Benghazi

Whitewashing Benghazi

Were he alive today, Richard Nixon would have to doff his hat to Barack Obama. Compared with how the Obama administration has swept under the rug the Benghazi attacks of September 11, 2012, Nixon’s attempt to cover up the Watergate burglary was rank amateurism. To be fair, Nixon’s team of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Dean were not in the same league as Obama’s, which includes not only his cabinet but most of the national media and much of Congress.

Romney tripped up by his neocon platform:

Lucky for President Obama, Mitt Romney supported American intervention in Libya, too, which left him unable to raise the obvious point that there would have been no Americans in Benghazi to be killed if Obama hadn’t foolishly put them there. Having wrongly decided that America had a national security interest in helping France topple Gaddafi, Obama’s mistake was compounded by the decision to put American diplomats in a city that was known to be a safe haven for terrorists. Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, knew or should have known of the security problems in Benghazi and had the responsibility to correct them. Romney wouldn’t point any of this out, and Obama certainly couldn’t admit it.

More reasons why Boehner should not be speaker:

Soon after the attacks, Virginia Congressman Frank Wolf introduced HR-36, a bill to create a House Select Committee to investigate the Benghazi attacks. Under Wolf’s bill, the special committee would have subpoena power and could force the issue of testimony and access to documents. If it did, we might yet see Obama exercise Executive Privilege just as he did in the “Fast and Furious” scandal. The bill has 177 sponsors, almost enough to pass the House today. The only problem is that House Speaker John Boehner won’t allow the bill to come to the floor. He has repeatedly blocked it from consideration. Without leaders interested in the truth, the American public will never find out, not now, not in the history books, just what happened on September 11, 2012. Nor, on present trends, will they find out why they can’t find out.

See also:

Mark Levin agrees

This seems important, but I don’t know what it means

EXCLUSIVE: FBI had human source in contact with bin Laden as far back as 1993 U.S. learned of plans to finance terror attacks

In a revelation missing from the official investigations of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the FBI placed a human source in direct contact with Osama bin Laden in 1993 and ascertained that the al Qaeda leader was looking to finance terrorist attacks in the United States, according to court testimony in a little-noticed employment dispute case. “It was the only source I know in the bureau where we had a source right in al Qaeda, directly involved,” Edward J. Curran, a former top official in the FBI’s Los Angeles office, told the court in support of a discrimination lawsuit filed against the bureau by his former agent Bassem Youssef.

For those paying attention, Edward J. Curran was the FBI agent who was known as the Executioner during the FBI’s witch hunt inside CIA. Said witch being Robert Hanssen who was not even in the Agency but worked for the Bureau.

See here:

Revisiting the Hanssen case

Robert Hanssen: 9/11's forgotten man

MSM worries that they may lose control of their monster

Joe Biden, The Media's Secret Quayle

Hidden just below the surface of the liberal media is a barely noticed trend of patronizing contempt: Joe Biden is the Democrats' Dan Quayle, but because he is a Democrat they'll do anything to avoid treating him like they treated Dan Quayle.

Related:

How we live now: The rule of the inept experts

Mark Levin agrees

Mark Levin: We owe Richard Nixon and his family an APOLOGY…

I think we owe Richard Nixon and apology – posthumously of course. But I think we owe him an apology – and his family. Because quite frankly I think Obama, in terms of his exercise of executive power – certainly his exercise of unconstitutional power, is MUCH WORSE than Nixon ever was! That’s right I said it! And let me go further! I think Holder’s worse than Mitchell was as Attorney General.

Related:

Yes, worse than Watergate

WORSE THAN WATERGATE

Shutdown theater and Nixon’s Ghost

Obama and Nixon (UPDATED)

Nixon had to pay for his dirty tricks and cover-up

Notes on Nazism

From Norman Davies, Europe

Hitler: “National socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd ties with a democratic order”


It was the Nazis who first instituted May Day as a national festival for (German) workers.


Most Nazi leaders were unbelievers; Hitler himself was a lapsed Catholic.

Willi Munzenberg, Stalin's master propagandist, understood the motives of the Nazi storm troops:

"'Brown on the outside', he would say of the unemployed urban tough guys of the [Nazi] SA, 'red on the inside.'"

If you ever said, "I wish this spy thriller had more supernatural overtones"

Then do I have a book for you.

It really is outstanding.

The logic of "Stand Your Ground"

Dear New York Times, Self-Defense Is Not Vigilantism

“Stand your ground” is not a principle that endorses vigilantism, the quest to enforce the law unilaterally, but instead a principle that declares that public spaces do not belong to violent aggressors. This represents not the abrogation of law but rather the use of law to more justly determine the rights of aggressor and victim, granting greater rights to the victim and thus bringing the statutory law closer in line with natural law. When the state, by contrast, mandates that citizens retreat from aggression (a concept fraught with practical difficulties and dangers), then it does not limit violence, it instead empowers unlawful aggression.

Mark your calenders

Bob Lee Swagger is back!

Book description:

In this tour de force—part historical thriller, part modern adventure—from the New York Times bestselling author of I, Sniper, Bob Lee Swagger uncovers why WWII’s greatest sniper was erased from history…and why her disappearance still matters today.

Ludmilla “Mili” Petrova was once the most hunted woman on earth, having raised the fury of two of the most powerful leaders on either side of World War II: Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler.

But Kathy Reilly of The Washington Post doesn’t know any of that when she encounters a brief mention of Mili in an old Russian propaganda magazine, and becomes interested in the story of a legendary, beautiful female sniper who seems to have vanished from history.

Benghazi

Catherine Herridge:

Former CIA official accused of misleading lawmakers on Benghazi

Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell is facing accusations from Republicans that he misled lawmakers about the Obama administration's role in crafting the bogus storyline that a protest gone awry was to blame for the deadly Benghazi attack.

Among other discrepancies, Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee allege Morell insisted the talking points were sent to the White House for informational purposes, and not for their input -- but emails, later released by the administration, showed otherwise.

Stephen Hayes:

Lawmakers: CIA #2 Lied to Us About Benghazi

Three aspects of the controversy are drawing particular interest: (1) Morell’s obfuscation of his central role in rewriting the talking points, (2) Morell’s contention that the FBI rewrote the talking points, and (3) Morell’s false claim that the talking points were provided to the White House merely as a heads-up and not for coordination.

Andrew McCarthy

Obama’s ‘Blame It on The Video’ Was a Fraud for Cairo as Well as Benghazi More Proof

The “blame it on the video” fraud so carefully orchestrated by the Obama administration in connection with the Benghazi massacre on the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks has always rested on a premise that remains unquestioned by the mainstream media and that is itself a fraud. To wit: the Libyan violence, in which a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were murdered, was triggered by rioting at the U.S. embassy in neighboring Egypt which was unquestionably provoked by an anti-Islamic video (an obscure trailer for the more obscure film, Innocence of Muslims).

As I’ve previously recounted, “blame it on the video” was a fraud as to Egypt as well a calculated fraud set in motion by State Department officials in Cairo who began tweeting about their outrage over the video before the rioting started. At the time they did so, our government well knew both that there would be demonstrations at the embassy and that those demonstrations were being spearheaded by al Qaeda. In addition to the general animus against the United States that is its raison d’etre, the terror network and its Egyptian confederates were animated by their long-running campaign demanding that the U.S. release the Blind Sheikh (Omar Abdel Rahman, the master jihadist I prosecuted in the nineties and who Osama bin Laden later credited with issuing the fatwa that approved the 9/11 suicide hijackings).

There is now more evidence corroborating the fact that al Qaeda-linked jihadists, not the video, propelled the Cairo rioting just as al-Qaeda-linked jihadists, not the video, propelled the Benghazi attack.

We are left, then, with the original Watergate question: If they have nothing to hide, "Why are there so many lies?"

Great Tom Wolfe interview

The Bizarre and the Jejune

Tom Wolfe talks about his life.

Related:

The Great American Novelists

What a difference a year makes

The mark of a great editor

When magazines mattered

The problem with twitter

Tweeting's true believers run short on wisdom.

Twitter gets the brevity of aphorisms right. It doesn’t much do the wisdom.

Aphorisms may die as clichés. They weren’t born that way. The old-school tweets of Hoffer, Pascal, and La Rochefoucauld hit the reader quickly. They developed glacially after careful thought. The best sound bites go down fast but take a long time to cook.

Before tweets, bumper stickers, sandwich boards, and peanut-gallery chants advertised shallow conformity. Twitter, to borrow from an ancient aphorism, is old wine in a new bottle

It’s just another case where speed kills.

Getting Russia right

When Americans look at Russia, they see what they want to see. And that's dangerous.

If you can't separate your biases from your analysis, your analyses will usually turn out to be wrong. One might argue that precisely this has been the case over the past few decades. In the 1990s, Westerners (and especially the Clinton administration) trumpeted Boris Yeltsin's success at leading Russia forward into a bright democratic future -- while ordinary Russians were experiencing an everyday existence marked by evaporating savings, rampant sleaze, chronically unpaid salaries, triumphant Chechen rebels, mafia shootouts, and patently unfair privatizations that left just seven men controlling most of the country's industrial assets. The architect of that privatization effort, Anatoly Chubais, was hailed by Washingtonians as a young, tech-savvy genius (he brought a laptop to meetings!), while most Russians saw him as the nauseating epitome of a corrupt new system that didn't even trouble to conceal its injustices.

Just one from my notebook

Jami Floyd on ABC 20/20, 28 November 2001:

Since September 11, the word ‘terrorist’ has come to mean someone who is radical, Islamic, and foreign. But many believe we have as much to fear from a home-grown group of anti-abortion crusaders.

It’s work like that which earned Floyd the Maggie Award for Outstanding Coverage of Reproductive Rights and Health Issuesfrom Planned Parenthood and a spot as Legal Contributor on AlJazeera America.

Broken immigration system

So that’s how H-1B visa fraud is done!

This is alleged H-1B visa fraud, remember. In order to hire an H-1B worker in place of a U.S. citizen or green card holder, the hiring company must show that there is no “minimally qualified” citizen or green card holder to take the job. Recruiting such minimally qualified candidates is generally done through advertising: if nobody responds to the ad then there must not be any minimally qualified candidates....

Employers are posting jobs that don’t really exist, seeking candidates they don’t want, and paying for bogus non-ads to show there’s an IT labor shortage in America. Except of course there isn’t an IT labor shortage

HT: Steve Sailer

Good sense if only the GOP will listen

Who’s afraid of Comcast?

Instead of blocking mergers or beating concessions out of the telecom giants, let’s give them the treatment they really fear: Policies that encourage the entry of competitors, which are the bane of every monopolist.

I'd also like to see a push for a la carte pricing for cable subscribers.

Conservative anger and the Reagan legacy

Republican honor Reagan but most of them have failed to study him and his administration. This is true of both elected officials as well as conservative activists.

When we look at the issues that have provoked the grassroots’s anger with DC republicans, we find that they trace their roots back to Reagan era.

I’m not saying that it was RR’s fault. Rather, the problems were apparent in his administration and the journalistic narrative about his electoral victories. That MSM gets big stuff wrong is no surprise. That they do so to the detriment of conservatives is almost a law of nature.

The key problem is that many in the GOP believed their BS.

The dinosaur media could never figure out Reagan. Was he an “amiable dunce” dependent on advisers to govern? A simple-minded actor who needed advisers to feed him his line for the “role of a lifetime”? A dangerous right-winger who had snookered the country with the help of his campaign consultants?

The storyline changed according to the needs of the narrative. What did not change was the disparagement of Reagan’s abilities and principles, and the denial that voters really supported his programs. Equally constant was the emphasis on the importance of Reagan’s advisers to his success.

Reagan did not win because his principles resonated with a center-right nation. No, it was Mike Deaver and his media management.

Too many Republicans came to believe that. Mercenary consultants became central advisers on everything and elected officials came to see voters as easily manipulated fools. (Google “Romney, etch-a-sketch” for the nadir of this arrogance.)

Related to the Deaver fallacy was the Gergen fallacy. The two went hand-in-hand. If elections were decided by image makers and pretty pictures, then it stood to reason that the Republic had to be saved by wise DC insiders who made sure that incompetent rubes did not get elected and then try to carry out their campaign promises.

When conservatives urged that his handlers ‘let Reagan be Reagan’, they were fighting against Gergenism, the central tenet of which is that Republicans, once elected, should break faith with their supporters.

David Gergen may be out to pasture at the Kennedy School and PBS but his legacy lives on in Boehner’s insistence that the GOP rescue amnesty.

Conservatives who remember the Reagan administration may be most in need of a refresher course. Memory is fallible.

Reading David Frisk’s biography of William Rusher, I was reminded again that many conservatives opposed Reagan before the 1980 primaries and spent most of his term complaining about his administration once he went to the White House. Norman Podhoretz thought he was losing the Cold War; Richard Viguerie believed he had sold out to the Establishment.

Pundits have to have something to complain about or else they will not be able to write. Reagan had to govern and governing is a matter of compromise. The best any president can do is balance expedience and principle. Reagan did that better than most and his achievements warm the heart of every true conservative. Yet, it is worth remembering that plenty of vocal right-wingers thought he was failing when he was actually changing the world.

Turns out that being president is a lot like baseball. President’s don’t fail when they cannot implement 70% of their platform; they bat .300 and achieve greatness.

Learning from Lincoln

Outstanding post here:

Five Key Lessons On Presidents’ Day From Abraham Lincoln

If you asked the average voter to list the greatest American presidents, Lincoln, TR, and Reagan would almost certainly be the highest rated Republicans. Yet, there are plenty of right-wing cranks who are trying to make Lincoln and TR the enemy.

Is there a better way to lose elections than to set yourself in opposition to everything the voters believe?

Sometimes i wonder

I can imagine a heavily guarded corner in the FSB archives devoted to the NKVD/KGB's greatest still-secret operations. Among those files is the greatest disinformation operation in their history. Longer lasting than The Trust. An operation that managed to outlive the primary agent of influence and which to this day promotes the collectivist cause.

"Imagine," thinks Putin to himself, "there are Americans so stupid that they still rally to Ayn Rand when they set out to fight Socialism."

This explains why David Brooks writes for the New York Times and Steve Sailer does not

I'm reading David Frisk's excellent biography of William Rusher and came across this piece of advice that Rusher gave to WFB back in the 1950s:

"I recently read somewhere a little homily to the effect that if a person makes us think we're thinking, we love him; but if he he makes us think, we hate him. Take your choice-- and then make up your mind to take the consequences."

Why the Patriot-News deserves to die

As Pennsylvania considers Paycheck Protection, their editorial page editor offers us this:

The proxy fight over "Paycheck Protection" being waged by national labor unions and astrotuf groups such as FreedomWorks and the Koch Brothers-funded American Legislative Exchange Council is playing out in the state Legislature with bills in the state House and Senate.

Nice even-handed journalism there.

BTW, to the P-N only right-wing campaigns can astro-turf. Gun control groups etc. are always treated as legitimate representatives of large constituencies. Even when they are just a couple of tweeters and a letterhead paid for by billionaire Mike Bloomberg.

Again, this is for a paper in conservative central Pennsylvania. I expect language like this (and the nonthinking thinking behind it.) in an alt-weekly in some college town. It is simply bizarre to see this contempt for the core audience of a for-profit fishwrap.

Previous installments of this deathwish series:

Way-points on the path to irrelevance and oblivion

A paper too stupid to live

One more reason why the Patriot-News can't die too soon

The Boehner problem in a nutshell

This Howard Kurtz piece is filled with the sort of flabby thinking and tired cliches that pass for analysis inside Washington.and the MSM. One statement deserves comment:

Having endured last fall’s senseless shutdown, which damaged the Republicans, the Ohio congressman didn’t want to push his party into another battle it couldn’t win.

If the party was damaged, then Boehner deserves much of the blame. And if it cannot win the next battle, then his weakness as a public spokesman is a large part of the reason.

See here:

The Boehner problem is a Republican problem

What comes after #JFK50 and #Beatles50?

#Watergate40 of course.

No way the MSM is going to downplay that anniversary, right?

Elections have consequences

Unfortunately, sometimes the politicians fail to mention what those consequences will be.

One More Cowardly Moratorium

Now comes Washington Governor Jay Inslee, announcing he will impose a moratorium, granting reprieves so that no one is executed while he is governor. He conveniently omitted any mention of an intent to would do that while campaigning for the office, so as to allow the people of Washington to decide if they wanted a governor who would clear-cut justice in this manner. (Campaign website here.) The election was reasonably close at 51.5 - 48.5, so it is quite possible he would not be governor if he had announced his intentions in advance of the election, which, of course, is precisely why he did not. If anyone reading believes that he has had a change of heart based on recent study and soul-searching, I would like to sell you a bridge. This action is one more in a series of Profiles in Cowardice that we have seen in multiple states. Get elected first, then drop the bomb.

The Boehner problem

As the debacle of Obamacare becomes more apparent, I’m amazed at the Republican’s inability to fully capitalize on it.

In particular, why is no one driving home the message that the President shutdown the government rather than delay the rollout when he should have known that the website and the whole program was not ready to go?

His numerous exemptions, deferrals, and changes should be evidence that the Republicans were right. But who in congress is saying that?

Why the relative silence about the corrupt crony capitalism aspects of Obama’s unilateral changes to the program?

Thomas Sowell got at part of the problem during the shutdown:

Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, epitomized what has been wrong with the Republicans for decades when he emerged from a White House meeting last Wednesday, went over to the assembled microphones, briefly expressed his disgust with the Democrats’ intransigence and walked on away.

We are in the midst of a national crisis, immediately affecting millions of Americans and potentially affecting the kind of country this will become if Obamacare goes into effect and yet, with multiple television network cameras focused on Speaker Boehner as he emerged from the White House, he couldn’t be bothered to prepare a statement that would help clarify a confused situation, full of fallacies and lies.

Boehner was not unique in having a blind spot when it comes to recognizing the importance of articulation and the need to put some serious time and effort into presenting your case in a way that people outside the Beltway would understand. On the contrary, he has been all too typical of Republican leaders in recent decades.

Okay. So Boehner isn’t the man to carry this message. That’s part of the problem.

The second part is this: Maybe Boehner doesn’t want to find women and men who can carry that message.

After all, that might make members of the House wonder if they would be better off with a leader who can lead in public and a Speaker who can carry the message to the voters.

The Speaker wouldn't be the first manager who was afraid to promote people with more ability.

One of Rumsfeld's Rules: "A's hire A's. B's hire C's."

Related:

How Reagan became Reagan: The Texas Earthquake of 1976

Regimentation and adaptability

Insight from Gen. Stanley McChrystal:

When I got to the Ranger Regiment as a young captain, I was retaught all of the fundamentals of being a soldier: how to hold my weapon, how to pack my ruck, how to tie my shoes. The focus on fundamentalsdoing simple things the right waywas all consuming. But there was a reason for it that went beyond just discipline. A Ranger in combat knows exactly where the medical kit is in his ruck. And he knows where it is in his buddy’s ruck, too. The fundamentals were always in place. Predictability drives adaptability.

I find this interesting on many levels. First, we are prone to think that regimentation leads to sluggishness and pig-headness. Yet here is an accomplished strategist and leader telling us that the opposite is true.

The key thing, it seems, is that the right fundamentals must be identified. After decades of combat, the Rangers know what matters. I wonder if most civilian organizations can say the same thing?
As the combat trainers say, when it hits the fan, you don’t rise to the occasion, you default to your training. On a more trivial note, many coaches could benefit from the Ranger way of doing things. I once heard one of Lombardi old players (I think Jerry Kramer) decrying way the things are now done in the NFL. Players, he said, “were over-coached and under-practiced.” He was not calling for a return to four-a-day practices. His point was that coaches were constantly expecting players to master new plays instead of  having them thoroughly master the fundamentals of their position. (Fundamentals, there is that word again.)

Nearly every NFL game I watch I see a handful of beautifully designed plays (over-coached) which fail because one or more players messes up his assignment (under-practiced).

OTOH, that does give the coach an out. He might not win, but everyone knows who blew his assignment, dropped the ball, or drew the penalty.

Some of the really great coach--Lombardi, Shula, Woodenwere fundamental fanatics. Funny that so few other coaches emulate these winners.

Something I read once from a Spec Ops guy: “Amateurs practice until they get it right; professionals practice until they can’t get it wrong."

Turns out, Andrew Sullivan was always an ignorant blowhard

Back in the early days of the Iraq war, Excitable Andy wrote this:

Now I can see the army is pissed off that they haven't really been needed yet for the climactic battle against the Republican Guard (if it hasn't already happened). But remind me why the rest of us should be concerned? From my particular, reclining armchair, it looks as if this war will be won primarily by the amazing work of the special forces, and the airforce (with critical backup, of course, on the ground).

I was reminded of this quote as I was reading a recent book co-authored by one the best living military historians Williamson Murray: Moment of Battle: The Twenty Clashes That Changed the World

One of the battles included in the book was the advance on Baghdad in 2003 by the 3rd Infantry Division. Here is the 3-69 Armored Battalion in action:

Only at one point did the enemy make a serious stand, when two hundred Iraqi's fired from behind fortified positions into the flanks of the onrushing armored column. Marcone's Alpha Company veered out of the advancing column and annihilated the position, then rejoined the battalion fifteen minutes later. What Marcones troops were reporting as light and sporadic contact was actually the entire 14th Brigade of the Republican Guard's Medina Division being ground out of existence

The 3rd ID did not do it alone. Ground troops and air power worked together to destroy the Republican Guard:

While being briefed by the Medina Division's commander, Hamdani proudly watched the 1st regiment of the 14th Brigade form up to launch a counterattack. A regiment in attack formation, however, was a lucrative and rarely found target, and U. S. sensors spotted it almost immediately after it formed. Before the regiment could move forward, American jets pounced. As Hamdani looked on, the regiment was annihilated in an instant of blast and flame.

Sullivan was not alone in foolish pontification. As the book notes Time magazine planned to run a cover story on "Why Are We losing" at the very time the US forces were launching their devastating offensive.

Sully, like his MSM brethren, live by the motto, “Better to be wrong than to be silent.” I discussed the danger of that ethos here.

#ad

Appalled but not surprised

Why the double standard for Woody Allen?

The Potemkin press critics at Fox and CNN continue to degrade themselves on the Woody Allen story.

On Sunday’s “Reliable Sources” Brian Stelter worked right from the pro-Allen playbook. First, he minimized the problem, suggested that it was all Mia Farrow’s fault, and wished the story would go away.

This weekend, there are new allegations by both sides in the ugly family battle between Woody Allen and his step daughter Dylan Farrow. This would normally be a private matter, but instead, it's being bitterly fought out on Web sites and newspapers.

Note how Stelter downplays the accusation (“ugly family drama”) and suggests that victims should just shut up (“private matter”) and see a good shrink:

My producer pointed out before the show the kind of thing that would normally be playing out in a therapist's office.

Actually, for many people, “this kind of thing” results in a criminal investigation, visits from Children’s Services, or a grand jury.

He continued:

Well, yesterday, Allen did get his say. "The Times" published his lengthy rebuttal, blasting the allegation as false and blaming former girlfriend Mia Farrow for manipulating Dylan.

"I love her," he writes of his daughter, "and hope one day she will grasp how she has been cheated out of having a loving father and exploited by a mother more interested in her own festering anger than her daughter's well being."

All well and good, but a real critic might have at least read Maureen Orth’s piece in Vanity Fair and mentioned this:

4. Allen subsequently lost four exhaustive court battlesa lawsuit, a disciplinary charge against the prosecutor, and two appealsand was made to pay more than $1 million in Mia’s legal fees. Judge Elliott Wilk, the presiding judge in Allen’s custody suit against Farrow, concluded that there is “no credible evidence to support Mr. Allen’s contention that Ms. Farrow coached Dylan or that Ms. Farrow acted upon a desire for revenge against him for seducing Soon-Yi.”

5. In his 33-page decision, Judge Wilk found that Mr. Allen’s behavior toward Dylan was “grossly inappropriate and that measures must be taken to protect her.”

Stelter's guests (Dylan Byers, of "Politico" and Robin Abcarian of the "LA Times") followed the same line. Byers, however, set a new low for MSM coverage of the story:

I'd also just point that Ronan Farrow has a new show on MSNBC. We know that Ronan Farrow was the one who actually that mitigated the meeting between Dylan Farrow and "The Los Angeles Times" editorial page. You sort of have to wonder why is this coming up now, and does it have anything -- I'm not saying, I'm not siding with one side or the other, I'm just saying, does it have anything to do, (a), with an attempt to sort of take down Woody Allen, and (b), with an attempt to sort of cast more light on another member of the family who has a new show coming?

See, Dylan Farrow was doing it for the PR so she could boost her brother’s new TV show.

Fox’s Kurtz hit all these same points on his own:

Woody Allen and Philip Seymour Hoffman: Media enablers and finger-pointers

Here’s the timeline: Dylan tells Vanity Fair that she was abused at age 7. Woody wins a lifetime award at the Golden Globes. Ronan Farrow (who is either Woody’s kid or Frank Sinatra’s Mia says she isn’t sure) tweets in favor of his sister. (Ronan is about to launch an MSNBC show.)

Dylan writes a letter accusing Woody and gives it to New York Times columnist Nick Kristof, a longtime friend of Mia and Ronan, and Kristof runs it on his blog. (The Times public editor says she is “troubled” by this.) Woody demands equal time, and the Times runs his op-ed Sunday proclaiming his innocence and charging that the whole thing is part of a vilification campaign by Mia. (He also acknowledges the public did not accept his marriage to Soon-Yi, also an adopted daughter of Mia.) Another brother supports Woody. Dylan talks to the Hollywood Reporter, responding to Woody’s response to her.

What we are seeing is a highly dysfunctional family whose members are determined to blacken each other’s reputations. Whatever happened or didn’t happen in that Connecticut farmhouse two decades ago, Woody was not convicted. We have been plunged back into an old and heart-rending dispute because media people, some of them with agendas, have been happy to provide a forum.

There are a lot of interesting aspects to this story and the MSM’s discomfort in dealing with it. For instance, since when does the press only cover crime stories AFTER a conviction?

But right now, I just want to raise this question: Would either Stelter or Kurtz sit back and allow a guest to suggest that some of those who accused Jerry Sandusky or Catholic priests had selfish motivations? After all, the huge civil awards in those cases were much more tangible than PR and buzz for a sibling’s new TV show.

Richard Jewell may finally get the recognition he deserves

Welcome Instapundit readers. Why not take a minute to check out the archives (please?).

You might also be interested in this post: Criminal justice and the Rosenhan Experiment

BTW I'm on Twitter @leadandgold_cdh. Thanks for stopping by.

‘Wolf Of Wall Street’s Leonardo DiCaprio & Jonah Hill Plan Re-Team In Story Of Richard Jewell; Labelled Hero, Then Falsely Vilified As Bomber At 1996 Atlanta Olympics

EXCLUSIVE: Fox has closed a deal to acquire rights to Marie Brenner’s 1997 Vanity Fair article “The Ballad Of Richard Jewell”, which will be developed for Jonah Hill to play the title subject. Jewell was the security guard who discovered a backpack in the Olympics compound in Atlanta in 1996. Initially hailed a hero for reporting the suspicious knapsack and then helping clear bystanders from the area before it exploded, Jewell was subsequently vilified just three days later as a potential suspect, his life and reputation torn apart in the advent of the 24 hour news cycle. Leonardo DiCaprio will play a lawyer Jewell knew casually, a Southern attorney who mostly did real estate closings and seemed in over his head, but he guided Jewell through a hellish Twilight Zone that went on even after the FBI officially cleared Jewell’s name three months later.

I blogged about the article that is the basis for the movie here:

Richard Jewell (III)

Several other posts on Richard Jewell:

Richard Jewell R.I.P

I wish i had found this before

Richard Jewell and the FBI

Worth a look

The Truth About Valerie Jarrett, Mystery Woman of the White House
The close adviser and friend of the Obamas is one of DC’s most powerful peoplebut what exactly does she do?

Heh

"Tim Tebow was a big winner on Sunday night," said Amy Beamer, whose website SpotBowl.com analyzes Super Bowl ads and polls viewers on the approval ratings of the commercials. "I don't think anybody going into Sunday night would have thought Tim Tebow would have a better night than Peyton Manning."

RTWT for some good questions about the NFL and its coaches

This is pretty damning for the pro-Allen apologists

10 Undeniable Facts About the Woody Allen Sexual-Abuse Allegation

The New York Times is filled with arrested adolescents

Fast Times at Eighth Avenue High

High school is an apt metaphor for the shenanigans inside the Times’ $850 million skyscraper at the corner of Fortieth Street and Eighth Avenue. The Times portrayed in Kurson’s article is not the established, serious, and competent institution of the liberal imagination. It is the Beverly Hills High School in Clueless, a cliquey and catty war of all against all, where the self-importance of the occupants masks deep insecurities. The next time our reporters and producers and anchors and bloggers affect an air of moral or social superiority, the next time they pretend to know the answers to every political and economic and cultural question, remember this: They are basically teenagers.

Amanda Knox

A telling point about the American dismissal of the Italian justice system:”

Frankly, it makes a mockery of the Italian magistrates who professionally managed this appeal, and who regularly risk their lives prosecuting the mafia in that very same courtroom. Has American arrogance ever been so bold? Have the western media ever been so complicit in such an orchestrated public relations sham?

RTWT

Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate.

For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful

G. K. Chesterton

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Whitewashing porn

From 28 Sherman

In the 21st century enlightened mindset, it is all good. Everything relating to sex is good, except for heterosexual male desire, and pornography will be endorsed by both men and women. Be sex positive. Be inclusive. Be open-minded about sex workers. You know why the media calls them porn stars no matter how lowly their career? If not porn stars, the only other applicable term is filmed hooker. Jon Millward decided to look at the Internet Adult Film Database and glean what information he could about the average performer. Stereotypes were challenged, and he puts a great spin on a seedy industry.

RTWT

This is a hardy perennial for the MSM. They are so afraid of being labeled a prude that they work overtime repeating the PR tropes of the purveyors of smut. They are so eager to shock the squares that they refuse to treat the porn business like they do any other business.

Compare the coverage of fracking with that of the porn industry. A technology that is pushing us toward energy independence and that has generated high-paying jobs is under constant scrutiny. Journalists look for the downside: does it harm nearby residents? Will it harm the nesting sites of starlings? Does it divert young people from college and reduce the enrollment in gender studies courses? Maybe it interferes with the reproductive cycle of the stink bug?

Porn, which is inherently exploitive and which exposes performers to a deadly disease on a daily basis, rarely elicits probing questions or long investigative pieces.

Reporters and pundits alike prefer to write fawning pieces about Hef or celebrate the cultural impact of Deep Throat.

Related:

"Hugh Hefner is in one in a long line of preachy perverts"

Thought for the day

Massad Ayoob:

My generation grew up with TV role models who racked up three-figure body counts, sometimes four at a time, and managed not to go out and perform mass homicides for real.

Modern times

G. K. Chesterton:

The trend of the time at its bests consists entirely of people who will not accommodate themselves to anything. At its worst it consists of many millions of frightened creatures all accommodating themselves to a trend which is not there.

Yes, they are real scandals

George Will: IRS targeting scandal on par with Watergate, Iran-Contra

Previously:

Benghazi in a nutshell

WORSE THAN WATERGATE

“No plan survives contact with the enemy” or “Why Denver lost”

From Cold Hard Football Facts:

It all leads us to one big conclusion: sexy offenses like the 2013 Denver Broncos tend to build their portfolio by beating up bad defenses.

Then when the season gets late, when they've consumed a little too much success and suddenly have to negotiate a speed trap of great defenses, these offenses look like your prom date after she disappeared with the guys from the hockey team for an hour: weathered, glassy eyed and not so hot.

For me the biggest surprise in the Super Bowl was that Denver really seemed to believe that they could beat Seattle with the same game plan that worked against San Diego and New England. In those games as throughout the regular season, the Broncos excelled in turning 4 yard passes into 10 yard gains.

Halfway through the first quarter it was clear that a four yard pass was going to be a four yard gain against the Seahawk defense,

This was not a surprise exactly--anyone who watched the Seahawks knew their D was fast and rallied to the ball.

It was a surprise that Manning and Fox apparently did not appreciate this.

The second surprise was that Denver had no Plan B when it was clear that the original game plan was not working

But pop culture is interested in you

Welcome Instapundit readers. Why not take a minute to check out the archives (please?). BTW I'm on Twitter @leadandgold_cdh. Thanks for stopping by.

I respect people who do not watch TV. They are probably smarter, better read, and more disciplined than the rest of us.

They are also completely unqualified to offer advice about winning elections.

Powerline:

Tevi, author of What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted, sees Obama’s Mad Men reference as part of his “successful and continual use of pop culture as a political tool.” This tactic enables the president to connect to his audiences via cultural references. Obama, like most presidents at this stage of a presidency, has largely been tuned out by the public. But, as Tevi says, “people perk up when he’s talking about a TV show or a popular movie.”

Related:

Conservatives and messaging