The Other McCain

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

Hurrah for Texas! Ted Cruz Wins!

Posted on | August 1, 2012 | 10 Comments

Erik Eckholm of the New York Times reports:

Ted Cruz, an insurgent backed by the Tea Party, easily defeated the candidate favored by Gov. Rick Perry on Tuesday in a runoff election for the Republican Senate nomination that revealed a wide rift in Texas between the party establishment and restless anti-incumbent activists on the right.
With the come-from-behind victory over Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, Mr. Cruz is heavily favored to win the Senate seat being vacated in November by Kay Bailey Hutchison and appears likely to become a star of the national conservative movement. . . .
Mr. Cruz, 41, is the latest conservative rebel to bring down an established party leader, tapping into frustration within the Republican ranks nationwide. These dissident triumphs include, in this year’s primaries, the defeat of Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana by Richard E. Mourdock and Deb Fischer’s win over a veteran Republican for the Senate nomination in Nebraska. They also echo Marco Rubio’s Senate victory in 2010 over a Republican governor, Charlie Crist of Florida.

Remember that I interviewed “the Marco Rubio of Texas” last year. Somebody you may remember sends her regards:

Congratulations to Ted Cruz! This is a victory both for Ted and for the grassroots Tea Party movement. This primary race has always been about the kind of leadership we need in D.C. Our goal is not just about changing the majority in the Senate. It is about the kind of leadership we want. Ted Cruz represents the kind of strong conservative leadership we want in D.C. Go-along to get-along career politicians who hew the path of least resistance are no longer acceptable at a time when our country is drowning in debt and our children’s futures are at stake. The message of this race couldn’t be clearer for the political establishment: the Tea Party is alive and well and we will not settle for business as usual. Now, it’s on to November!
– Sarah Palin

Here’s a press release from someone else you may remember:

Rick Santorum, former Republican Presidential candidate and Chairman of Patriot Voices, congratulated U.S. Senate candidate Ted Cruz (R-TX) on his victory this evening in the Texas Republican Senate run-off.
Rick Santorum said, “On behalf of Patriot Voices, I am proud to congratulate Ted on his terrific victory this evening. The people of Texas resoundingly responded to Ted’s strong conservative values and his message of limited government, the power of free markets, and the importance of traditional American values.  We look forward to working with Ted in the general election to help elect him the next Senator from the great state of Texas.”
Rick Santorum and Patriot Voices endorsed Ted Cruz for U.S. Senate in May. Since that time, Patriot Voices has operated a national call-from-home program for Cruz, and Santorum has traveled to Texas to campaign on Cruz’s behalf.

Gosh, this whole “Tea Party” thing is so 2009, eh? Didn’t the media tell us it was over? Guess somebody forgot to tell the Tea Party:

Tea Party Express Chairman Amy Kremer said, “We could not be more proud of this historic tea party victory tonight against the Texas establishment. This is probably the most significant upset Texas has seen since Perry defeated Hightower in 1990, and it comes at the hands of the tea party.
“What we saw in Ted Cruz and this Senate race was threefold: we saw an unquestionably strong and bold tea party conservative in Cruz; we saw Dewhurst as the anointed Austin politician that was exactly what we have been working to rid Washington of; and finally we saw the passion in the Texas tea party activists that could set the stage for this historic victory. . . .
“Tonight we sent a message that should shake Obama’s Chicago headquarters: Texas not only is going to be staying a red state, but the tea party is alive and ready to own 2012,” Kremer concluded.

“Hurrah for Texas! Texans always move them!”

Category: Election 2012, Senate, Tea Party, Texas

… And the Pulitzer Prize for Recycling Second-Hand Rumors From HuffPo …

Posted on | August 1, 2012 | 32 Comments

. . . goes to the Washington Post:

Mind you the Washington Post isn’t citing an unnamed source that has talked to them, they are reporting that someone else (Harry Reid) claims that an unnamed source said something.
I don’t claim to have been in this business all that many years, but I know enough that I can’t report hearsay.

Here’s the WaPo headline:

Harry Reid: Mitt Romney didn’t pay taxes for 10 years

The article is just Ed O’Keefe recycling the interview that Sam Stein and Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post did with Reid. Ed can’t be bothered to pick up the phone and ask Reid’s office how in the name of hell the Senate Majority Leader justifies this kind of reckless smear:

A month or so ago, he said, a person who had invested with Bain Capital called his office.
“Harry, he didn’t pay any taxes for 10 years,” Reid recounted the person as saying.
“He didn’t pay taxes for 10 years! Now, do I know that that’s true? Well, I’m not certain,” said Reid. “But obviously he can’t release those tax returns. How would it look?
“You guys have said his wealth is $250 million,” Reid went on. “Not a chance in the world. It’s a lot more than that. I mean, you do pretty well if you don’t pay taxes for 10 years when you’re making millions and millions of dollars.”

Instead of doing some, y’know, reporting on this remarkable claim, the WaPo’s Ed O’Keefe lets it go with this bland acknowledgement:

Neither Reid nor his aides would identify the alleged investor, HuffPo reported.

Grant that Reid’s wild accusation — “financial McCarthyism,” you might call it — is newsworthy even if it is absolutely false. And it almost certainly is false, Dan Primack of Fortune says. But is it now an accepted practice at the Washington Post just to repeat whatever politicians say (in interviews with reporters for other publications) without bothering to do any independent reporting at all?

This is one of those “too-good-to-check” situations, and there are obvious problems with Reid’s claim. Isn’t the provenance of the claim intrinsically suspicious? How the hell would an investor in Bain Capital know how much taxes Mitt Romney paid? (Phil Klein made this point.) And why would a Bain investor call Harry Reid to make this claim? Who is this mysterious investor who’s got Harry Reid on speed-dial? Do they talk regularly? What else has he told Harry?

These questions — who, what, when, where, why, how? — are obvious, as I say, and reporters are supposed to ask them. However, if it is now the practice of the WaPo to repeat anything said by anybody on the Internet, why isn’t Ed O’Keefe quoting Allahpundit?

By the way, some random guy on the Internet told me Obama was born in Kenya. Now, do I know that’s true? Well, I’m not certain. But let me just toss it out there.

Maybe arrange a midnight meeting in a parking garage or something.

UPDATE: Breaking news that Harry Reid shtupped Nancy Pelosi “in the Senate cloakroom”? Now, do I know that that’s true? Well, I’m not certain. But I’m obligated under The Ed O’Keefe Rule of Journalism to repeat every crazy thing I find on the Internet.

Category: Election 2012, Harry Reid, Media Bias, Mitt Romney, Taxes

LIVE AT FIVE: 08.01.12

Posted on | August 1, 2012 | 5 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Ted Cruz Wins Big In GOP Upset

Ted Cruz thanks his fired-up supporters on election night

Thrashes establishment candidate, Lt. Gov. Dewhurst, by 13 points after placing second in primary

Obama Spends Heavily In Swing States
GOP spending on the rise as the MittStar enters firing range


WaPo’s Cilizza Calls For Portman To Be Romney’s VP
Kiss of death?



POLITICS
California’s Proposition 8 Defenders Take Their Case To SCOTUS

Recently retired district judge Vaughn Williams, who wrote the opinion striking down Proposition 8

Will Supremes grant cert on amendment defining marriage traditionally?

House GOP Won’t Extend Farm Bill

Chick-Fil-A Controversy Comes With A Side Order Of Passionate Opinion

Academics Pore Over Predictive Models For Presidential Election

Poll Finds Partisan Split On Gay Marriage

Potential Defense Cuts Would Spare Personnel

Metro Atlanta Voters Reject Transportation Tax

Obama Campaign Team Sees Hope In Third Party Candidates

Moderate GOP Congressman LaTourette To Retire



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Crude Extends Losses, Weak PRC Data Weigh; NYMEX $87.97, Brent $104.69
US Raises Pressure For Eurozone Crisis Action
Fannie, Freddie: No Principal Reductions
Power Restored In Most Of India After Historic Failure
SEC Urges Reforms Of Muni Bond Market
Microsoft Shifts E-Mail Crown From Hotmail To Outlook.com
Dropbox Confirms It Was Hacked, Offers Users Help
Verizon No Longer Allowed To Block Tethering Apps, Gets $1.25 Million Fine For Trying
Apple TV Adds Hulu Plus
Digg Reboots With Added Twitter, Facebook Integration
“Star Wars” MMO Expands Free-To-Play Option This Fall
Square Enix Backs Kickstarter-Funded Console Ouya
Years Late, Millions Over Budget, FBI’s Sentinel System Finally On Line



SPORTS
Deadline Moves

Shane Victorino: now a Dodger


Dempster to Rangers, Pence to Giants, Victorino to Dodgers, Broxton to Reds

NHL Labor Proposal Under Review

O’s Wipe Out Yankees’ 5-0 Lead With 11-Run Rally

Miley Shuts Down Dodgers, Snakes Win 8-2

Tejada’s Error Sinks Harvey, Mets Lose To Giants

…And Then Some Stuff Happened At The Olympics

Strasburg Blasted In 8-0 Loss To Depleted Phillies



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Taylor Swift, Conor Kennedy Dating?

Taylor Swift, Conor Kennedy


NO, TAYLOR, NOOOOOOO!!! DON’T GET IN THE CAR!

CBS Developing “Brady Bunch” Reboot With Vince Vaughn

“Kate The Great” Tops Vanity Fair’s 2012 Best Dressed List

Will Emma Watson Be Suiting Up For Some Time In The “Red Room Of Pain”?
Related: Angelina Jolie Wants Role In “Fifty Shades Of Grey”

Snoop Dogg Now Snoop Lion

Lindsay Lohan’s Bizarre Sex Scene Demand

Suri Dresses As “Little Mermaid” Ariel During Trip To Disneyland With Dad

More Slop About The Kristen Stewart Cheating “Scandal”



FOREIGNERS
Blackout Fuels Doubts About India’s Economic Ambitions
Fighting In Damascus Nears Christian Quarter Of City
Human Rights Group Cites “Atrocities” In Burma
Anti-Putin Activist Charged With Stealing Timber
Philippines, Cambodia In Diplomatic Row Over Latter’s South China Sea Remarks
Panetta Upbeat On Egypt’s Future
Related: The Muslim Brotherhood’s patient jihad
Turkish FM To Meet With Barzani On Kurdish Rebel Activities In Syria
Taiwan, PRC On Alert As Typhoons Approach
Cuba Charges Spaniard In Dissident Paya’s Death



BLOGS & STUFF
Da Tech Guy: Can We Stop Calling The Washington Post A “Newspaper” Now?
Moe Lane: Is Harry Reid Losing It?
Weekly Standard Blog: Ted Cruz Wins Runoff For Senate In Texas
Conservatives4Palin: Who’s Up For An Exciting Mitt Romney Bus Tour?
American power: latest Obama Campaign Ad Defames Romney As A “Felon”
Reihl World View: Breaking – Romney Kicks Obama’s App
Rush Limbaugh: Romney’s Trip So Successful Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Endorses Obama
Mitt Romney: Culture Does Matter
Michelle Malkin: Lying Obama PR Flack Apologizes To Krauthammer Over Churchill Bust Story
American Thinker: Romney’s Jerusalem Doctrine
Wizbang: Wall Photo Of Mitt Romney Gets Woman A Beatdown From BF
Right-Wing News: Black Pastors To Turn Against Obama Over Gay Marriage


SOTD: Postcard Love

Category: Live at Five

Golden Boy Jesse Angelo Lays Off Daily Staffers, Keeps $23 Million House

Posted on | July 31, 2012 | 7 Comments

Being the Harvard roommate of Rupert Murdoch’s son is a great way to get ahead at NewsCorp. Murdoch agreed to invest $30 million in The Daily, with golden boy Jesse Angelo as editor.

What could possibly go wrong, eh?

The Daily, News Corp.’s attempt to create a digital newspaper for the iPad age, is laying off nearly a third of its staff.
The publisher plans to tell its workers today that it will fire 50 of its 170 employees, according to people familiar with The Daily’s plans.
The move comes 18 months after the tablet newspaper’s high-profile launch . . .
while Daily executives say they now have more than 100,000 paying subscribers for its iOS and Android editions, the paper hasn’t been able to live up to Murdoch’s expectations, and the money-losing publication has been under scrutiny since launch.

Do you really need $30 million and a staff of 170 people to run a Web site? Does Jesse Angelo really need a $23 mllion Upper East Side house? The multimillionaire editor offers some Harvard-educated words for readers without mentioning his soon-to-be-laid-off employees:

The Daily was born of change. A changing technological landscape — the beginning of the tablet and smartphone revolution — made us want to rethink how we create media. And we believe that a healthy product and a healthy organization is one that continues to change. We try to innovate every day in the content we bring you — blending words, pictures, video, animation, design, code and touch interactivity in a way that no one else does.

Yadda, yadda. How much of that $30 million has Jesse Angelo pissed away in the past 18 months to “innovate” with “interactivity”?

UPDATE: The New York Observer names names of staffers laid off by the golden boy’s $30 million iPad boondoggle, including a sports staffer who Tweeted: “Yep, first found about my own layoff via Twitter. I feel just like an MLB player!”

UPDATE II: The plight of The Daily “raises questions about the viability of digital-only publications,” writes Jeff Bercovici of Forbes:

 If The Daily, which has consistently been among the top two or three apps in terms of gross revenue in the iTunes store since its launch, can’t make money, who can?

Oh, I dunno: Someone with fewer than 170 employees, maybe?

The New Media environment favors a lean-and-mean mode of operation, figuring out how to do more with less, maximizing the reader-value with an emphasis on flexibility and efficiency. More general-assignment writers, fewer specialized beats. Also, save a ton on “marketing” by hiring writers who understand the importance (and most effective means) of promoting their own work online.

UPDATE III: Vodkapundit figures The Daily’s high-concept project — a newspaper! on an iPad! — was a bad idea from the get-go. But nobody’s offering either or us $30 million to prove that that a bad idea is a bad idea, so we can be more objective, I suppose.

Category: Journalism

There Are Still 5 A’s in ‘RAAAAACISM!’

Posted on | July 31, 2012 | 7 Comments

At least in English. The Polish translation, I’m not sure:

Linda Wertheimer, National Public Radio: So today [Mitt Romney is in] Poland. Why is he stopping in Poland. What does he hope to accomplish with that?
Cokie Roberts: Well, I think part of it was a desire to portray President Obama as something of a wimp, and say he’s abandoned Eastern Europe. But look, you remember well the Reagan Democrats. Those ethnic white voters who had been Democrats for many years; turned out for Ronald Reagan, and have been fairly predictable Republicans since then. Now it’s a smaller percentage of the population — of the voting population — than it used to be, but white voters are still much more Republican than any other group in the electorate. They went for McCain in 2008 by 55%. And I think that getting those ethnic voters excited is really what Romney has in mind here. It’s more for the folks at home — the descendents of the people that he will be speaking to — in Poland.

This is how you know Polish-Americans are now perfectly assimilated: Liberals view them as just another bunch of racist Republicans.

UPDATE: According to liberals, everything Romney says is racist, including “America,” “free” and “working.”

Category: Election 2012, Media Bias, Mitt Romney, Poland, Racism

DNC Endorses State-Sanctioned Sodomy

Posted on | July 31, 2012 | 33 Comments

The Party of Official Perversity:

A plank supporting same-sex marriage will be included as part of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) draft platform, according to an exclusive report at the Washington Blade, which notes it was a unanimous decision.

Fire, brimstone and further updates expected . . .

UPDATE: We are supposed to believe — indeed, the “respectable Republican” types often argue quite vociferously — that only ignorant hateful bigots oppose same-sex marriage. But there are fundamental issues at stake, as I explained in November 2008:

Before he was purged from the bench, former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore made a remarkable and lamentably unappreciated contribution to American jurisprudence.
Concurring in the 2002 case of Ex Parte H.H., a custody dispute involving a lesbian mother, Moore demonstrated that homosexuality had no protected status in the Anglo-American common-law tradition, that indeed such behavior had been proscribed for centuries as “a crime against nature,” and that Alabama courts had consistently condemned homosexual acts as “illegal under the laws of this state and immoral in the eyes of most of its citizens.”
One does not have to share this abhorrence of homosexuality to agree that Moore’s concurrence — copiously studded with court precedents and citations of Blackstone’s Commentaries, 16th-century British jurist Sir Christopher Wray and even the Justinian Code — accurately summarized the legal foundation of the case against gay rights. . . .

Read the whole thing. You may blithely shrug, “To hell with the Anglo-American common-law tradition,” but such a dismissive attitude is a large step down a very slippery slope: Ideas Have Consquences.

UPDATE II: Not directly related, but it’s encouraging to see that Mitt Romney’s (hetero)sex(ual) appeal is still driving ’em crazy.

 

Category: Democrats, Election 2012, Gays, Marriage

The GOP School of Media Relations

Posted on | July 31, 2012 | 44 Comments

Pioneered by Ron Ziegler during the Nixon Administration, the Republican Party policy of contemptuous mistreatment of the press corps produces yet another predictable “success” :

WARSAW — A Mitt Romney aide told reporters to “shove it” Tuesday morning after the American press corps here shouted questions at the presidential candidate.
As Romney was walking away from Pilsudski Square toward his vehicle, reporters asked him about his string of gaffes and whether he had any comment for Palestinians, some of whom took offense at the Republican’s suggestion Monday in Jerusalem that Israel’s economy is superior because of cultural advantages Israelis enjoy. Romney ignored the questions and got in his car.
But his traveling press secretary was furious.
“Kiss my ass; this is a holy site for the Polish people,” said aide Rick Gorka. “Show some respect.”
Gorka then told a reporter to “shove it.”

This Ziegler-style hostility toward reporters was something I experienced during the 2008 campaign. No publication on the planet had been more hostile to the Clintons than The American Spectator, yet when I showed up on the campaign trail to cover Hillary’s primary campaign, the reception I got was surprisingly cordial.

Twice I covered impromptu post-event “availabilities” (i.e., press conferences) with the candidate, including one in Shepherdstown, W.Va., where I sat in the front row less than 10 feet from Hillary while she took questions from a press corps that kept asking variations on the question, “When are you going to quit?”

When I subsequently went out on the trail to cover John McCain, by contrast, there were no press conferences, and when Sarah Palin was added to the ticket, she was kept within a protective “bubble.” In fact, McCain campaign staffers at times tried to cordon off reporters in a pen, so as to prevent them even from interviewing people attending campaign rallies.

This is what GOP operatives like to call “message discipline,” and it has the predictable effect of entirely alienating the press corps.

Suppose that you are a correspondent who is following around a candidate at considerable expense to your news organization. Your bosses expect that you’re going to provide them with actual news, and hopefully something exclusive. Instead, you go to three events a day at which the candidate gives the same basic stump speech over and over. There’s never a press conference, never a minute of unscripted access to the candidate, and the campaign staffers are under orders never to tell you anything useful in terms of actual news that might distract from the pre-approved Message of the Day.

Wouldn’t that piss you off? And especially if your editors had sent you all the way to Warsaw, Poland, for such a dog-and-pony show?

How many times have I explained to my friends — many of whom are in fact Republican operatives — why this approach doesn’t work? Hundreds. Yet the same Ziegler-style policy continues to be Standard Operating Procedure, because you will never meet a Republican operative who doesn’t consider himself an authoritative expert on media relations, and they will heed no advice from actual journalists.

UPDATE: In checking back on my 2008 campaign covered, I found my American Spectator article about Hillary’s appearance in Shepherdstown, which was the day after she’d lost North Carolina and barely squeaked past Obama in Indiana:

Hillary’s supporters cheered and chanted her name at the West Virginia event, but reporters pounced at a post-rally press conference, suggesting it might be time for her to strike the tent. Does her vow to keep fighting, asked one network TV reporter, mean that Clinton will continue her campaign all the way until the vote on the convention floor in Denver?
“I’m staying in this race until there’s a nominee, and I obviously am going to work as hard as I can to become that nominee,” she answered. “So we will continue to contest these elections and move forward.”
The reporter fired back with a follow-up question: “But what do you say to those Democrats who fear that you’re putting the Democratic Party’s chances at risk by…continuing to stay in?”
Such questions caused Rush Limbaugh (who claimed that his “Operation Chaos” delivered Hillary’s margin of victory in Indiana) to wonder why the “Drive-By Media” were so concerned with the Democratic Party’s chances in November.
“All of these media types are demanding that Hillary drop out of the race now . . . and the Drive-Bys are saying, ‘Get out of the race to save the party.’ Now, what’s the party got to do with the media? I ask rhetorically, of course,” Limbaugh told his listeners after watching TV coverage of the Shepherdstown press conference.

The reporter shouting hostile questions was Mark Knoller of CBS News, an obnoxious slob, the Michael Moore of the White House press corps. Knoller’s presumption of speaking on behalf of “those Democrats” was scarcely presumptuous, of course. And the fact that Hillary was willing to stand there in front of all those cameras and answer Knoller’s pushy questions was quite a contrast to the inherently defensive way the McCain campaign kept the press at arm’s length.

UPDATE II: Bill Quick insists that I’ve got it “bass-ackwards,” which is the typical response I get from my friends when I try to explain the GOP’s media-relations problem. The undeniable fact of liberal bias has become such a gigantic obstacle in the minds of Republicans that it induces a sort of mental paralysis, so that they are incapable of thinking of reporters as human beings, as individuals.

This was what infuriated me when Melissa Clouthier declared, “A journalist is a wild animal with an appetite for conservative meat and should be interacted with that way — always.”

Really? The entire press corps — including, inter alia, Byron York and Carl Cameron, to say nothing of myself — is to be condemned pre-emptively and categorically as sub-human monsters? Do you suppose that such a contemptuous attitude can be hidden? Or, if you give the “wild animals” of the press credit for having the intuition to detect that you despise their very existence, do you suppose that they will respond to your hostility by giving you better coverage than they otherwise would?

When I objected to Melissa’s all-encompassing condemnation of the newsman’s trade (“Conservatives Against Journalism,” June 26, 2010), this made me a villain. The fact that I’ve been in the news business since 1986 doesn’t qualify me as knowing anything about “media strategy.” My assertion to the contrary — and in contradiction to the Ron Ziegler approach to press relations that is standard thinking among Republicans — was viewed not only as a personal insult toward Melissa, but toward every Republican who shared her opinions.

Look: Reporters are human beings, and human beings respond to incentives. You are never going to encourage reporters to provide fair coverage if, in the carrot-and-stick calculus of incentives, they know they’re going to get the stick every time, no matter what they report. Neither are you going to be able to establish any kind of working relationship with people unless you (a) treat them as individuals, and (b) deal with them on a basis of honesty.

The campaign has a job: To get the candidate elected.

The press has a job: To cover the campaign.

Insofar as liberal bias makes this working relationship difficult for Republicans, it is because some reporters (wrongly and unfairly) view their job as making sure the Republican doesn’t get elected.

OK, so how about this? When the campaign perceives that certain reporters — as individuals — are blatantly engaged in hostile partisanship, they address their complaints in an informal setting toward the offending reporter in an honest and professional manner.

“Hey, c’mon, Mark, what’s with all the gotcha questions, huh? Are you working for CBS News or are you working for the Obama campaign?”

There are some reporters who are beyond shame in their biased attitudes, “having their conscience seared with a hot iron,” as it were. But I believe that some lingering sentiment of fairness — some tiny spark of humanity — probably still exists even in the depraved souls of such creatures as Mark Knoller. The alternative to such a belief would require us to abandon any hope that the pervasive wretchedness of the American press can ever be even mildly reformed, to surrender forever any effort at getting any actual truth from the media.

Call me a fool for believing that an optimistic attitude is better than the helpless passivity that pessimism inspires. As a great man once said, “It is history that teaches us to hope.”

UPDATE III: John Hinderaker takes note of the “hypercritical” nature of coverage of Romney’s foreign trip, and Romney himself has now weighed in on the subject of media bias:

Asked about his missteps in an interview with Fox News’ Carl Cameron before he left Poland on Tuesday, Romney accused reporters of trivializing the substance of his trip and trying to divert attention from President Obama’s stewardship of the economy.
“And I realize that there will be some in the Fourth Estate, or whichever estate, who are far more interested in finding something to write about that is unrelated to the economy, to geopolitics, to the threat of war, to the reality of conflict in Afghanistan today, to a nuclearization of Iran,” Romney said, according to a transcript of the interview that aired on Tuesday morning. “They’ll instead try and find anything else to divert from the fact that these last four years have been tough years for our country.”

This is both true and newsworthy. And an honest, direct, but not overtly hostile confrontation between Romney and those in the press corps who are actively engaged in attempting to sabotage his campaign is long overdue. Reporters are under no obligation to be absolutely neutral, but they are under an obligation to be honest.

Bob Dylan once said that, I think.

UPDATE IV: To attempt to bring this argument to some sort of conclusion — I’ve got some actual reporting to do today, and can’t dwell much longer on this — let me say that what bugs me about the Republican tendency to use media bias as an excuse for failure.

If media bias were really such an insuperable obstacle to GOP success, no Republican would ever be elected anywhere. Obviously, some Republicans are able to run effective campaigns and perhaps even occasionally garner press coverage that isn’t entirely negative.

By using media bias as an all-purpose scapegoat for Republican failure, GOP politicians and campaign operatives prevent anyone (including themselves) from asking whether Republicans themselves may be partly responsible for their hostile relations with the media.

It’s sort of like the embittered guy who, after a divorce, places all the blame for the breakup on his ex-wife. Then he re-marries, and that marriage also ends in divorce, and once again, to hear him tell the story, it’s all his ex-wife’s fault. So he’s 0-for-2, and wants you to believe that this is just bad luck: He coincidentally got stuck with two bad wives.

When you hear a woe-is-me story like that, isn’t your gut-hunch suspicion that maybe this guy has problems of his own? In fact, don’t you think that his insistence on placing the blame on his ex-wives is a symptom of that problem, namely his inability to accept responsibility for his own personal failures and shortcomings?

Therfore, when I see a candidate as wretched as the 2008 GOP presidential nominee, who employs in key positions such faithless backstabbers as Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace, and then I hear Republicans whining about media bias — no, I’m sorry, I ain’t buying that.

Blame the loser who lost the election.

 

Category: Election 2012, Media Bias, Mitt Romney

In Which I Forgive @TheRealRoseanne Her Unrelenting Ignorance

Posted on | July 31, 2012 | 39 Comments

by Smitty

As the son of a son of a sailor, I gave a decade active, and a decade more in the reserves, to my country. Actually more, but I’ll keep it simple. Grew up on the edge of foodstamps; moved all over the West Coast; didn’t really get to know my father until I was 16, and he was on his final shore tour. And I’m fortunate. I at least got to know my dad, and no one in the family has left body parts in some odd corner of the planet.

Also, I don’t do guilt. I rejoice in your exercise of free speech. Quite a blessing, isn’t it?

I’d just like you to know, Roseanne, as you toss off random bits of condescension on Twitter, that far nobler folk than you are out there ensuring that Americans can ply a porcine pie-hole with prosciuotto. In fact, it’s a point of honor to defend the liberty of Americans to maximize their God-given talents, or to be useless sacks of rancid crap.

May you one day mature to the point of grasping this.

Forgiving you in liberty, Roseanne,

Chris

via Twitchy

Category: Culture
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