LIVE AT FIVESIX: 09.14.12

Dr. Richard J. Keller, 56, of Andover, was arrested and charged today with receipt of child pornography.
Prosecutors said Keller bought or ordered more than 50 DVDs of child pornography online. An ongoing search of his home in Andover has turned up more than 500 high-gloss photographs and between 60 and 100 DVDs of child pornography, authorities said.
Keller is a pediatric endocrinologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and a pediatrics instructor at Harvard Medical School, according to U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz’s office. He was also medical director at Phillips Academy for 19 years before he stepped down last year. . . .
[T]he case began with an investigation two years ago of an unidentified overseas movie production company that offered streaming video and DVDs of films featuring nude young boys engaged in food fights, showering, wrestling in bed and playing Twister. . . .

Because the Harvard instructor’s position at an elite prep school gave him access to, well, nude young boys, Dan Riehl at Riehl World News is concerned: “I hope we don’t start hearing about a long list of actual incidents involving minors.” More at the Boston Globe and CBS Boston.

Such cases confront us with a chicken-or-the-egg question: Which comes first, the decadence or the elitism? Aren’t we justified in suspecting that a contempt for ordinary people is somehow related to a contempt for ordinary morality?

Recall the case of Columbia University Professor (and Palin-hating HuffPo blogger) David Epstein, who was convicted last year of “consensual incest” with his own daughter.

Professor Epstein’s conviction was never reported by the major media, and we saw no intellectual pundits proclaiming that his perversion was an institutional scandal reflecting badly on the university that employed him. No — such lectures are reserved exclusively for scandals involving Catholic priests or Republican politicians, never Ivy League professors or other such elites whose superiority fits liberal conceptions of merit.

Roman Polanski and Woody Allen are revered film directors — how dare you lowbrow slobs pass judgment on them!

Just as none of the sins of show-biz icons can be interpreted as evidence of that Hollywood has embraced decadent values, no crime committed by anyone at Harvard or Columbia can be adduced as a general indictment of the Ivy League’s into degeneracy, a trend that Bill Buckley first described more than 60 years ago in God and Man at Yale.

Category: Crime, Education, Scandal, Sex

Reporting Their Own Opinions as ‘News’

Posted on | September 13, 2012 | 8 Comments

“It all was part of a group effort . . . to shift the focus from the death of a U.S. Ambassador on a day when all the warning signs of trouble were in place but the U.S. government did little if anything to beef up security.
“It was a day on which the media could have been reporting facts as to the absentee President, the failure to heed the warnings and protect our diplomats, the failure of Muslim outreach, in fact, the failure of U.S. Mideast policy since the Arab Spring.
“But no, all the media wanted to talk about was their own opinions as to how badly Romney supposedly screwed up, with quotes from unnamed former Republican sources as the excuse for reporting it as news. This was . . . a clear attempt to frame the narrative to help a favored candidate presented as fact reporting.”
— Professor William Jacobson, “Middle East and Journalism in Flames,” LegalInsurrection.com, Sept. 13, 2012

Category: Election 2012, Legal Insurrection, Media Bias

SAVAGES: Did Libyan Mob Sodomize U.S. Ambassador Before Killing Him?

Posted on | September 13, 2012 | 38 Comments

This report is so shocking that it seems impossible: According to one unconfirmed Arab-language account from a Libyan news agency, citing the French agency AFP, “the U.S. ambassador to Libya was raped sexually before killing by gunmen who stormed the embassy building in Benghazi.” It appears that the first English version of this account was published last night at the NOPC blog, then made its way to I Own the World, was picked up by Riehl World News, and then reported at the Washington Times by Kerry Picket.

My apologies in advance if I’ve gotten the sequence of events in any way confused. I learned of it via a Tweet from Michelle Malkin, and wish to emphasize — as Picket did in an update — that this is an unconfirmed report. Obviously a mob that would attack our consulate and kill four Americans is capable of anything, but we do not yet have confirmation that this reported atrocity actually happened.

Last November, journalist Mona Eltahawy described being sexually assaulted by Egyptian security forces after she was detained in Cairo, prompting me to remark:

A few weeks ago, discussing Libya on Red Eye, Kevin Williamson used the phrase “desert savages,” which is politically incorrect, but when we see savagery like this, who can say it isn’t also accurate?

The question remains valid, for obvious reasons.

UPDATE: One of the things about liberal bias is how it creates a bizarre disproportion in attitudes toward events. While mobs of enraged Muslims are now besieging U.S. embassies worldwide — in Yemen and elsewhere — the liberal media continues to unblinkingly accept the administration’s assertion that the real problem is not Islamic thuggery, but rather an obscure anti-Islamic video that no one in American had even heard about until Tuesday. Political correctoids are more offended by Kevin Williamson’s “desert savages” description of Libyans than they are by actual Libyan savagery. And we must remember, of course, that political correctness is ultimately about politics:

Which is more offensive to media: Libyan mob killing U.S. ambassador or Romney criticizing Obama? lonelyconservative.com/2012/09/romney… via @lonelycon

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) September 13, 2012

Category: Libya, Terrorism

Ambush: Media Exploit Obama’s ‘Clear Advantage’ Narrative Against Romney

Posted on | September 13, 2012 | 7 Comments

Protesters at U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2012

Many people were shocked by the hot-mike incident Wednesday, in which reporters were overheard coordinating their questions before a Mitt Romney press conference, planning to question the candidate about whether he regretted his statements about the Libyan attack that killed four Americans, and how his “answer is continuing to sound.”

What has perhaps been forgotten was that the day before the eruption of Muslim riots in Libya and Egypt, the Obama campaign had already dictated its foreign-policy narrative to the media. This was the message already packaged and delivered on the eve of the annual 9/11 commemoration. An article at BuzzFeed posted early Tuesday morning had this headline:

Obama’s Plan To Use National
Security To Beat Romney

The article included explicit comments like this:

“For the first time in a very long time, a Democrat has a clear advantage on national security issues,” Michele Flournoy, a national security campaign advisor and former Defense Department official said. “This is a real significant shift in our political system.”
Voters, Flournoy went on to say, “consistently prefer President Obama over Mitt Romney on this issue by double digits.”

It was therefore pre-determined by the Obama campaign that the 9/11 remembrance would be the occasion for emphasizing the Democrat’s “clear advantages” on foreign policy.

No “Swiftboats” allowed!

One might have thought that the sudden onslaught of Islamic violence that left the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans dead would have been perceived as an unfortunate reminder that the “clear advantage” wasn’t really so clear.

However, inside the pro-Obama bubble that seems to envelop much of the political press corps — evidently including of Ari Shapiro of NPR and Jan Crawford of CBS — no contradictory facts can be permitted to disturb the precious narrative: Obama is winning, Romney is losing, and everything must be conformed to that storyline.

Toby Harnden of the London Daily Mail is evidently outside that bubble, and saw the attacks in Egypt and Libya for what they actually were:

The Obama administration is engulfed in a full-blown foreign policy crisis just two months before the presidential election after the murder of the US ambassador to Libya and three other officials and amid fierce criticism from his opponent Mitt Romney.

These incidents, occurring as they did in two nations where Obama had sided with radical insurgents who overthrew their governments in the “Arab Spring” uprisings, clearly raised questions about the wisdom of the administration’s policy. But for pro-Obama reporters, the attacks had to be interpreted within the “clear advantage” narrative, and so whatever Mitt Romney said or did, the Republican challenger’s response had to be portrayed as insufficient, inadequate or otherwise wrong.

By daring to criticize the Obama administration, Romney was contradicting the press-corps consensus, as John Podhoretz says:

The murders of US diplomats in Libya and the attempted storming of the US Embassy in Cairo took place 56 days before the election of America’s next president.
Apparently, it is the view of much of the mainstream media and foreign-policy establishment that discussing these horrific events in the course of the presidential campaign is monstrous.
One might think that these custodians of the public good would wish the discussion to be of nothing else. The United States and its representatives abroad have been attacked, and in a manner that threatens to spread like wildfire. You’d think everyone would agree it’s time to talk foreign policy.
Oh, no. In the precincts of America’s Most High, the worst evil done [Tuesday] was Mitt Romney daring to broach the subject and use it to criticize President Obama’s foreign policy. . . .

Read the whole thing, as Podhoretz describes how the attacks on Romney started with explicitly left-wing Talking Points Memo and then dispersed throughout the media. The real outrage, in the minds of the pro-Obama media, is not that savages destroyed our consulate in Benghazi and killed four Americans, but rather that a Republican would dare describe this tragedy as a consequence of Obama’s failed policies.

Category: Barack Obama, Egypt, Election 2012, Libya, Media Bias, Mitt Romney

Postvarication

Posted on | September 13, 2012 | 16 Comments

by Smitty

Obama caves to Romney, according to Munro in the Examiner:

President Barack Obama used Air Force One to conduct a policy loop-de-loop Wednesday, asserting in a CBS interview that he supports Americans’ right to criticize Islam, following almost 18 hours of determined condemnation from Team Romney and damaging news from Egypt and Libya.
“We believe in the First Amendment,” Obama told CBS’s Steve Kroft during an interview arranged days earlier.
“It is one of the hallmarks of our Constitution that I’m sworn to uphold, and so we are always going to uphold the rights for individuals to speak their mind,” he said, according to a transcript narrated by White House spokesman Jay Carney.

This is about the bazillionth time in the last three years that:

Crisis event occurs.
Obama administration offers a creepy response.
American outrage ensues.
Obama administration mumbles something recognizably American.

I submit that:

#2 represents the actual Obama opinion on #1 for his real audience, for which he’ll have more flexibility after his re-coronation in November.
#4 is just a bone thrown to those bitter, racist cling-ons in flyover country.

This administration is pretty much guilty until proven innocent by non-Commie validation, as far as I’m concerned. The sense of the word prevaricate seems to be a sequence of fact distortion moving from false to true, as investigation drags facts to light.

Maybe one of the few genuine ‘accomplishments’ of this administration is creation of a new form of lying: postvarication, where the truth is served up for the target audience, and then a pile of hooey follows for the purported rubes. Postvarication goes from true to false.

This blog doesn’t believe much of anything said by the administration or the media. Even though I didn’t like Clinton, I was still willing to give the creep the benefit of the doubt. BHO & Co. have a tremendous problem on their hands, as they systematically de-legitimize everything about our culture and its institutions.

via SissyWillis

Update: much more at The Daley Gator.

Category: Barack Obama

‘[Mario Draghi] Will Fight To The Last German Taxpayer To Keep The Mediterranean Countries That Should Never Have Joined The Euro In There’

Posted on | September 13, 2012 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

Hold on to the end, as another MEP asks a fascinating question, which I’ll paraphrase:

<spicolli>Mr. Hand, you’re like this epic buzzkill. You have been sounding like the Pet Shop Boys played backward since around the sixth season of South Park. Can’t you just quit harshing our mellow and say something different?</spicolli>

The mighty Daniel Hannan:

Update: Daily Pundit inquires, “”

Category: Europe

« 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.

The Other McCain

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

LIVE AT FIVESIX: 09.14.12

Neutral, Objective Fact

Once More Proving Why the Ivy League Elite Are Our Moral Superiors

Reporting Their Own Opinions as ‘News’

SAVAGES: Did Libyan Mob Sodomize U.S. Ambassador Before Killing Him?

Ambush: Media Exploit Obama’s ‘Clear Advantage’ Narrative Against Romney

Postvarication

‘[Mario Draghi] Will Fight To The Last German Taxpayer To Keep The Mediterranean Countries That Should Never Have Joined The Euro In There’

THE FULL METAL JACKET REACH-AROUND AWARD

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

Search

Recent Posts

RSS reader subscription

MEMEORANDUM

Recent Comments

THE AMAZING GONZO FEED

Major Leagues

Archives

Free Agents

SHAMELESS CAPITALISM

Triple-A Franchises

Blogroll

About

Subscribe to our feed

Search

Admin