The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Malaysians, and Other Foreigners I Might Be Able to Give a Damn About, If You Could Pay Me $389,724.70 to Care

Posted on | March 2, 2013 | 24 Comments

Bar Refaeli, a key element of Israel’s foreign-policy strategy

(CONTENT ADVISORY: This post contains strong language, generic xenophobia and brutal cynicism.)

After having briefly remarked — “Damn. Just . . . Damn.” — last night about this story, I’ve had a few conversations with friends, and taken time to reflect on the shocking news that Josh Trevino collected $389,724.70 over a three-year span from the government of Malaysia, “its ruling party, or interests closely aligned with either” to operate a sort of blogospheric pay-for-play P.R. racket.

The obvious response: King Abdul, call me.

We could do business, Your Highness. 

Could I suggest TheOtherKingAbdul.com? For the right price . . .

These so-called “human rights groups” claiming that your constitutional monarchy is actually a corrupt and brutal authoritarian regime?

Lies, all lies.

For a modest sum, perhaps $389,724.70, complete and slavishly favorable coverage of the government of Malaysia, “its ruling party, or interests closely aligned with either” could be arranged. Just say the word — and, of course, sign the check — and I’ll be all over it like flies buzzing around the bloated corpse of an “opposition leader” who met with an unfortunate machete accident, sources say.

This is the real lesson for students in the emerging field of “Blogging Ethics”: If you’re going to sell out to shady foreign interests, don’t sell out cheap. Also, spend time improving your money-laundering techniques so that, instead of “Malaysian kickbacks,” your extra income is reported as “bowling tournament prize.”

Normally, as a New Media consultant/professional bowler, I charge clients top dollar for that kind of advice. But for you, King Abdul, this first “strategy memo” is free — or at least, I’ll put it on your tab for now. Until the check clears.

 Basically, bloggers can be divided into two categories:

  1. Bloggers who would sell out to Malaysia for $389,724.70; and
  2. Bloggers who are never gonna get that kind of offer.

Say what you will about Josh Trevino and his Malaysian benefactors, they’ve solved the punchline shortage. And I’m sure the whole story will be told in Josh Trevino’s forthcoming tell-all memoir, How to Become Topic of the Day on MSNBC and Also the Subject of a Hilarious 10-Minute Parody Segment on The Colbert Report.

More seriously — but only slightly more seriously — the question must be asked: “Did this pay-for-play scheme actually do anything for the Malaysian regime?”

What percentage of Americans, or how many members of Congress, could find Kuala Lumpur on a map, assuming they even knew that Kuala Lumpur was the capital of Malaysia? (Which I didn’t, until I Googled it just now.) When was the last time you thought about Malaysia, if ever?

And if you, the political-news junkies who spend your weekends reading blogs, don’t know anything about Malaysia — much less care anything about Malaysia — exactly what harm was done by Josh Trevino hustling King Abdul’s buddies for $389,724.70 with the ridiculous promise that somebody might actually read any of that stuff? Such was the subject of an e-mail I sent to friends today:

This is just a fascinating multi-layered onion of a story.
Here’s my thing: Malaysia? Malaysia?
Was no one even the slightest bit suspicious when, out of a clear blue sky, a bunch of Republican pundits started offering themselves as experts on Malaysia?
The reason that this question strikes me so hard is that I’m someone who has spent the past five years of his life neck-deep in the conservative blogosphere and never once did I notice anybody of any consequence blogging about Malaysia. So the idea that the Malaysian regime would pay nearly $400,000 to Trevino in return for a PR operation that didn’t make a ripple in my consciousness . . . I dunno. The value-added of this particular pay-for-play deal might have made sense from the perspective of the client, but I just don’t see it.
Anyway, the sudden appearance of these Johnny-come-lately Malaysian experts in rightward blogworld should have triggered suspicions, and perhaps would have done so, except for the fact that NOBODY NOTICED THIS HIRED FLACK-WORK BECAUSE NOBODY IN AMERICA GIVES A DAMN ABOUT MALAYSIA.
If you told the average American that the president of Malaysia was a ruthless bloodthirsty Islamo-Marxist cannibal named Ceausescu Amin Mengistu, the typical American would respond: “Malaysia? Never heard of it. How ’bout that Lakers game last night, huh?”
Good luck trying to get Americans to care about foreign countries that we aren’t at war with. If it weren’t for Bar Refaeli, we’d probably ignore Israel, and Malaysia doesn’t have any international super-models.
Hell, nobody even cares about The Canadian Menace that has been looming on our northern border all these years.
But for $400,000, I’d certainly be willing to try to stir something up.
— RSM

Therefore, insofar as I have any right to be indignant about Josh Trevino’s Excellent Scheme, it’s that I lacked the shameless greed and/or marketing genius necessary to keep a straight face while pretending to give a flying fuck about a Third World country whose capital city sounds like a comical character in a Willy Wonka movie.

And, in case any authoritarian regimes with P.R. problems are reading this, I remind you of the Five Most Important Words in the English Language: Hit the freaking tip jar!




 

UPDATE: This left-wing blog headline is grossly inaccurate:

Former Third-World Nation
Hires Third-Rate Pundits

Malaysia is obviously still Third World, or otherwise they’d have famous international super-models. And, in a market-based economy, $389,724.70 is a helluva lot more than “third-rate” pay in the blogosphere.

By the way, what’s the going rate for punditry at Firedoglake? King Abdul might have some cash to spare.

UPDATE II: James Joyner’s headline:

Malaysia Buys Bloggers,
Forgets to Haggle Over Price

Dr. Joyner, how do you know they didn’t haggle? Are you privy to some inside knowledge of the bidding process? Those questions aside — and ignoring the silly “full disclosure,” as if every free beer is a credibility-destroying ethical compromise — Dr. Joyner’s bottom-line analysis parallels my own:

Why would the government of Malaysia pay out some half million dollars to Trevino and his band of merry contractors to crank out content about Malaysia and post them to readerships that couldn’t point out Malaysia on a map? Aren’t there actual Malaysia experts who would be able to write credibly on the matter who hold views sympathetic to the government?

However embarrassing these revelations may be, having the price become a matter of public record will help establish a market value for all future secretive pay-for-play operations. If you’re offered a dime less than $389,724.70 by an obscure authoritarian regime trying to buy some Internet publicity, you’re being insulted: Sub-Trevino wages.

Linked (or more accurately, juxtaposed) by Ed Driscoll.

 

Category: Foreigners

CPAC 2014 Idea

Posted on | March 2, 2013 | 40 Comments

by Smitty

This year’s CPAC is a done deal, with the usual kerfuffles about groups that are too sexuality-centric (GOProud) and too controversial (Pamela Geller). I’d favor an improvement in the Rules of Engagement that supports bringing in more people with whom I don’t necessarily agree, as long as there are ground rules about how we all disagree agreeably. If you really think the Apollo moonshot was a hoax, OK, set up your table. Just don’t be disruptive. As an academic exercise, I’d love to hear a full exposition on how Sharia finance works, and think it a shame that anyone feels unwelcome.

Then again, I’m not an organizer for the event. Maybe a follow-on event, DPAC, could be staged for those deemed too exotic, replete with a talk from Chopra.

More seriously, there are guys like Reynolds, Jacobson, Althouse, and Volokh who would be both great to meet, and wonderful to hear. Specific topics of interest:

  • Have the Precious Bodily Fluids of the SCOTUS been terminally polluted?
  • Should the entire Department of Justice be cashiered?
  • If we started now, could we re-ratify the Constitution in 2037 for its 250th anniversary, legitimizing (some of) the Progressive drift over the last century, so that conservatives can relax?

via Mind Numbed Robot

Category: CPAC

Women: Can’t Live With Them, Can’t Live With ‘Em

Posted on | March 2, 2013 | 38 Comments

by Smitty

The title is about as negative as I ever get about women while having a conversation. It’s symmetric about the gender line, and I hope the ladies appropriate it as well. It relieves the very real tension about the gender divide in a joking way that doesn’t widen the gap.

All that is a lead-in to saying that Steven Crowder, again, is spot-on here:

When men get together, they moan about their wives. The commentary provided on marriage between groups of men, is typically one from a viewpoint that assumes marriage to be life’s greatest, most unfun mistake. Not only is it often as disingenuous as Joe Biden’s hairline, but it’s incredibly harmful.
Firstly, there may be some people out there who actually believe their wife to merely be the “old ball and chain.” To you I say… you are a loser. Not only are you a loser for dishonoring the woman who is now an extension of yourself, but you’re a loser for picking someone who you hate having to come home to every night. What kind of an idiot are you to marry a person that you think is an absolute moron?
These same people are shocked when I don’t chime in on their urinate-and-moan-fests regarding their old maids. Yeah, imagine that!

There are some amusing words, like Hausdrachen, that point to the universality of spousal complaints, but I’ll double down on Steven’s conclusion: grow up. Trashing other people in general, and one’s spouse in particular, is a sign of immaturity. That’s why, when I hear other men do that, I trot out this post’s title. It’s good to acknowledge what was said, and hint at a bit of empathy, without delving into sympathy. Because then we’re just perpetuating a bad thing.

Category: Culture

Who Andrew Breitbart Was

Posted on | March 1, 2013 | 27 Comments

P.J. O’Rourke encounters Andrew Breitbart at the
Manchester, N.H., Radisson Bar, Saturday, Jan. 7, 2012

In May 2007, I interviewed Andrew Breitbart while he was working — doing his shift as an editor at the Drudge Report — at the D.C. offices of Reason magazine, and described how he worked and why he did it:

His computer pings with every new e-mail. His cell phone rings with calls from friends. Distractions surround Andrew Breitbart. Yet he remains focused on the latest happenings from around the world, flowing into his laptop computer via a half-dozen wire services and other news sources.
A self-described “news addict,” the 38-year-old Californian sips a Mountain Dew as he scans the latest headlines and talks about his journey from being a stereotypical Generation X slacker to being on the cutting edge of the 21st-century information revolution. . . .
“I’m a news addict, news aficionado who, instead of watching ‘Sesame Street’ growing up, would watch the local news. And I’d watch the 4:30 news, then I’d watch the 5 o’clock news, then I’d watch the 6 o’clock news, then I’d watch the national news at 6:30. . . . I was such a voracious news consumer.”

You can read the whole thing. There have been multiple tributes to Andrew today, the one year anniversary of his shockingly sudden death at age 43. Professor Glenn Reynolds has a round-up at Instapundit.

It’s important to remember, I think, that Breitbart was a self-professed “news addict” — not a politics addict or still less a Republican Party addict, which is what his enemies would very much love to demonize him as having been.

Any intelligent “news addict” (and Breitbart was extraordinarly intelligent) who approaches the business from an outsider’s perspective cannot help but observe the herd instinct of the media, and resent it: “Hey, look, big media — over here! There’s an interesting story you missed because it doesn’t fit your prefabricated template!”

 That’s really what it’s about. The fact that the big media’s herd instinct, insofar as it touches politics, is demonstrably about 90% partisan Democrat or ideologically liberal — that’s the niche Breitbart was filling, and also the source of his Righteous Indignation. But it’s wrong for the animals in the media herd to make that political difference a motive to smear Breitbart as they did during his life and as they have continued to do after his death.

Whose bias is the real problem here?

To assert that Breitbart’s liberal critics hated him for something other than politics is to tell a lie, just as it was a lie for liberals to smear the Tea Party as “racist.”

At some point, the cumulative weight of such dishonesty becomes a negative verdict on the credibility of those who tell these lies. And the Democrat-Media Complex, by its incessant partisan cheerleading, becomes responsible for the policy failures of the party whose propaganda it delivers as if it were Neutral Objective Fact.

Well, I need to hurry up and post this before midnight, and I’ll come back later to extend it with updates and links to other tributes, but I just had to get that off my chest first. Right now, frankly, I’m kind of depressed by this news:

A range of mainstream American publications printed paid propaganda for the government of Malaysia, much of it focused on the campaign against a pro-democracy figure there.
The payments to conservative American opinion writers — whose work appeared in outlets from the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner to the Washington Times to National Review and RedState — emerged in a filing this week to the Department of Justice. The filing under the Foreign Agent Registration Act outlines a campaign spanning May 2008 to April 2011 and led by Joshua Trevino, a conservative pundit, who received $389,724.70 under the contract and paid smaller sums to a series of conservative writers.
According to Trevino’s belated federal filing, the interests paying Trevino were in fact the government of Malaysia, “its ruling party, or interests closely aligned with either.” . . .

You can read the whole thing, and all I’ve got to say about it is, damn. Just . . . damn.

UPDATE: Rick Bulow makes an important point:

Like Andrew said at CPAC last year, “If you’re not in that bunker because you’re not satisfied with a certain candidate, more than shame on you! You’re on the other side!”

This is a point that I’ve certainly come to appreciate — and I think all of us should appreciate more — in the past year. During the long primary campaign, some conservatives got so into the “Anybody But Mitt” mindset that they simply couldn’t let it go. In the four months since Election Day, there has been an endless round of finger-pointing and told-ya-so’s that haven’t done anything useful toward organizing victory or, at least, staunching the bleeding.

So, yeah — get in the fight, or you’re on the other side.

UPDATE II: At the annual CPAC Blog Bash last year, the National Bloggers Club awarded Andrew Breitbart the “Changing the Narrative” Award — the only award he ever received for his work as a journalist. This year and henceforth it will be known as Andrew Breitbart’s Changing the Narrative Award.

UPDATE III: Dana Loesch remembers:

It was easy to be brave with Andrew around. People drew from his courage when theirs had dissipated. He likened himself to a rodeo clown, of all things. I want to share something for which I’ve never gotten to thank him, which has really bothered me. . . .

You really, really need to read the whole thing. As was said of a great general, he saw the whole field.

 

Category: Andrew Breitbart

The _____ Of Things To ____

Posted on | March 1, 2013 | 7 Comments

by Smitty

‘Tis so sweet to trust in _____
Just to take ___ at his word.
Just to rest upon his ______.
And to know, “Thus _____ the _____.”


I, for one really feel that I’m getting my _____’s worth from my government.

Category: humor

‘He Would Fain Have Had It’

Posted on | March 1, 2013 | 35 Comments

“Obama: Anatomy of a World Leader,” by Alex Gray (detail)

“I can as well be hanged as tell the manner of it. It was mere foolery. I did not mark it. I saw Mark Antony offer him a crown (yet ’twas not a crown neither, ’twas one of these coronets) and, as I told you, he put it by once — but, for all that, to my thinking, he would fain have had it. Then he offered it to him again, then he put it by again — but, to my thinking, he was very loath to lay his fingers off it. And then he offered it the third time. He put it the third time by. And still, as he refused it, the rabblement hooted and clapped their chapped hands and threw up their sweaty night-caps and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Caesar refused the crown that it had almost choked Caesar — for he swooned and fell down at it. And for mine own part, I durst not laugh for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air.”
— Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene 2

“President Obama sometimes feels strangely compelled to indicate that he is not the Master of America.”
— James Poulos, Forbes

We have come to expect these protestations of helpless impotence when Dear Leader does not get his way:

“Jessica, I am not a dictator, I’m the president,” he said while speaking to reporters in the White House Press Briefing Room. “Ultimately, if Mitch McConnell or John Boehner say we need to go to catch a plane, I can’t have Secret Service block the doorway.”

The stenography pool known as the White House press corps is busy chiseling his immortal words into stone, even as Obama offends sci-fi fans by confusing the Vulcan mind-meld (Star Trek) with “Jedi mind tricks” (Star Wars). But of course, his apologists would plead Obama’s underprivileged Indonesian upbringing as an excuse.

Did I mention he once ate a dog?

This is how it is with a Cult of Personality: Everything must always be interpreted in favor of Dear Leader. His exotic background — the subject of his best-selling memoir, Dreams From My Father — can only be praised and celebrated. One is not allowed to interpret the same set of facts as potential evidence that Dear Leader is out of touch with the people he presumes to lead. Any such interpretation is raaaaacist, as is just about any other imaginable criticism of Dear Leader.

This week, Bob Woodward accidentally joined the hate-mob, and if he doesn’t straighten up, he might get listed on the SPLC map right next to the Family Research Council.

When Obama succeeds (and these are always political successes), his press-corps fanboys praise him as transcendent Lightworker — omniscient, super-human, his powers beyond the capacity of mere words to describe — but when Obama fails (and these are always policy failures) his media hagiographers attribute this to the infinite evil of his enemies. And on those rare occasions when Obama’s policy failures are also political failures, as with the allegedly cataclysmic “sequester” cuts that don’t really bother anyone, his journalistic idolators erupt in a fury of confusion.

“And for mine own part, I durst not laugh for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air.”

 

 

UPDATE (Smitty): welcome, Instapundit readers!

Category: Barack Obama

Rising GOP Rock Star Alert:
Susan Stimpson Brings It

Posted on | March 1, 2013 | 20 Comments

by Smitty

Virginia is for lovers. . .of elections. There is a state convention in Richmond in May, to select the GOP slate for this November’s races for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Attorney General.

The shy, retiring Ken Cuccinelli managed to overcome his introversion and clear the decks for the Gubernatorial race. Attorney General has two hard-chargers looking to carry on The Cooch’s tradition of staunchly defending liberty.

The action, then, is at the Lieutenant Governor level, where there are seven (7) candidates. Last night, there was a forum. Some candidates had surrogates speak, others offered their stump speeches, but there was one who cut right to the chase about McDonnell’s Folly:

It turns out that her other half is a retired Officer of Marines. Having been raised a military brat myself, one can attest that active duty spouses are made of stern stuff. When anyone retires from a full active duty career, it is very highly likely that the first person thanked at the retirement ceremony is one tough-as-nails blessing of a spouse. The chops that held down the homefront are evidenced by her record as Chairman, Stafford County Board of Supervisors. She is clearly packin’ the gear:

  • Cut overall real-estate taxes 3 years in a row, 7 cents below the equalized rate ($11M)
  • Abolished the business tax (BPOL)
  • Reduced the boat tax
  • Zero’d out the Rt 17 tax district
  • Eliminated Falmouth/George Washington District Impact Fees
  • In 2010, 2nd consecutive budget less than the year before (not done since 1965)
  • Rolled back general admin staff to 2004 levels

Her speech was a rousing call to conservative action, covering her record and inquiring just what McDonell was on about with the tax hike. None of the other candidates in attendance went anywhere near that elephant in the room, which was surprising. One would have expected at least the other two in attendance to get beyond their stump speeches and say something, anything about what appears a colossal Left turn.

The position of Lieutenant Governor is substantially a ceremonial one, but an important means of raising visibility. Virginia’s LtGov race this year is an embarrassment of riches: they’re all great candidates, and one wishes a composite of all of them were possible. Such would be a conservative juggernaut.

I’m not certain of all the rules at the May convention, but I guess it’s three rounds, dropping the bottom two finishers, until the final three contestants have some kind of steel cage match to see who makes the ballot. Good times.

Category: Virginia

Harvard Abandons America (Or: Ted Kaczynski Is Not ‘Anti-Intellectual’)

Posted on | March 1, 2013 | 30 Comments

What has been well-known for years is now official policy: Conservatives need not apply at Harvard University.

This is really full-circle Back to the Future stuff, because the American conservative movement can be said to have properly begun in 1951 with the publication of William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale, which exposed in detail for the first time the Ivy League elite’s embrace of collectivism and abandonment of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Today’s near-totalitarian hegemony of the Left in academia began as toleration (under the rubric of “academic freedom,” an attitude Buckley rightly described as a “superstition”) of what were then the unpopular beliefs of a marginal fringe of atheists, socialists and other disgruntled misfits. The liberal fetish of “tolerance” made elite campuses a soft target for radicals in the 1960s, and radicalism became dominant in subsequent decades as Marxists undertook The Long March through the institutions.

While the Left had invoked “academic freedom” to defend themselves in  the early years of the Cold War, however, this “tolerance” has been systematically denied to opponents of the Left now that the erstwhile dissenters are firmly ensconced as the regnant arbiters of orthodoxy. In 1987, Allan Bloom surveyed the encroaching nihilism in The Closing of the American Mind and, by 1991, Dinesh D’Souza was able to describe political correctness as a ubiquitous campus phenomenon in Illiberal Education.

Now the staff of the Harvard Crimson sniffs that the university’s critics are attempting “to curry favor with the more anti-intellectual members of our body politic” — i.e., anyone who is critical of Harvard is anti-intellectual, Q.E.D.

There has been a trickle-down effect from the radical takeover of elite academia, in large part because graduate schools of the humanities and social sciences are producing more Tenured Radicals than the faculty of elite universities can employ. Thus, we find Professor Erik Loomis, eminent expert on the gay sex lives of anarchist lumberjacks, struggling to survive on a pittance as an untenured assistant at the University of Rhode Island.

This trickle-down radicalism first came to my attention when Orit Sklar and Ruth Malhotra were forced to sue Georgia Tech to protect their First Amendment rights against a totalitarian “speech code” regime.

Georgia Tech! Radical gays and militant Muslims bullying a Christian and a Jew at Georgia Tech?

My uncle attended Georgia Tech. Being a native Atlantan, I had trouble imagining this engineering school that UGA alum Lewis Grizzard always jokingly called the “North Avenue Trade School” — perhaps most famous for its proximity to The Varisity drive-in — could have been taken over by political correctness. Yet here were Orit and Ruth being terrorized by campus radicals for refusing to accept the administration’s Orwellian speech-code policies. What we have witnessed in American intellectual life the past half-century is a top-down revolution that seeks to impose on the nation a homogeneity of opinion, calling to mind one of Buckley’s cogent observations:

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”
– William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)

Faced with the iron grip of radicalism on the country’s most prestigious institutions, we see that the cherished tolerance of “academic freedom” Buckley so long ago described has been replaced by its exact opposite, as prophesied by Marxist academic Herbert Marcuse in 1965:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.

Thus, whereas Ortega y Gassett in 1932 had warned of The Revolt of the Masses, we are instead today confronted by the result of what Christopher Lasch in 1996 described as The Revolt of the Elites. David French, the Harvard-educated attorney who defended the rights of Orit Sklar and Ruth Malhotra, reflects on the current situation:

[T]he idea that conservatives who attend Harvard have some kind of “dread of academia” is similarly amusing. No, my conservative classmates and I attended Harvard in large part because we were seeking an academic challenge, because we wanted to experience life at allegedly the best academic institution in the world. We did not bring anti-intellectualism to Harvard; anti-intellectualism was inflicted on us. . . .
While there were some bad days, I simply refuse to believe that we conservatives should abandon an almost 400-year-old American institution — arguably the most important academic institution in the world — to one side of the political, cultural, and religious debate.

Who has abandoned whom, David? Isn’t this rather like chastising Israelis for not supporting Hamas? Could Harvard — which purged Larry Summers as too “conservative” for its tastes — be any more explicit in its hostility to dissent?

Why should conservative parents spend $52,650 a year to send their children to be indoctrinated by the Marxist faculty of Harvard, when they could instead send their children to Hillsdale College for $21,390 a year? For that matter, if bright young people have sufficient confidence in their own ability that they don’t insecurely crave the imprimatur of elite credentials, why not just save all that private tuition money and attend a state university?

It’s hard to imagine anyone dreams of boasting that their child attended Harvard, alma mater of the Unabomber.

(By the way, the pharisaical editors of the Harvard Crimson might notice that I’ve cited the titles of a few books. Anyone care to bet that none of the fanatical ignoramuses have ever read any of those books? Also, just for good measure, permit me to recommend The Higher Education Bubble, by some guy who went to Yale Law.)

Update (Smitty): welcome, Instapundit readers!

 

 


Category: Education, Intellectuals
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