The Other McCain

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

Elite Pundit, Belatedly Catching Up With Me, Recognizes the ‘Fox Trap’

Posted on | February 3, 2013 | 20 Comments

How long have I been talking about the “Fox Trap”? Forever, it seems, but for example, here’s a description from February 2009:

Media-wise, the GOP made the mistake of putting all its eggs in one basket. I enjoy Fox News, but it has created a syndrome where Republicans watch Fox all the time and delude themselves into thinking, “Hey, our message is getting out! We’re winning!” Fact: The evening news broadcasts of ABC, NBC and CBS reach a combined audience of about 22 million; the top rated Fox News show, “The O’Reilly Factor,” reaches 4 million viewers. So if the three broadcast networks are viciously biased against Republicans — and they are — then that anti-GOP message is reaching more than 5 times as many TV viewers as Fox.

Fox News becomes an excuse for liberal journalists to engage in partisan cheerleading, as I explained in April 2012 at The American Spectator:

The very existence of a conservative-friendly TV news alternative, however, relieves liberals at other networks of any twinge of conscience about bias in their programming. They may well reckon, “If conservatives don’t like it, let ‘em go watch Fox.” And given how liberals have demonized Fox — portraying it as an all-powerful evil force in media — some reporters may even feel the need to slant their coverage more stridently leftward, so as to counteract the exaggerated right-wing news menace.
Many conservatives, however, do not fully grasp how this phenomenon (which I’ve come to think of as “The Fox Trap”) may actually result in mainstream media coverage that shows a shameless disregard for political fairness. Even if the audience for the major network news broadcasts slowly shrinks, that audience — like the readership of liberal “mainstream” newspapers — is still much larger than the audience reached by conservative alternative media. Yet too many conservatives have been lulled into complacency. Self-selecting their media choices (Fox News, talk-radio, conservative websites, etc.) many conservatives may believe that their viewpoint is adequately represented in the overall media ecology, when in fact the larger news industry is as liberal as it ever was, if not more so.

Having repeatedly discussed this subject over the years, I should probably be pleased that Peter Wehner at Commentary finally got a clue:

To say that the elite media has a liberal bias is similar to declaring that the sun rises in the east. But it’s never been this transparent, the infatuation never this deep, the advocacy this passionate. . . .
What explains this?
A combination of factors, I think. One is the rise of Fox News. For decades progressives had a monopoly on news, which meant they were content to slant the news but not routinely cross the line into advocacy. But now that Fox News has offered not only a different perspective, but a popular one, journalists may feel they must, in order to compensate for their loss of influence, increase their liberal advocacy.

Not even a fucking hat-tip, you useless neurasthenic dweeb?

Like I said, I probably should be pleased, but instead I’m angry, and maybe later I’ll write a rant about why I’m angrty.

Category: Fox News, Intellectuals, Media Bias

How to Make Babies

Posted on | February 3, 2013 | 27 Comments

Do I really need to explain this, people? Apparently so, because Jonathan V. Last has written an entire column at the Wall Street Journal about the fact that people aren’t having babies and — as if that were not enough — has also written a book on the subject, What To Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster.

This is depressing. Why? Because no one’s paying me to write a book about how to fix the problem, despite the fact that I’ve got six children. Whatever the “demographic” problem is, I’m an expert on the solution. Not quite as much an expert as Jim Bob Duggar, I guess . . .

Penis + Vagina = Babies.

It’s not really complicated. What solution does Jonathan V. Last prescribe? I don’t know. Why should I read a book about a problem that I’ve already solved, insofar as it involves my own personal share of the reproductive burden? As far as childless people are concerned, they don’t need to be reading books, they need to be making babies.

There’s your solution in a nutshell: Stop reading books about demographics, and start making babies instead. Which is probably why nobody’s offering to pay me to write a whole book about it, because I’ve just solved the demographic crisis in a little over 200 words.

 

Category: Culture, Family, Sex

Billion With a ‘B’: Did Menendez Provide Special Favors to HookerGate Donor?

Posted on | February 2, 2013 | 20 Comments

A sex scandal is quite often more than just a sex scandal, and the emerging story of the connection between embattled Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and his shady Palm Beach patron, Dr. Salomon Melgen, appears to be developing as a complex scandal:

Sen. Bob Menendez used his influence to advocate for a Dominican Republic business deal that helped a longtime friend and donor whose South Florida office was raided by federal agents this week.
Menendez questioned Obama administration officials at a July hearing about what it was doing to help U.S. businesses that he felt were being unfairly treated by the government of the Dominican Republic and other Latin American countries.
One company Menendez was apparently referring to: ICSSI, acquired the year before by Dr. Salomon Melgen, a Palm Beach County eye doctor and friend. The firm was seeking to enforce a contract it had won to X-ray Dominican Republic port cargo, that could be worth $500 million to $1 billion over two decades.

Follow the money — if Melgen had a billion-dollar contract at stake, his “friendship” with Senator Menendez was obviously more than a mere social acquaintance, which doesn’t necessarily mean that it was illegal for Menendez to pressure the administration to help Melgen enforce his Dominican port security contract. But how and why does a Florida opthamologist become an international port-security mogul? The New York Times rather unsubtly raised that point Friday:

Two years ago, Dr. Melgen, despite an apparent lack of experience in border security issues, bought an ownership interest in a company that had a long-dormant contract with the Dominican Republic to provide port security. . . .
The friendship between the two men goes back to the 1990s, when Mr. Menendez, who entered the House of Representatives in 1993, began regularly visiting the Dominican Republic. They spent holidays together, often in the Dominican Republic, where Dr. Melgen has a home in Casa de Campo, a gated oceanfront resort where houses cost as much as $20 million and which has been home to some of the country’s richest residents, like Oscar de la Renta. . . .
Also in 2010, Dr. Melgen moved to buy the ownership interest in ICSSI, a company based in the Caribbean that had been awarded a contract to provide extensive screening of cargo from ports in the Dominican Republic. The Dominican government was refusing to honor that contract, after Miguel Cocco, then the Dominican customs director, had long said the deal was an exorbitant giveaway to the company.

Question: Would just any random investor be interested in a deal like this, or would ICSSI’s “long-dormant contract” be valuable only to someone with enough political “juice” to apply leverage against these Dominican officials?

Did Melgen’s carefully nutured relationship with Menendez therefore give him a special opportunity? The questions multiply and it’s often difficult in such situations to prove that this quid over here is connected to that quo over there by a pro, if you see what I’m saying.

Back during the Lewinsky scandal, remember, the president’s lawyer buddy Vernon Jordan made an extraordinary effort to help Monica get a job with New York-based Revlon (a firm headed by a Clinton donor) and then arranged for Monica to sign an affidavit stating that she couldn’t testify in the Paula Jones lawsuit because, well, she was moving from D.C. to New York for her new job at Revlon.

The blindingly obvious truth is that this was obstruction of justice and suborning of perjury as part of a corrupt effort to deprive Paula Jones of relevant testimony in her civil-rights lawsuit against Clinton, but actually proving the “pro” part of the quid pro quo — helping Monica get this job from a campaign contributor in exchange for having her sign this false affidavit denying a sexual relationship with her presidential boyfriend — was impossible, so long as everybody involved was willing to lie about it, as they most certainly were.

Or think about Watergate: If it hadn’t been for the White House tapes, Nixon might have gotten away with that cover-up, letting some minor figures take the fall for the “Plumbers” operation and using plausible deniability to conceal any direct presidential knowledge.

All of which is to say that turning HookerGate into enough of a scandal to take out a Democrat in heavily-Democratic New Jersey could be rather more difficult than it might seem. However, it doesn’t seem that Obama is willing to invest any political capital to protect Senator Menendez, as Neil Munro reports at the Daily Caller:

White House spokesman Jay Carney refused to defend Sen. Bob Menendez when he was quizzed by a reporter Thursday.
Does “the president have full faith and confidence in the senator?” asked a reporter during the midday White House press conference.
“I’ve seen those reports. I don’t have anything for you on that,” Carney said.
“He plays a significant role in immigration,” the reporter followed up.
“I don’t have anything for you on those reports,” Carney repeated.

Munro reminds us of yet another Menendez scandal:

In December, immigration agents arrested an intern who worked for Menendez’s staff. The Peruvian intern was an illegal immigrant and a convicted child molester, who worked in Menendez’s New Jersey office.
The Associated Press subsequently reported that federal immigration officials delayed any arrest of the man until after Menendez won re-election Nov. 6.
When asked [Thursday] if White House officials knew of agency’s decision to delay the arrest, Carney declined to answer. “I’ve not seen those reports. I don’t have anything for you on that,” he said.

Remember that the HookerGate story first broke on Halloween, six days before Election Day, but it seemed impossible at that time to get anyone to take the story seriously. I remember being frustrated with some of my Republican friends whose response was, “What difference does it make in New Jersey? Menendez is going to win no matter what. We need to concentrate on the presidential campaign.”

Republicans can’t walk and chew gum at the same time? Couldn’t the spectacle of a Democrat senator whore-hopping in the Caribbean have value as a pushback against the ridiculous “war on women” narrative of the campaign? But when you raised that point, Republicans would then tell you, “Well, the liberal media will ignore it anyway” — defeatism, a de facto confession that the entire elaborate messaging apparatus of the Right is utterly useless in overcoming media bias.

No point in hindsight recriminations now, although it’s amusing to see David Graham at The Atlantic attempt to rationalize why the story was indeed ignored by the major media in November:

The story didn’t go anywhere, partly because it was so close to the election and Menendez was already a prohibitive favorite for reelection — he ended up beating his GOP challenger by nearly 20 percentage points — and partly because the Daily Caller has a reputation for wildly overpromising on scoops and then underdelivering on facts. (Remember the video that was going to end Obama’s campaign?) The article suggested there might be dirt, but nothing there that passed a smell test for serious news organizations.

Oh, dear God, where to begin? It took the National Enquirer to break the John Edwards scandal because the “mainstream” press was willing to ignore it, and even the Lewinsky scandal was originally spiked by Newsweek. We therefore have good precedent to expect that, when there is a really juicy scandal involving a Democrat, the story isn’t going to be broken by the mainstream outfits.

Ergo, one cannot dismiss such stories out of hand simply because they originate outside the journalistic mainstream. The fact that there is now an FBI investigation into — and a New York Times article about — the Menendez scandal requires that David Graham make some kind of excuse for having previously ignored a legitimate story, and all those digs at the Daily Caller are just that: Excuses.

You got scooped. You got beat. And the kid that beat you, Matthew Boyle, is still beating you on this story:

Dominican Flights Cost Menendez
Up to 18 Percent of Net Worth
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Menendez’s net worth is between $317,005 and $680,000. . . .
Since the reimbursement he made to his donor Dr. Salomon Melgen’s company totaled $58,500, Menendez spent a massive portion of his financial livelihood on the reimbursement for those two flights. . . .

Menendez Prostitution Scandal: Donor Melgen’s Political
Contributions Exploded After IRS Filed Tax Lien
Ophthalmologist and Democratic political donor Dr. Salomon Melgen may have tried to buy cover from the IRS for the $11.1 million he owes in back taxes from 2006 to present . . .
The donations continued to grow in size and quantity before Melgen began facing tax problems with the IRS in July 2002. The Free Beacon reports that the IRS filed a federal tax lien against Melgen for about $1.3 million then for unpaid taxes dating back to 1999 . . .

Matthew Boyle is still kicking ass and taking names, and The Hill’s Jordy Yager reports there’s blood in the water around Mendendez:

A cloud of scandalous allegations is rapidly growing over Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), putting Democratic leaders in a difficult position as the integrity of their immigration point man in the Senate falls under question at a critical time.
The bad news keeps coming: a Senate Ethics probe, allegations involving underage prostitutes, an FBI investigation of a key campaign donor, undisclosed flights on the donor’s private plane, and now, reports linking Menendez to an existing multi-million dollar contract he urged officials to enforce for the disgraced donor.

Depending on how strongly reporters follow up on the hooker angle, we may be just weeks away from Menendez’s resignation.

And what’s that you say, Jim Treacher? “Why is Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) following a very young-looking Dominican girl on Twitter?”

UPDATE (Smitty): Welcome, Instapundit readers!

PREVIOUSLY:

 


Category: Corruption, Democrats, Dominican Republic, Florida, New Jersey

I Guess We’re Not Supposed To ‘Shop The #OccupyResoluteDesk Skeet Photo

Posted on | February 2, 2013 | 38 Comments

by Smitty

Which is fine, because Soopermexican flogged it hard:

Update: Moe Lane opines, and Cynthia Yockey asks

Update II: Oh no:
Category: Barack Obama

Bolshevik Subversive Conor Friedersdorf: Innocent ‘Liberal’ Dupe or Red Agent?

Posted on | February 2, 2013 | 13 Comments

“The Communists (we must give them credit for many things) are intelligent, are well disciplined, and take their orders direct from Moscow and are proud of it. . . .
“Not only is Soviet Russia trying to wipe out all forms of religion, but it is successful in doing it.”
— Rep. Hamilton Fish (R-New York), “The Menace of Communism” (1931)

“Anyone who opposes the American communists . . . becomes the object of a systematic campaign of character assassination. This is easily understood because the basic tactics of the Communist Party are deceit and trickery. . . .
“The Communist propaganda technique is designed to promote emotional response with the hope that the victim will be attracted by what he is told the Communist way of life holds in store for him. The objective, of course, is to develop discontent and hasten the day when the Communists can gather sufficient support and following to overthrow the American way of life.
“Communist propaganda is always slanted in the hope that the Communist may be aligned with liberal progressive causes.”
— J. Edgar Hoover, testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, March 26, 1947

One of the dangers of doomsaying prophecy is that if the predicted disaster does not happen immediately, and in exactly the way predicted, not only is the prophet discredited, but his failure will invariably be cited to dismiss any similar doomsday warning in the future. So if you predict that Dangerous Trend X will lead to Catastrophic Consequence Y, you can expect to be derided as a laughingstock if the actual result proves to be Unfortunate Outcome Z.

A certain modesty in regard to the future is therefore necessary when warning against potential dangers, because complex causation and the Law of Unintended Consequeces have a way of falsifying prophecies that are too detailed and specific. What sometimes happens is that a danger is foreseen, the alarm is sounded, measures are taken to prevent the danger and then — by a dishonest perversion of logic — cynics will claim that the danger successfully averted never really existed, and that those who warned against the danger were deceitful charlatans.

We ought to be wise to such tactics, especially when they are employed to rewrite history that we actually know. Barely two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Empire, liberals would have us believe that the Red Menace never existed, that communism never posed a real danger to the American way of life, and that the courageous efforts of American anti-communists were therefore a comical farce.

Such is the effect (and one must assume, the purpose) of Conor Friederdorf’s article at The Atlantic, “Pornography ‘Weakens our Resistance to the Communist Masters of Deceit.'” Friedersdorf ridicules a 1961 documentary, Perversion for Profit, that warned against the evil influence of pornography. It probably won’t surprise you that the title of Friedersdorf’s article is taken out of context from the film’s script:

“The Military Chaplains Association of the United States, practically every major fraternal, civic and religious organization, the juvenile court judges, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, innumerable psychiatrists, sociologists and psychologists, attribute the moral decay among our people in very large part to the obscene and pornographic literature so prevalent in our society. This moral decay weakens our resistance to the communist masters of deceit.”

Facts are stated: Various organizations and individuals have warned that pornography contributes to “moral decay” — would anyone argue otherwise, even today? — and in turn, it is asserted, this decay undermines “resistance” to communism. That warning doesn’t strike me as particularly far-fetched, either: A nation of wankers, perverts and degenerates would be ill-positioned to oppose the disciplined forces of a totalitarian opponent.

Perhaps Friedersdorf is too young to understand the extent to which America’s resistance to communism was based in religious faith. Given the militant atheist ideology of Marxism and the knowledge that communist governments suppressed and persecuted Christians, it was always the case that anti-communism was most fervent and determined where religious belief was most devout. If pornography was an agent of moral corruption — which it most certainly was, and still is — wasn’t pornography therefore also a threat to religious faith and, in turn, a force that could do exactly what the film warned against, weakening resistance to “the communist masters of deceit”?

That particular phrase, incidentally, is from the title of a 1958 book by J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism and How to Fight It, and the question ought to be asked: Does Conor Friedersdorf think the threat of Soviet subversion was a figment of right-wing imagination? Is he mocking anti-communism? Does Friedersdorf mean to suggest that the demoralizing influence of pornography was misunderstood or exaggerated by the producers of the documentary, Perversion for Profit?

Here is the problem: If the documentary helped inspire patriotic Americans to oppose the dissemination of pornography, and if this opposition was effective to any significant degree — so that pornography was less available than it might otherwise have been — how can we say that the danger was exaggerated? Stipulate that nearly all anti-communist messages from the Cold War era now sound quaintly obsolete, and that this documentary in particular manifests a cornball “square” mentality that doesn’t translate well to the ironic disposition of 21st-century culture. Despite all such caveats, can anyone watch this 30-minute documentary and say, as Friedersdorf does, that it is ridiculous, absurd and impossible to take seriously?

Maybe among Friedersdorf and his friends, pornography is entirely commonplace and acceptable, so that any warning against it seems as ludicrous as being called a “Bolshevik subversive.” Or is it perhaps the case that, in the half-century since Perversion for Profit was produced, the Bolshevik subversives have been so diligent in undermining our nation’s morality that they have finally succeeded, even though the Soviet Union — the foreign menace that originally inspired their anti-American activities — crumbled into the ash-heap of history in 1991?

Thus is falsified the adage that the winners write the history books. The communists lost the Cold War, yet their sympathizers now dominate academia and publishing in America to such an extent that we must be lectured by Friedersdorf about the harmlessness of pornography, and about the supposed “asburdity” of moral degeneracy as a subversive weapon of the communist menace.

Friedersdorf continues to claim that he is a conservative, despite the observable fact that his entire journalistic career has been an incessant assault on the conservative movement and its leaders. It’s almost as if Friedersdorf’s “basic tactics . . . are deceit and trickery.”

 

Category: Culture, History

Prepping The Next Conflict

Posted on | February 2, 2013 | 18 Comments

by Smitty

Hector Timerman has refused to meet representatives of the Falkland Islands government, which Argentina does not recognise as legitimate.
The islanders were expected to tell Mr Timerman that Buenos Aires should respect islanders’ rights and leave them in peace.

Fortunately for Argentina, #OccupyResoluteDesk doesn’t care about Malvinas, Melvins or the Maldives. Endives aren’t looking good, either. Are the British going to do a thing if there is another flare-up? Doubt it. The last Falklands War, back in the Thatcher era, was right at the edge the Royal Navy’s capabilities. The best the Brits can hope from from the Anglosphere is an Obama speech wherein he decries violence, regrets the mess Bush made of international relations, uses a lot of personal pronouns, and hopes the Brits don’t forget to thank him for being wonderful.

via Drudge

Category: Uncategorized

Daniel Hannan Quotes Our Declaration Of Independence To The Eurocrats

Posted on | February 2, 2013 | 7 Comments

by Smitty


Logophile bonus: about halfway through, he uses ‘peregrination‘, which is not what you get from the Governor of Texas when he hears a joke.

via Daniel Hannan’s blog

Category: Uncategorized

A Scandal Too Far: Steve Capus Terminated as NBC News President

Posted on | February 2, 2013 | 11 Comments

The New York Times spins it this way:

The longest-serving president of any of the three network news divisions, Steve Capus of NBC News, stepped down from his position on Friday, six months after Comcast restructured its news units in a way that diminished his authority.

Exactly how voluntary was this “stepping down”? John Nolte points to the scandal-plagued tenure of Capus at NBC News:

  1. During last year’s presidential election, Andrea Mitchell was caught manufacturing a Romney gaffe where none existed.
  2. During last year’s GOP primary, Ed Schultz edited video of Texas Governor Rick Perry to make him look racist.
  3. In April of last year, the “Today Show” was caught editing audio of a 9-1-1 call to make George Zimmerman look racist.
  4. In August of 2009, Contessa Brewer sliced and diced a photograph so it wouldn’t look like a black man attended a Tea Party carrying a firearm.
  5. Just this week, NBC News maliciously edited video of a town council meeting to make it look as though Second Amendment civil rights activists heckled a parent who lost his son in Newtown.

The network should place an ad on Craigslist: “NBC News is now hiring a Democrat News Executive. Ethics and objectivity optional.”

 

Category: Media Bias, NBC, Scandal
« go back — keep looking »

    About

    This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.

    Subscribe to our feed

    Search

    Admin