The Other McCain

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

‘The Pack of Right-Wing Polemicists Who Make Big Bucks Spewing Rage . . .’

Posted on | January 18, 2011 | 19 Comments

That’s Joe Scarborough talking about . . . whom? The comment in Scarborough’s Politico column is directed at Glenn Beck, but who are the rest of these right-wingers he’s talking about?

Rush Limbaugh? Sean Hannity? Laura Ingraham?

From there, Scarborough pivots to indict 2012 Republican presidential candidates:

We know Palin won’t call out irresponsible language or lead the discussion back to civility, but who will?
Where was former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who covets the moral authority to lead his party in 2012? Is there anything — anything at all — a member of his own party can say that offends this man?
Or former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who refused to call out his state’s best-known congresswoman, Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann, for saying that the best way to oppose energy legislation is to be “armed and dangerous.”
Or former House Speaker Newt Gingrich? Oh, wait. Never mind.
From their defensive crouch, these candidates are clearly scared to do the right thing by calling out reckless rhetoric. . . .
It’s time to grow up, act responsibly and start planning for the 2012 election.

Very easy to say, I suppose, from the studios at 30 Rock.

Category: Crime, Election, MSNBC, Talk Radio

LIVE AT FIVE – 1.18.11

Posted on | January 18, 2011 | 6 Comments

TOP NEWS
Apple’s Jobs Takes Medical Leave Again

Steve Jobs with some Apple gizmo or another


Can Apple survive without its wizard?


Greed Of Leila Ben Ali Major Goad To Tunisian Revolt
“The Imelda Marcos of the Arab World”




House GOP Ready To Rumble
Repeal/replacement of Obamacare still job #1

Lebanon On Brink Of Chaos As UN Indictments Delivered
Ayatollah Khamenei, Hezbollah charged with ordering, carrying out Hariri’s assassination



POLITICS
Rep. Giffords Could Leave Hospital In Weeks, Possibly Days

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords

Plans underway for extended rehab; meanwhile, Federal attorneys fight to keep Loughner’s trial in Arizona

Maine Governor LePage: Backtracking on NAACP Remark, Or Staying The Course?

Federal Grand Jury Probes John Edwards For Campaign Finance Violations

Bloomberg: School Chancellor’s Birth Control Remark Just A Joke

State of Alaska, Native Groups To Sue Department of the Interior Over Polar Bear Habitat



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Starbucks Introduces Supersized Coffee With Asinine Name
Because “extra-large” is just so pedestrian.
Goldman Sachs Limits Sales Of Facebook IPO; No Americans Wanted
Crude Oil Prices Fall As Trans-Alaska Pipeline Reopens
Facebook Update Exposes User Contact Info
Apple Should Be Paranoid About Android
File Taxes From your Smartphone? There’s An App For That



SPORTS
Zenyatta Crowned Horse of the Year

Zenyatta at last year's Breeders' Cup

19-1 last year, beats out Blame by over 20 votes

Raiders Promote Hue Jackson To Head Coach

#5 Pitt Ends Syracuse’s Undefeated Run

Favre  Retires, Officially


Nyets Lose Sixth Straight, Fall to Warriors 109-100



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Ricky Gervais: One And Done At Golden Globes

Ricky Gervais, dying at the Golden Globes

Robert Downey Jr. – “Aside from the fact that it’s been hugely mean-spirited with mildly sinister undertones, I’d say the vibe of the show’s pretty good so far, wouldn’t you?”

Octomom Whips It In Fetish Video

Anne Hathaway To Play Chris Colfer’s Lesbian Aunt On “Glee”

Heidi Montag Forced To Turn Down DWTS Invite

The Second Creepiest Thing You’ll See Today (Video)

Snooki: Sorry, I’m Not Dead (Video)



FOREIGNERS
PRC, US Eager To Put A Happy Face On Relations
“Baby Doc”‘s Return to Haiti Denounced; France Sez “We Didn’t Do It”
Stuxnet To Create Chernobyl-Style Meltdown In Iran? (Video)
UN To Authorize More Peacekeepers For Ivory Coast



BLOGS & STUFF
Yuval Levin: Paul Krugman, Logician
Don Surber: To Ayres Is Lefty
Legal Insurrection: Jennifer Rubin Discovers Think Progress Playing The Race Card
Big Hollywood: Ricky Gervais Gives Hollywood A Taste Of Their Own Sucker-Punch Medicine
Ed Morrissey: NYT – Maybe We Should Have Waited For The Facts Before Blaming The Right
Outside The Beltway: George Allen Back For Another Bout With Jim Webb?


— compiled by Wombat-socho

Category: Live at Five, Uncategorized

Blame Tucker Carlson!

Posted on | January 17, 2011 | 7 Comments

“‘The keepers of the faith won’t enter into debate with [critics],’ the narrator [of Zeitgeist] says. ‘They ignore them or denounce them as blasphemers.’
“At that moment, Zeitgeist turns to — of all people — Washington pundit Tucker Carlson to pivot from the Christianity myth to the Sept. 11 myth. Interviewing a 9/11 skeptic on MSNBC in 2006, Carlson said, ‘It is wrong, blasphemous, and sinful for you to suggest, imply, or help other people come to the conclusion that the U.S. government killed 3,000 of its own citizens.’
“To the makers of Zeitgeist, that is an ‘Aha!’ moment: a skeptic being literally denounced as a blasphemer. From there, the movie recounts standard 9/11 truther stuff, like claiming plane crashes alone could not have brought down the World Trade Center towers.”
— Byron York, “Tucson shooter obsessed with bizarre Internet movie,” Washington Examiner

Click Here to Watch Zeitgeist, the Conspiracy Movie That
Had a ‘Profound Impact on Tucson Suspect Jared Loughner

Category: Conspiracy Theories, Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist: 9/11 ‘Was an Inside Job’ Also: It Won a ‘Progressive’ Film Award and Is Based on ‘New Age’ Sources

Posted on | January 17, 2011 | 12 Comments

For the benefit of David Dayen, the liberal blogger who claimed that the 2007 film Zeigeist is “right wing,” here is a screen-cap from the movie:

The 911 Truth

Criminal Elements within the US Government
staged a “False Flag” Terror Attack on its own
citizens, in order to manipulate public
perception into supporting its agenda.
They have been doing this for years.

911 was an Inside Job.

Click here to see the video (this part comes at 1:47 of the clip). And this is what gets me about fact-challenged dishonest dilberts like David Dayen: They can’t be bothered to do any actual reporting or research.

No, that would be beneath them.

Instead, it’s much easier to avoid that grubby work and take someone’s else’s word about what’s in Zeitgeist:

[T]he rhetoric on the far, far right played a role in amping up the paranoia of a mentally unbalanced man. In fact, one of the shooter’s friends focused on a movie that echoes many of the themes on the fringe right as extremely important to shaping Loughner’s worldview. . . .

C’mon: Whose “fringe” asserts that 9/11 was an “Inside Job”? When Zeitgeist was produced in 2007, who was hectoring us about “criminal elements in the US Government”? Read more

Category: Arizona, Conspiracy Theories, Crime, Liberals, Zeitgeist

OMFG: Zeitgeist Is ‘Right-Wing’?

Posted on | January 17, 2011 | 12 Comments

It’s the liberal Rorshach test — show them an inkblot and liberals scream, “Blame conservatives!”

Loughner’s Conspiracy-Fueled Rampage
Has Origins on the Fringe Right
Now, you don’t have to believe that Sarah Palin purchased the gun for Loughner and whispered in his ear about targets to believe that the rhetoric on the far, far right played a role in amping up the paranoia of a mentally unbalanced man. In fact, one of the shooter’s friends focused on a movie that echoes many of the themes on the fringe right as extremely important to shaping Loughner’s worldview. . . .
Zeitgeist in particular has echoes of anti-Federal Reserve theories popular with the John Birch Society.
The more you read by Loughner, or the more videos you see from him, they reflect these beliefs very strongly.

Someone needs to send David Dayen for counseling. He’s as obsessed with the “far right” as Loughner was with Bush-hatred:

“His anger would well up at the sight of
President George W. Bush, or in discussing what he
considered to be the nefarious designs of government.”

Permit me to observe that it is possible to be conservative — not “far, far right” or “fringe right” — and not be a huge fan of George W. Bush. Bruce Barlett certainly is no Bush fanboy, and there are many others within the conservative mainstream who would endorse Bartlett’s critique of the Bush administration.

But you see it’s “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” with the likes of David Dayen. Conservatism can be condemned for anything and everything Bush did — despite the many conservative voices that proclaim, as does Bartlett, that Bush was not really conservative — and yet, when it serves their purposes, they’ll condemn conservatism for “fringe” beliefs of people who’ve never had any active association with the mainstream conservative movement. This resembles a fallacy that we might call The Nixon Syllogism of Liberal Argument:

  • Nixon was a Republican;
  • Nixon did bad things;
    and therefore
  • Republicans are never to be trusted.

Liberals have these ironclad mental associations of “right-wingers” with various pre-demonized political scapegoats and the trick, in any debate over contemporary issues, is to conjure up these negative associations to say that today’s conservative personality is analogous to the scapegoat, be it Nixon, Joe McCarthy or George Wallace.

The argument begins with the conclusion — conservatives are bad — and all that is necessary is to adduce “evidence” to prove it. Anything at all will suffice as “evidence,” and liberals will ignore a mountain of information that doesn’t fit the conclusion in order to scream about the irrelevant molehill that they insist “proves” their point.

And if you don’t buy their argument, your disagreement merely reinforces their point: Conservatives are close-minded bigots and therefore, bad people.

This kind of circular reasoning is, of course, not actually reasoning at all. It’s tautological, an expression of partisan prejudice, and it does no good to enter into debate with such people. They’ve got their minds made up, and all you can say to them is, “I disagree. You’re wrong and you’re not going to persuade me.”

I’m not arguing with David Dayen with any idea that he’s going to have a Road to Damascus moment and recognize his errors. He’s too far gone for that. Nor is there any need to “preach to the choir.” This is merely another object lesson in how to confront the counterfactual and irrational mentality of the Left. (See, for example, yesterday’s encounter with liberal blogger Don Millard who pushed a discredited “Blame Palin” meme.)

The object of the argument in such a case is not to convert the fool to wisdom. Rather, it is to expose his folly for the benefit of those who encounter the argument not as participants, but as spectators. And speaking of which, here’s my latest column at The American Spectator:

Divided into three parts, Zeitgeist begins with a half-hour assault on Christianity as a myth. The film asserts that Jesus is “a literary and astrological hybrid… a plagiarization of the Egyptian sun-god Horus.” This is a thesis promoted in a series of books, including The Christ Conspiracy (1999), by author D.M. Murdock, who writes under the pen-name “Achyra S.” Murdock served as an adviser on Zeitgeist, and the film’s popularization of her “Christ-myth” ideas has brought it to the attention of Christian writer James Patrick Holding of Tektonics Ministry. He notes that many viewers of Zeitgeist claim it has “shown them the truth for the first time,” and that it evidently appeals to those “disaffected with the status quo.” Holding said Zietgeist “also seems to have appeal among what I call ‘fundamentalist atheists’ who are deeply hostile to Christianity.”
Deeply hostile, indeed, as the film tells viewers: “Christianity, along with all other theistic belief systems, is the fraud of the age.” This idea of fraudulent mythology is then carried over into the film’s second segment, about the 9/11 attacks: “A myth is an idea that, while widely believed, is false. In a deeper sense, in the religious sense, a myth serves as an orienting and mobilizing story for a people.”
“They do not want you to think too much.… You had better wake up and understand that there are people guiding your life, and you don’t even know it,” says one of the film’s “experts,” anti-Masonic conspiracy theorist Jordan Maxwell, near the end of Zeitgeist, after the narrator has denounced “the stupefying downward slide” of American education. A few minutes later, while images including Jesus Christ, Bill O’Reilly and Saddam Hussein flash across the screen, the narrator says: “The last thing the men behind the curtain want is a conscious, informed public, capable of critical thinking, which is why a continually fraudulent zeitgeist is output via religion, the mass media and the educational system.” . . .

Go read the whole thing. I’ll have more about Zeitgeist later. For now, I consider it sufficient to say that a film which cites purveyors of anti-Masonic kookery and relies upon New Age authors as sources to attack Christianity is definitely not conservative. And anyone who thinks otherwise needs to have his head examined.

Category: American Spectator, Arizona, Liberals, Zeitgeist

The Dangerous Myth of Sexual Equality

Posted on | January 17, 2011 | 1 Comment

“Armed with a ‘Take Back the Night’ pamphlet, we were led to believe that, as long as we avoided the hordes of date rapists, sex was an egalitarian endeavor. The key to sexual harmony, so the thinking went, was social conditioning. Men who sexually took advantage of women were considered the storm troopers of patriarchy, but women could teach men to adopt a different ideology, through explicit communication of boundaries — ‘you can touch there’ or ‘please don’t do that.’ Thus was the dark drama of sex replaced with a verbal contract. Once the drunken frat boys and brutes were weeded out, if we gravitated toward a kind of enlightened guy, an emotionally rewarding sex life was ours for the taking. Sex wasn’t a bestial pursuit, but something elevating. . . .
“Male desire is not a malleable entity that can be constructed through politics, language, or media. Sexuality is not neutral. A warring dynamic based on power and subjugation has always existed between men and women, and the egalitarian view of sex, with its utopian pretensions, offers little insight into the typical male psyche.”
— Natasha Vargas-Cooper, “Hard Core,” The Atlantic Monthly

Category: Feminism, Sex

Tucson’s James Fuller: ‘My Personal Agenda Promoting Social Justice’

Posted on | January 17, 2011 | 6 Comments

James Fuller has been using his victimhood in the Tucson massacre to lash out at political scapegoats who had nothing to do with Jared Lee Loughner’s heinous crime. Fuller got himself arrested Saturday when he threatened a Tea Party leader, and people naturally are wondering, “Who the heck is this guy?”

Fortunately, Fuller himself has told us who he is: A year ago — on Jan. 11, 2010, to be exact — he went on the site Hypnothoughts.com (“The free online hypnosis community”) and filled out a profile:

What are you looking for on this site?
Kindred spirits and an opportunity to advocate my personal agenda promoting social justice and common sense. . . .
My experiences encountering public figures and many affluent travelers in person has led me to believe that we all are to blame for George W. Bush.

He is, in other words, a fanatic. See Fuller’s complete Hypnothoughts profile here — nice that someone was clever enough to screencap it before it could be flushed down the memory hole.

(Hat tip: Dan Collins.)

Category: Arizona, Liberals, Piece of Work in Progress

‘The End of It Is Wicked Madness’

Posted on | January 17, 2011 | 15 Comments

That’s a quote from the guy that Smitty sometimes calls “Ancient Commenter Solomon,” the Book of Ecclesiastes to be exact, cited in Amanda Read’s Washington Times column about Jared Lee Loughner:

“What is government if words have no meaning?”
Such was the question that Jared Loughner asked Representative Gabrielle Giffords at an event in 2007. Unsatisfied by Giffords’ response (or warranted lack thereof), Loughner targeted her with an apparently vengeful fixation.
The budding thought processes of this anarchical philosopher-wannabe clearly had nothing to do with then-obscure Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck – nor did they have anything to do with the then-nonexistent Tea Party. . . .
?From online message boards to YouTube videos to the classroom, Loughner demonstrated himself to be a pathological riddler who was angry at the world for refusing to answer his intellectually dishonest questions. As Loughner’s incoherent ramblings and love of conspiracy spiraled downward to senseless bloodshed, King Solomon’s warning proved true – “the lips of a fool consume him; the beginning of his talking is folly and the end of it is wicked madness” (Ecclesiastes 10:12-13). . . .

Read the whole thing.

Category: Amanda Read, Arizona, Conspiracy Theories, Crime, Religion, Zeitgeist
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