Archive for the ‘media’ Category

…in Ezra Klein’s sort of Mea Culpa:

Ezra Klein made the biggest mistake that can be made by a liberal — progressive — socialist — communist — no labelist — whatever the heck they call themselves on the 31st of the month.

He was being honest.

He does not believe in the Constitution.

He is cynical about it and he projects that same cynicism onto those who disagree with him.

That’s a pretty serious charge but he backs it up:

In reality, the tea party — like most everyone else (emphasis mine) — is less interested in living by the Constitution than in deciding what it means to live by the Constitution. When the constitutional disclaimers at the bottom of bills suit them, they’ll respect them. When they don’t — as we’ve seen in the case of the individual mandate — they won’t.

What a telling statement in that last paragraph is.

What Ezra Klein means by “most everyone else” is Ezra Klein.

And so the sentence means that Ezra Klein is not interested in living by the Constitution but rather, Ezra Klein wants to decide what the Constitution means.

That is his point of view.

Such a belief would explain why the Left was so upset about Gitmo — shredding the Constitution — under Bush but now could not care less about Gitmo.

When a document means whatever people want it to mean then it means nothing. The Constitution is a contract and a contract means what is says. How would you like us to redefine what the deed to your house means? The contract you work under, The rules of blackjack when you are winning? Or as Don puts it:

Well, when you are taught — as Al Gore said it — that “the Constitution is a living and breathing document” you really miss the entire point of having a Constitution.

Bingo!

While the rest of us on the right pick apart Colman McCarthy over this Washington Post column Robert Stacy McCain decides in a brilliant bit of counter programing to tackle the issue that has sadly been ignored, namely the best tactics to ahem; stimulate the economy of the movie industry:

The question of what it takes nowadays to get people to go to the multiplex and pay $9 to see a movie they can catch a few months later on HBO or Netflix is a perplexing question for Hollywood. But when a chick says to her boyfriend, “Hey, you want to go see a ballet movie?” it’s kinda helpful if she can follow that up with, “You know, the one with the Natalie Portman lesbian scene.”

He then follows up 20 paragraphs on the cultural history of the “lesbian scene” in print and film including this gem:

It would be a worthwhile project for some “cultural studies” grad student to go through the 1971-79 Penthouse archives and count how many girl-on-girl pictorials they published. And you could probably get a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to do that research.

The irony of course being that you likely could get a grant from the NEH for such research and this is precisely the type of scholarship that our Mr. McCarthy would prefer our kids in college study as opposed to ROTC and the like.

This is usually the hit starved season for bloggers but Stacy knows that the phrase “natalie portman lesbian scene” will generate hits for years to come in search engines not yet invented to shore up his slow days. Why comment on the news of the day when you can make a long-term investment that will guarantee you hits and page views forever?

Update: Nothing like an Instalanche to start the new year, between the 63 (so far) at my party and this it’s quite a start. Don’t forget to tune into WCRN AM 830 tonight at 9:30 for DaTechGuy on DaRadio with DaScienceGuy and Barbara Espinosa of American Freedom. And remember two weeks from tonight Glenn will be my guest on the show (Jan 15 9 p.m. ) Mark that on the calendar! Listen live here. And if you are a business or a blogger looking for hits, you can’t do better than that for a draw.

As I been reading the continuing commentary on the Washington Post piece that has really got the attention of bloggers and readers from the daily pundit

DADT as the reason for ROTC’s banning was always a sham. Now the mask is finally off. The elite professoriat doesn’t hate ROTC because of DADT, they hate ROTC because they just can’t stand “the warrior ethic”. That’s code for courage, honor, and duty, ethics all anathema to Leftist indoctrinators. They prefer us supine, afraid, and dependent on them.”

an opinion I share to Vodkapundit

See there, Mr. U.S. Marine Captain — McCarthy doesn’t hate you. Why, he thinks you’re every bit as respectable as a Taliban.

who adds a graphic that says it all to this post at Ace of Spades HQ that compares the course requirement for ROTC at Sienna College and woman and gender studies at Columbia guess which one is more challenging academically?

While all of these are first-rate there is a thought that hit me this morning that hasn’t been touched on. Namely that the McCarthy’s of the world actually bring about the results they claim to deplore.

Consider; our media tends to reflect the views of people like McCarthy and the movies and media we put out there tend to show our troops in a very poor light, particularly over the last 40 years that has been exported as American Cultural and elite opinion to foes all over the world that the Saddam’s, Bin Ladin’s and Chavez’s et/al have bought into. It is precisely believe they have bought into the weakness of American culture and the people opposition to the military and the troops as uneducated rabble that they have been bold enough to make war figuring we can’t defeat them or oppose them.

Hundreds of thousands of idiotic and fanatical followers of these fools have learned the hard way that this is not true (in fact it was the last thing they ever learned), yet their fanatical leaders who are not hiding in caves manage to convince them that America will simply roll over. Why don’t they believe the evidence of the empty chairs where their predecessors have been? Because men like McCarthy promote the idea of a military unwanted and supported, because our media is so focused on the number of our casualties in war that they ignored the losses of our foes that dwarf ours.

These men are the enablers of the very wars they claim to oppose, and even more ironically are only able to be such enablers because our military is precisely NOT like the Taliban or any of these guys.

The secret here is that the McCarthy’s on the left’s position is really less about their hatred of the military, but more about convincing themselves of their own moral superiority. They can’t match the courage or the honor or the sacrifice of these men and women so they denigrate them in a vain attempt to convince themselves that it is their words and good wishes, dare I say it their faith in their own love for their fellow-man that outweighs the works of the military in risking their own lives to save others.

That’s liberalism in a nutshell belief and good intention trump works and results every time.

Update: Oh Brother!

Hitler could have been waited out. He might have been overthrown by his own government. Who knows? To have 50 million people killed: Hitler would have died within 10 years no matter what he did.

Oh and Lincoln was wrong to fight the civil war too. Moe Lane nails it:

Whichever editor approved this Washington Post article should be ashamed of him- or herself. I do not expect shame, but it’s long past time that we started telling these people when they’ve done something foul.

He certainly has the right to free speech but did he have the right to a Washington Post op-ed?

One of the things that is always of note is how the left in particular likes to play with language to change opinion.

The best example of course being the change from “Global Warming” to “Climate Change” as Victor Davis Hanson mentions in this piece:

When did global warming so easily get away with becoming “climate change”? With record winter low temperatures again this year in Europe, and similar freezing weather in the U.S., we are given a number of contorted exegeses from climatologists and green activists that, in fact, argue terrible cold is proof of global warming. One wonders: if it were now 80 degrees in New York or dry and 70 degrees in London, would we be told such unseasonable heat was not an artifact, but likewise real proof of climate change?

Philology usually is a good barometer of ideology: when global warming became climate change and now is evolving to “climate chaos,” you can see a case study in deductive thinking, as symptoms are fudged to conform to a preexisting diagnosis. Circular reasoning also is characteristic: we convince the coal-devouring and nuclear-producing Chinese that there is a soon to be big (Western-subsidized) global market for wind turbines and solar panels, given the spread of Gorism among Western elites and grandees, then we frighten Americans that the Chinese will soon capture the entire “green” market that we fostered unless we … (fill in the cap and trade / green subsidy-grant blanks).

I mentioned another example in my last post where the Amnesty business crowd has morphed into the Partnership for a new American Economy and of course the is the “other 98%” that became the “coffee party” that spun off “reclaim the dream” and “return to sanity” and now is “no labels“.

Well the left is at is again, as there is a concerted attempt to pressure the media into dropping “illegal Immigrants” to “undocumented immigrants”. When Megyn Kelly called them on it on Fox the clueless TPM nutcracker actually objected to HER:

Plenty of conservatives are pretty upset over a campaign by the Society of Professional Journalists to convince reporters to stop using the terms “illegal aliens” and “illegal immigrants” in favor of “undocumented immigrant.” But none are as livid as perpetually outraged Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who on Wednesday afternoon asked if journalists were going to start calling rapists “non-consensual sex partners” next.

“You could say that a burglar is an unauthorized visitor. You know, you could say that a rapist is a non-consensual sex partner which, obviously, would be considered offensive to the victims of those crimes,” Kelly said. “So how far could you take this?”

Mind you they put this up thinking it helps their case.

Dan Riehl at Big Journalism calls them out further:

Of course the Society of Professional Journalists would have a “Diversity Committee.” How else could liberals continue on with the thought policing of which they became so fond in college?

If you want to know why Fox is cleaning up in the ratings this is it.