Category Archives: Media

Fix News Falters, But Flatters

Conservatism, Ethics, Etiquette, Ilana Mercer, Media

When “‘Obama, Love Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry’” was first published and circulated, Megyn Kelly led her show with the exact reference and column title, even cuing the music from “Love Story.” Did she or her producer have the decency to credit the column? You know the answer to that.

Our editor sent me this comment: “yep, par for the course—still kinda cool though.” He’s right.

Indeed, as documented in “Glenn Beck Awakens To The Color Of Hate Crime (But Fails To Credit Those Who Went Before),” this is not a first for big, conservative media—generally challenged in the originality department. Passing off the often-idiosyncratic ideas or references of others as their own is “par for the course” in these circles.

Personally, I experienced Sean Hannity as a cordial gentleman—disarmingly charming—who was generous on air in his praise for my work and controversial position. (Perhaps the only position I’ve taken that I’ve come to deeply regret, even though it is probably philosophically correct.)

Debbie Schlussel, however, has had a different experience, detailed in “Why is Sean Hannity Deliberately Ripping Me Off?”.

UPDATED: Obama, Love Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry (Fix News)

Barack Obama, Bush, Ethics, Healthcare, Media

“Obama: Love Means Never having To Say You’re Sorry” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

So where do we stand in the health care chain reaction, cooked-up in the Barack Obama command-and-control centers? Let’s see. Having destroyed the market for health insurance, the president turned to another parlor game, hailed by the daytrippers at CNN and the New York Times as a “health fix” and a “fix for canceled plans.”

Yes, the fix is in. Parsed, the president’s advice to the millions who’ve lost coverage is, essentially, “I’ll let you keep your already canceled policies through 2014. Feel free to take it up with your insurance company.”

In the preceding weeks, and against the backdrop of polls in which 50 percent of voters said, “President Obama knowingly lied when he repeatedly told Americans they could keep their plans under his signature health care law,” the paper of record took a “different” view. Obama, the apple of their eye, “wrongly assured Americans that they could retain their health care plans.”

An “incorrect promise” was another euphemism used by NYT story tellers.

Quite the opposite, opined Patrick J. Buchanan:

WHO’S THE BIGGEST LIAR OF THEM ALL? In the grand scheme of history, Obama’s rank lie “now enters presidential history alongside George H.W. Bush’s ‘Read my lips! No new taxes,’ Bill Clinton’s ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,’ and George W. Bush’s tales of yellow cake in Niger and hidden arsenals of WMDs.”

As wrecking balls go, Obama and “W” are tied in ignominy. Christopher Conover of Duke University estimates that “129 million, or 68 percent of Americans, may not be able to keep their current health care plans once Obamacare is fully implemented. [Conover’s] study also suggests that 18 to 50 million people will lose their plans altogether.”

The butcher’s bill of human suffering—Bush’s—has been tallied. Obama’s is still to come. …

The complete column is “Obama: Love Means Never having To Say You’re Sorry.” Read it on WND.

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UPDATE (11/15): FIX NEW. Megyn Kelly of Fox News uses the exact reference and title of my Friday, WND column, even cues the music from “Love Story” referenced. Did she or her producer have the decency to credit the column? You know the answer to that.

Correction, Gov. Christie: It’s Obama The Liar Talking

Barack Obama, Education, Healthcare, Intelligence, Media, Morality, Propaganda, Republicans

“That’s Barack Obama the lawyer talking” was the crappy Chris Christie’s explanation to the attempts of the president to finesse the lies he told at least 24 times about his subjects’ ability to hang on to their health-care.

Correction Gov. Christie: It’s Obama the liar talking.

CNN knows who to go to in order to bolster the narrative that the nitwork has been promoting: The Anointed One merely misspoke when he roared repeatedly, from 2009 through to 2012:

“If you like your health care plan, you will keep it. Or, “If you got health insurance and you like your plan and like your doctor, you will keep your plan, you will keep your doctor.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper is obviously—and energetically—collecting affidavits for his nitwork’s favorite man. Who else to galvanize but a character like New Jersey Gov. Christie, who is an expert at lying about lying? Here’s what that mountain of opportunistic flesh told Tapper:

“Don’t be so cute,” Christie said. “And when you make a mistake, admit it. Listen, if he was mistaken in 2009, 2010 on his understanding of how the law would operate, then just admit it to people. Say, ‘You know what? I said it, I was wrong. I’m sorry and we’re going to try to fix this and make it better.’ I think people would give any leader in that circumstance a lot of credit for just, you know, owning up to it.”

Tapper referenced Obama’s revision last night of his “if you like your plan, you can keep it” pledge.

“Don’t lawyer it,” Christie continued. “People don’t like lawyers. I’m a lawyer. They don’t like ‘em. You know? Don’t lawyer it. When I saw that this morning—I saw that this morning for the first time, and I thought, he’s lawyering it. That’s Barack Obama the lawyer.”

I love the way everyone reverentially alludes to the president’s former profession, as though he was anything but a lawyer with no private-practice or scholarly achievements, and a subpar university teacher with bad ratings from students:

During his 12 years as a lecturer at the University of Chicago’s Law School, [Obama’s] student-approval ratings were low. In fact, he was one of the lowest ranked professors in his last 5 years at the university. As we already know … [Barack Obama] left no record of legal scholarly writings.

Curse of Chucky Krauthammer

Media, Neoconservatism, Republicans, War

Fox News is energetically marketing the neoconservative warmonger, Chucky Krauthammer. A generally “fair and balanced” newsman, Fox News’ Bret Baier turned positively obsequious in his Krauthammer coverage, making a song-and-dance of disclosing their close friendship. It’s all so incestuous, isn’t it?

When it comes to spying on Americans, Charles Krauthammer sees Obama’s NSA, 4th Amendment infractions as a vindication of Bush’s. The columnist has invited Democrats now excusing Obama to pardon Bush and … party on.

“After badmouthing tea-party Republicans for attempting to leverage a partial government shut-down and debt-ceiling deadline to dilute ObamaCare, Krauthammer quickly scolded ‘the media” for its biased coverage of the quixotic showdown. Pot. Kettle. Krauthammer.”

Like all “neocon artists”—they were once radical leftists and are still hardcore Jacobins—on the invasion of Iraq, Krauthammer dished out dollops of ahistoric, unintuitive, and reckless verbiage. Neocons had dismissed and maligned the Old Right (that’s us) and rubbished generals and government officials who warned against that war: Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, Secretary of the Army Thomas White, former general and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft; former Centcom Commander Norman Schwarzkopf; former NATO Commander Wesley Clark; former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, and Marine Corps Commandant James Jones: all were cool to the war. Retired General Anthony Zinni, distinguished warrior, diplomat and card-carrying Republican, warned Congress against the “wrong war at the wrong time.” The neocons dismissed them all as “yesterday’s men.”

From anti-discrimination legislative attacks on private property and First Amendment rights to the promotion of “large-scale Third World immigration” that displaces “Western core populations by groups that are culturally different and, in some cases, openly antagonistic”—the neocons are in philosophical tandem with The Left.
… these “illiterate leftists posturing as conservatives,” as Paul Gottfried has dubbed them, have been partial to—even complicit in—the historical elevation of Martin Luther King Jr. above the Founding Fathers. Neocons are always eager to conflate the messages of the two solitudes, even though the founders’ liberty is related to King’s egalitarianism as neoconservatism is related to traditional Republicanism—never the twain shall meet.

About the “sage of Fox News,” Jack Kerwick has reminded me of Krauthammer’s admission, as late as the eve of the 2008 election, that neither he nor George Will could figure out who Obama was: a centrist or a leftist. This, ventures Kerwick, speaks volumes. How anyone could’ve doubted that O was anything but a radical leftist, especially after the Jeremiah Wright thing blew up, is unfathomable. Jack thinks “Krauthammer and co. have zero business doing what they’re doing if they are that blind. And, of course, they got the country into Iraq.”

As to Chucky’s prose. He writes decently enough, but I am never curious enough to complete a column of his. It’s as unexciting as he is.

Chucky Krauthammer is a failed “expert,” for whom public goodwill runs eternal. “So why are insightful commentators whose observations have predictive power generally barred from the national discourse, while neoconservative false prophets are called back for encores?” This last question was posed and answered in “PUNDITS, HEAL THYSELVES!”:

The answer will not please admirers of the late James Burnham, who blame scheming elites for any popularly accepted project they dislike, be it unwarranted wars or welfare. Contrary to Burnham, elites, media included, can rule only if they represent ideologies that are widely embraced, as the invasion of Iraq was. Today’s news is not what it used to be because a dumbed-down population, well represented in newsrooms, cannot distinguish evidence from assertion and fact from feel-good fiction. News is now nothing but a slick, demand-driven product designed to please – not inform – the populace.