Category Archives: Media

Updated: Militant Mama Obama

America, Barack Obama, Democrats, Education, Elections 2008, Media, Race

Exhibit #2 in my case against Barack’s bride: “As a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station.” So spoke M. Obama.

Indeed, “Michelle Obama’s gaseous swipe reminds me of the last two black men picked off while pumping gas. Wait a sec, I got my facts topsy-turvy. Two of the D.C Snipers’ 13 victims were murdered in gas stations. Neither was black. The Snipers, on the other hand, were both black. The pattern of racial victimization in the country Mrs. Obama will likely officiate as first lady is unidirectional.”

In “Militant Mama Obama,” I make the case that, “if anything, her charmed life has made Michelle Obama more racially militant.”

Updated: “Michelle Obama thesis was on racial divide,” reports Jeffrey Ressner of the Politico.
So the moribund media is catching up with us and reporting on the thesis I mentioned in Militant Mama Obama.

Questionnaires, the kind M. Obama relied on to arrive at her conclusions, are notoriously unreliable and riddled with bias. Methodology aside, this woman is an identity activist through-and-through.

She concluded:

“I hoped that these findings would help me conclude that despite the high degree of identification with whites as a result of the educational and occupational path that black Princeton alumni follow, the alumni would still maintain a certain level of identification with the black community. However, these findings do not support this possibility.”

In Mama Obama’s view, blacks at Princeton assimilated excessively. Also, in her first sentence above, she ought to have written, “I HAD hoped…”

Celebrating the Creeping Caliphate in Kosovo

Democrats, Foreign Policy, Islam, Media, War

Is there any doubt that by intervening in Kosovo, we strengthened the al Qaida-backed, Islamic Kosovo Liberation Army, and Islam’s greater project, to the detriment of Orthodox Christian Serbs? Is there any doubt who the neocons are supporting when they get in Putin’s face about Chechnya, another terrorist entity?

Republicans blasted Clinton, and for good reason, for warring against Serbia. The same principled people have made lingering in Iraq, and loving that equally unjust foreign policy foray, a fulcrum of their candidate’s presidential platform. The Christians of Iraq are numbered; they’ve been eliminated or expunged thanks to Bush’s faith-based intervention.

Geraldo Rivera, the neoliberal (or Neolithic) Fox fabulist, was dancing in the streets in celebration of Kosovo’s independence. What was he celebrating? In whose honor were Bush and his bastardized conservatives prancing about? Was this an ode to Clinton’s folly for partaking in an assault on a Christian country—Serbia—which, as Patrick J. Buchanan reminds us, was “an ally in two world wars, and [had] never attacked us”?

Where is Ron Paul when you need him?

CNN GOP Debate: The Meta-Perspective

Elections 2008, Journalism, Media, Republicans

From a journalistic perspective, the last CNN GOP debate was an especially corrupted and corrupting process.
What do I mean? The best to date was the ABC debate moderated by Old School journalist, Charles Gibson. Evenhanded, tough, fare, no favorites—he and his colleague were there to get answers for the viewers, not to choose the frontrunners or make celebrity appearances. Which is what Anderson Vanderbilt Cooper is all about. 
The less said about he and Jim VandeHei, the blogger cognoscente from “Politico,” and Janet Hook of the Los Angeles Times—moderators all—the better.
There were four candidates present, not two. Tasked with the assignment, journalists with a modicum of integrity and intellectual curiosity would have made sure that by the end of the evening, viewers had a good idea of the positions all four held. Instead, Cooper and his colleagues zeroed in on Romney and McCain and remained there. On the few occasions Cooper and Company turned to them, Paul and Huckabee were granted very little time to respond—Paul even less than Huckabee. Moreover, because four contenders were present and two were ignored, the meta-message was that of contempt—and arrogance on the part of the moderators.
 
Rush Limbaugh has offered a coruscating critique of McCain as the anti-conservative, yet Huckabee was framed by Cooper as the main object of Limbaugh’s attack. This was a sort of Straw Man Argument. Huckabee is not the frontrunner. If Limbaugh’s renunciation of any candidate ought to have been brought up for the benefit of the voters, it is his root-and-branch rejection of McCain. But that bit of dreck, Cooper, wanted to spare his man McCain, who is lionized by liberals.
The debate has stuck in my mind as richly revealing of the workings of the media, content and process alike.  
To be continued.

Update (February 3): Readers have pointed to other solid interviews conducted over the months with the candidates, such as at the dank corner of MTV cable, of all places. I would add the Google or Yahoo executive’s interview with Paul—and the others. Fine, informed, intelligent stuff. This demonstrates, once again, that if in search for genius, always look outside what I call the Media-Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex, sycophants and parasites all.
This is also why you ought to never blindly follow the media’s constant abuse of Mitt Romney, clearly of a far superior mind and mien than the miserable, mummified McCain. I say this as a “Paulbearer.” But more about Romney—a tremendously accomplished man in his own right—latter. A run outdoors, eating, ironing, and book writing will keep us apart for the next few hours.

‘Idiot Pundits and Pollsters Strike Again’

Elections 2008, Journalism, Media

At least this empty tracksuit, Joel Achenbach, admits he and his cohort are “imbeciles” (why, then, are they still employed by prestigious publications and remunerated for their idiocy?):
“I guess it was premature to write those forward-looking analyses of President Obama’s re-election strategy in 2012.
I don’t want to suggest that the pundits look stupid this morning. More like complete freakin’ imbeciles. Count me among those who thought Obama was a runaway train, that he’d blow Clinton out of the water. (It’s early and I didn’t get enough sleep, so we just went ahead and mixed the metaphor.)
You had to see the crowds! Feel the energy! Okay, so in retrospect a lot of those people were probably college kids on break from Massachusetts or Maryland. Still, many of us sensed that we were witnessing history, a transition to a new era. Turning the page.
“You have to BELIEVE,” I told my jaded friend Von Drehle.
“In WHAT?” he said.
“In HOPE,” I said. I was just trying to get in the spirit of things, and be a true news medium.
In retrospect, I regret posting that item about Obama turning water to wine.
A little after midnight, in Nashua at the gym where Obama had spoken to his stunned supporters, a nationally known pundit said to me: “I spent half an hour today on television talking about the Clintons IN THE PAST TENSE.”
What happened?
Maybe it really was the “Ed Muskie in reverse” effect. That’s the Sid Blumenthal phrase. Clinton cleaned up among women, and women made up 57 percent (so I am told) of Democratic primary voters. Perhaps women rallied to the cause after the Emotional Moment. You heard what the woman from Bow told me yesterday: She suddenly switched from Edwards to Clinton after seeing the news clip of Clinton tearing up in Portsmouth. And several other voters told me they absolutely loved the EM.
Last night at the Obama rally, Sue Tice, a librarian at the high school who seemed floored by the results, said of the turnaround, “I really wonder if it was yesterday when Hillary became a person.”
And then there was the image of the boys ganging up on Clinton in the debate — and that snarky comment by Obama, calling Hillary “likeable enough,” which surely he meant to come out in a more jocular fashion. Never mind his intent: “Jokes don’t work,” said Dave Barry this weekend, and he knows a thing or two about that.
We’ve seen over the years that the New Hampshire Primary can turn on a gesture, a phrase, a single searing moment. Politics isn’t left-brained, it’s more reptilian than that.
We had buried Clinton by Monday night and had moved on to wondering what she’d do with the tattered remnants of her career. But guess what: the voters decide these things. It’s too soon to know precisely how this race stands and where it’s going and what’s going to happen, but from where I’m sitting — in the Manchester airport, ready to get the hell home — she’s the front-runner again.
And remember: Front-runners usually win.”

[Snip]

As I keep pointing out, there is nothing these people can predict accurately or analyze correctly (bar Pat Buchanan, who called the results in Iowa and New Hampshire). The print media’s timeless tenure is without justification.