The Other McCain

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

The Best Revenge: Ohio-Bound

Posted on | September 24, 2012 | 25 Comments

By the time you read this, I should be within a couple hours of Lima, Ohio, where Paul Ryan is due for a 2:30 p.m. rally. Right now — as I’m writing this — it’s about 2 a.m. and I’m awaiting my ride while laughing at the latest ridiculousness from Neal Rauhauser:

McCain has never filed for a peace order. McCain has never shown a police report. McCain has only misrepresented his change of address and sudden need for a much higher income as a threat from another victim of the fringe right’s obsession, rather than the inevitable outcome of his indecent behavior. He is defrauding the Tea Party masses with his act, a common tactic for the people he associates with, such as Ali Akbar.

You see? It is absolutely true that I’ve never filed for a peace order, I’m neither a plaintiff nor a defendant in anyone’s lawsuit, and there is no police report — why would there be?

This whole sue-me, sue-you game may be fun for civilians, but I’m a professional journalist and it would be impossible for me to report on a story while simultaneously suing (or pressing criminal charges against) the subject of the story. One of the reasons my location remains undisclosed is to prevent any sort of incident that might involve me in such legal hassles and interfere with my continuing coverage of The Kimberlin Files.

My “indecent behavior … defrauding the Tea Party masses”! These heinous slurs are outright lies fabricated from whole cloth, a classic example of the “accuse the accusers” tactic that Rauhauser and his client Brett Kimberlin have been using for months.

You know the Miranda warning? Well, whenever you’re targeted by the Kimberlin-Rauhauser Axis, everything you say can and will be used against you in their next vicious smear. They accuse, accuse, accuse, expecting their targets to deny, deny, deny — or to explain, explain, explain — so that they can then twist the target’s denials and explanations as “evidence” for their next accusation.

Screw that. I’ve been very careful not to play that game (also not to sue anybody or to file any criminal complaint), leaving them with nothing else to do except recycle old smears. And my “much higher income”? Yeah, armagnac and decolletage!

What I am paid to do is cover the news. These distractions from Rauhauser aren’t going to stop me from earning my pay, and so I’m off to Ohio to cover the Romney-Ryan bus tour, thanks to those who’ve contributed generously to the Shoe Leather Fund: Charles in Georgia, Jackie in Salisbury, William in Dallas, Mike in El Segundo, Jeff in Chesapeake, Jack in Oklahoma, Geoffrey in Washington State, Sean in Connecticut, Richard in Hollywood, Diana in San Francisco, and Jeff in Walla Walla.

Do any of you guys feel “defrauded” by my “indecent behavior”? I think not. And here’s my latest American Spectator column:

The Romney-Ryan campaign kicks off a three-day bus tour through the key swing state of Ohio today. Folks arriving early at the Republican rallies who pay attention to the warm-up music played before the events may hear an old blues-rock tune that has become a staple in the rotation, the first verse of which proclaims, “I was born lonely, down by the riverside. Learned to spin fortune wheels and throw dice.”
“Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” was the title track of Bob Seger’s 1969 debut album. It was incorporated into Mitt Romney’s campaign-rally music back in February when the candidate was fighting a GOP primary battle against rival Rick Santorum in Michigan, home state of both Romney and Seger. No one has ever confused the Republican presidential nominee with the rock singer, but Seger’s lyrics might offer some valuable inspiration to Romney as he rambles across the Buckeye State this week, trying to beat the increasingly long odds in his campaign to defeat Barack Obama.
To listen to some people, in fact, you might get the idea that the campaign is already over. Last week’s Romney “gaffe” — the secret video that was, in fact, recorded in May — was supposedly the fatal blow to the GOP challenger. The liberal media said so, as did certain Republican commentators who were vehemently denounced by Rush Limbaugh. “The glitterati, the intelligentsia, the stars inside the Beltway think Romney lost the election yesterday — they really do,” Limbaugh told his nationwide radio audience Wednesday. “I never met a bunch of quitters like these in my life. I never met a bigger bunch of defeatists! We haven’t even had the debates. It’s not even October yet.”
Indeed not, but the time is getting short. Election Day is six weeks from Tuesday, early voting has already begun in half the states and, after a month of non-stop negativity from the media, Romney needs to recapture the excitement generated by his Aug. 11 announcement of Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential running mate. . . .

Read the whole thing. Me? Babe, I gotta ramble . . .


Category: American Spectator, Election 2012, Fear. Loathing., Ohio, The Kimberlin Files

Separated At Birth: Dick Tracy / Robert Gibbs Edition

Posted on | September 24, 2012 | 10 Comments

by Smitty

I’m probably being unfair to Dick Tracy here, as he’s at least an honorable cartoon character, juxtaposing him with a cretin like Gibbs.

Keep lying, Gibbs. The more you urinate down the back of the American public and call it rain, the more it motivates honest Americans to make sure that you and your lying masters are separated from levers of power on a permanent basis.


What a godforsaken tool.

Both via Breitbart

Category: Barack Obama

So, Other Than All That, Mr. Levin, What Did You Think Of Conor’s Article?

Posted on | September 24, 2012 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

A friend of the blog points to a carpet bombing of Wee Conor’s article the other day. Levin on FaceBook:

A mind is a terrible thing to twist
This puny stalker writes and thinks like a Trotskyite, reading people in and out of the conservative and libertarian movements. He has accomplished nothing significant. He has written nothing intellectually compelling or coherent. He has built nothing. Yet his conceit knows no limits. Eric Hoffer said of such people that they are driven like the teenager going through puberty but never mature to adulthood.
. . .
There’s so much stupidity, incoherence, arrogance, and fascistic thinking in his column, I’ve already tired of commenting on it.
But I am generous to a fault. He wanted attention so here is his 10 seconds worth. Ladies and gentleman, I introduce you to a complete idiot.

RTWT. It’s probably more attention than Friedersdorf deserves.

Category: Mark Levin

LIVE AT FIVE: 09.24.12

Posted on | September 24, 2012 | 4 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Japan Files Official Protests As PRC Ships Enter Senkaku Waters

A Chicom surveillance ship is shadowed by a Japanese fishery protection vessel

Taiwan to get into the act later this week with its own fishing fleet
Asahi Shimbun poll: Bilateral ties no good, say most Japanese, Chicoms


Obama Campaign Still Whining About Romney’s Taxes
Romney campaign says president’s campaign needs to stop lying to voters

Farm Aid Still Going Strong After 27 Years
30,000 turn out in Hershey to hear Willie, Kenny Chesney and other celebrate the family farm



POLITICS
Obama’s “Brilliant” Re-Election Campaign

Obama agonistes

Campaign showing all the competence of the candidate’s governance

Bill Clinton Calls For Action At Start Of His Global Initiative Conference

Closing Arguments Due On SC Voter ID Law

America’s Hidden Jobless: Too Dismal To Count

Donors Keeping Distance From Oregon Pot Campaign

Palin Advises Romney To Go Rogue

US Policy Toward PRC Criticized As Incoherent And Dangerous

The Return Of Ralph Reed



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Crude Prices Fall As Eurozone Worries Resurface; NYMEX $92.01, Brent $110.39
Euro Stocks Poise dFor Weak Open On Growth Worries
Denver Company Buys Village Voice, Other Alternative Weeklies, But Not Backpage
Dollar Rises As Greece, Spain Jitters Return
Local Businesses Worry About Cancellation Of Kansas State Program
ROK Suspends Bidding For US Rice After FDA Raises Arsenic Worries
Palm Oil Heads For Two-Year Low As Stockpiles Increase
Foxconn Halts Production At PRC Plant After Massive Brawl
Nokia Kicks Apple’s Map In The Apps
iPhone 5 All But Sold Out
Microsoft Courier Lives On In In Windows 8’s Project Austin App
For Walmart, Cons Offset Pros On Kindle



SPORTS
Reds Reunite With Dusty Baker

LA’s Adrian Gonzalez celebrates hitting his second homer of the game

Return spoiled by 5-3 loss to Dodgers

Gordon Lives To Fight Another Day For Sprint Cup

Twins Sweep Tigers In Doubleheader

Replacement Refs Blow It Twice-In One Game

Texans Beat Broncos With Air Game, Now 3-0

Raiders Stun Steelers In Wild Finish

Succop Kicks Six As Chiefs Drop Saints To 0-3

Belichick Boils Over At Refs In Loss To Ravens

Nats Lose It In The Sun (Twice), Fall 6-2 To Brewers



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Billie Joe Armstrong Heads For Rehab After Vegas Concert Meltdown

Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong

Green Day frontman seeking help for “substance abuse”, band to cancel some promotional appearances

A Big “Homeland” Surprise At Emmys

Eric Stonestreet Weighs In On Charlize Theron Dating Rumors

Natalie Portman Goes Blonde

Justin Timberlake Celebrates Bachelor Party In Vegas, Cabo

Sharon Stone Hospitalized Briefly For Migraine

Amanda Bynes Flees To New York

HBO’s “Treme” Renewed For Fourth, Final Season



FOREIGNERS
France And Germany Celebrate 50 Years Of Friendship
Former Chungking Top Cop Wang Lijun Gets 15 Years
French PM Urges More Time For Greece
Libya Exploits People Power In Ejecting Militia
Pakistan Clarifies: Minister’s Bounty Offer Not Government Approved
Syrian Rebels Seek Islamic Democracy But Also Protection Of Minorities
Belarus Votes Amid Opposition Boycott Call



BLOGS & STUFF
1389 Blog: A Lesson From Australia
Weekly Standard Blog: Obama Takes Responsibility For Everything
Valley Of The Shadow: Time For Goths To Sack The LA GOP
The Lid: Obama Calls Israeli Concern Over Iran “Noise” To Be Ignored; Ahmadinejad Agrees
Sacred Monkeys: Obama Adviser Gibbs Can’t Explain Why President Has Time For Whoopi Goldberg But Not World Leaders
Brietbart: Media Put 18,000 In Not Quite Full 5,000-Seat Venue For Obama In Wisconsin
Babalu: Great News! Unemployment Rate Falling Because Suicides Now Outnumber Deaths In Auto Accidents
Just One Minute: Winding Down In Iraq, Responsibly Or Otherwise
Power Line: A Bump In The Road, Or A Massive Roadblock?
Gateway Pundit: Obama Thanks Egyptian President For Protection Of Cairo Embassy – After Storming, Burning Of US Flag

Category: Live at Five

The Phantom Menace, Remembered

Posted on | September 23, 2012 | 14 Comments

Perry campaign volunteers, Des Moines, Iowa, Aug. 9, 2011

“He surfed into the race on a tsunami wave of overconfidence, his campaign led by a bunch of cutthroat a–holes who had just finished sabotaging Newt Gingrich.
“They convinced a lot of people . . . to climb aboard The Smilin’ Texan Express for a one-way ride to glory.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Nov. 29, 2011

Back during the primary campaign — and I think it was in January, but I could be wrong — Ace of Spades did a post in which he ranted sarcastically against “gut hunches” as a basis for political judgment. Perhaps it is solipsistic to imagine Ace had me in mind, just because my hunches during the campaign repeatedly proved more accurate than the predictions of the elite punditocracy.

Even before the campaign really began, I saw the enormous upside potential of Herman Cain’s candidacy at a time when most of the other reporters regarded him as a novelty lightweight. By the time he zoomed to the top of the polls in late September 2011, I looked like prescient genius, and if it hadn’t been for the unexpected (and, Herman still insists, entirely false) sexual allegations, who knows what might have happened?

As soon as the Cain Train ran off the rails, I jumped straight to the Santorum Express, at a time when he was the lowest underdog in the field. Again, my gut hunch proved prescient, and by the time the polls began to catch up with my gut, Santorum was on the verge of a stunning upset in the Iowa caucuses. Despite all the odds against him, until he finally dropped out in April, Santorum was the last viable alternative to Romney.

Many other things my gut also got right: Pawlenty was too boring, Huntsman was hopeless, the Gingrich bubble predictably imploded, and Sarah Palin never got past the “maybe” I got from her people when I tried to gauge her interest in the 2012 race back in early November 2010. (The well-placed source who, in June 2011, left me hanging in the wind with his word that Palin would make a final decision “within a week”? Yeah, maybe I ought to burn him, but he swears that was the word he got from Palin’s people, and I guess their mixed signals were not his fault.)

Of all my gut hunches, however, none was more accurate than the weird vibe I got in August 2011 about the Rick Perry campaign:

“What I fear will happen is that Perry will spend several months sucking up media oxygen and burning through GOP donor cash, only to collapse early next year. This will have the effect of suffocating other conservative candidates, and thereby lead to … Romney 2012.”

Something was definitely wrong with the Perry campaign, and if I couldn’t quite articulate the rational basis for that spooky foreboding, the deadly accuracy of my hunch was amply vindicated by subsequent events. So now comes Jay Root of the Texas Tribune to tell his own version of events:

At this point you may be wondering why anyone would write a book about a presidential candidate who made the word “oops” his calling card. The short answer is that “Oops! A Diary From the 2012 Campaign Trail” began not as a book but as a diary — a behind-the-scenes look at life on a modern presidential campaign. The “embed” reporters. The bus. The way news is really gathered in the age of Twitter and YouTube.
I had every reason to believe I was covering the eventual Republican nominee when Perry immediately shot to the top of the polls in the summer of 2011. By the time his campaign ground to a halt five months later, the words of the Democratic strategist James Carville, spoken on CNN in January, seemed like the most apt description of what I had witnessed: “the worst presidential campaign/candidate in American history.”  . . .

Read the whole thing. It may not as interesting as some of my gut hunches, but it’s still pretty good.

Category: Election 2012, Rick Perry

Oh, Say, You Can’t See, By The Hope Or The Change, What So Sadly We Beheld, Like Benghazi’s Last Blood Streaks

Posted on | September 23, 2012 | 13 Comments

by Smitty

First, the United States has not properly mourned the deaths of our Libyan Ambassador, or the other three victims in the Benghazi tragedy. The Obama Administration piled deceit after the fact upon incompetence beforehand, and has still not come fully clean.

Thus it was with grisly irony that the blogs seized on Obama’s vainglorious corruption of our national flag:

Alongside the literal handwriting on the wall in Benghazi where the some final thoughts were communicated, perhaps while Barack was getting some much-needed rest:

And how do you know that American voices penetrated the fog in Obama’s head in a way those fingers in Benghazi couldn’t penetrate the wall? “Whoops! Our bad”

“Our bad”, indeed. In 2008. We either voted for an incompetent, or didn’t work hard enough to fend off an incompetent. While it’s a great thing that the U.S. elected a black man, removing the final stain of racism (except where evil ones on the Left strive to keep the stain in place) just about everything else about Obama has been a wash. And, if you take away bagging Osama, you lose that “just about”.
Obama deserves to be pilloried about taking down that flag ad, roughly as much as putting it up there in the first place.

via PowerLine

Update: linked at Maggie’s Notebook

Category: Barack Obama

You Don’t Say, Kirsten Powers!

Posted on | September 23, 2012 | 9 Comments

The media — with certain notable exceptions, she neglects to add — “seem to have taken their marching orders from the Obama administration” in their coverage of the terrorist attack that killed our ambassador to Libya:

The fact is, most of the major media didn’t even wait for marching orders, but rather began their coverage of the Benghazi massacre with the premise that it was a campaign controversy (which Obama must win), rather than a policy issue (which might possibly damage their beloved idol’s re-election chances). So they were willing and eager to attack anything Mitt Romney said about it or (contingently) to attack him for being silent if he said nothing at all.

The current narrative the media are interested in telling can be summed up in six words: Heads, Obama wins; tails, Mitt loses.

Category: Libya, Media Bias

Classic: State Department Attacks CNN for Reporting Inconvenient Facts on Libya

Posted on | September 23, 2012 | 23 Comments

We now know that, despite warnings from multiple sources — including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens — about the rising threat from Islamic extremists in Libya, the Obama administration failed to take necessary precautions. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans, the Obama administration dishonestly tried to deceive the public by characterizing the attack as part of a “spontaneous” protest inspired by an obscure video. As the truth of the matter has slowly emerged, the Obama administration has sought to avoid admitting its errors and deceptions, and instead attempted to distract from this catastrophic failure of its own policies by attacking media outlets that are reporting honestly on the Libyan disaster.

CNN news reported that Ambassador Stevens was concerned that he was on an “al-Qaeda hit list,” but the network failed to disclose that one source of that report was the ambassador’s journal, which the network’s reporters had recovered from the ruins of the consulate.

The State Department has scapegoated the network for that decision, and you can see the predictable dogpile at Memeorandum, although news that is favorable to the Obama administration — e.g., “secret video” — never provokes this kind of reaction. PJ Media’s Rick Moran comments on the ethical question:

One can sympathize with the family on this issue, but the murder of an American ambassador and publishing his thoughts leading up to his death is a story with worldwide significance. CNN felt it had an obligation to selectively air those thoughts, only after confirming them with other sources, and keeping secret any personal and intimate details contained in the journal.

It’s a rare day when I agree with Rick Moran, but he’s right here: While CNN’s conduct is certainly subject to criticism, that pales in comparison to the “worldwide significance” — the legitimate news value — of the story they were reporting. Attempting to distract from this important story by trying to indict CNN before the court of public opinion? Predictable and wrong:

CNN broke a pledge to the late ambassador’s family that it wouldn’t report on the diary, said State Department spokesman Philippe Reines, a senior adviser to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In a blistering statement, Reines called CNN’s actions “indefensible.”
The channel said in the story online that it took “newsworthy tips” from Stevens’ diary and confirmed them with other sources. Citing an unidentified source “familiar with Stevens’ thinking,” CNN said that the ambassador was concerned about security threats in Benghazi and a “rise in Islamic extremism.”
In a statement Saturday, CNN defended its use of the journal’s contents and asked “why is the State Department now attacking the messenger.”
“CNN did not initially report on the existence of a journal out of respect for the family, but we felt there were issues raised in the journal which required full reporting, which we did,” the channel said.
The public has a right to know what CNN learned from “multiple sources” about fears and warnings of a terror threat before the Benghazi attack, the channel said, “which are now raising questions about why the State Department didn’t do more to protect Ambassador Stevens and other U.S. personnel.”

Here is the CNN video report:

More commentary from Darleen Click, Ann Althouse,  The Lonely Conservative, Twitchy, Gateway Pundit and NewsBusters.

Related: “Fox News’ Chris Wallace Hammers Obama Advisor Robert Gibbs on Administration’s Libya Lies.”

 


Category: CNN, Libya, Terrorism
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