LIVE AT FIVE: 07.27.12

We have recently been presented with the puzzle of James Holmes, who has been arrested for the massacre that killed 12 people and wounded dozens more at a Colorado movie theatre. You have to shake your head in dismay at reading stories like this:

Holmes was awarded a prestigious grant from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. . . .
It gave the graduate student a $26,000 stipend and paid his tuition for the highly competitive neuroscience program at the University of Colorado in Denver. Holmes was one of six neuroscience students at the school to get the grant money.

Then there was the report that Holmes had sent a package to a psychiatry professor detailing his mass-murder plans. At some point, we’ll get the full background on how Holmes went from being a promising science student to being a cold-blooded killer.

Tonight, however, I’m thinking about Lee Harvey Oswald.

A few days ago, I explained my idea for a book about the 15 years in American history from 1948 to 1963, from the re-election of Harry Truman to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. This idea was inspired, as I said, by Robert Bork’s observation that the radical uprising of the 1960s could not have succeeded as swiftly and easily as it did, if the Establishment had not “already been eaten hollow” by liberal beliefs.

Well, what about Lee Harvey Oswald? Wouldn’t Oswald’s life during this era provide some interesting episodes for the narrative history I have in mind? So I went to Amazon and found a 1978 book, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, by Edward Jay Epstein.

In 1948, when he was nine years old, Oswald’s mother divorced his stepfather, a divorce that had the effect of drasttically lowering the family’s socio-economic status. By the time he was 15, Oswald became an avowed Marxist, and at age 20 defected to the Soviet Union.

This was a rather extreme manifestation of alienation. What happened? Oswald later said that he became attracted to Marxism after he was handed a Communist Party pamphlet by a woman protesting the execution of Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953, and Oswald was living in New York at that time, so this seems plausible.

One other interesting tidbit: Oswald’s favorite TV program was I Led Three Lives, based on the story of Herbert Philbrick, who infiltrated the Communist Party for the FBI.

While the Communists were the bad guys and the FBI agent was the good guy in the series — which aired 1953-56 — it would appear that Oswald identified with the villains.

Think about that. And consider something else: Over and over again, those who encountered Oswald described him as “arrogant.”

Oswald was intensely alienated from American society, he was very arrogant, and he identified with his nation’s Communist enemies.

Lee Harvey Oswald is, of course, just one character in a very large historical narrative of an era which preceded the eruption of Sixties radicalism, but he strikes me as a sort of symbolic harbinger.

American have become unfortunately accustomed to tragedies inflicted on innocents by angry, alienated young men. Where did it begin?

Category: History

World’s Youngest Blogger At 1 Year: Already A Big Planner

Posted on | July 26, 2012 | 15 Comments

The World's Youngest Blogger expounds on his plan to rebuild America using Legos and blocks.

Category: World's Youngest Blogger

Romney Busted? No, Obama

Posted on | July 26, 2012 | 8 Comments

by Smitty (via JWF on Twitter)

Well, Romney is at least showing interest in being busted:

At an event in London, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said, “I’m looking forward to the bust of Winston Churchill being in the Oval Office again.”

Romney’s trip to Ol’ Blighty might help to explain the attempt to play an Anglo-Saxon race card. Breitbart, however, reports that the Anglo-Saxon kerfuffle was Rancid Pile of Hooey #8,442 from #OccupyResoluteDesk:

Obama’s desperate Media Palace Guards don’t want to talk about the flood of bad economic news we’ve been hit with this week, and they surely don’t want to talk about Obama’s revealing “you didn’t build that” comment for another day. So, ever in search of a new distraction-narrative, what we are now witnessing before our very eyes is the media ginning up a coordinated attack against Romney based on an unsourced quote that the Romney campaign has already denied.
In an email the Romney campaign just told me: “Flat out. Wasn’t our campaign.”
Won’t matter though; the media has a failed president to save.

Will not November come, so we can rid ourselves of this turbulent turdmonger?
More at The Corner:

Unfortunately, the alleged statement by the unnamed Romney adviser, if it actually happened as relayed, distracted attention from the underlying reality behind the sentiment expressed, and by the unfortunate choice of an outdated term, let the statement become the issue. To be fair, the adviser was probably somebody who followed the European financial press closely, where the term Anglo-Saxon is a standard and uncontroversial term for describing the English-speaking economies, especially in the French press. However, in a campaign, nobody is going to stop to be fair.

Update: linked at Hogewash

Category: Barack Obama, Mitt Romney

“We Tried Our Plan And. . .” “We Don’t Have A Definitive Solution. . .We Just Don’t Like Yours”

Posted on | July 26, 2012 | 11 Comments

by Smitty

While this new Romney ad is good. . .

I think the mail on #OccupyResoluteDesk’s speechifying is better answered by TurboTax Timmy, back in February:

It should be increasingly clear to all that, while America is not a failed state, we are under a failed Administration.

Category: Barack Obama

Barack Obama Is the Antichrist — and Other Neutral Objective Facts

Posted on | July 26, 2012 | 22 Comments

“I agree with the late Hunter S. Thompson that a lot of what passes for ‘objective journalism’ is bullshit. . . . The reason so many Americans hate the news media is because so many supposedly ‘objective’ journalists are transparently dishonest in what they’re doing.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, April 16, 2009

The futile pursuit of that elusive phantom, “objective journalism,” may be more than a mere waste of time, but also a disservice to readers:

A new experimental study . . . finds that opinionated reporting is better at motivating the politically unengaged than objective reporting.
For years, much of the media has assumed that objective education, alone, was enough to promote a healthy democracy. What traditional media failed to realize is that a good chunk of the population needs a reason to care in the first place. “News articles that are written through the eyes of a mere observer, without a perspective or slant, can foster political disaffection among citizens,” explains author Minha Kim of Sungkyunkwan University.

An “experimental study”? The science is settled! The study itself appears to be motivated by left-wing sentiment, but makes valid points:

In situations where news consumers have well-established knowledge of important issues and converse frequently with fellow citizens, objective reporting actually promotes the legitimization of political actions, resulting in stronger participatory intentions on the part of the news consumer. An obvious limitation of journalistic objectivity is that a journalist must take on the role of a disengaged third person, but the willful ignorance of such a practice is not supposed to be the goal of the public journalist. Instead, objectivity needs to be distinguished from social detachment, and it is the latter rather than the former that a journalist needs to overcome. Although it is true that objectivity and social detachment overlap each other to a certain extent, a careful examination of the desirable journalistic role allows the two to be distinguished from each other.

Of course, this study doesn’t really tell us anything that students of Gonzo journalism didn’t already know. Outside of hard-core political junkies, nobody gets much excited about political news reported with bland even-handed neutrality by a bunch of faceless nobodies.

Grant that somebody has got to perform the thankless task of filing that toothlessly objective Associated Press story about the State of the Union speech, and we would be shocked if we picked up our local paper and saw an article like this on the front page:

PRESIDENT’S SPEECH REACHES HISTORIC
NEW LOWS IN SHAMELESS DISHONESTY

By Helmund Gormworthy
ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Obama’s annual State of the Union speech was a gigantic lie from start to finish, as he told one fib after another in an increasingly desperate effort to hide the multiple failures of his administration.
“My fellow Americans,” Obama began, in an obvious attempt to conceal his Kenyan ancestry, before proceeding to tell Congress a series of big fat whoppers in a deceitful lecture that continued for more than an hour before concluding with a trite and transparently insincere, “God bless America.”
During the course of his 72-minute speech, the president told 64 outright lies and more than three dozen half-truths, according to an analysis provided by the Republican National Committee.
“Frankly, the overwhelming stench of bullshit nearly made me vomit,” Speaker of the House John Boehner said afterwards. “This was the most heinously dishonest speech I’ve ever been forced to sit through. Not even Bill Clinton told this many outrageous lies.” . . .

You see my point, perhaps. What we are becoming accustomed to in the New Media age, however, is selecting our news from a vast smorgasbord of choices that didn’t exist 40 years ago, when the average person could choose from one local newspaper and three broadcast TV channels. Today there are not only multiple cable-TV news outlets — Fox, MSNBC, CNN — but also talk radio and a bewildering profusion of online sources, many of them strongly opinionated or at least quite selective in terms of their coverage.

I take it for granted that anyone reading this blog is a highly engaged news consumer, who is also gathering information from many other sources, and this assumption frees me from the burden of reporting everything in an entirely balanced way, as though my lack of objectivity might unfairly prejudice the reader’s viewpoint.

The larger the outlet, and the more it strives to be a “one-stop” outlet for news, the greater the danger that the biases of the editors and reporters might distort public perception.

This is why the biases of NBC Nightly News (about 8 million viewers) matter more than the biases of Fox News (about 3 million viewers for The O’Reilly Factor), especially because no one who tunes in to watch Bill O’Reilly is misled into thinking that he is strictly neutral in his viewpoint. I’ve repeatedly pointed this out: The combined audience for the “Big Three” evening news broadcasts is six or seven times larger than the Fox News audience, so why the Media Matters obsession with the alleged evils of right-wing bias at Fox?

What must be fought against is the journalistic herd instinct, the phony manufactured “consensus” of the Conventional Wisdom. The phenomenon we call “liberal bias” is merely one variety of this problem: Most news reporters and editors are liberal Democrats and therefore, however much they may pretend to be providing Neutral Objective Journalism, their coverage will necessarily reflect certain biases of their herd, for example in regard to the evils of homophobia, the dangers of global warming and the benefits of socialized medicine.

Those of us who don’t share those biases, and who wish to counteract the incessant yammering from vendors of Conventional Wisdom, are freed from any need to pretend that what we write is “balanced” to the point of being neutral. This doesn’t free us, however, from the need to provide readers with facts. Expressing our opinions is only helpful insofar as we are giving the reader access to facts they might not see in the mainstream media. One of my beefs about coverage of the 2010 mid-term elections is that it tended to downplay the sheer size of the Republican victory:

Buerkle’s victory brings to 63 the number of House seats gained by Republicans in the mid-term election. That’s the GOP’s biggest net gain in any election since 1938, and gives Republicans 242 House seats — the most they’ve held since 1949. Their majority is bigger by 12 seats than the one captured by Newt Gingrich’s GOP in 1994.

Nearly two years later, most people still don’t realize that the Republican victory in 2010 was actually bigger than in 1994, and I believe this lack of public awareness explains the persistent obstructionism — the do-nothing inertia — of Harry Reid’s Senate Democrats. Media talking heads keep whining about the alleged unwillingness of Republicans to “compromise,” but why should they compromise with the vastly unpopular liberal agenda of Democrats who just got embarrassed by one of the most lopsided electoral ass-whuppings in American history?

For essentially the same reason, I think the mainstream media are underrating the prospects of a landslide win for Mitt Romney in November. Defeating an incumbent president is, historically, a very difficult task. If you exclude LBJ’s decision not to seek re-election in 1968, only three times since 1932 has an incumbent president been defeated: When Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford in 1976, when Ronald Reagan beat Carter four years later, and when Bill Clinton beat George Bush in 1992. But all three of those elections occurred when the economy was bad, and this year the economy is much worse than it was in 1992, if not (yet) quite as bad as it was during the 1970s era of “stagflation.”

So when I went to an Obama campaign event in Virginia, which is supposed to be a crucial “swing state” this year, and found hundreds of fired-up Tea Party protesters outside the event, it struck me that the Conventional Wisdom might be completely wrong: Maybe Virginia will be safely Republican in November, and the public perception of Obama’s economic ineptitude will be so widespread that, rather than Obama hoping to win “purple” states like Colorado, Nevada and Iowa, the Democrats will find themselves fighting desperately to avoid defeat in previously “blue” states like Michigan and Pennsylvania.

I’m not saying that will happen, but it could happen, and the only reason most in the media are ignoring the possibility of a complete Democratic meltdown this year is that the Conventional Wisdom blinds them to evidence that might indicate that possibility. They haven’t even acknowledged the significance of the Republican landslide in 2010, and seem to have in mind that this was a trivial aberration.

Everybody seems to be taking for granted that this is going to be another election decided by a few percentage points in the popular vote and a slight tilt in a few key “battleground” states and who knows? They’re probably right. But if things start shifting toward a GOP landslide, don’t let the mainstream media tell you this is a shocking and unexpected development, because there are plenty of little clues that this is well within the range of possible outcomes, although not what you’d call a “likely scenario.”

The prejudice of political pundits is to keep their predictions strictly within the realm of the most likely scenarios, which is why really important shifts in the electoral landscape are always a shock to the people who manufacture and consume Conventional Wisdom. Back in March, I warned that if Romney got the nomination and polls showed Obama losing ground, the media would start playing the Mormon card, so I was scarcely surprised to see Brian Williams raise the issue during his interview with Mitt.

That’s a legitimate issue for a Republican, whereas no one in the media can be permitted to mention the 20 years Obama spent in the pews of Jeremiah Wright’s anti-American church.

Such are the parameters of public discourse as established by the Conventional Wisdom, and we aren’t supposed to notice the resultant artificiality of our political conversation.

Only by stepping outside that consensus to call attention to the overlooked facts — or to provide an interpretation of facts that doesn’t fit neatly within the consensus — is it possible to see anything other than what the Conventional Wisdom machine dispenses. If it were indeed a fact that Barack Obama is the Antichrist foretold in Bible prophecy, for example, you’d never see that reported on NBC News. The appearance of apocalyptic omens from the Book of Revelation would not be headlined as such in the New York Times.

RIVERS OF BLOOD, DARKNESS AT NOON
Women, Minorities Hardest Hit; GOP Denies Responsibility

Satan could not be reached for comment.

Category: Fear. Loathing., Media Bias, Neutral Objective Journalism

Michael Moore: Can I Out-Stupid @AmandaMarcotte? Why, Yes, The Founders Might Say That I Can

Posted on | July 26, 2012 | 19 Comments

by Smitty

Listen, Michael Moore, you corpulent Commie: the inalienable right of every man to defend himself is precisely what the Founders protected with the Second Amendment. The First Amendment means that the government cannot purge your rotten mind of its Marxist filth, and the Second Amendment means that you can defend all 17 feet of your circumference*.

As with Amanda Marcotte’s infamous tweet, Michael Moore’s absurd, ahistorical fantasies would have earned him a musket butt upside his fat head from just about any of the Colonials who fought, froze, marched and died for years to deliver the liberty that one who of the sort who “. . .never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it” so casually trashes in word and deed.

I’d close on a “get stuffed”, Michael Moore, but you’re clearly long since overachieved on the gluttony. However, Tina answers both you and the PHB in today’s Dilbert:

via The Blaze

Update: linked by Andrew J. Patrick, who would attempt to educate the hapless Moore.

*A prime number pulled from the air. I did not actually perform an orbit of Michael Moore to quantify his Jabba-the-Hut-ness.

Category: Culture

Tina Brown to Newsweek Staff: ‘Don’t Worry, We Can Lose Millions Forever’

Posted on | July 26, 2012 | 13 Comments

Or words to that effect. Tuesday we got the not-surprising news that the merger of Newsweek with Tina Brown’s Daily Beast has failed to stem the multimillion-dollar losses at both operations. Tina Brown has never done anything else but lose vast sums of money — a journalistic career written in red ink, as it were — and I had predicted exactly this result when the “Newsbeast” merger was announced in 2010.

After Tuesday’s announcement that the Harman family was pulling back from its “investment” (Sidney Harman bought Newsweek for $1 in 2010), this required some explanation from Barry Diller, whose IAC conglomerate holds the controlling interest in Tina Brown’s red ink empire. And in a Wednesday conference call, Diller seemed to signal that Newsweek would cease print publication later this year:

Newsweek will eventually transition to an online publication, owner IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI) said today, marking the beginning of the end for the money-losing magazine’s 79-year run as a print weekly.
IAC Chairman Barry Diller made the announcement during a quarterly conference call, saying the New York-based company aims to curb investments in the business. Newsweek is projected to lose as much as $22 million this year, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. Still, Diller stopped short of saying the magazine would undergo a “total” shift online.
“The transition to online from hard print will take place,” Diller said. “We’re examining all of our options.”
A plan for Newsweek will be announced as early as September, Diller said. Newsweek became part of his media holdings in 2011 when it merged with IAC’s Daily Beast Co., an Internet news startup that Diller founded with former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown. The merger was part of an agreement with the late Sidney Harman, who acquired Newsweek from Washington Post Co. (WPO) for $1 and the assumption of liabilities.

It has been estimated that the Daily Beast was already losing $10 million a year before the merger with Newsweek, a magazine that was carrying $50 million in debt when Harman bought it for a token $1. Jeff Bercovici at Forbes reports:

IAC doesn’t break out the Newsweek/Beast’s fiances, but published reports have consistently pegged its losses at around $30 million last year. . . . While Diller said in December that the losses were moderating, a source with detailed knowledge of the business estimates it is now on course to lose as much as $35 million this year, with Newsweek accounting for more than $20 million of that.

That’s a lot of money to lose on a Web site and a magazine. Nevertheless, when Diller expressed the obvious fact that these staggering losses cannot continue infinitely, it evidently set off a panic among Newsweek staffers, requiring Tina Brown to issue this note to her staff:

Barry Diller would like to make it clear that he did not say on the earnings call as reported that Newsweek is going digital in September.
He made the uncontroversial, industry-wide observation that print is moving in the direction of digital.
Below, in summary, are the points he actually made on the IAC earnings call when he was reporting the tremendous results of the company this quarter.
1. The Newsweek brand is strong, and far stronger than it has been in years.
2. We wouldn’t finance The Daily Beast at anywhere near the level of ‘12.
3. That eventually, over time, digital would replace much of print (hardly a controversial revelation).
4. In September we would be evolving our plan for the year ’13, with many options to choose from.
Best,
Tina

Lots to chew on in that brief note, e.g.: How is a brand “strong,” in a business sense, when it is synonymous with catastrophic financial losses? More important, however, is the revelation that Diller won’t continue funding Tina’s operation “at anywhere near” its current levels.

What that will likely mean — if you read between the lines — is a hiring freeze, at the very minimum, and the possibility of significant layoffs.

In other words, the gravy-train years at the Daily Beast are coming to an end, Diller’s stockholders can’t continue forever footing the bill for these extravagant expenses, and Tina’s employees will be expected to endure some belt-tightening measures in coming months.

Tina Brown herself, however, will continue to be the privileged publishing diva she has always been, with an amazing knack for convincing people to let her throw away their money.

Category: Newsweek

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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: 07.27.12

Alienated and Angry and Arrogant

World’s Youngest Blogger At 1 Year: Already A Big Planner

Romney Busted? No, Obama

“We Tried Our Plan And. . .” “We Don’t Have A Definitive Solution. . .We Just Don’t Like Yours”

Barack Obama Is the Antichrist — and Other Neutral Objective Facts

Michael Moore: Can I Out-Stupid @AmandaMarcotte? Why, Yes, The Founders Might Say That I Can

Tina Brown to Newsweek Staff: ‘Don’t Worry, We Can Lose Millions Forever’

THE FULL METAL JACKET REACH-AROUND AWARD

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