The Other McCain

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

BREAKING NEWS: Dan Rather Is Still Alive, Imagines Someone Gives a Damn

Posted on | February 23, 2013 | 22 Comments

Call someone who’ll listen
And might give a damn . . .
But don’t you come around here
Handing me none of your lies.
Here’s a quarter,
Call someone who cares.

It may be necessary to remind younger readers that there was once a guy named Dan Rather, who worked at CBS News and was considered kind of important. Then in the middle of the 2004 election campaign, Rather decided to recycle a stale, bogus smear against President Bush, got caught, and was ushered off the national network platform he had disgraced for decades by his dishonest partisan bias. The Dan Rather file at Newsbusters is extensive.

So now, via Twitchy, we get this sermonette from Disgraced Dan:

“Good reporting and sourcing is in steep decline . . . We now have the new Internet . . . It remains so susceptible to manipulation, deception and distraction that it allows lies to get started and then spread like mildew in a damp basement.”

The Dan Rather “fake but accurate” threshold is so high, eh? I think our old buddy Dan needs a little Travis Tritt theme music:

 

Category: Media Bias

What Coordinated Messaging Looks Like

Posted on | February 23, 2013 | 11 Comments

The Left does this “Meme of the Day” trick all the time, but I thought this example (via Memeorandum) was particularly obvious:

House Republicans Strip Protections From
LGBT Victims In New Violence Against Women Act
— Think Progress

Top Dems Reject House GOP’s Violence
Against Women Act: ‘Simply Unacceptable’
— Talking Points Memo

VAWA 2013: House GOP Unveils Bill With No
LGBT Protections, Modified Tribal Provision
— Huffington Post

And further coverage by  MSNBC, Taylor Marsh, The Democratic Daily, Rachel Maddow, Booman Tribune and Daily Kos.

Andrew Breitbart loved to use the term “narrative” to describe how liberals deliberately control the media message for political purposes. Most of the time, it’s not a conspiracy, it’s a consensus. (The media votes 89% Democrat.) But every once in a while, you see the same message simultaneously transmitted in nearly exact terms by so many outlets . .. Yeah, the polite term is “coordinated messaging.”

James Carville famously observed that if you see a turtle on top of a fence post, you know it didn’t crawl up there by itself.

Just sayin’ . . .

 

Category: Media Bias

Progressive Tax-Exempt Group’s Secret Plan to ‘Eviscerate,’ ‘Cripple’ GOP

Posted on | February 23, 2013 | 19 Comments

Blueprint NC is “a nonprofit that coordinates the activities of liberal-leaning nonprofits” in North Carolina and when this 501(c) group’s communications director Stephanie Bass forwarded a strategy memo to member organizations, she included a disclaimer:

“CONFIDENTIAL to Blueprint, so please be careful — share with your boards and appropriate staff, but not the whole world.”

Oops. The memo got leaked to reporter Mark Binker at WRAL in Raleigh. The contents are quite disturbing and clearly partisan:

“The most effective way to mitigate the worst legislation is to weaken our opponents’ ability to govern by crippling their leaders (McCrory, Tillis, Berger, etc…)” the memo reads, referring to the governor, House Speaker Thom Tillis and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger.
The memo goes on to describe a “potential two-year vision” during which the groups would “eviscerate the leadership and weaken their ability to govern.”

Matt Vespa at PJ Tatler has many more details on the shocking partisanship carried out by this tax-exempt 501 (c)(3) group.

Let me bring this a little closer to home for regular readers: Why do you think I’ve devoted so much coverage to Bill Schmalfeldt’s relentless harassment of Lee Stranahan?

Perhaps a better question: Do you suppose Stranahan was randomly selected for this harassment? Can’t you see that Lee’s association with Breitbart.com is the motive for the attacks on him, and isn’t it obvious that this is part of a much larger strategy by the Left to discredit, suppress or silence conservative journalists?

Thanks to journalists like Mark Binker and Matt Vespa, we know how Blueprint NC orchestrated an effort to “cripple” and “eviscerate” Republicans in North Carolina, but how many strategy memos like this — how many conference calls and private e-mails — never leak out of their “confidential” channels? And if the Left can shut down Lee Stranahan, what’s to stop them from shutting down Matt Binker or Matt Vespa or anyone else they decide to target?

People need to wake up to what’s really going on. The Left isn’t just trying to win elections and pass legislation. The Left has totalitarian ambitions to destroy all opposition and silence all dissent.

 

Category: Democrats, Journalism, North Carolina, Progressivism

Rule 5 and Immigration Policy

Posted on | February 23, 2013 | 17 Comments

Years ago, I propounded Rule 5 — “Everybody Loves a Pretty Girl” — as one of the secrets of blogging success. And I have also stipulated that, despite my somewhere-to-the-right-of-Tom-Tancredo stance against illegal immigration, I’m firmly opposed to a crackdown on beauty queens who have overstayed their visas: Bring me your tired, your poor, your Miss Universe contestants yearning to breathe free.

So . . . some people don’t seem to appreciate the humor in that.

“Tough room,” as they say.

Category: humor, Immigration, Rule 5

Dangerous Video Could Trigger Another Great Awakening If Too Many View

Posted on | February 23, 2013 | 36 Comments

by Smitty

This is lengthy, but worth your time, especially the first 38 minutes or so:

Positive arguments given by Dr. Craig include that God is the best explanation:

  1. why anything at all exists,
  2. for the origin of the universe,
  3. the applicability of mathematics to the physical world,
  4. for the fine tuning of the universe for intelligent life,
  5. intentional states of consciousness in the world,
  6. of objective moral values and duties in the world,
  7. of the historical facts concerning Jesus’ resurrection,
  8. of God’s ability to be personally known and experienced.

The first six are rather wonky, the seventh is more historical, and the final point is crucial for the discussion to be more than abstract.

The atheist opponent, Dr. Rosenberg immediately tries to alter the terms of the debate. The debate is not about theism; the debate is about whether faith is nuts. Watch the whole thing when you have a chance. Dr. Rosenberg seems consumed with the Problem of Evil, especially in the case of the Holocaust. I guess if I was Dr. Craig, I would have pointed out that the last century’s Holocaust was by no means the first to occur to the Jews, as a reading of the Old Testament shows.

As for Dr. Rosenberg’s arithmetic argument, he seems to have happened upon a possible model for angelic beings, other than Lucifer & cohort.

Category: Uncategorized

Our Homogenous Elite

Posted on | February 22, 2013 | 45 Comments

If you’ve spent much time around the Washington, D.C., political establishment, you know how rare it is to encounter anyone there who might be what folks down home would call “a character.” Colorful people with interesting tales to tell — and interesting ways of telling them — are not common among Capitol Hill staffers, advocacy-group administrators, think-tank “senior fellows” and so forth.

D.C. is overcrowded with straight-A students, valedictorians, and every other type of book-smart goody-two-shoes who ever got beat up for his lunch money in grade school. Even newsrooms, once a bastion of motley hell-raisers and assorted eccentrics, are relatively tame collections of apple-polishing honor students in D.C.

You only notice this, however, if you come to D.C. after having worked somewhere else. I had more than a decade of small-town journalism under my belt before I came to Washington in 1997, so I noticed the weird conformity of the place, the general sameness of background that typifies bureaucratic personalities. However, most of the apparatchik class have never worked anywhere else: They interned in D.C. while in college, came to work in Washington immediately after graduation, and therefore lack any useful perspective on what life is like outside the bubble. Megan McArdle has a long essay on the subject today:

Since I moved to Washington, I have had series of extraordinary conversations with Washington journalists and policy analysts, in which I remark upon some perfectly ordinary facet of working class, or even business class life, only to have this revelation met with amazement. . . .
Then there was the time I responded to the now-standard lament that graduates of elite schools tend to gravitate to banking and consulting by pointing out that traditional management rotation programs frequently involve less-than-glamorous stints in line jobs; one of my friends from business school ended up running a call center for a telecoms firm. Another very smart, very wonky person who I deeply respect argued that this was an idiotic misuse of an elite MBA, for both the company and the MBA. Which is just 100% wrong. It is not a waste to have a smart, well-educated person in telecoms management. And senior executives at a telecom should have run a call center, or done something very similar: that’s where you learn to understand your customers, and the core challenges of your business.
But many of the mandarins have never worked for a business at all, except for a think tank, the government, a media organization, or a school–places that more or less deliberately shield their content producers from the money side of things. There is nothing wrong with any of these places, but culturally and operationally they’re very different from pretty much any other sort of institution. I don’t myself claim to understand how most businesses work, but having switched from business to media, I’m aware of how different they can be. . . .

Read the whole thing, because if she hasn’t hit the nail squarely on the head, Megan has certainly come very close to capturing the nature of the strange insularity in environments where, unless you have a certain degree from one of a handful of super-elite schools, don’t even bother applying. In other words, if you weren’t on the academic fast-track by seventh grade, or if at any time since seventh grade you stepped off the treadmill of hyper-achievement, there are certain positions which no amount of native smarts or hard work — or even any of the manipulative strategic-friendship tactics euphemistically called “networking” — can ever enable you to reach. If you didn’t graduate from Harvard/Yale/Princeton and land a certain job right out of school . . . Well, you can’t get there from here.

And this explains the homogeneity: All of the people in elite environments got there by jumping through the same set of hoops, and this has the effect of eliminating non-conformists.

Back in the day when Megan McArdle wrote for The Atlantic Monthly, I pointed out that she was practically the only one there who didn’t have Harvard on her resumé. Her background is Penn and U. Chicago, both top-notch schools, but . . . not Harvard.

IYKWIMAITYD.

Look, most people would think of a D.C.-based journalist like Dave Weigel as a certified member of the elite. Weigel attended Northwestern University, which has a highly-regarded journalism school and where annual tuition is $43,380. And yet, by D.C. standards, Weigel is a blue-collar plebian. He didn’t go to an Ivy League school, and thus is unlike Matthew Yglesias (Harvard), Ross Douthat (Harvard), and Josh Marshall (Princeton). Perhaps the greatest mystery in D.C. journalism is how Ezra Klein became godfather of the Juice Box Mafia despite having attended lowly UCLA.

Is the homogeneity of the elite a problem? Is there anything, policy-wise, that can or should be done to remedy it?

Well, as a proud alumnus of Jacksonvile (Ala.) State University, it would be an honor to be asked to address such lofty questions by anyone in a position to pay me to answer it, or who might have the influence to give my answer any practical effect. As it is, however, answering the Big Picture questions is above my pay-grade, and it would be ridiculously pretentious for me to think otherwise.

What I can do is to describe the situation, or at least call your attention to those who describe it as well as does Megan McArdle:

As I say, the mandarins are in many senses deserving: they work very hard, and they are very smart. But there is one important thing they do not know, which is what it is like to be anyone except a mandarin. . . .
[T]he people entering journalism, or finance, or consulting, or any other “elite” profession, are increasingly the children of the children of those who rocketed to prosperity through the postwar education system. A window that opened is closing. The mandarins are pulling away from the rest of America. . . .

Like I said, read the whole thing. (Annual tuition at Penn is $39,088.)

 

Category: Education

The Country’s in the Very Best of Hands

Posted on | February 22, 2013 | 9 Comments

Good thing there aren’t any criminals to investigate:

It sounds like the plot of a bad movie: bugging your boss’ office. Sending naked photos around to co-workers. Sexting in the office. Paying for sex in a massage parlor.
But it all happened in the federal agency whose motto is “fidelity, bravery, integrity” — the FBI.
These lurid details are outlined in confidential internal disciplinary reports obtained by CNN that were issued to FBI employees as a way to deter misconduct.

Via Memeorandum.

Category: Crime

It’s Internet Crazy Day: Special Ironic Menendez ‘Healthy Youth’ Edition

Posted on | February 22, 2013 | 11 Comments

OK, I spent most of this morning exchanging e-mails with various suffering victims of the Butt-Hurt Epidemic that is laying waste to the online world today. If anybody has personal contact info for Bono, I think there should be a special all-star TV concert.

It’s For the Children™ — won’t someone think of the children?

The good news: I heard from the kid with the bad haircut and I think he’s going to be all right, having survived the sarcasm hate crime.

The bad news: Internet Hall Monitor Kurt Eichenwald unfortunately suffered a sudden and mysterious spasm of self-righteousness, and may be on his way to the kind of laughingstock status that typically involves becoming the subject of a Downfall parody.

Meanwhile — back in the world of politics, which is what this blog is allegedly all about — there is urgent news from Capitol Hill:

The Real Education for Healthy Youth Act would expand comprehensive sex education programs in schools, while ensuring that federal funds are spent on “effective, age-appropriate and medically accurate” programs. . . .
Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Al Franken (D-Minn.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) are co-sponsoring the bill, as well as 35 House members.

This stunning news has made headlines:

Show Me on the Doll Where I Touched You.
Slowly. Make it Hot: Bob Menendez Sponsoring
Comprehensive Sex Education Bill

Expert further updates on the escalating madness. Did I mention that somebody filed a peace order against Bill Schmalfeldt?

 


Category: Democrats, Fear. Loathing., humor, Rule 4, Scandal, Sex
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