LIVE AT FIVE: 10.12.12

AGAIN, RADDATZ INTERRUPTS RYAN — TWICE — WHILE HE’S ANSWERING HER QUESTION, THEN JOE INTERRUPTS, TOO!

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 12, 2012

I’m going to have to start putting together my column for the American Spectator.

UPDATED 10:03 p.m. ET: It’s clear that Biden was advised to be aggressive, to bulldoze, interrupt and filibuster, to treat Ryan with contempt. The astonishing thing (or, maybe not) is how moderator Martha Raddatz is enabling that strategy.

GOD LORD! WHEN JOE DOESN’T INTERRUPT RYAN, RADDATZ HERSELF DOES IT!

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 12, 2012

UPDATED 9:39 p.m. ET: VodkaPundit is drunkblogging. Biden is drunkdebating.

UPDATED 9:35 p.m. ET:

RADDATZ JUST LETTING BIDEN INTERRUPT WHENEVER HE WANTS, AND FILIBUSTER FOREVER.

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 12, 2012

WHO’S RUNNING THE STOPWATCH ON THIS? RADDATZ IS LETTING BIDEN STEAL TIME ENDLESSLY

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 12, 2012

UPDATED 9:12 p.m. ET: Biden interrupted Ryan’s second answer to accuse Ryan of “malarkey” — because Joe’s an expert on “malarkey”!

* * PREVIOUSLY 8:30 p.m. ET * *

This is rather a bold headline, consdiering that it’s now 8:30 p.m. ET and the debate in Danville, Ky., doesn’t even begin for another half-hour, but I’ve been saying for the past week that Ryan would make mincemeat of Biden, so there’s little additional risk in going all-out balls-to-the-wall with my headline.

Ace, on the other hand, is trying to tamp down expectations for reasons that are entirely factual and logical, which is OK, if that’s how you roll.

Me, I’ve got no problem going big. Dave Weigel asks, “Can Joe Biden Save Barack Obama?” And I say, “RAAAAACIST! How dare you say Obama needs a white man to save him?”

Anyway, consider this your Official Vice Presidential Debate Thread. There’s an NFL game on tonight, if you’d rather watch that, then check back here later to see exactly how Ryan stomped Biden.

EXPECT UPDATES . . . .

Category: Debates, Election 2012, Joe Biden, Paul Ryan

@StefCutter Triples Down on Libya

Posted on | October 11, 2012 | 5 Comments

Katie Pavlich caught Obama spokespuppet Stephanie Cutter on her way into tonight’s debate arena, and Cutter refused to back off her “Blame Mitt” defense of the Benghazi debacle:

Let me predict a Downfall video parody in Ms. Cutter’s future.

Category: Libya

‘All Is Proceeding as I Have Foreseen’

Posted on | October 11, 2012 | 6 Comments

So says Vodkapundit, observing that “RCP moved MI and PA into the tossups this morning,” which I hadn’t noticed, but it’s one of the necessary preconditions for a full-blown liberal freakout.

Disaster is now coming at Democrats from multiple unexpected directions. Yesterday, Bob Belvedere observed that “James O’Keefe and his Mission: Impossible crew have done it again,” and what they did is what I call impact reporting: News that results in action, in this case the firing of DNC official Stephanie Caballero:

The Democratic National Committee has terminated the employment of Houston, Texas, Organizing For America Regional Field Director Stephanie Caballero after she was caught on camera calling voter fraud “cool” and “so funny” while advising a presumably-liberal voter how to vote twice.
In a comment to the liberal Talking Points Memo, DNC spokeswoman Melanie Roussell accused James O’Keefe and Project Veritas of selectively editing their videos – but admitted that what Caballero did on his tape was wrong and she’s now been fired.
“There is obviously a history here of making selective use of taped material, and we will certainly not vouch for the completeness of what was released,” Roussell said. “However, what we saw was enough for us to take the action that we did.”

Once again, as with the ACORN sting, O’Keefe is accused of “selectively editing” video, without anyone expecting Democrats to produce evidence to support the accusation: What did O’Keefe allegedly edit out? Never mind — the DNC simply makes the accusation to provide an ironclad excuse for any reporter at a mainstream news organization who wants to ignore the story: “Oh, this isn’t really news because, selective editing!”

Hey, Scoop: If this is all a ginned-up nothingburger — if the unsubstantiated charge of “selective editing” automatically disqualifies it as newsworthy — why did Caballero get fired?

Unanswered (and usually, unasked) questions like that were what used to annoy the hell out of Andrew Breitbart, and rightly so. Leave aside entirely the question of a professional journalist’s obligations. Just normal human curiosity would make ordinary people ask questions: What’s going on with Democrats and voter registration? Is it true that many hundreds of people have been documented as voting illegally in two states during the same election year? What, if anything, are Democrats doing to prevent this? Or is it all just a bunch of ginned-up phony outrage? Like I say, this is the kind of stuff that ordinary people find interesting, and which you might think an editor at the Washington Post or the New York Times or CBS News would therefore find worthy of further reporting: “Hey, this is kind of weird and it might make for an interesting story, let’s assign somebody to poke around and see what they can dig up.”

But . . . no.

It’s frustrating, because you have the sneaking suspicion that if the mainstream media ever devoted serious effort to such stories, the result would be a lot more interesting than the dreck they usually produce. And it used to make Andrew Breitbart very angry:

Toward the end of the new movie Hating Breitbart, there is a scene that captures the essence of what the late New Media entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart did — and how he did it. The camera follows Breitbart as he makes his way up Capitol Hill, past the crowd at a 2010 Tea Party rally where the founder of Breitbart.com was about to give a speech. “Hey, Andrew, remember me?” says a man amid the throng on the opposite side of the crowd-control barricade. “I’m the one who sent you that video … the nine-second clip.”
Breitbart knew exactly which clip the man was talking about, and remembered the online moniker of the amateur cameraman who sent it: “Marooned in Marin, right?”
The significance of that moment isn’t explained in the movie, as director Andrew Marcus is content to let viewers connect the dots for themselves when Breitbart takes the stage to give one of his many impassioned speeches. While he was at times credited with singlehandedly destroying the mainstream media’s suffocating liberal stranglehold on news, Breitbart always understood that his work depended on people like Marooned in Marin who sent him e-mail tips, including videos and photos, that exposed the untold truths that too many professional journalists were willing to ignore. And so when he stood on the stage in front of the Capitol that September afternoon in 2010, Breitbart pointed to the audience and told them, “You are the army!”
Marcus’s camera then captures Breitbart’s reaction, after he leaves the stage to cheers and applause, telling a friend that he didn’t have any idea what he was going to say until he started talking. That’s how it was with Breitbart — a master of improvisation, an impulsive personality who learned to turn his attention deficit disorder into an asset. The astute viewer of Hating Breitbart recognizes that the chance encounter with Marooned in Marin (whose name Breitbart had stored in his amazing memory) triggered the thought that led to the inspirational words he spoke on stage that day at the Tea Party rally. And every new day brings fresh reminders of how the inspiration has outlived the man who died in March at age 43. . . .

Please read the rest at The American Spectator. You’re sure as hell never going to read anything like it in the New York Times.

Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World!

Category: Andrew Breitbart, Corruption, James O'Keefe, Media Bias, VodkaPundit

Benghazi Breakdown: Team Obama, Liberals Now in Full Freak-Out Mode

Posted on | October 11, 2012 | 20 Comments

First, the headline:

Mother of Slain State Dept. Official Tired of Being
Lied To and Stonewalled by Obama Administration

Next, the video, which got the AOSHQ Flaming Skull Alert:

Now, we point out that Stephanie Cutter has doubled down on her outrageous claim that the terrorist attack on our consulate in Benghazi is only the subject of controvery because — wait for it — Republicans “politicized” the issue. This is the kind of harmonic convergence of self-serving bullshit unprecedented since the days when LBJ lied America into a shooting war in Southeast Asia.

And it reminds me of something else:

@michellemalkin Have you noticed, w Romney gaining in polls, liberals seem to be returning to 2002-05 Golden Age of Unhinged Moonbattery?

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 11, 2012

Let anyone who watched the moonbat brigades in action during that era testify to their own memories, but I recall it this way: It started with the 2002 mid-terms. Democrats had been expecting to make the usual congressional gains that the party out of power makes in the next election after losing the White House and, instead, the Republicans actually gained seats. This completely demoralized the Left and within a few months, we invaded Iraq.

OK, so the Left then mounted its typical anti-war movement, with the Netroots latching onto Howard Dean as their Gene McCarthy/George McGovern peacenik presidential candidate. Dean melted down in Iowa, and instead the nomination went to Vietnam-era peacenik hero John Kerry who got “Swiftboated” (a term that means “unfairly telling the truth about a Democrat”) and Bush got re-elected in 2004.

The absolute nadir for the Left was when the exit polls showed that Bush had won Ohio because of so-called “values voters” who had turned out in droves to vote for a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. This was a horrid shock to the Left to learn that their two favorite issues — treason and sodomy — had been rejected by the American people, and so they vowed revenge against those damned flag-waving homophobic heartland Republicans.

As I say, this was the Golden Age, with the Left so completely discredited, disempowered and disconsolate that their pitiful crusades — “Indict Karl Rove!” — were fodder for endless mockery by conservative bloggers, who could laugh at the madcap antics of the Kossacks back then.

That era ended when Democrats won the 2006 mid-terms (thank you, Jack Abramoff, and thank you, Mark Foley) and the painful shoe of despair was on the other foot after Obama got elected in 2008. But it seems the karmic wheel is now beginning to turn.

Notice Nate Silver’s slo-mo walkback, his Forecasting Model™ now giving Romney a 32.1% chance of victory, and Nate compelled to pretend there are “a couple of rays of hope” for Democrats.

Whistling past the graveyard much, Nate?

They’re trying to stave off complete panic, and if Paul Ryan does well in tonight’s debate with Joe Biden — my prediction is that Ryan will stomp Joe the way Godzilla stomped Tokyo — we’re likely to see one of the most memorable freak-outs in the history of liberal freak-outs.

Sully’s liable to be on suicide watch if the polls keep trending this way another week, and if analysts ever start moving states like Pennsylvania and Michigan into the “toss-up” category . . .

Oh, it will be epic.

UPDATE: Top thread at Memeorandum, with reaction by Gateway Pundit, Phil Klein, Da Tech Guy, The Lonely Conservative and this memorable response by Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom:

Good lord. It’s long past time to vote these scumbags out: it’s time to tar and feather them and put them in stocks so that we can all take turns throwing rotten vegetables at their ugly treasonous faces.

Once these things start going sideways — with mainstream outfits like CNN sniffing the scent of Fear and Loathing — it’s gonna be hard for the White House to put Humpty-Dumpty together again. Yet we must maintain momentum to maximize the impact.

OK, everybody start praying for a @paulryanvp win in tonight’s debate. PRAY HARD!

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 11, 2012

Category: Debates, Election 2012, Joe Biden, Libya, Paul Ryan, Polls

How Do You Spell ‘LOL’? Idiotic Error by Former New Yorker Fact-Checker

Posted on | October 11, 2012 | 22 Comments

When Bob Tyrrell told me about this on the phone, I was astonished: Evidently, James Pogue is a person with literary pretensions who once worked as a fact-checker for the New Yorker. In order to support his literary pretensions — he’s “writing a novel,” as are, inter alia, about nine thousand unpublished lawyers who dream of becoming the next John Grisham — Pogue managed to con somebody at Vice magazine into an assignment to cover the presidential campaign.

Pogue showed up a couple of weeks ago at a Romney-Ryan rally at the Dayton Airport in Vandalia, Ohio, an event I also covered (see the Sept. 25 blog posts “ROMNEY-RYAN AT DAYTON AIRPORT” and “SCENES FROM ROMNEY-RYAN RALLY,” as well as my Sept. 26 American Spectator column, “Spiking the Ball Early?“). While awaiting the start of the rally, I was inside the “press filing” pen and wandered over to the edge of the pen to smoke a cigarette, talking briefly with Byron York of the Washington Examiner, who was standing outside the pen.

This utterly routine encounter — Byron is ubiquitous on the campaign trail, and I’m always standing around smoking outside campaign events — got “reported” by Pogue at Vice, thus:

In the crowd section, leaning on the fence of the press corral, was a man in a Filson jacket who looked in person so much like Jonathan Franzen that I had visions of a scoop:
“NOVELIST TRAILS ROMNEY CAMPAIGN: MOTIVES UNCLEAR”
But this man was actually Byron York, the conservative writer, occasional Fox News talker, and sort of multi-purpose representative of those post-Buckley elitist conservatives who still exist in America. Smoking and speaking quietly with York from inside the corral was a man wearing an outback hat and jeans so long he’d had to roll them up to avoid walking on the hems. This man was Robert Emmett Tyrell, the founder and editor-in-chief of the American Spectator, a magazine whose diminished state might be taken as representative of the fates of those Yorkite conservatives. I came over and offered to buy a cigarette from him. York looked disgusted. Tyrell looked amused. He introduced himself and said he didn’t need my money. I said hello to York and he refused my handshake and walked away. . . .
York wandered away. Tyrell took down my name and said he’d google me.
Writers who don’t do this sort of thing for a living, who go out and lark it for a while as political journalists, tend to come to events like this and focus on the mechanics of the event, to touch a bit on the crowd, and to write a great deal about the other journalists. Everyone does it, from Hunter Thompson to David Foster Wallace, and it’s always seemed to me to be a bit of a cheap trick, on the reasoning that a smart guy with the freedom of a big word count ought to be able to come and draw political lessons from the same material the newspaper writers work with. Now I get it. There’s nearly nothing else to talk about. . . .
And who are these reporters who produce the optics? They’re an astonishingly slovenly group. Tyrell turned out to have been one of three men, out of maybe 15 of us, whose pants were so ill-fitting that he had to roll up the legs to avoid the mud. There were uncountable pairs of square-toed loafers; cheap pinstripe suits. We could be on a used car lot in Bucharest. The Romney aids dress the same way. It wasn’t that they’d been on the trail and their wardrobes were bare and dirty, that much seemed pretty clear. They just didn’t know how to dress. . . .
And then we had Romney. Tyrell leapt up on the fence to get a view, and the iPhones went up, and the women behind us began a chant again, “Rom-ney, Rom-ney” and this time the crowd joined in. . . .

Well, how much more wrong could you possibly get it? To begin with, R. Emmett Tyrrell spells his surname with two R’s, and I’m not him, and Tyrrell doesn’t smoke. Exactly how on earth Pogue made this ridiculous mistake, I don’t know. Tyrrell is a dashingly handsome fellow who I am certain is grateful he looks nothing like me.

Furthermore, to classify Byron York among “post-Buckley elitist conservatives” is absurd: He’s a splendidly down-to-earth guy, and no self-respecting “elitist” would ever talk to me. Nor, I think, do post-Buckley elitists spend much time hanging out with Bob Tyrrell. I vaguely recall giving Pogue a cigarette and refusing his offer to pay for it, a courtesy from a fellow nicotine addict who has more than once had to bum a smoke after forgetting to bring along a spare pack. (For some reason, campaign events are almost never held in the vicinity of convenience stores, and once you get inside the security perimeter, you want to stay there, or else you’ll be forced to go through the metal detectors again when you come back.)

Incidentally, when Tyrrell first told me about this Pogue article and mentioned Byron York, I was confused as to which Romney-Ryan event he was referring to: At a Ryan event in Lima the day before, I’d run out of batteries for my camera and been forced to bum a couple of AAs from York, for exactly the reasons I’d described in reference to the cigarettes: If you go outside the perimeter once the candidate is on the scene, the Secret Service probably won’t let you back inside, media credential or no media credential — “Just following orders, mein herr.”

As to the length of my jeans: My thrifty wife bought me a new pair of jeans a few months back — found them on clearance somewhere and couldn’t resist the bargain — and it was also she who packed my suitcase for the Ohio trip. My wardrobe was chosen hastily at the Dayton hotel where I was staying, as I hurried to get ready to go to the airport rally. Frankly, I don’t give much thought to fashion when I’m on the campaign trail, or anywhere else for that matter. Back when I was young and single, I was quite stylish, with a wardrobe that included shirts by Yves St. Laurent and Pierre Cardin, and ties by Alexander Julian, but no longer give a damn about impressing anybody with my fashion sense, even if I could afford to be such a fop.

Well, what the hell, huh? Rolled-up jeans are the New Black!

Also: The “leapt up on a fence” is wrong. What I did was climb the steps to the camera riser, and the reason was not just “to get a view,” but rather to get photographs, like this one giving the readers some sense of the size of the crowd. See, the polls had Romney down by 10 points in Ohio, and all the pundits were writing him off as doomed, which made the turnout at the Dayton airport on a drizzly day — 4,000 people — kind of newsworthy, certainly more newsworthy than whatever fashion statement I was making with my rolled-up jeans.

This is what makes James Pogue’s reference to Hunter S. Thompson so stupidly offensive: Yes, if you “don’t do this sort of thing for a living,” it is perfectly natural to report on the mechanics of the campaign, including the habits of the press corps — and I do that, too. Why? Because so many of the reporters are caught up in the Daily Horse-Race Narrative of the campaign that they almost never report the size of the crowd, the weather, or the other interesting little details of the carnival-like atmosphere that surrounds a presidential campaign.

Understand that I’m not competing with Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times to provide the Page One inverted-pyramid Definitive Account of the campaign. No, my coveraage here and at the American Spectator is a sort of colorful “news feature” version of the story, and even though I sometimes actually break news in the process, there’s no point chasing the Drudge link because, frankly, we don’t have enough server capacity to handle that kind of traffic.

The day after “Super Tuesday,” I attempted to explain my concept of what I’m doing in a post: “Memo From the National Affairs Desk: ‘Committing Acts of Journalism’.”

Does it make sense as a business model? Is there a market demand for this product? I do OK. I don’t usually run too late on deadline, and I at least try to get basic facts right, whereas literary pretender James Pogue makes a complete fool of himself.

With more than a week to write his account of the Sept. 25 Vandalia rally, which didn’t appear on the Vice.com site until Oct. 5, Pogue got the facts hilariously wrong and, in doing so, destroyed whatever flimsy claim to journalistic integrity he might have thrown behind his assertion that, at this rally, “there was a fat little man in a windbreaker” selling anti-Obama stickers with a racist theme.

Damn you to hell, James Pogue.

Go find some other some other profession to disgrace.

UPDATE: Ladd Ehlinger spots an error by Pogue that should have been obvious to anyone who’s ever been within range of my voice, which is usually about a quarter-mile:

I knew there was something wrong when I read “speaking quietly…” @rsmccain theothermccain.com/2012/10/11/how…

— Film Ladd (@FilmLadd) October 11, 2012

“Speaking quietly,” me? LOL.

BTW, I just saw that Paul Ryan will be heading back to Ohio on Saturday. Whether I make that trip or not, I’ve got to get back on the campaign trail pretty soon, so please hit the freaking tip jar.

Category: American Spectator, Election 2012, Fear. Loathing., Ohio, Washington Examiner

@AmbassadorRice: The Shameful Stain That Is Susan Rice, Now on Twitter

Posted on | October 11, 2012 | 7 Comments

So proud to defend #humanrights and ensure #LGBT voices are heard at the #UN. @global_equality

— Susan Rice (@AmbassadorRice) October 11, 2012

“Four dead Americans, and she’s doing a happy dance because she thinks the UN is gay-friendly now? What delusional fantasy world is she living in?”
— Sunshine State Sarah

What part of “misplaced priorities” is so hard to understand here? Does Ambassador Rice think gay people are too stupid to understand that they’re being dragooned into service as human shields to protect the (suddenly) endangered employment of herself and her boss?

That is to say, what she’s doing here is attempting to drape herself in the mantle of “human rights” and “equality,” to suggest to gays that if she gets thrown under the administration’s bus — of if President Obama doesn’t get re-elected — somehow these values as they pertain to “LGBT voices” will be jeopardized, not by bigoted foreigners, but rather by those evil homophobic Republicans.

“Defend me, you faggots — I’m on your side!”

If Andrew Sullivan had any shred of integrity remaining, he’d see through this shameless pander for what it is, and denounce it as an insult.

Also: “Our country is being run by liberal college students.”

Category: Gays, Libya, United Nations

That Winning Combination

Posted on | October 11, 2012 | 16 Comments

by Smitty

Update: welcome, Instapundit readers!

Category: Uncategorized

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The Other McCain

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

LIVE AT FIVE: 10.12.12

PAUL RYAN SCORES CRUSHING VICTORY OVER BIDEN IN DEBATE

@StefCutter Triples Down on Libya

‘All Is Proceeding as I Have Foreseen’

Benghazi Breakdown: Team Obama, Liberals Now in Full Freak-Out Mode

How Do You Spell ‘LOL’? Idiotic Error by Former New Yorker Fact-Checker

@AmbassadorRice: The Shameful Stain That Is Susan Rice, Now on Twitter

That Winning Combination

THE FULL METAL JACKET REACH-AROUND AWARD

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