Pink Elephant Pundit Requests The Attention Of Keith Olbermann

Posted on Comments

by Smitty

Here is the evidence:

In light of GeicoGate and the recent accusations from the media regarding the violent rhetoric of the conservative movement, I’ve taken the liberty of editing together the voicemails and emails we’ve received as a result of DC Douglas’ call to contact FreedomWorks. Here’s the result.

I listened to about a minute of the stuff at the link. After 4.5 years at sea and 3 deployments in the Navy, I can pronounce these callers unimaginative. For all their voices are clearly those of adults, albeit sounding rather stoned, their taunts really don’t advance beyond the schoolyard.

Fight the good fight, Tabitha. Clearly Keith should give these twerps some vocabulary lessons. If they’re going to tie up an organization’s phone line with repetitive, whiny invective, the ranting should at least include a modicum of entertaining bombast. And Ms. Hale at least merits one of Olbermann’s trademark declensions into the nether fathomage of self-parody for her opprobrious behavior.

Yeah, and I’ve been bad, too.

Related, here is some sweet Olbermann hypocrisy on dissent.

Troubling News From Fitchburg, Mass.: If Scott Brown’s Lost Josh Romano . . .

Posted on Comments

In his new gig writing for the Examiner, Pete Da Tech Guy finds trouble at the corner market for the “41st vote”:

We now know Brown’s price; $354,000.

That’s a local voter’s reaction to this Boston Herald article:

U.S. Sen. Scott Brown – the upstart GOP maverick who has threatened to filibuster the Democrats’ move to rein in Wall Street – raked in hundreds of thousands from investment banks blamed for the economic meltdown – including Goldman Sachs, according to a Washington, D.C. watchdog. . . .
Wall Street firms were Brown’s second-biggest donors, dishing out $354,000 to his campaign, including $5,500 from Goldman, according to the D.C. group.

“Party of the rich,” blah blah blah. The financial regulation bill is a phony load of crap, and no sensible person has to be bribed to oppose it, so there is no basis for the insinuation that Scott Brown is merely doing the bidding of Corporate Amerikkka. And I’m betting Chris Dodd and Barney Frank have gotten a lot more Wall Street money than Brown has.

Congratulations to Da Tech Guy on his new gig — it doesn’t pay all that much, but he’s already got an Instalanche on one of his articles. Meanwhile, his famous “Have Fedora, Will Travel” offer is still available, if you get the urge to hit his tip jar, as you certainly should.

The Most Important Sentence in Gabriel Sherman’s Sarah Palin Hit Piece

Posted on Comments

“While careful not to say anything that might make her rear her head, some in the GOP Establishment whisper that they hope Palin stays in Wasilla. She may be useful in raising funds and drawing crowds, but Palin’s unseriousness and carnival antics damage the brand. ‘There’s a big piece of the Republican Party that doesn’t want her to run,’ said one national Republican strategist.”

Really, let’s cut to the chase here. Some of the details in the New York magazine article just confirm what I’ve previously noted, i.e., Palin’s inaccessibility to the press, her tendency to rely on a small number of close advisers, etc. But this kind of dishy “behind-the-scenes” feature story wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for the willingness of GOP insiders to badmouth Palin behind her back. And being badmouthed constantly by anonymous Republicans only increases Palin’s defensiveness. Why should she trust anyone, when it seems there is an incessant stream of tattletales running to whisper damaging gossip to reporters?

UPDATE: A friend wonders why I said nothing about this part of Sherman’s story:

The only real blip concerned her ghostwriter, Lynn Vincent, a writer for the Evangelical World magazine, whom Palin chose from a short list of candidates presented to her by HarperCollins. After news of Vincent’s selection leaked, critics seized on a January 2009 pro-life piece she had written for World titled “Black Genocide” — as well as her association with the co-writer of her 2006 book Donkey Cons, former Washington Times writer Robert Stacy McCain (no relation), who had a history of racially charged statements and associations — to claim that Vincent was racist. Vincent, who had collaborated on a New York Times best seller about racial reconciliation, told me that she was deeply hurt by the racism allegation and considered suing the Daily Beast for a piece by writer Max Blumenthal headlined “Palin’s Noxious Ghostwriter.” But when the media shifted its focus to Palin’s next adventure, Vincent dropped the lawsuit idea.

The problem with suing for libel (and as a journalist, I thank God for this) is that under the Sullivan precedent, it’s almost impossible for a “public figure” to win a libel suit. Like politicians and entertainers, an author is more or less automatically a public figure, thus requiring proof of actual malice. And as opposed to, say, a false accusation of criminal behavior, the charge of “racism” is damnably hard to disprove, which is why it is slung around so frequently in political discourse.

So there was no percentage in Lynn suing the Daily Beast, besides which going to court over what was clearly a third-hand guilt-by-association smear wouldn’t help Palin — and helping Palin was what Lynn was hired to do, after all.

And shame on those people who keep spreading malicious rumors that Max Blumenthal was arrested in a raid on a so-called “ladyboy” brothel in Phuket!

UPDATE I: Ian Lazaran at Conservatives for Palin debunks a lot of Sherman’s article, which repeats several previously debunked memes.

UPDATE III: Allahpundit ho-hums:

Poor Dave Weigel was so bereft of juicy tidbits from the piece for his “Those Darned Wingnuts” beat at WaPo that he was forced to highlight the fact that she writes her own Facebook posts and how she fits into TLC’s programming strategy.

Yeah, Dave: Tell your bosses to rename it “Those Darn Wingnuts.”

For Dessert? ‘Epistemic Closure’!

Posted on Comments

The entrée is crow:

Here’s a free hint, kid: don’t talk crap about someone being a shill for ideologically-driven publications and think tanks when that sums up your entire resume. Your bosses might find you ungrateful . . . or they may giggle over the fact you’re a malleable idiot utterly lacking in self-awareness.

What causes this self-awareness deficiency? Yglesias appears on the verge of becoming Sullivanesque in this respect.

Paul Ryan Is Great, Even If His Ideas Need Work

Posted on Comments

by Smitty

Rep. Paul Ryan is that absolutely rare political animal who manages to be at once wonkish and likeable.
In a system geared by election frequency toward myopia, he has had the unmitigated gall to offer something like a tangible plan to work on the most pressing fiscal problems besetting the country. Note that I don’t say ‘fix’ or ‘solve’: the ‘F’ and ‘S’ words are indicators that whoever has the floor is either (a) stupid or (b) thinks you are stupid.
Here he is on Fox on 21Apr10:

Ryan’s plan is important. Its very existence belies the claim that the GOP has no ideas. Also, it argues an evolutionary change. Whereas many, for example, me, would argue that we should just admit that Federal entitlements are a 10th Amendment violation and boil them down for glue, Ryan’s plan is a far more realistic compromise in favor of something workable.

This admission does not mean that pressure to kill Federal entitlements should be removed. It doesn’t mean that chucklehead Brooks has won a new pair of nicely creased chinos. Rather, that the admission that there is merit in Ryan’s plan means it’s OK to club the beast on a variety of levels to bring about the necessary demise. Get bent, Brooks.
Via the Barracuda Bridage, Newsmax did a Ryan interview that his fans may find interesting. This rather friendly interview elaborates on the topics from the Fox clip in a little more detail. At the end, the interviewer throws out the executive branch bait, which Ryan refuses to admit giving any thought. Ryan is not thinking about it now, but fell well short of a Sherman denial. And why should he not?
For all I like and would support Ryan, individual entitlements are not a Federal issue. The sooner we overcome the cranial rectalitis on this point, the sooner we can set about un-baking the situation.

‘An Intellectual Grievance Culture’

Posted on Comments

Jonah Goldberg hits the nail on the head in describing the phenomenon we might as well call Friedersdorfism:

When I first came to Washington, I hung around in very similar circles of young eager-beavers. I may not have been as smart as many of them, but I was just as determined to get my articles published and make my mark. We had many gripe sessions conversations about how hard it was to break-in at places like NR, the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal etc. But, because Al Gore hadn’t gotten around to inventing the internet yet, there was no place for me to vent these complaints in print, never mind work them up into a meta-narrative about the decrepit state of conservatism.
That’s not the case for today’s 20-somethings who have the luxury of translating their frustration with “the business” into long cri de coeur blog posts and essays that tend to bounce off one another for reinforcement. Instead of late night griping at the Toledo Lounge, the way we did things in the 1990s, the conversation has gone public. Indeed, so public that it has become something of an intellectual grievance culture all its own.

Exactly. Given that I’m 10 years older than Goldberg, I was already well into my 30s before the Internet began to revolutionize publishing, and was past 40 when blogging became a phenomenon.

Friedersdorf, at 30, graduated college at the dawn of the blogging age, and never had to earn his living as a journalist in a world where there was no online alternative to print. (Marla Edwards, a reporter I worked with at the Rome [Ga.] News-Tribune in the 1990s, was one of the first hires at CNN’s Web site, and I remember how strange it seemed to the rest of us when she tried to explain her new job. How does that work? You mean, all you’re doing is writing updates for an Internet page?)

The impatience of ambitious youth is such that the Young Turks always resent the Old Guard — sic semper hoc — but this familiar situation is now aggravated by the ease with which Young Turks can find outlets for their resentment and have those resentments reinforced by their peers.

In a world where anybody with a Blogspot account can be a pundit, the genuinely ambitious youngsters now consider themselves failures if they’re not recognized as genuine public intellectuals by the time they attend their five-year college reunion. (When I attended my five-year reunion, I was the sports editor of a twice-weekly Georgia paper and counted that as success.)

Predictably, Friedersdorf responds to Goldberg with — what else? — a long cri de couer blog post, which is immediately seconded by Matthew Yglesias of Think Progress. (Yglesias mocks conservative journalism as a “nice, very cushy gravy train” — as opposed to the grueling conditions for Harvard grads at John Podesta’s Center for American Progress. )

At some point, you think these kids would grow tired of their intellectual wankfests or at least realize they’re trapping themselves in a narrow career niche. But among other things, the Internet can foster the illusion that there is a vast market demand for such obscure political squabbles, when what the online world actually craves is chubby chicks in lingerie commercials.

(Hat-tip: Memeorandum.)

National Security Advisor Archie Bunker

Posted on Comments

No need to get all outrageously outraged here, but Gen. James Jones ought to have thought twice before telling Jew jokes at a foreign-policy seminar:

Professor William Jacobson observes:

I have no problem with the joke. I think we have to be able to laugh at ourselves, including laughing at stereotypes; in humor we often expose the stereotype rather than build upon it.
That said, this is another one of those “can you imagine” moments. Substitute blacks or latinos or gays or almost any other group for Jews, and the joke playing on old stereotypes never would have been told by Jones. And if it were, Jones already would be gone from the administration.

And not only that, “can you imagine” if an official in a Republican administration had told that joke on camera? Oy, vey!

Via Memeorandum, with more reaction from Stephen Green at Vodkapundit, Israel Matzav, Scott Johnson at Power Line, Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit, Dan Riehl at Riehl World View, DaTechguy and Roger Simon.

UPDATE: The predictable denouement: Abe Foxman complains, Jones apologizes. Another triumph of multicultural sensitivity in the Obama Age. How about a “beer summit” at the White House?