The Other McCain

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

DON’T MISS IT: Steven Crowder Will Speak at BlogCon 2012 in Charlotte, N.C.

Posted on | March 15, 2012 | 17 Comments

That’s right: My close personal friend Steven Crowder — follow him on Twitter — has been honored with an invitation to speak at BlogCon 2012, April 20-21, at the fabulous Hilton Center City in Charlotte, North Carolina. Here is Steven’s latest video, produced in association with the National Center for Public Policy Research:

Trust me, folks, you don’t want to miss BlogCon 2012. All the important people in conservative New Media will be there. IYKWIMATIYD.

Category: Blogging, Tabitha Hale

Asking the Important Questions: Why Does Gillian Anderson Want Me to Blog About Her Teenage Lesbian Affairs?

Posted on | March 15, 2012 | 34 Comments

Yes, it’s been a week since my last Instalanche and, while I sincerely doubt that Professor Glenn Reynolds would want to encourage such absolutely shameless link-baiting, I’m otherwise mystified as to why any attractive celebrity would make this kind of confession:

Gillian Anderson, the actress best known for playing agent Dana Scully on ”The X-Files,” has admitted she’s had romantic relationships with women in the past.
Speaking to Out, the actress talked about how in her youth she was voted “Most Bizarre” and “Most Likely to Be Arrested.” Embellishing on her desire to shock at such a young age, she admitted to having a relationship with a girl, “for a long time when I was in high school.”
When asked if that meant a lesbian relationship, Anderson says, “Yeah, yeah, well it’s … You know, I’m old enough that I can talk about that.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Anderson downplayed other same sex relationships she had. “If I had thought I was 100-percent gay, would it have been a different experience for me?” She continued, “Would it have been a bigger deal if shame had been attached to it and all those things that become huge life-altering issues for youngsters in that situation? It’s possible that my attitude around it came, on some level, from knowing that I still liked boys.”

Let me be the first to say that unless she’s prepared to publish video proof — or at least a few grainy old Polaroids — I can only conclude that Gillian’s just making up this stuff in order to stoke the kinky fantasies of her fans. Or maybe her “I Was a Teenage Lesbian (Kinda)” story is about signaling that she’s cool with the whole gay-rights “No Bullying” thing.

Either way, it’s an obvious P.R. stunt, and the only reason I’m writing about Gillian Anderson is the off-chance Instapundit will link me, so I can enhance my traffic with what is, quite frankly, just another lazy round-up of links topped off with a tasty slice of cheesecake and a clever headline to lure in the readership. Like the Big Man says, Time to clear the freaking browser tabs!

Why? Because you know that’s what teenage lesbian Gillian Anderson would want you to do — in your dreams.

UPDATE: POH Diaries rubs salt in my wounds:

I didn’t realize that she and Stacy McCain had so much in common. Now we now know thanks to Playboy, Meghan McCain has an obsession with Hunter S. Thompson. Hmmmm.

Weird, huh? Here’s the difference: I’m a professional journalist. Meghan’s a rich brat exploiting her second-hand fame and big titties.

Therefore, I’m exploiting her second-hand fame (and big titties) by writing about Meghan — as a professional journalist!

No, I’m not proud of it. But that’s what I’m doing.

UPDATE II: Dan Riehl is mildly amused by Meghan. And by “mildly amused by,” I mean, coldly contemptuous of.

Playboy Reads Dan Riehl “for the articles” — heh!

UPDATE III: In case anyone should accuse me of “misogyny” toward Her Bratness, permit me to point out that the list of young conservative women in New Media with more talent than Meghan McCain is almost infinitely long. For example, Katie Pavlich of Townhall:

Just a day after the DCCC issued a 250 word email mentioning the “War on Women” four times and just two days after Hillary Clinton warned women of “extremists” in America looking to take away their rights, TIME Magazine is out with a cover story all about women. The cover story isn’t about how women are oppressed in America, but about how women are now out earning men and bringing home the bacon.

But the liberal media don’t celebrate conservative young women like Katie Pavlich — or Mary Katharine Ham, et al. — do they?

Why, then, do the liberal media luvvvv Meghan McCain, huh?

That’s what we call “a rhetorical question,” Meghan.

UPDATE IV: It might be worth pointing out that I once got a lot of traffic for the headline: “Dana Loesch in Playboy?”

Remember: I am a professional journalist!

Category: Celebrities, Dan Riehl, Jimmie Bise Jr., Meghan McCain, Rule 5

Nostalgia Is Not a Business Strategy

Posted on | March 15, 2012 | 5 Comments

The introduction:

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and a monthly contributor to The Providence Journal, among other publications. This essay is one of this year’s Delacorte Lectures at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Oh, boy. You know this one’s gonna be a hoot:

Long before I took myself off Facebook, I doubted the so-called revolutionary potential of the Internet. In part my viewpoint was formed early on by the annoying smugness of the pre-crash dot.com “entrepreneurs,” who always seemed to be murmuring initial public offering nonsense at a table next to mine in tony restaurants.
I recall one such occasion in the year 2000 when Lewis Lapham, then editor of Harper’s Magazine, and I were dining in indirectly lit luxury, somewhere near San Francisco on our promotion tour to celebrate the magazine’s 150th anniversary. . . .

The phrase “dining in indirectly lit luxury” in combination with “Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism” might suggest that Mr. MacArthur is a snob who enjoys the finer things in life, and if you suspect that he’s basically whining about how New Media makes it hard for snobs to make money, you’re right.

There is no doubt that the Internet has lowered, and will likely continue lowering, the money-to-work ratio for most journalists. However, new technology offers real and exciting opportunities, which are kind of hard to see if you spend all your time grumbling about new technology. Mr. MacArthur seems to think all commercial online content should be behind paywalls, and after telling some interesting Back in the Good Old Days stories about working on the copy desk in Chicago, concludes:

I have examples of successful alternatives to the Internet publishing model, but I don’t have a solution to the crisis. I can only make some suggestions. Such as don’t write for free. This is becoming nearly impossible, but you should really think about it.
Put up paywalls on blogs, if you must blog, for pennies if that’s all the market will bear. But at least hold fast to the principle that writing is work, that writing has value, and that writers should be paid.

Mr. MacArthur, if you wish to pay for what I write, nobody’s stopping you: Hit the freaking tip jar, and forgive me for laughing at the Twitter summary provided by Matthias Shapiro:

5,000 word essay summarized: “Get off my f***ing lawn, internet” http://bit.ly/x6sPd0

That’s gonna leave a mark.

Category: How This Here Internet Thingy Works, Journalism

I’VE BEEN BLINDED BY HATE!

Posted on | March 15, 2012 | 35 Comments

So says Bill Quick at Daily Pundit, who says I’m “spouting arrant hooey” in observing that Newt Gingrich’s campaign is doomed.

Quick says my “visceral hatred of Gingrich” accounts for my hooey. Even if accurate, this accusation completely misses the relevant point that Newt’s campaign faces financial ruin after Tuesday’s double defeats in Mississippi and Alabama.

As I’ve said repeatedly in the past week, while we have had announcements of February fundraising totals from both Romney ($11.5 million) and Santorum ($9 million), we haven’t heard a peep from Team Newt, which is a very bad omen for Gingrich.

Perhaps I was the only one who noticed the report (and I could look it up if I had to) of what Gingrich was doing while his campaign in Nevada was stumbling toward its Feb. 4 disaster. Newt was reportedly “dialing for dollars,” phoning up contributors who hadn’t yet maxed-out and asking them to give more. If you know anything about elections, you know that the most valuable resource in any campaign is the candidate’s time. The report that Gingrich was dialing for dollars in Nevada, at a time when he evidently didn’t have time to attend a scheduled meeting with the state’s popular Gov. Brian Sandoval, was therefore something I saw as highly significant.

Remember: On Jan. 21, Gingrich had defeated Romney in the South Carolina primary, following two televised debate performances that many conservatives hailed as triumphant for Newt. Yet here he was, less than two weeks later, his campaign evidently in such dire financial straits that his time had to be devoted to fundraising phone calls.

What that tells me is that the Gingrich campaign’s “burn rate” got out of control in Florida: They weren’t merely spending the money as fast as it came in, but they were spending it so fast that they outpaced even the bumped-up fundraising they had after their South Carolina victory. (Remember, also: Rick Perry endorsed Gingrich on Jan. 19, which should have made all of Perry’s big-money Texas donors fair game for Newt.)

Quick furthermore accuses me of “wishing and hoping that Gingrich supporters will move en masse to Santorum without Newt urging them to do so,” a mistake that I can assure him — and anyone else — that I have not made. But neither do I suppose that Newt’s endorsement would have any magic benefit for Santorum. In case Bill hasn’t noticed, the endorsements of Newt by Perry and Herman Cain have not magically transferred their supporters to Newt’s camp.

Politics doesn’t work that way: People support who they support for very idiosyncratic reasons, and people who have spent the past few months staunchly supporting Newt Gingrich — most obviously including Bill Quick — do so in part because they have rejected the available alternatives.

If they wanted to support Rick Santorum, the Newtoids might have jumped aboard the Santorum Express after Iowa, or after Santorum’s Feb. 7 trifecta in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri. The fact that they are still supporting Gingrich now, when his campaign is so plainly hopeless (e.g., attendance at his Illinois events numbered in the dozens) tells me that Newt’s remaining diehards have strong objections to Santorum’s candidacy which might deserve the term “hatred” far more than my own attitude toward Gingrich does.

As a sort of Rorshach test, let me ask Bill Quick what he thinks of this inkblot quote that Newt gave Greta Van Sustern last night:

I’m third among the three, but we’re continuing to campaign, continuing to develop ideas.
And I have a hunch that just as has happened in the past, the more we watch Romney and Santorum fight, the more attractive I’ll look and the more I will regain strength as people look at my solutions, rather than politics as usual.
I don’t pretend to be a traditional politician. I’m somebody who wants to really have very large-scale change in Washington.

To borrow Toby Harnden’s excellent phrase, this is “so far removed from reality that calling it delusional seems like an understatement.” And once again, I’ll quote myself:

Unfortunately, some Gingrich supporters want to blame people who explain to them that Newt can’t win, as though he could win, if only we’d be quiet and pretend he could.
Lashing out at scapegoats is not a useful substitute for success.

You can kill the messenger, but the facts are still the facts, and I do not rule out the possibility that we may be doomed to Mitt Romney. However, if conservatives were really serious when they said they wanted “Anybody But Mitt,” they must understand that their only hope now is to rally behind Rick Santorum.

(BTW: Bloggers should observe how well Bill Quick has understood my Rule 4 adage: “Love me, hate me, as long as you link me.” What’s the point of having an argument, if it doesn’t boost our traffic?)

UPDATE: Bill updates to say that I’m “mischarecterizing [his] arguments,” and maybe I am. But the point is that I’m linking his arguments, and anyone can compare what I’ve written and what he’s written and make up their own minds as to whether either of us is right. I don’t rule out the possibility that we’re both completely wrong, or that we’re each clinging blindly to some comforting small piece of the truth while both ignoring something very large that we don’t want to look at too closely, i.e., the likelihood that we’re doomed beyond hope of redemption and should be praying for the swift arrival of the Sweet Meteor of Death.

Maybe we should both stop blogging about the 2012 GOP campaign and start blogging about Whitney Houston’s dysfunctional family.

If you think about it, there are similarities . . .

Category: Bill Quick, Election 2012, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Rule 4

Obama in 1990: America ‘Mean-Spirited’

Posted on | March 15, 2012 | 5 Comments

While a student at Harvard Law School in 1990, Barack Obama was interviewed by the Associated Press in an article the Illinois Daily Herald headlined, “Harvard student tackles racism at core“:

America suffered when the movements of the 1960s dissipated, he said. Those movements succeeded in raising doubts about harmful traditions of sexism and racism, but failed to offer a viable alternative.
“Hopefully, more and more people will begin to feel their story is somehow part of this larger story of how we’re going to reshape America in a way that is less mean-spirited and more generous,” Obama said.

(Hat-tip: Gateway Pundit.) This article shows Obama to have been a man of his time in two important ways:

  1. Second-Hand Sixties Nostalgia — Born in 1961, Obama was too young in the 1960s to have any real direct knowledge of what “the movements of the 1960s” were actually like. (Of course, in 1967, when he was 6, young Barack moved to Indonesia.) Like many liberals of his age, however, Obama was raised to view “The Sixties” as a sacred thing, so that it was a terrible thing when the “movements . . . dissipated.” This attitude was common among liberal college kids in the ’80s. The South African “divestment” campaign that became a campus vogue during that decade was typical of attempts to re-live the legendary glories of Sixties protests movement.
  2. The Critique of Reagan-Bush Policy as ‘Mean-Spirited’ — Keep in mind that, when Obama gave that 1990 interview, the Left had just suffered an epic decade of political disasters. Ronald Reagan had been elected and re-elected and handed off the baton to George H.W. Bush, who won the 1988 election in a memorable landslide, defeating the hand-picked champion of Massachusetts liberalism, Mike Dukakis. Worst of all, from the leftist perspective, America was on the brink of winning the Cold War. The Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989 and, when Obama gave his interview to the AP, the Soviet Union itself was near complete collapse. Liberals of the era, however, viewed the entire decade of the 1980s as an orgy of “mean-spirited” selfishness.

Because liberals flocked to academia in the 1960s and ’70s, theirs was the historical worldview — “Sixties good, Eighties bad” — that prevailed in such elite environments as Obama inhabited at Harvard Law in 1990. As a man of the Left, Obama certainly would have felt right at home there, despite his assertion in the interview that he was confronted by “dismissive” racism on a regular basis.

Category: Barack Obama, Culture, History

Andrew Sullivan Should Be Deported, Not Invited to White House State Dinners

Posted on | March 15, 2012 | 4 Comments

Let me set this up by telling you a story: My 13-year-old son Jefferson accompanied me to South Carolina in January. After the debate in Myrtle Beach was over and I’d hit my deadline for the American Spectator (“Carolina Spin Wars“), friends wanted me to join them at the hotel bar, and I told Jefferson to wait for me in the lobby.

So after the refreshments (and I swear, it was only a half-hour) I came back to the Sheraton lobby and . . . no Jefferson.

A search ensued which, as it continued, became increasingly frantic on my part. I asked the hotel staff to help me look. The thought occurred to me that maybe Jeff had wandered back out to the hospitality tent, so I looked there. No luck. Thinking maybe the kid had gotten tired of waiting and gone to the car, I checked — nope.

So I got in the car and drove over to our motel, four blocks away, went up to the room to check and he wasn’t there, either. Back in the car, back to the Sheraton lobby, and my mind was racked with the worst imaginings when I encountered Toby Harnden of the U.K. Daily Mail.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“I’ve lost my son! My wife is going to kill me!”

Understanding the urgency, Toby volunteered to help look, and a few minutes later, he found Jefferson, peacefully sleeping on a bench in the lobby of the convention center.

Explanation: The Sheraton and the convention center in Myrtle Beach are one big connected complex, and when I had told Jefferson to meet me in the lobby, he didn’t realize that the convention center lobby wasn’t the same as the hotel lobby and . . .

Well, anyway, Toby found my son, and my wife didn’t kill me.

Toby Harnden is therefore The Journalist Who Saved My Life, but evidently was not invited to Wednesday night’s White House State Dinner for British Prime Minister David Cameron, because:

A. He’s not a major Obama donor; and
B. He’s not the kind of British journalist Obama likes.

That would be . . . . Andrew Sullivan, as Toby Tweets:

How DC works RT @LewisMcCrary: Andrew Sullivan praises Obama-Cameron lovefest, gets invite to state dinner bit.ly/zrI0ti

Twitchy has the whole story of Brit journos getting wined and dined at U.S. taxpayer expense. And I should point out that, unlike Andrew Sullivan — a diseased criminal drug addict foreigner who should be deported — Toby Harnden is a naturalized U.S. citizen, who I’m sure will be invited to the White House by President Santorum.

Toby doesn’t seem to be worried about a Gingrich presidency:

The problem is his self-important rhetoric is so far removed from reality that calling it delusional seems like an understatement.
Describing himself, Gingrich said: “I believe we need a visionary leader who is prepared to talk about a dramatically different future with dramatically more jobs, dramatically more energy and a much safer and stronger America. That’s the key to winning in the fall. Not all this petty baloney but the really big choices.”
Except that the voters do not believe he is such a person — if they thought he was another Ronald Reagan, they’d have made that clear at the ballot box.
Less than a week ago, Gingrich’s own campaign said that Alabama and Mississippi were “must wins” for him. He not only lost in his native Deep South but he lost to the man who he’s been competing with to be the “anti-Romney” candidate. Gingrich has now finished behind Santorum in 20 of the 24 states where they’ve both been on the ballot.

Truth so brutal, it seems almost sadistic.

Category: Andrew Sullivan, Barack Obama, Great Britain, Journalism

Rick Santorum for President Because …

Posted on | March 15, 2012 | 15 Comments

. . . he really brings out the crazy-talk at MSNBC:

Lawrence O’Donnell: “Is anything surprising to you in this result so far?”
Mark Thompson: “No, not at all. When Rick Santorum first announced he was running for President, in his announcement speech, he was criticizing President Obama for saying America wasn’t as great as it was until there were programs like Medicare and Social Security. But in that criticism, he said directly to the President, he said, ‘Mr. President, America was great before 1965.’  I called that out as a coded message. You know, I go to Selma every year, and 1965 is a sacred year in the history of this country, and a never-forgotten year in terms of the history of Alabama. When he said that, I knew exactly who he was speaking to in that coded language. So I’m not surprised at all that he won Alabama.”

Selma! Coded language! Also, please: Hurt Karen Finley Some More.

Category: Election 2012, MSNBC, Rick Santorum

Shapiro Is Far Too Kind To #OccupyResoluteDesk

Posted on | March 15, 2012 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

Ben Shapiro at Breitbart.com grinds on with The Vetting, this time looking at the inversions of #OccupyResoluteDesk during his time as a Constitutional lecturer. Looking at his final exam question, he concludes, formatting mine:

Obama’s an extreme legal leftist.

  • He thinks that banning infertility treatment for unwed couples is akin to sterilizing them.
  • He thinks that there is no connection between childbearing and childrearing and the integral value of marriage.
  • He thinks that arguments about “tradition” are troubling.
  • And he believes that all judges rule according to their experiences – which goes a long way toward explaining his love for Sonia Sotomayor, whose “wise Latina” experiences may shape her judicial reasoning, according to her own admission.

I think Shapiro is too kind. Obama is a fool, of the dangerous sort who’s convinced himself that his foolishness is the new wisdom.

Barack is in the rationally wasted tradition of Postmodernism. We have extended the benefit of the doubt to this hellish falsehood for far too long. Obama. Must. Go.

And, via Insty, anyone who would let his sorry puss desecrate the flag, while certainly within the First Amendment, merits having abuse heaped about his head and shoulders. I was unaware that this was occurring at a Democ**t Party office. How sick, shameful, and wrong. In summary: Democ**t.

Legal Insurrection embeds video. My dudgeon is sufficiently high that I won’t embed the video or still photos. The fact that any Democ**t is too stupid to understand how antithetical this is to all we represent in this country just goes to show what a decadent little pack of lemmings the crypto-Marxists have become. I need to stop here before my rhetoric gets eliminationist.

Category: Andrew Breitbart, Barack Obama, Democrats
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