Category Archives: Ethics

CNN Halloween Ghoul Gloria Borger: Can She Be Humanized?!

Ethics, Gender, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Objectivism, Propaganda, Reason

In anticipation of Mitt Romney’s last major speech delivered on Friday, in Iowa, the voter was expected to endure the analysis of one of the most banal brains on TV (and that takes an effort, given the competition):

Gloria Borger.

This bitch (and yes, I’ve not been mincing words lately) has not stopped maligning Romney’s character. As I’ve said repeatedly, Romney’s political philosophy is situated on a continuum of statism, and, as such, is of a piece with Obama’s.

But in his personal life, Mitt’s a lovely man. That is unless the stupid hos who monopolize discourse in the USA no loner like the silent, tall, capable, hard-working, over-achiever.

Romney’s funny too.

Yet Borger, a member of the Bitches for Obama Brigade at CNN, has not shut up about the need to “humanize” Mr. Romney, the premise of which it that the man is inhuman.

Romney’s public persona is a fictitious construct invented by the characters on the liberal cable news stations, with some acquiescence from Republican women. All agree about his stiffness.

Stiff? Sure, Romney is as rigid as the “Mad Man” Don Draper of the eponymous HBO period drama. The good type of rigid.

So here’s what Borger disgorged about the role, in particular, of Ann Romney in rehabilitating her rogue husband:

BALDWIN: “I want to bring back Gloria Borger, because here we are, strategy wise, 11 days left. We’re counting every day. The Romney camp, you know, seems to be featuring more of Mitt Romney, you know, Mitt Romney the man. And you’ve spent quite a bit of time with the woman who’s been instrumental in that, Ann Romney.”

BORGER: “Right.”

BALDWIN: “Tell me more about that.”

BORGER: “Well, Ann Romney has kind of become their secret weapon here. You know that Mitt Romney has a large problem with women voters. Ann Romney is out there now trying to appeal to women.
She’s also sort of been Mitt Romney’s character witness. Because his big problem has been that average voters say he doesn’t care about my problems. He doesn’t understand my problems. He’s too rich. He’s too out of touch. He doesn’t get it.
So Ann Romney’s job, and she’s been pushing for this in the campaign, is to kind of humanize him, open Mitt Romney up and kind of say to people, you know, actually he does care about you. She pushed for more of that. You heard a little bit more of that at the convention. You heard some of that in the debates.
So now his message is two-pronged. Yes, I can talk about the economy, but, yes, I also understand your problems. And we’ll see if more and more people believe that he does, because he runs substantially behind the president when it comes to economic empathy, if you will. And she’s part of that plan to get people to think that he does get it.”

Fareed Zakaria Plagiarizer Is Back

Ethics, Journalism, Media, Morality

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria is back from purgatory. Zakaria had been exposed for the second-hander I’ve long claimed he was—and worse. Front-and-center tonight—opining on the final presidential debate at Boca Raton, Fla.—Zakaria was found to have plagiarized another journalist’s work: the New Yorker’s Jill Lepore.

What’s more, plagiarism is a pattern for Fareed. Dan Amira provides a Zakaria background check, and with it evidence that “… this isn’t even the first time that Zakaria has been accused of taking ownership of another writer’s work.

If you’d imagined that a pathetic excuse for a writer, as is Zakaria, would be run out of town for his transgression—you’d be wrong. You’d be making a dodgy presumption of standards—moral and other.

Despite a pattern of plagiarisms, Zakaria’s employers were content to merely suspend his column for a month. (Someone called Tunku Varadarajan accuses everyone baying for Fareed’s journalistic blood of envy.)

Zombie Zakaria joins another by now infamous CNN friend, Candy Crowley, who helped tilt last week’s presidential debate in BHO’s favor.

What a lineup.

Bottoms Up,* Kate Middleton

Aesthetics, Britain, Celebrity, Ethics, Etiquette, Free Speech, Private Property

She’s a gorgeous girl. She’s also stabler than her late mother-in-law (which, I guess, is not saying much, considering that the dodo Diana was a manipulative neurotic, given to histrionics).

In any event, Kate Middleton, aka The Duchess of Cambridge, will get over the fact that images of her bare breasts and bum are already in circulation, snapped in order to feed the voyeuristic fetish of the average consumer.

Certainly demand-driven, unethical, ugly and maybe even immoral: Hounding this girl wherever she goes is all of the above. But surely only trespassing on private property renders the action of the offending photographer illicit in natural law?!

The topless images of Kate were snapped from “the side of the road between trees, around half a mile away from a chateau,” in the south of France.

Was the photographer trespassing on private property? No report seems to specify. “Invasion of privacy” laws seem to belong to a broadly defined area of law, one that has little to do with the always unmentionable rights of private property.

(Bottoms up* means “here’s to you.”)

On Conflating The Candidate With The Machinations Of The Republican Party Politburo

Elections, Ethics, Family, Journalism, Republicans, Ron Paul

…the Republican National Convention did provide Americans with extraordinarily important information about Mitt Romney and the sort of leader he is likely to be …he is also a rules lawyer who is more than willing to smash the spirit of the game while rewriting its rules any time it appears to suit his interests. From keeping important party figures such as Ron Paul and Sarah Palin off the podium to refusing to recognize the duly-elected delegates from Maine, from changing the party rules on the fly to indulging in a Soviet-style vote count in which only votes for Romney were reported, it is clear that Mitt Romney is even more inclined toward authoritarian rule than Barack Obama has ever shown himself to be.

The problem with assertions made above in “Romney’s Fair Warning,” by Vox Day, my WND colleague, is that they are … assertions, in which Day skips a crucial step. This step would involve showing that Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee are one and the same thing, and that the candidate is involved in the bureaucratic machinations of the party executive.

This is quite possible, but unproven in the column; Day has been too quick to collapse the distinction, at least in so far as administrative matters go, between the purview of the Republican Party politburo and that of the candidate.

I mean, did the candidates running at the time have a hand in what the National Republican Senatorial Committee did to Christine O’Donnell?

Again, it is quite possible that Mitt Romney agreed with party leadership’s decision to bar the most controversial speakers from the 2012 RNC. But it is unclear that Romney was behind it. Assertions absent proof don’t cut it in journalism.

If anything, there is evidence that the “Romney campaign’s [decision] to feature a video tribute to Paul [was] because he likes Paul.” There were rumors on the campaign trail that the two candidates and their wives had become fast friends. And why not? Politics aside, both ladies are gracious, lovely women with family and faith on their minds. (See also “Romney and Paul: BFFs?”)