Former US Ambassador To Bulungi: ‘That South Korean Ship Explosion Was Prolly Cuz Of Crazed Glenn Beck Fans’

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by Smitty

Chad Halpern, Former Ambassador to Bulungi, recently returned from, you know, hanging out on Tioman for a few years. The lure? One of those recess appointments, this one to the UN. “We gotta help out the Obama Administration, dude. These Republicans are a bunch of dicks, blocking all these important jobs and all,” said Halpern.

Halpern’s legendary diplomatic chops were quickly employed by the UN delegation in working on a statement about the sinking of the Cheonan on March 26th, as CBC News reported:

The United States said Thursday that China and other key countries have agreed to condemn the attack on a South Korean warship and express “deep concern” over findings that North Korea was to blame — but their proposed statement did not directly accuse Pyongyang.

Their agreed statement, circulated to the full 15-member UN Security Council for approval, calls for “appropriate and peaceful measures to be taken against those responsible” for the sinking of the 1,200-tonne Cheonan on March 26, killing 46 South Korean sailors.

But it doesn’t identify who is responsible, and “takes note” of North Korea’s response “that it had nothing to do with the incident,” according to the text obtained by The Associated Press.

Halpern offered some crucial background reasoning for this surprising turn of events.

Yoon Duk-yong, co-head of the team investigating the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan in March, talks next to torpedo parts salvaged from the Yellow Sea. (Jung Yeon-je/Associated Press)

“They found some stuff left over from whenever Patton bombed Inchon during the Russo-Japanese War, and thought it had something to do with the Kikkoman sinking. Perfectly understandable. It’s like some right-wing jerk came over and poured Coke down your X-Box–you’d be livid, too.

What they haven’t disproved is that the whole thing was prolly ‘cuz of some crazed Glenn Beck fans who were over in Seoul and got kind outta hand with the maekju. They really gotta get those dudes on the no-fly list, them and the Tea Party types. See, they want to push everything into a meltdown around the world, to make President Obama look bad. All that Tea Ba-Party stuff is getting way outta control.”

Pressed on whether or not he really believed the North Korean statement, Ambassador Halpern doubled down:

“Look, they said they ‘had nothing to do with the incident’. If you want diplomacy to work, you have to take people at face value, unless they are named Bush or Cheney.

Furthermore, we owe these people $65 trillion in damages since the Russo-Japanese War. They’re pretty broke, dude. They can’t even afford a robusto, much less a torpedo. Heh.

Instead of laughing at these people, and calling Kim ‘ronery’, why don’t we just poney up the money, so they can make a run for the border and get some grub? Why does the US always have to play the heavy? Can’t we just be mellow?”

The Roberts Court Will No Doubt Give The 6th Month Drilling Moratorium A Good Listen

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by Smitty

Mighty Michelle Malkin echo’s Yahoo’s report that the 5th Circuit told the White House to talk to the hand on the ban.

She also notes:

. . .it’s reportedly too late for some companies that are already moving rigs and workers overseas for projects.

Really, if the Administration can’t just decapitate the Gulf economy outright, they can destroy companies so many other ways. Ah, the town that Billy Sunday couldn’t shut down:

Does This Work As A Metaphor For This Congress And Administration?

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by Smitty (via HuffPo)

It looks to be a proper board, but the pack of goof on it, headed downhill with no safety gear or reasonable means of managing the thing, bring Nancy, Harry and Barry to mind:

I’m not too sure if ABBA works as a proper soundtrack for the 111th Congress and the Obama Administration. I needed something more; something rife with wretched, nihilistic excess. There was really only one suitable cut: [brief, yet contextually appropriate, blasphemy warning] Jesus Built My Hotrod. Embedding disabled on request, but that likely won’t bother Stacy.

Which Is Better for the Economy: Getting a Job or Collecting Unemployment?

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When Nancy Pelosi declared that unemployment compensation “creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name,” most people laughed at this obvious affront to common sense. Yet considering that common sense doesn’t seem to be all that common — Nancy Pelosi is, after all, Speaker of the House — it’s nice to have someone explain precisely what’s wrong with Pelosi’s argument:

On the face of it, the idea that higher unemployment benefits won’t lead to more unemployment doesn’t make much sense. Imagine what the unemployment rate would look like if unemployment benefits were universally $150,000 per year. My guess is we’d have a heck of a lot more unemployment. Common sense and personal experience indicate higher unemployment benefits will make unemployment less unattractive and thereby increase unemployment even in the Great Recession. . . . [S]ince the 1970s there’s been a close correlation between increased unemployment benefits and an increase in the unemployment rate. . . .

That’s Art Laffer at the Wall Street Journal. Read the whole thing.

What If Glenn Beck Said This?

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“I think of Obama’s politics as entirely cultural. It is about creating the new America, epitomized by Barack Obama’s racially mixed radicalism. It is about banishing the Bush-Cheney years by celebrating the man hired to destroy the Constitution. It is about dreaming of a new America — the America transformed by the New Deal, by mass immigration of non-whites, by the civil rights era, by Darwinist hostility to religion. It is a kind of new fundamentalism — animated by no policies that one can determine (has anyone ever heard Obama cite how he would balance the budget?). And yet it’s very potent, because it makes up for its minority status with a ferocity and passion that infuses all truly radical populist movements and can swamp lethargic majorities when necessary.”

Well, of course, his habit of imputing radicalism and secret motives to the Left — “I’m going to expose their hidden agenda!” — is why Glenn Beck is often dismissed as a kooky conspiracy theorist. Yet the quote above is not by Beck, but merely a strategically edited version of what Andrew Sullivan actually wrote at The Atlantic Monthly:

“I think of Palin’s politics as entirely cultural. It is about resisting the new America, epitomized by Barack Obama’s racially mixed pragmatism. It is about banishing the Bush-Cheney years by demonizing the man hired to clean up the appalling mess. It is about dreaming of an old America  – the America before the New Deal, before mass immigration of non-whites, before the civil rights era, before Darwin up-ended fundamentalist nuttery. It is a kind of new fundamentalism – animated by no policies that one can determine (has anyone ever heard Palin cite how she would balance the budget?). And yet it’s very potent, because it makes up for its minority status with a ferocity and passion that infuses all truly radical populist movements and can swamp lethargic majorities when necessary.”

Andrew Sullivan is permitted to say anything he wants about Sarah Palin and her supporters, including insinuations of racism, and his editors at the Atlantic simply don’t care.

Why? Because Anti-Palinism sells.

Liberals gobble up Sullivan’s anti-Palin rants and come back for more. It doesn’t matter whether Sullivan is slamming her for “fundamentalist nuttery” or pretending to have secret knowledge of her obstetric history. The editors at the Atlantic would give Alex Jones his own blog if he’d start pushing Palin conspiracies instead of 9/11 conspiracies.

And if you point out that Sully’s treatment of Palin is far more irresponsible than anything Glenn Beck ever said about Barack Obama?

Crickets chirping.

‘The Unfortunately Named Contessa’

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That’s how Andrew Breitbart always refers to MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer, who complained in an interview with Media Bistro about how hard it is to interviewing guests who “come on and they are prepared to be challenging and to be difficult.”

In another segment from the same interview, Brewer says it makes her “crazy” when blogs point out her on-air gaffes, such as the occasion in 2009 when she introduced Jess Jackson as Al Sharpton:

(Via Kyle Drennen at Newsbusters — Part I and Part II.) Brewer typifies why people hate the media: The adversarial stance of some TV personalities who seem to think their job is to orchestrate on-air “gotcha” moments. A similar attitude prevails among a lot of younger print journalists, who have been raised on this kind of stuff.

This “gotcha” dynamic is a function of television, in which the reporter is also a performer and, especially in a live interview, the idea is to push the subject into an on-air conflict. Brewer routinely did this to Republican guests, and so is hated by conservatives, but I’ve seen Sean Hannity do the same thing to hostile guests on Fox, badgering and interrupting them. It’s one of those Marshall McLuhan the-medium-is-the-message aspects of television: It’s show business.

As a print journalist, I’ve never sought that kind of television-style “gotcha” confrontation, because it tends to be counter-productive to the work I’m trying to do. Even if you’re dealing with a hostile source, it’s better to be perceived as harmless or sympathetic than to act like an attack dog.

With a print reporter, sources will just clam up or not return phone calls if you get hostile, whereas most people can’t resist an opportunity to be on TV and once they’re on camera, they usually feel the need to answer even the rudest  questions. So people like Contessa Brewer get used to treating people like crap — and getting away with it, simply because they have the enormous prestige of a network news organization behind them.

“The unfortunately named Contessa” is a creature of TV and epitomizes the values of that medium.

Markos Wants Some Cheese

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To go with that whine:

In case you were wondering why you haven’t seen me on MSNBC recently, it seems that Joe Scarborough, he of the lowest rated morning show in cableland, has blackballed me. And Phil Griffin, the alleged president of MSNBC, is going along with it.

(Via Memeorandum.) Did Moulitsas ever mock MSNBC’s ratings before he got “blackballed”? I doubt it. So his opinions of TV networks are evidently based on whether they book him or not. He explains his alleged victimhood by quoting his Twitter to Scarborough about “a certain dead intern” — a reference to former Scarborough aide Lori Klausutis, about whom Kos had blogged in 2005. Kos quotes an e-mail from MSNBC’s Griffin:

Yes, after I became aware of the ugly cheap shot you took at Joe on Twitter, I asked the teams to take a break from booking you on our shows for a while. I found the comments to be in poor taste, and utterly uncalled for in a civil discourse. . . .
I just don’t know how one could reasonably expect to be welcomed onto our network while publicly antagonizing one of our hosts at the same time.

The key word there is “reasonably.” Exactly how reasonable is it for Markos Moulitsas to incite a war with MSNBC over a Twitter fight with Joe Scarborough in which Kos insinuated that the death of Lori Klausutis was a “scandal” for Scarborough?

BTW, I often watch “Morning Joe,” and Da Tech Guy is a huge fan of the show. And I’m not saying that because I want to get booked on the show, as all the stuff I’ve written about Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews would forestall any such prospect under the Phil Griffin Rule.

Strangely enough, although Rachel Maddow is as hard-left as Olbermann — and once invoked me in a cheap smear on Sarah Palin — I actually don’t mind watching Maddow so much. And my reasons are purely superficial: She’s got a nice smile. Bad politics, but good teeth.

The moral of the story: If you want to be on TV, think before you Tweet.

Machiavellian, in a Good Way

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“[I]f you yield to a threat, you do so in order to avoid war, and more often than not, you do not avoid war. For those before whom you have thus openly demeaned yourself by yielding, will not stop there, but will seek to extort further concessions, and the less they esteem you the more incensed will they become against you.”
— Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses Book II, Chapter 14

That was quoted by a commenter on the Hot Air thread about Thaddeus Russell’s column opposing the U.S.-Israel alliance. Russell also got smacked by Ron Radosh at PJM, and there is a related thread on Memeorandum. 

Meanwhile, it appears that President Obama has figured out that Israel-bashing is bad politics:

Four months ago, the Obama administration made a politically perilous decision to condemn Israel over a controversial new settlement. The Israel lobby reared up, Netanyahu denounced the administration’s actions, Republican leaders sided with Netanyahu, and Democrats ran for cover.
So on Tuesday, Obama, routed and humiliated by his Israeli counterpart, invited Netanyahu back to the White House for what might be called the Oil of Olay Summit: It was all about saving face.
The president, beaming in the Oval Office with a dour Netanyahu at his side, gushed about the “extraordinary friendship between our two countries.” He performed the Full Monty of pro-Israel pandering: “The bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable” . . .

Dana Milbank’s derisive references to the “Israel lobby” and “pro-Israel pandering” seem intended mainly to heighten the perception of Obama’s humiliation. What’s interesting to me here is reflexive nature of liberal logic: Because Republicans are viewed as too pro-Israel, therefore Democrats must be anti-Israel.

Thus, any Democrat who is not relentlessly critical of Israel is accused of cowardly “pandering” by the Sirhan Sirhan wing of the Democratic Party.