The Other McCain

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

Joe Biden, Class Act

Posted on | January 3, 2013 | 8 Comments

Three headlines from Drudge:

Remember when they said Sarah Palin wasn’t ready to be vice president?

Category: Uncategorized

Memoir, Narcissism and the Problem of the Unreliable First-Person Narrator

Posted on | January 3, 2013 | 18 Comments

In addition to its advice about “Crazy Hot Sex” (“10 Secrets to Intense Action”), the February issue of Cosmo features an interview with an actress you probably never heard of before. Julianne Hough tells Cosmo that when she was studying dance in London as a girl, she “was abused, mentally, physically, everything. . . . I was a tormented little kid who had to put on this sexy façade because that was my job and my life.”

Shocking, but have Hough’s abusers been prosecuted? No:

Hough declines to say who abused her or provide other details.
“I’m a very forgiving person, and I don’t want to hurt anybody,” she says. “What’s past is past.”

Unless it is Cosmo‘s purpose to expose the shameful secrets of abusive dance studios — a criminal enterprise in need of investigation — one might be tempted to think that the primary journalistic purpose here is to let Julianne Hough tell her dramatic tale of victimhood. And Cosmo evidently didn’t bother to contact anyone at London’s prestigious Italia Conti Academy of Arts, the alleged scene of her abuse, to attempt to verify these disturbing (but rather vague) claims by Hough.

My own purpose is not to dispute the truth of Julianne Hough’s tale. For all we know, her experiences in London were every bit as horrible as she suggests, and Scotland Yard may yet launch an investigation that exposes the Italia Conti Academy of Arts as a criminal den of sadistic depravity. Readers meanwhile can believe whatever they want. I don’t care.

Rather, it is the entire confessional genre that is the object of my critique. In recent decades, we have become so accustomed to these shocking first-person revelations — “I Was a Teenage Call Girl” and so forth — that we seldom ask what usefulness they provide, and credulously accept the truth of even the wildest tales, without pausing to wonder if the tale-teller might have a motive to exaggerate or otherwise distort the facts.

We’ve seen where this leads: James Frey became a bestselling author whose memoir A Million Little Pieces was featured by Oprah Winfrey:

In emotional filmed testimonials, employees of Winfrey’s Harpo Productions lauded the book as revelatory, with some choking back tears.   When the camera then returned to a damp-eyed Winfrey, she said, “I’m crying ’cause these are all my Harpo family so, and we all loved the book so much.”

Unfortunately . . .

Police reports, court records, interviews with law enforcement personnel, and other sources have put the lie to many key sections of Frey’s book. The 36-year-old author, these documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw “wanted in three states.”
In addition to these rap sheet creations, Frey also invented a role for himself in a deadly train accident that cost the lives of two female high school students. In what may be his book’s most crass flight from reality, Frey remarkably appropriates and manipulates details of the incident so he can falsely portray himself as the tragedy’s third victim.

How shocking: The criminal drug addict was also . . . a liar.

Well, a lesson learned the hard way, huh? Unfortunately, not:

Oprah Winfrey has a new book scandal on her hands. A “memoir,” praised in her O Magazine as “startlingly tender,” has been revealed as a complete work of fiction.
“Love and Consequences,” written by Margaret B. Jones, a self-described half white, half Native American foster child and former drug runner, has been revealed as a fake. The fictional story was actually penned by Margaret Seltzer, a white, private-school educated writer.

The problem in both cases was that these liars’ tales were (a) cleverly told, and (b) stories that many people wanted to believe were true.

Good liars are like that: They have a keen sense of what the listener wants to believe, and a capacity for telling lies that seem plausible to the intended audience. Evidently, book editors and TV producers are particularly gullible, if the tale and teller appeal to their sympathies. But why bring Obama’s Dreams From My Father into this? Read more

Category: Journalism

@DailyPundit, Optimist At Large

Posted on | January 3, 2013 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

But since [the re-election of Rep. Boehner as Speaker] just a squabble over the leadership of the minority faction of the Ruling Party, none of this has a great deal of meaning in the larger scheme of things. No matter who is in charge of the GOP faction, everything will continue to go to hell in the same way it has been going to hell for the past several decades.

I just wonder where Bill gets his supply of rose colored glasses. The #FiscalCliff kabuki was only a 60-day stay of execution for the sequester. Then there is the debt ceiling. If the purpose of the #FiscalCliff, besides thrashing the holidays of all paying attention, was to destroy public interest in paying attention to what these yahoos are doing with the public purse, it was largely successful. Speaker Boehner’s resumption of the gavel was anticlimactic, despite a minority of the peanut gallery stimming itself about unseating him.
From Boehner’s remarks:

Our government has built up too much debt. Our economy is not producing enough jobs. These are not separate problems.
At $16 trillion and rising, our national debt is draining free enterprise and weakening the ship of state.
The American Dream is in peril so long as its namesake is weighed down by this anchor of debt. Break its hold, and we begin to set our economy free. Jobs will come home. Confidence will come back.

As I was able to Tweet the good speaker for his immediate inattention:

Category: Bill Quick, John Boehner

Alternate Headline for Current TV Deal

Posted on | January 3, 2013 | 17 Comments

The top of Memeorandum is cluttered with news that Al Gore’s Current TV was sold to Al-Jazeera, but Allahpundit nails the real story:

Al Gore opposed to paying his ‘fair share’

Liberal hypocrisy, thy name is Al:

Al Jazeera did not disclose the purchase price, but people with direct knowledge of the deal pegged it at around $500 million, indicating a $100 million payout for Mr. Gore, who owned 20 percent of Current. Mr. Gore and his partners were eager to complete the deal by Dec. 31, lest it be subject to higher tax rates that took effect on Jan. 1 . . .

Unfortunately for Gore, they couldn’t manage to close the deal until yesterday, so he got screwed out of a few million bucks. The bonus kicker:

Glenn Beck reportedly tried to buy the network last year [but] was told that they wouldn’t sell to someone who wasn’t “aligned with our point of view.” So, naturally: Al Jazeera.

No word yet on whether Al Jazeera, the pro-Islam network based in Qatar, will re-hire Keith Olbermann, who quit Current TV in a huff and filed a $70 million lawsuit against the network. Certainly, if it were a matter of being “aligned with out point of view” . . .

 

Category: Media Bias

Gun Control and the Politics of Ignorance

Posted on | January 3, 2013 | 18 Comments

“Senator Feinstein’s latest attack on the Second Amendment relies entirely on public ignorance of firearms and their legitimate uses,” writes William A. Levinson in an American Thinker article answering the question, “Why Does Anybody Need a 30-Round Magazine?”

It’s important to consider worst-case scenarios: Suppose that you found yourself in a conflict with multiple assailants, each armed with 9-mm pistols, each with a magazine capacity of 10 shots. In that situation, a 30-round magazine gives you equal firepower (without reloading) to three attackers. You may not be able to imagine such situations, but sometimes the unimaginable happens, and who is Dianne Feinstein to tell other people what precautions they are permitted to take?

The Politics of Ignorance is what enraged me so much about the so-called “assault weapons” ban that Feinstein supported in 1994. Repeat after me: A semi-automatic rifle is not an “assault weapon.”

Feinstein and her allies in the Clinton administration were exploiting public ignorance. They had polls and focus-group information showing that “soccer moms” — suburban middle-class white women, a key “swing” constituency that Democrats sought to win over — supported restrictive measures against guns, in large part because of (arguably racist) fears about inner-city drug gangs.

Despite headline-making incidents like the Oklahoma City bombing and the Long Island commuter-train massacre, the political impetus behind the law (officially titled the “Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994”) really had nothing to do militias or mass-shooting sprees, and everything to do with fears of the criminal violence associated with the crack cocaine epidemic.

Ultimately, of course, the crime problems of the 1980s and ’90s were “solved” by a drastic increase in incarceration rates due to mandatory sentencing laws (especially for drug offenses) and so-called “three strikes” laws, as well as improvements in law-enforcement tactics and private security. The widespread use of video surveillance at retail venues and advances in DNA testing, to mention just two examples, have not only helped police solve more crimes, but also have a significant deterrent effect, because would-be criminals know the greater risks of apprehension.

The Feinstein-backed “assault weapons” ban was classic Clinton-era pandering: A largely cosmetic response to media-hyped hysteria, producing a law that did not actually ban anything — existing weapons were not outlawed, but merely the manufacture or importation of such weapons — and the prohibited weapons were only superficially different from weapons that remained fully legal.

That idiotic law expired in 2004, thank God, but gun-control advocates continue relying on appeals to ignorance, particularly when talking about the so-called “gun show loophole.” What this rhetoric is about is trying to inhibit the private re-sale of weapons, thus depriving gun owners of the full economic value of their assets.

Many millions of Americans own guns and these are actually economic investments, as firearms tend to retain value. There is a ready market for antique and collectible guns. A model 1911 Colt .45 semi-automatic pistol can sell for more than $1,000. And so the family gun cabinet represents a real financial asset to the owner — if he is permitted to re-sell them.

However, when liberals talk about “closing the gun-show loophole,” what they actually mean is requiring these private gun owners to run background checks on purchasers, just like federally licensed gun dealers. This would impose an all-but-prohibitive restriction on the private seller — how much would compliance cost? — and thus makes it practically impossible for him to reap the full value of his asset. True, he could sell his guns to a licensed dealer, or place them for sale on consignment with such a dealer, but in the process he would lose not only the price difference between wholesale (what the dealer pays the seller) and retail (what is paid by the dealer’s customer), but also the convenience of being able to sell the gun himself.

There are millions of guns owned by individuals in this country that have been re-sold over and over — from one private citizen to another — without any licensed dealer being involved in the transactions since the day they were first sold, brand-new. If your brother-in-law admires your Winchester .30-06 or your Mossberg 12-gauge and offers you a fair price for it, you can sell it to him.

You could sell your guns at your next garage sale, if you wanted to, and why not? It’s your gun, isn’t it? It’s a free country, isn’t it?

Well, not if Dianne Feinstein gets her way.

 

 


Category: Constitution, Crime

Green Energy Underpants Gnomes

Posted on | January 3, 2013 | 10 Comments

An item at Doug Ross’s blog inspired this business plan:

  1. Raise big bucks for Obama’s campaign.
  2. Start a “green energy” company.
  3. Get an Energy Department grant.
  4. Profit!
Category: Environmentalism

Should Hagiography Wait Until The Subject Has, Regrettably, Passed?

Posted on | January 3, 2013 | 6 Comments

by Smitty

Maybe Tina Brown was literarily spoofed by someone wanting her to appear the demented love child of Andrew Sullivan and Rachel Maddow:

The idea of losing Hillary has seemed especially unbearable at this political moment. It’s as if she has become, literally, the ship of state. She stands for maturity, tenacity, and self-discipline at a time when everyone else in Washington seems to be, in more senses than one, going off a cliff—a parade of bickering, blustering, small-balled hacks bollixing up the nation’s business. She’s a caring executive too, and that takes its own emotional toll. What a disgrace that John Bolton and his goaty Republican ilk accused Her Magnificence of inventing a concussion to get out of testifying at the Benghazi hearings. Bolton is not fit to wipe her floor with his mustache.

This blog must double down on its unwavering stance regarding the physical condition of this storied civil servant:

And, indeed, Hillary has exited the hospital building. Let’s hope she chills out in Hawaii with the Preshizzle and doesn’t get too stressed about matters.

via Kaus

Update: linked by EBL

Category: Hillary Clinton

Subsidized Stupidity

Posted on | January 3, 2013 | 15 Comments

Woman tries to buy iPad with her food stamp EBT card:

Weekly Vice via Fox Nation:

Tracy Browning, a 38-year-old Louisville woman, was jailed after she allegedly tried to purchase several iPads with a food stamp card, then fled to another location where she tried to make the same transaction.
According to Louisville police, Browning went to the Valley Station Walmart and tried to purchase two iPads with an Electronic Benefit Transfer card. When the transaction was denied, she assaulted a store clerk, pushed another employee to the ground and fled from the store with the merchandise.
Investigators say Browning went to another Walmart in the area a short time later and again attempted to buy several iPads with an EBT card. She was apprehended at the scene while attempting to flee with the merchandise.

We’re subsidizing stupidity and, as everyone who has studied economics knows, when you subsidize something, you get more of it.

Category: Crime
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