Poll. “I don’t know,” the Iowan replies. “I’ve only met him twice.”
The joke by Albrecht, spokesman for the state’s popular Republican Gov. Terry Branstad, refers to how accustomed Iowans are to being personally solicited for their support in this state whose first-in-the-nation caucuses have long been a crucial proving ground for presidential candidates. While most Americans go their entire lives without ever meeting a serious candidate for the nation’s highest office, campaigning here is a face-to-face business where voters expect to shake hands and talk directly with those who seek their votes.
That tradition of old-fashioned politicking is what the Ames Straw Poll is all about, which explains why some Iowa Republicans seem a bit miffed by Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s long-rumored entry into the 2012 presidential field. Last week I began calling him the “Phantom Menace” of Iowa because, like the sinister Sith of the “Star Wars” series, he seems omnipresent even though he is far away.  Ads promoting Perry’s candidacy have been running in fairly heavy rotation on Iowa TV recently, and his shadow campaign has been soliciting write-in votes for Saturday’s straw poll. However, the governor himself hasn’t yet stumped here, while the other GOP candidates have been frenetically crisscrossing the state imploring Iowans to “join me here in Ames,” as Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann says in  her own TV ads. . . .

Read the rest at The American Spectator. And while I make no claim to rate as a “mainstream Republican” on the Burns-Haberman Scale, I think there is a “plausible chance” you’ll hit the tip jar.





Just as a final note: I’m meeting today with Will Upton of Americans for Tax Reform, who flew into Des Moines today to attend a Wednesday morning meeting of Iowa conservative leaders. Will called me after he landed at the Des Moines Airport and reports that Mitt Romney was on his American Eagle commuter flight into town: “He was in coach with the rest of us!”

Oh — and Ladd Ehlinger Jr. is coming to town to meet with a potential client.


PREVIOUSLY:

Liberals Spinning S&P Credit Downgrade: BLAME IT ON THE REPUBLICANS!

Posted on 39 Comments

Nothing is more amazing than the ability of liberals — both politicians and “journalists” — to synchronize their lies. In the wake of Standard & Poors downgrading of the U.S. credit rating Friday, the Democrat-Media Complex has now forged a consensus that this had nothing to do with massive two-year binge of deficit spending embarked on by President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. No, it’s because Republicans and their Tea Party supporters are against tax increases:

Hartmann’s column, especially, illustrates how these left-wing agitprop campaigns work: The “Mainstream Media” ignore a million and one things that conservatives wish they’d pay attention to, but when liberals accuse reporters of ignoring something, the reporters — who are, of course, nearly all liberal — will jump to correct the perceived omission and will, in fact, often harp on this “unreported” angle to the exclusion of everything else.

Let us stipulate that (a) U.S. fiscal health wasn’t exactly robust when Obama became president, and (b) in a time of fiscal crisis, a steadfast opposition to tax increases doesn’t soothe the worries of the bond market, yet still the fact remains that the immediate cause of the current crisis was the incredible two-year Obama/Pelosi/Reid deficit spending binge. And Obama’s response to the debt-ceiling impasse — tax the rich! millionaires and billionaires! corporate jets! Republicans are coming to steal Granny’s Social Security check! — was immature, selfish and harmful.

Democrats don’t want to fix the problem, they want to score political points against Republicans. And they expect their liberal friends in the media to help them do it — a perfectly realistic expectation, given the fact that Barack Obama could only have become president with the willing assistance of his liberal friends in the media, who more or less anoninted him as the Democratic nominee the day he beat Hillary in the Iowa caucuses.

I’d imagine even some liberal reporters are now experiencing buyer’s remorse and — despite their profound instinctive loathing of Republicans — are sick and tired of watching Obama scapegoat others for his own incompetence.

Liberals hate Republicans and most reporters don’t know jack shit about economics, but they know failure when they see it, and Obama has proven to be an outright failure as president. One of these days, and the day might come very soon, reporters will start ignoring the White House spin machine and start reporting the truth. And then liberals will bitch, bitch, bitch about the “right-wing bias” of the media.

Jonah Goldberg, in Fine Form

Posted on 35 Comments

Worked up into a long-overdue rant:

Tom Friedman — who knows a bit about Hezbollah — calls the tea partiers the “Hezbollah faction” of the GOP bent on taking the country on a “suicide mission.” All over the place, conservative Republicans are “hostage takers” and “terrorists,” “terrorists” and “traitors.” They want to “end life as we know it on this planet,” says Nancy Pelosi. They are betraying the Founders, too. Chris Matthews all but signs up for the “Make an Ass of Yourself” contest at the State Fair. Joe Nocera writes today that “the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests.” Lord knows what Krugman and Olbermann have said.
Then last night, on the very day Gabby Giffords heroically returns to cast her first vote since that tragic attack seven months ago, the vice president of the United States calls the Republican party a bunch of terrorists. . . .

Read the whole thing. You can also read the Joe Nocera New York Times column that helped set off Goldberg’s rant.  Scott Whitlock at Newsbusters has video of Chris Matthews, in case you missed this:

“Why did [Obama] let this develop for six months…this drum roll of the Republicans saying, ‘We’ve got the baby. You don’t get the baby back unless you pay us?’ Why do you let the other side have the baby, to use kidnapping terms?”

Meanwhile, the supposed radical Tea Party terrorist plan passed the Senate 74-26. So three-quarters of senators are “hostage takers,”  including such fanatics as Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Al Franken, John Kerry, Debbie Stabenow . . .

Muslims: Don’t Hurt Their Feelings!

Posted on 19 Comments

For example, it hurts their feelings when an Australian court says they can’t have sex with 8-year-olds.

And it especially hurts their feelings when you suspect them of involvement with terrorism:

Right-wing websites quickly pointed the finger at “jihadis,” and Pamela Geller, publisher of the website Atlas Shrugs and executive director of Stop Islamization of America, wrote on her site: “You can ignore jihad, but you cannot avoid the consequences of ignoring jihad.”
Counter-terrorism experts soon weighed in, implicating Al Qaeda.

Pamela Geller gives it right back at ’em. Why do none of these oh-so-sensitive liberals ever worry about  hurting Pamela’s feelings?

Obligatory ‘Chris Matthews Says Something Stupid’ Video Post

Posted on 7 Comments

Richard McEnroe at Three Beers Later called attention to this yesterday:

David Corn says “the Republicans have depicted themselves as hostage-takers who are ready to blow things up and the public doesn’t like this” — which is both untrue and stupid. Pat Buchanan then attempted to defend Republicans and the Tea Party movement.

This evidently inspired Chris Matthews to re-assert his claim to championship of the Liberal Stupidity Derby:

“The whole idea is to separate this idea of ideological warfare you [i.e., Buchanan] enjoy from the need to keep the government from default. You seem to be one of the happy Indians. By the way, the tea partiers, the original ones, dressed up like Indians and put on a little show. These guys are running around burning down houses. It’s a different kind of tea party,”

Whatever you think of the “Cut, Cap and Balance” bill that passed the House yesterday, it is at least something. Obama’s got nothing, and Obama’s spokesman Jay Carney says nothing is better than something.