Lena Dunham

RS McCain:

Lena Dunham is a selfish brat who has been protected all her life from the consequences of her own irresponsibility. Never once in her life has she done anything decent or generous, and instead has made a career of corrupting our culture. She has earned a reputation for dishonest cruelty. Like all such monsters, she cannot stand it when people tell the truth about her. And now she seeks pity as a victim?

I thought of Dunhan when i read Jerome Tuccille's discussion of Martha Gellhorn and her first novel What Mad Pursuit

The book was met with tepid reviews, with most critics unimpressed by her story of three college girls searching for something to believe in as they drank too much and exposed themselves to veneral disease and unwanted pregnancies. The Buffalo Evening News called the novel 'hectic,' and the New York Times said it was crude....It would be more likable if Miss Gelhorn were not so enamored of her own heroine, and if she did not dabble so ineffectually with questions of social justice."

Sounds a lot like Girls

Gellhorn took the criticism to heart

Martha herself was late embarrassed by her novel and refused o bring it back into print after it disappeared from view shortly after it was published.

She moved past solipsistic fiction and became one of out most famous war correspondents.

In contrast,, the critics have lauded everything Lena Dunham does, has done, or might do. A sort of mass hysteria has taken hold.

What do Don Imus and SAE have in common?

Each were at the center of a media firestorm which came at a suspiciously convenient time for the MSM

Emmanuel Goldstein is always a red herring

Remember that the Imus scandal happened right after the Duke hoax fell completely apart. But the Imus story was SO IMPORTANT that the MSM did not have time to discuss the mistakes they made in Durham or the lies they told about the lacrosse players. As i wrote at the time:

One story allows talking heads parade their noble moral sensibility in front of the cameras. The other one highlights their intellectual shortcomings and moral corruption. Which one is filling the airwaves?

See also here.

And it is worth noting, that hateful speech by media figures (both before and after the Imus imbroglio) did not elicit the same around the clock talking head outrage:

Some one owes Don Imus and Nancy Reagan an apology

So now, the most important story in the world is the crude antics of some frat boys on a bus.

Awfully convenient that the SAE story "broke" just after the media-generated hoax in Ferguson, Misouri came crashing down around their heads.

The problem with iconoclasts

Allan Millett:

To some degree, JFC Fuller and Basil H. Liddell Hart provided the public forum for such discussion, but their thirst for celebrity status, book royalties, and international influence as well as their vitrtiolic attacks on the army leadership made their writings suspect with the political and military establishment.

Forgotten chapters in the story of the “Bonus Army”

Every history of the New Deal tells the story of the Bonus Army and Herbert Hoover’s response to it. (Wikipedia) It’s a melodramatic story of a heartless Republican who is swayed by the paranoid fantasies of J. Edgar Hoover and orders his power-crazed Army commander drive the poor huddled masses out of the capital of the country they fought for. People were gassed and beaten; several died.

Barricaded inside the White House, lacking the political instincts to deal with the Bonus Army in a firm but conciliatory fashion, misunderstanding popular attitudes toward it, Hoover had committed and enormous public relations blunder.
A. L. Hamby, For the Survival of Democracy

But the Good and True had their revenge. His action against the protesting veterans helped seal his fate. He loses the 1932 election to FDR and sunlight and happiness return to America.

But what of the Bonus Marchers?

Until I read Jerome Tuccille’s Hemingway and Gellhorn I did not know THE REST OF THE STORY.

This was a problem because I was a history major and covered the New Deal in at least a half-dozen undergraduate and graduate classes. Took a look at the books in my shelves to see what they said about FDR and the Bonus Marchers. From the oldest idolatry-laden volumes to new histories by historians I respect, the story is incomplete.

So here it is.

FDR was no more willing to have the Bonus Army camp out in Washington than was Herbert Hoover. When some veterans came to Washington for his inauguration, he made sure their encampment was in far away Virgina.

In 1935, FDR actually vetoed a bill to pay the Bonus early.

But FDR did play the PR game better than Hoover. He placated the veterans, sent his wife to their encampment for a photo op, and got them out of DC area as quickly as possible.

Some of the veterans were given work by Harry Hopkins’s FERA (Federal Emergency Relief Administration) and sent to worker camps in remote areas.

Hundreds of them ended up in the Florida Keys building and repairing roads.

The camps were primitive, even ramshackle.

In April 1935 an administrator in Florida wrote to Washington and asked that they build several large strong buildings at the camps. “This area is subject to hurricanes and it is our duty… to furnish a safe refuge during a storm.”

Washington ignored him and did nothing.

In September the Keys were hit with a Category Five hurricane. It killed 423 people; 259 of them were veterans who were left to die on small islands with no strong shelter.

Eleanor Roosevelt had no comment.

Ernest Hemingway was at Key West when the storm went through. He saw the devastation and the death. He had plenty of comments.

To his editor Max Perkins:

Harry Hopkins and Roosevelt who sent those poor bonus march guys down here to get rid of them got rid of them all right.

In an article titled “Who Murdered the Vets”:

Whom did they annoy and to whom was their possible presence a political danger? Who sent them down to the Florida Keys and left them there in hurricane months? Who is responsible for their deaths

So there you have the rest of the story. FDR, political expediency, and bureaucratic inertia killed many times more Bonus Marchers than did Hoover, PR ineptitude, and a heavy-handed military response.

But that rarely makes it into the history books or journalist’s hagiographies.

The 'founding fathers' of serious New Deal historiography in the 1950s and early 1960s-- James MacGregor Burns, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and William E. Leuchtenburg-- established a tone that still dominates the study of American politics in the 1930s: a near adulatory perspective, occasionally nagged by a sense that FDR was too 'conservative' to lead us entirely into the promised land of egalitarian social democracy….By and large, most professional historians, up through David Kennedy's recent spendid narrative, still work from within the viewpoint of the founding fathers, or somewhere to the left of it.
A. L. Hamby

Worth a read

The Generation of ’91

It providers further evidence that Victoria Nuland, like Jamie Gorelick, is a true Mistress of Disaster.

Whatever the case, there is ample evidence that the US was in the midst of things, in the form of Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s famous phone call to the American ambassador to Ukraine, conveniently taped and made public by the Russians. ....

Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s Rhodes scholarship classmate at Oxford, was at the center of US policy towards Russia throughout the ’90s. A one-time Time magazine journalist, Talbott served as Ambassador-at-Large to the New Independent States before becoming Deputy Secretary of State in 1994.Today he is president of the Brooking Institution....

Talbott’s State Department chief of staff, Nuland, is at the helm of the State Department’s Eurasian affairs today. During the Bush administration she advised Vice President Dick Cheney on the eve of the Iraq invasion and served as US ambassador to NATO.

And remember, Nuland helped push the Benghazi lies and cover-up.

I wish Keviin Williamson would tell us how he really feels

Can we finally—finally!—be done with the Clintons?

As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton schemed to subvert record-keeping and transparency rules for reasons that are probably more or less communicated by her surname: The Clintons are creeps and liars and scoundrels and misfits, always have been, always will be. They are the penicillin-resistant syphilis of American politics.

This point is absolutely critical:

When the law does not apply to the lawmakers and law-enforcers, you are not being governed: You are being ruled. And we are ruled by criminals.

If you treat IRS rules the way the IRS treats IRS rules, you go to prison; if you treat federal law the way the secretary of state does, you go to prison. If you treat immigration controls the way our immigration authorities do, you go to prison. If you’re as careless in your handling of firearms as the ATF is, you go to prison. You cook your business’s books the way the federal government cooks its books, you go to prison.

Hillary Clinton is not going to prison. She’s going to release whatever emails she feels like releasing and dare any of you peons or your elected representatives to try to make her do otherwise. You’ll take what she offers, and you’ll like it.

Absolutely fascinating to those of a certain age

ODE TO BOBBIE GENTRY

The mysterious star who gave us the “Ode to Billie Joe” is revived if not rediscovered.

Stuff Rolling Stone can't say anymore

Michael Bane:

If this was really a sane world, if we lived in a sane world, a no-talent hack like Taylor Swift ... would be washing dishes for Tom Russell.

Found here.

Variations on a theme

Theodore Dalrymple,
The Rage of Virginia Woolf

The book is important because it is a naked statement of the worldview that is unstated and implicit in all of Virginia Woolf’s novels, most of which have achieved an iconic status in the republic of letters and in the humanities departments of the English-speaking world, where they have influenced countless young people. The book, therefore, is truly a seminal text. In Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf lets us know without disguise what she really thinks: and what she thinks is by turns grandiose and trivial, resentful and fatuous. The book might be better titled: How to Be Privileged and Yet Feel Extremely Aggrieved.

Carl Rollyson,
A woman of her word

[W]hile a bewildered Virginia Woolf enjoyed the way West brought the world to her, Woolf withdrew from West’s very presence, preferring to dismiss Rebecca because she had dirty fingernails. Bloomsbury was Woolf’s safe haven, but West—certainly just as enamored of creature comforts as Woolf was—journeyed to the Balkans and beyond, to Lebanon and South Africa, in order to understand the nature of the modern world. She was not, in short, afraid of dirtying herself by reporting on great events and movements of the twentieth century, including the Russian Revolution, the New Deal, the Nuremberg and treason trials after the Second World War, and the Cold War.

Theodore Dalrymple,
Small Acts of Disdain

And so, in dealing with her servants, as this interesting book shows, she often managed to think of herself as almost martyred by them; she was always the injured party in any dispute. Her servants worked long hours in harsh conditions, of a kind not met with anywhere in the Western world today, but she nevertheless berated them in her diary and in her letters for their stupidity, their lack of finer feeling or accomplishment, their suspected dishonesty and even their greed when, like Oliver Twist, they asked for more (despite her advanced views, she never offered them more than the going rate, and sometimes a little less, the annual wages of a servant employed by her being at one time no more than one percent of her own annual income). She thought that they were so different in kind from her own class that no real communication could exist between her and them, as if they were aliens from another planet. She wrote repeatedly that subjective understanding of their lives was impossible for her.

Virginia Woolf letter (1928) [From Joseph Pearce, Bloomsbury and Beyond

I have just had a most shameful and distressing interview with dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there's something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.

Theodore Dalrymple, "Rage of Virginia Woolf"

If the good life is a matter of judgment, the war proved that all her adult life she had none. My mother, with her wrench by day and helmet by night, did more for civilization (a word that Mrs. Woolf enclosed in quotation marks in Three Guineas, as if did not really exist) than Mrs. Woolf had ever done, with her jeweled prose disguising her narcissistic rage.

Had Mrs. Woolf survived to our time, however, she would at least have had the satisfaction of observing that her cast of mind—shallow, dishonest, resentful, envious, snobbish, self-absorbed, trivial, philistine, and ultimately brutal—had triumphed among the elites of the Western world.

Could the US break apart like post-Tito Yugoslavia?

Sobering Before you say ‘no, of course not’ read this assessment and warning from XX Committee.

Yugoslavia’s Warning to America

Only a fool or a charlatan will deny the ominous parallels.

Note—the author is warning, not predicting: He believes there is still time to avoid Yugoslavia’s fate.

Yet the collapse of Yugoslavia offers several cautionary tales to Americans today, and if they are wise they will heed them and set the United States on a correction course before it is too late. As one who witnessed the dreadful collapse of Yugoslavia and its terrible aftermaths — including the seemingly permanent impoverishment of Southeastern Europe, mired in crime, corruption, and extremism — I would very much like America to discover a far happier fate.

++++++

The fate of Yugoslavia was anything but preordained. The United States, whatever its problems, is a far richer and better-run state than anything created by Tito. But the same threats lurk, particularly those of economic degradation caused by debt and made impossible to fix thanks to toxic racial politics. America need not become a vast Balkan horror show — I think it’s more likely in coming decades to become a huge nuclear-armed Brazil, with entrenched economic inequality, often among racial lines, that I find noxious and unworthy of our country — but the fate of Yugoslavia must be avoided at all costs. Our next Civil War would be much more vicious and protracted than the last one, have no illusions.

I also found this discussion interesting but also a little scary:

after the early 1950s, the repressive state apparatus didn’t have to throw many dissidents in prison, as public shaming, including threats of unemployment and loss of housing, cowed most would-be complainers into towing the party line, at least in public.

Related:

Orwell meets Sartre

A Totalitarian Wind

Max Peak MSM Blue Bubble

It has to be the media slobbering over Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart.

It is not just that they praise him. It is their blithe assumption that all right-thinking people, all thinking people, join in their Hosanas. Critical thinking and nuance are almost wholly absent in the MSM commentary.

They fawn over him when they assess his achievements. Worse, they assume that fawning is the only correct critical posture.

Take NPR’s “On the Media” program and its handling of Colbert and Stewart. Take it, first, because it is supposed to be a critical look at all things media. And, also, because you, the average non-lefty taxpayer are helping to pay these people.

When Colbert left his show, host Brooke Gladstone practically anointed him a saint:

Stephen Colbert, is a brilliant comedian who uses his power for good. He seems to be a modest man. Too modest, perhaps, to see that by lightly shedding the cap of his creation he’s depriving us all of a national treasure. And I’m not joking.

Gladstone and Bob Garfield did not pretend that Colbert was balanced, objective, or anything but a liberal.

Colbert, in the character of a right-wing blowhard, has used irony as a bludgeon against conservative Republicans for 9 years.
---
Fake pundit Stephen Colbert contained multitudes: political pitchman; self-righteous hack; pompous patriot; sloppy sentimentalist; and of course, oblivious, ignorant boob.

They are so deep inside the bubble that they do not think they have anything to hide. They can dismiss Rush Limbaugh with his vast audience as merely a “right-wing blowhard” while praising comedians with much smaller followings as significant historical figures.

Seen from outside the bubble the Daily Show is your average hit on cable. In comparative terms, its audience is pitifully small. Megyn Kelly and Duck Dynasty reruns “destroy” Stewart in the ratings. More millennials get their news from the old tired evening network news broadcasts.

Yet, inside the bubble, The Daily Show is one of the MOST IMPORTANT PROGRAMS IN THE HISTORY OF TELEVISIONS!!!!!!!!!!!

[Yeah, they took it to Eleven]

Brooke Gladstone:

"We've all heard year after year, 'The Daily Show makes me feel like I'm not crazy'"

This is Max Bubbliciousness.

Not only does Gladstone know people who say stupid stuff, she apparently knows many, many people who think this way.

And she thinks all of us think this way and know many people who also think this way.

Inside the bubble, they depend on the mugging of a moderately talented hack comic and his carefully selected videos to hold onto their sanity.

On the Media loves to go against the grain. They usually make special efforts to bring on perspectives that they feel are under-represented in mainstream media. After the Paris atrocities and “Je suis Charlie”, they wondered if the journal went to far and if the demonstrations for free speech might strengthen “islamaphobia” and right-wing nationalism. They love to push back against over-wrought narratives on the dangers of terrorism and epidemics.

Yet when it came to Stewart and Colbert, they joined the coastal narrative and sang “Hosana” as loud as anyone.

It is not as if it is hard to find opposing opinions. For many years the right has questioned the honesty of Stewart’s critical pose when he plays the “clown nose” game. Yet, Gladstone did not mention this, she simply blessed TDS and Stewart for giving us “" a clear-eyed lesson in integrity“" each night.

David Marcus in the Federalist punctured many of the pretentions of Stewart and his fans.

Jon Stewart Was Never A Newsman

Jon Stewart is the perfect poster child for the unhealthy, smug age of outrage we live in. The partisan gulf, from the cliffs of which we scream at each other, grew wider when Stewart attained the mantle of legitimate newsman. Instead of worrying that those who disagree with us would discredit our ideas, we came to worry that we would be mocked like a middle schooler wearing the wrong color on Thursday.

NR’s Kevin Williamson was also brutally clear-headed:

Mr. Stewart is among the lowest forms of intellectual parasite in the political universe, with no particular insights or interesting ideas of his own, reliant upon the very broadest and least clever sort of humor, using ancient editing techniques to make clumsy or silly political statements sound worse than they are and then pantomiming outrage at the results, the lowbrow version of James Joyce giving the hero of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man the unlikely name of Stephen Dedalus and then having other characters in the novel muse upon the unlikelihood of that name. His shtick is a fundamentally cowardly one, playing the sanctimonious vox populi when it suits him, and then beating retreat into “Hey, I’m just a comedian!” when he faces a serious challenge. It is the sort of thing that you can see appealing to bright, politically engaged 17-year-olds.

His audience is not made up of bright, politically engaged 17-year-olds. But Mr. Stewart has pulled off a pretty neat trick: He has, as the half-million or so headlines mentioned above indicate, made fake news into real news, and it is not an accident that the verb “destroys” so often follows his name. Mr. Stewart is the leading voice of the half-bright Left because he is a master practitioner of the art of half-bright vitriolic denunciation. His intellectual biography is that of a consummate lightweight

Gladstone and Garfield do not have to agree with Marcus or Williamson. Honest critic/reporters, especially those who operate as a public trust, would at least acknowledge their viewpoint and, maybe, have them on as guests.

Inside the Bubble, however, credible critics of Jon Stewart do not exist.

Which makes Marcus and Williamson’s point in spades.

Logic only a journalist could love

The Patriot-News, our local fishwrap, is endlessly fascinating. Their editorial pages are exemplars of the anti-business model so beloved by self-regarding guild members. (See examples here, here, here, and here.)

Lately, they are less likely to argue with their conservative readers; they prefer to troll them.

Case in point: this defense of Marie Harf and her “don’t kill the terrorists hire them” brain fart.

As Marie Harf controversy shows, it's nuance, not truth, that's the first casualty:

See, Marie Harf did not say something stupid, nor did she ad lib an inartful answer to a tough question, nor did she articulate a seriously flawed policy.

No. Marie Harf is a victim. Her subtle geopolitical insights were misunderstood and misinterpreted by sexist, agist, stupid right-wingers.

Now, she's the "terrorists need jobs lady." And, at age 33, she's been patronizingly dismissed (with no small amount of sexism underpinning the criticism) as too young and inexperienced to hold the job she now holds. It's a firm bet that no similar accusation would have been hurled if Harf's first name were Michael instead of Marie.

I guess John L. Micek never heard of Tommy Vietor or Ben Rhodes.

Micek also defended Harf by appealing to the wisdom of the greatest American statesman of the twentieth century.

But any military response must still be accompanied by a political one. After military victory in World War II, it was the Marshall plan that secured seven decades of peace among the warring parties.

This struck me as a poor analogy for a lot of reason. So, I tweeted one to Micek:

Re Harf: We did not start debating the Marshall Plan until we had defeated the Nazis.

Micek then proceeded to “destroy” me like his intellectual heroes Jon Stewart and Vox do to pesky stupid conservatives:

Doesn't mean we have to wait in this case

I was devastated. His tweet laid bare the fatuity of my arguments and I beheld the wisdom of Marie Harf-- our new Kennan.

Now I know Marie Harf was right because of the Marshall Plan, even though the “plan”, circumstances, and timing are completely different.

There are misleading analogies and flawed analogies. Then there is this - a non-analogy which is better than the best analogy because it proves Marie Harf was right and right-wingers are stupid.

Journalist logic at its finest.

By the way, there is a better analogy for Harf and Micek to use. We once did dangle economic growth in front of an enemy engaged in a shooting war.

In 1965 LBJ proposed a “TVA on the Mekong” to Ho Chi Mihn as a carrot to end the invasion of South Vietnam. Ho turned him down cold. Hanoi and the NVA preferred victory first, economic development later.

Just for the record, let’s get a few other points clear.

The Marshall Plan was not an attempt to wean the Nazis away from their warlike ways or address Germany’s legitimate grievances. Before Marshall the Diplomat worked to rebuild Germany, Marshall the General had implemented the Total War strategy which left Germany crushed, helpless, and with no choice but to surrender “unconditionally”. Contra Harf and Micek, Marshall and the rest of the allies were quite prepared to “kill our way” to victory.

At no point did the US negotiate with the Nazis or dangle incentives before them.

As Churchill put in July 1941:

We will have no truce or parley with you [Hitler], or the grisly gang who work your wicked will. You do your worst and we will do our best.

Finally, nuclear weapons, massive retaliation, and Mutual Assured Destruction had more to do with keeping the Cold War cold than did the Marshall Plan. The Bomb and the Polaris kept Western Europe free; the Marshall Plan helped them regain their prosperity.

What do you mean “we”, writer man?

Ron Rosenbaum in Slate:

Why America Loves Serial Killers
They give us an alibi for our murderous culture.

Don't turn away: Serial killers are America's alibi, and every time you pay your 12 bucks for another serial-killer movie or put one on your Netflix queue, you're feeding the beast.

You're an accomplice. In making serial killers giggly, kitschy chic, we're all accomplices.

From 2005:

The glamorization of evil is one least attractive features of our age. For my money, Silence of the Lambs was an obscene book and movie for precisely this reason.

From 2008:

I'm not a big fan of the slasher/serial killer horror genre. It's partly a matter of philosophy, part cultural inheritance.

A college friend once summed up the moral of the Friday the 13th series as "you can't kill the boogie man." At the time that struck me as an accurate assessment which meant the movies were profoundly nihilistic.

The glorification of sadism is repugnant, and, in itself, is a deal-breaker. These movies also have little appeal because i find it impossible to identify with the victims and their contrived helplessness. The "plots" require too much suspension of belief for any student of Col. Jeff Cooper.

Can't kill the boogie man? Yes we can!

From 2003:

Figures like Holmes or Peter Wimsey are fictional and bear little resemblance to real detectives. But they are hyper-realistic compared to the serial killers in modern thrillers. Writers like Thomas Harris have turned the detectives into somewhat intelligent bureaucrats while making the killer the one endowed with the rare mind. Philip Marlowe is only the " personification of an attitude, the exaggeration of a possibility;" Hannibal Lector bears no resemblance to real serial killers. He is the personification of an impossibility as a criminal, but the perfect example of moral rot as an "artistic" creation.

This post by Ace explains why True Detective struck such a nerve and why it was a breath of fresh air on American TV:

The show ultimately was, as Pizzolato said, not about the serial killer at all, but about the two men, Hart and Cohle, and their long, rocky relationship with one another.

And it's about mystery. The serial killer plot is a pretext to explore mystery -- and evil -- and philosophy -- and sex -- and all the rest of it, but in the end, the show was about the mystery and muddle of life. Not about some Hannibal Lecter-like supercriminal and his lunatic beliefs.

In the end, he wasn't the interesting one; the heroes were the interesting ones.

One of the best things I've read in months

The West, Islam, and the Last Stand of the WEIRD

Kind of Blue

This is an incredibly interesting BBC report on Miles Davis's epochal album. Especially liked the interview with drummer Jimmy Cobb, the last surviving member of the sextet.

Miles Davis and Kind of Blue

In honor of Brian Williams hard-won journalistic credibility

Ace is the place:

Brian Williams Has Been Lying About Supposedly Being Shot Down in a Helicopter In Iraq Since 2003; Now Says He "Misremebered" Some Details and Is "Sorry"

Brian Williams: You Should Trust My Reportage Because of All the "Sand Snakes" (Ground to Air Missiles) I've Had to Personally Dodge to Deliver the News to You

From the archives (2007):

Is Brian Williams going nuts?

Note that incidents of the sort Williams invented were central to his argument for why people should trust him. Oh, and why NBC should pay him millions of dollars.

Question:

Falsus in Uno, Falsus in Omnibus?

Exit question:

At what point does NBC News become complicit in his lies? At what point does the failure to fire him mean that they approve of his fabrications?

Murder, mystery, and Nazi spies

I’n not a fan of the true crime genre. All too much of it consists of cheap, exploitative stories written by unintelligent, poorly-educated hacks.

Every now and then a compelling story draws the attention of an enterprising reporter. The result is a book than surpasses its pedestrian competion.

Clint Richmond’s Fetch the Devil is just such a book.

In 1938, Hazel and Nancy Frome disappeared as they drove from El Paso to Dallas. Days later they were found murdered over a hundred southeast of El Paso. The wife and daughter of a prominent West Coast executive had been tortured for several days before they were killed and dumped in the desert. The investigation into the crime was the largest in Texas history. Yet, the crime was never solved despite the diligent efforts of talented investigators.

Richmond tells this story with verve while avoiding cheap sensationalism and pervy voyeurism. He also does a great job limning the historical settingAmerica a decade into the Great Depression, war clouds gathering in Europe, unrest in Mexico that threatens to spill across our southern border.

As is often the case with unsolved murders, the investigation was compromised by media-whoring and political jockeying by various police agencies.

Fetch the Devil ends with the author offering his hypothesis of who murdered the Frome’s and why. I found his ideas well supported by the facts and very convincing.

Benghazi: Imagine a press corps that did its job

This piece by Sharyl Attkisson demonstrates that there are still important unanswered questions about the 2012 terrorist attack and the White House’s handling of it.

Unanswered Benghazi Questions: 8th in a Series

We do not know the answers to Attkisson’s questions. But we do know this much:

If there is no fire, the White House sure is wasting a lot of energy pumping out smoke screens.

If the WH has nothing to hide, they are not helping themselves by spreading so many lies.

The consequences for the republic are grave when the watchdog press sides with those in power.

The submarine cocktail: not a girly man drink

Edward Ellsberg:

Even so I had always come up after a dive numbed and stiff from the cold, requiring a powerful “submarine cocktail,” a pint of hot coffee and whisky, mixed half-and-half, to help thaw me out.

Two hundred years ago today

New Orleans

On this day in 1815, Andrew Jackson decisively defeated the British Army at New Orleans.

Robert Remini, in The Battle of New Orleans, wrote:

There was a time when the United States had heroes and reveled in them. There was a time when Andrew Jackson was one of those heroes, along with the men and women who stood with him at New Orleans and drove an invading British army back into the sea.

The victory was unexpected. The British had had the better of it in most of the land and sea battles and even burned Washington, DC. At New Orleans they had 8,000 regulars who were veterans of Wellington's army that had defeated the French in Spain. Jackson had only 4,000 troops most of whom were militiamen and recent volunteers.

Even more surprising was the lop-sided outcome. British losses were 291 dead, 1,262 wounded and 484 taken prisoner. The Americans lost only 55 KIA, 185 wounded and 93 missing.

We rarely commemorate the battle today, but for those who were alive in 1815 and for their children, it was a different story. Remini, again:

Americans in the first half of the nineteenth century did believe that January 8 would be remembered like July 4-- both dates representing the nation's first and second declaration of independence from Great Britain. Indeed some called the War of 1812 the Second War for Independence. Generally speaking, widespread observance of January 8 as a day of national celebration continued for the next fifty years.

Merry Christmas

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Luke 2:8-14

Sometimes it takes a mole to catch a mole

The Mysterious Cuban Spy at the Center of Obama’s Havana Rapprochement

Little is known about the Cuban who is now headed toward what will likely be a comfortable retirement in the United States. But what little U.S. officials disclosed on Wednesday make him one of the United States’ most important Cold War spies. “Information provided by this person was instrumental in the identification and disruption of several Cuban intelligence operatives in the United States and ultimately led to a series of successful federal espionage prosecutions,” Brian P. Hale, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in a statement, a highly unusual acknowledgement of a U.S. intelligence asset’s contributions.

Among the Cuban spies he helped take down were Montes; the former Department of State official Walter Kendall Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn, and members of the so-called “Wasp Network,” which infiltrated the Cuban exile community. Taken together, Montes and Myers are probably the most damaging turncoats in the history of the U.S. intelligence community, rivaled only by Navy Warrant Officer John A. Walker, who compromised an immense portion of American encryption systems.

Pearl Harbor and the path to war

Two interesting articles on the run-up to the Pacific War.

A Strategy has to be able to work to be masteful

The author has made an in-depth study of the Japanese plans and actual attack. He is less than enthralled with the "genius" of Commander Minoru Genda and Admiral Yammaoto.

Japan's Decision for War in 1941: Some Enduring Lessons

Still, it cannot be denied that, in threatening Japan's economic destruction (and consequent military impoverishment), the United States placed the Japanese in a position in which the only choices open to them were war or subservience. "Never inflict upon another major military power a policy which would cause you yourself to go to war unless you are fully prepared to engage that power militarily," cautions Roland Worth, Jr., in his No Choice But War: The United States Embargo against Japan and the Eruption of War in the Pacific. "And don't be surprised that if they do decide to retaliate, that they seek out a time and a place that inflicts maximum harm and humiliation upon your cause."

The key lesson for today is to recognize that a policy can be morally right but strategically obtuse.

The U.S. insistence, after Japanese forces moved into southern Indochina, that Japan evacuate China as well as Indochina, as a condition for the restoration of trade relations, thus made no sense as a means of dissuading the Japanese from moving south. On the contrary, the demand that Japan quit China killed any prospect of a negotiated alternative to Japan's conquest of Southeast Asia (e.g., restored trade in exchange for Japan's withdrawal from Indochina). In effect, the United States went to war over China rather than Southeast Asia -- a volte-face of enormous strategic consequence since it propelled the United States into a war with Japan over a remote country for which the United States had never been prepared to fight. The fate of China, even of Southeast Asia, did not engage core U.S. security interests, especially at a time when Europe's fate hung in the balance. A war with Japan was, of course, a war the United States was always going to win, but Japan was not the enemy the Roosevelt administration wanted to fight. The United States could have settled its accounts with Japan after Hitler's defeat had been assured. Was denying Japan an expanded empire in Southeast Asia more important, in 1941, than defeating Hitler?

Joe Biden: Senile or psychopath? One of a continuing series

Ayaan Hirsi Ali fights radical Islam's real war on women

In her speech to the dinner guests in Washington, Hirsi Ali recalled meeting Vice President Joe Biden. He informed her that “ISIS had nothing to do with Islam.” When she disagreed with him, Biden actually responded: “Let me tell you one or two things about Islam.”

HT: Patterico

Funny how no one is upset about Biden manspaining to Hirsi Ali.

Previously:

Is Joe Biden a psychopath or is this evidence of advancing senility?

The MSM still hates Dick Cheney

The New Republic meltdown without the piety

Zero piety.

Less than zero. Iconoclastic. Nasty.

A thing of beauty.

Standing Athwart The New Republic, Yelling ‘Stop’

So where does this leave us? If I have to pick sides between liberal policy journalists insisting they are immune to the reality of business economics and a Silicon Valley enfant terrible who tried to buy his hapless husband a Congressional seat, I’m afraid I’m left rooting for injuries.
++++++

Given that Hughes was fabulously gay in addition to fabulously wealthy, it seems he was concerned about his staff putting the hetero in heterodoxy. According to the Washington Post, Hughes “lashed out” after senior editor “Alec MacGillis had dared to propose writing a piece about Apple avoiding taxes just after Apple’s Tim Cook had come out of the closet.” Should gay politics trump progressive concerns about tax avoidance, or vice versa? I sure as hell can’t sort it out, and I’m certainly uninterested in a magazine that would have been consumed by such ridiculous debates.

RTWT

Related:

Do magazines have DNA?

Why Eric Garner Died

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies
Balzac:

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results
attributed to Einstein

The Right doesn't like to acknowledge that the power and authority of government can be a good thing, up to a point, in the hands of a genius. The Left doesn't like to acknowledge that geniuses are few and far between.
David Gelernter

Great deals

Highly recommended.

I'm enjoying both collections.

Why twitter?

The Message of the Medium Why the left loves Twitter

It is not the sequence of adoption, or as Gibson suggests the intellect of the users but rather the nature of the medium that makes Twitter so beloved of the left. You see to write a political blog post you generally have to take an idea and develop it in some detail. It wouldn’t be enough to simply report the news with your spin on it, as this is well covered by the traditional media organizations. And because these blogs are usually open to comments from readers you tend to find that huge leaps or flawed logic are challenged. Although high profile commentators have blogs, most bloggers tend to be hobbyists writing about what interests them.

Then along comes Twitter a running commentary on events as they happen, in 140 characters of fewer. Not enough of course to actually develop a point or idea, and because it’s fast moving little room to challenge fallacious ideas.

(HT: S. T. Karnick)

I blogged on this a while back:

Why do journalists love twitter and hate blogging?

Two additional points:

On Twitter, ideas succeed [not] on their merit but on their instant appeal.

So true. The Twitterverse is dominated by people who refuse to heed Mencken’s warning that “There is always an easy solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong.”

Maybe I should tweet Mecken’s quote as a warning three times a day.

Then this:

The message of this banal medium is ‘Don’t think, we’ve done that for you. Don’t analyze as that’s all been done. Like Retweet. And show the world that you’re trendy and with it.” A message made by and for the left.

From Robert Conquest’s Reflections on a Ravaged Century:

The Australian poet James McAuley wrote penetratingly of the pro-Communist phenomenon: 'During the thirties and forties Australian intellectual life became subjected to an alarming extent to the magnetic field of Communism. All sorts of people who would regard themselves as being non-Communist, and even opposed to Communism, in practice were dominated by the themes and modes of discussion proposed by the Communists, danced to the Communist tune, and had serious emotional resistances to being identified with any position or institution which was denounced by the Communists as "reactionary".' He adds that 'one reason for all this was that schools of thought genuinely independent of and opposed to Communist suggestion were in this country not well organized and publicly present. They lacked prestige, that magical aura which captures the minds of the young in advance of argument and establishes compelling fashions'

Stephen Koch on Stalinist propaganda in the Thirties:

Munzenberg wanted to instill the feeling, like a truth of nature, that seriously to criticize or challenge Soviet policy was the unfailing mark of a bad, bigoted, and probably stupid person, while support was equally infallible proof of a forward-looking mind committed to all that was best for humanity and marked by an uplifting refinement of sensibility.
+++++++ Munzenberg provided two generations of people on the left with what we might call the forum of righteousness. More than any other person of his era, he developed what may well be the leading moral illusion of the twentieth century: the notion that in the modern age the principal arena of the moral life, the true realm of good and evil, is politics. He was the unseen organizer of that variety of politics, indispensable to the adversary culture, which we might call Righteousness Politics. 'Innocents Clubs': The very phrase suggests how the political issues Munzenberg manipulated came for many to serve as a substitute for religious belief. He offered everyone, anyone, a role in the search for justice in our century. By defining guilt, he offered his followers innocence, and they seized upon it by the millions.

Related:

Radical chic in its dotage

How we live now: The rule of the inept experts

Remember Pearl Harbor

A recent book that challenges conventional history, paranoid conspiracy theories, and ill-informed revisionism. Highly recommended.


The defeat at Pearl Harbor was temporary. What we need to remember is the courage shown on that day and the determination and skill that let the US Navy recover so quickly. The Japanese were confounded and defeated because of that quick recovery.

Book learning and crime reporting

The best take i've seen on the Rolling Stone U Va story:

A Rape Hoax for Book Lovers

Key point:

As a work of journalism, it’s most interesting for what it inadvertently reveals about the bizarre legends that seem plausible to American media consumers in 2014.

Of course, the key consumer of stories like this is television news operations. And they are gullible when a juicy story fits their ideological blinders.

Sailer is also a charter member of the Tom Wolfe is a Prophet Club:

Like most 21st-century brouhahas, “A Rape on Campus” recapitulates many themes of Wolfe’s novels.

When big is bad

The Core Incompetencies of the Corporation

Large organizations of all types suffer from an assortment of congenital disabilities that no amount of incremental therapy can cure. First, they are inertial. They are frequently caught out by the future and seldom change in the absence of a crisis. Deep change, when it happens, is belated and convulsive, and typically requires an overhaul of the leadership team. Absent the bloodshed, the dynamics of change in the world’s largest companies aren’t much different from what one sees in a poorly-governed, authoritarian regime – and for the same reason: there are few, if any, mechanisms that facilitate proactive bottom-up renewal.

Second, large organizations are incremental. Despite their resource advantages, incumbents are seldom the authors of game-changing innovation. It’s not that veteran CEOs discount the value of innovation; rather, they’ve inherited organizational structures and processes that are inherently toxic to break-out thinking and relentless experimentation. Strangely, most CEOs seem resigned to this fact, since few, if any, have tackled the challenge of innovation with the sort of zeal and persistence they’ve devoted to the pursuit of operational efficiency. Their preferred strategy seems to be to acquire young companies that haven’t yet lost their own innovation mojo (but upon acquisition most likely will).

A topic i've covered at length on this blog:

Diseconomies of scale

Why corporate change is hard and failure almost inevitable

Fad-surfing and corralled rebellion

Knowledge sharing as the ultimate killer app

Sharing is our competitive advantage

What made Homo sapiens different from the Neanderthals was most likely our social abilities and behaviors, how we behave as a collective. As a human species we have always been very focused on communicating and transferring knowledge. Not only from one person to another, but also parent to child. This way, the next generation can build further on the collective knowledge of the previous generation.

During the 400 000 years that the Neanderthals lived on the earth, they didn’t develop their tools very much. In fact, the tools they used at the end of their time were similar to the ones they used in the early years. If we compare that to Homo sapiens, the tools we used in the early years cannot be compared with the tools and technologies we have developed since. From creating simple stone tools we have created spaceships that can send people into space and digital communication technology that has the potential to connect all human beings on the earth. What made this possible is our innate drive and ability to share what we know with each other.

I think there is an important insight in this line of thought. An important point that the Rand-infected Right ignores.

Humans, at our core, are social apes.

We mock the sheeple and the Grubers with the 'a pack not a herd' meme. Yet, we too often forget that selfishness is not a pack virtue.

In short, a pack not a herd. Nor a collection of pathological narcissists.

Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Was Thursday

All the best people hate gridlock

Leninism was a hard realistic philosophy for hard, realistic men. It dealt with power struggles and in crude terms and justified the natural impatience of the brilliant intellectual with the slow, tentative, and wasteful motion of the political democracy. To a 'born bolshevik'-- and this is how Whittaker Chambers later described Alger Hiss-- the flabby morality of bourgeois democracy was fine for the herd, but something for the 'superior' man to cut across.

Ralph de Toledano,
The Seeds of Treason

Defining strategy

Good post:

Strategic Thinking and Thinking Strategy: The Strategist's Core Mental Competency

Especially liked this:

To unpack what exactly a "strategic thought" is, a useful starting point would be to describe strategy - which Emile Simpson calls "a dialogue between possibility and desire."

Easy way for reporters to be less stupid

If the MSM would spend 20 minutes with Michael Bane or Massad Ayoob, they would sound less stupid when it comes to Second Amendment and self-defense issues.

On this podcast Bane clearly explains why the Colorado gun laws were/are a direct threat to the rights of honest gun-owners.

Downrange Radio #306

As I listened to it, I was reminded of Mark Steyn's point that in our current criminal juatice system "the process is the punishment".

Ayoob, one of the pre-eminent experts on self-defense, has several great posts on Ferguson and the shooting of Michael Brown. They start here:

Ferguson Part 1

Related

Who are you going to believe?

Why journalism sucks and the MSM is beyond saving

They don’t see their grievous flaws, they don’t understand what they get paid for, and they blame the readers for their problems.

Shot:

Why Serial is important for journalism

Chaser:

Newspapers, mental blinders, and business models

Q: What is the greatest public service news papers perform?

The Juarez femicide myth

An interesting interview with a scholar who has demolished the MSM narrative on murder in Juarez

Q&A with Molly Molloy: The Story of the Juarez Femicides is a ‘Myth’

It’s almost like we’re fetishizing these dead women. To always be looking back at these women as if their bodies are this kind of sacrificial host—I find that to be troubling, in terms of our culture and our focus on life and death and what it means. In other words, if you’re constantly focusing on women as if they’re this symbol for suffering, you never move beyond that particular death to look at the social conditions that gave that kind of life, and that kind of death, for so, so many people...

I’ve read things by some feminist scholars talking about the “harvest” of young, nubile women. I mean, the terminology becomes kind of sensual, or sexual. Some of the writing about these cases I find to be pushing over into the extreme and eroticizing the victims

This recent book is the best examination of the gap between the facts on the ground and the MSM narrative.



See also:

How fake narratives get made

Saving Christmas

Nothing will be done until we have realized that charity is not giving rewards to the deserving, but happiness to the unhappy.

G. K. Chesterton

Today-the day formerly known as Thanksgiving-marks the beginning of the Winter Festival of Getting and Spending.

For those who still yearn for the Spirit of Christmas a couple of ideas.

1. Watch the Greatest Christmas commercial ever:


Then remember Toys for Tots while doing your Christmas shopping.

2. Watch George C. Scott in the best version of A Christmas Carol.



3. The Salvation Army has done good work longer than any of us has been alive.

Huxley's denunciation of it for fanaticism and regimentation hindered it no more than did the disdain of professional men, who seemed to think that spirit seances and Theosophical jargon were worthier expressions of their feelings. It was not until George Bernard Shaw made the point in Major Barbara that the so-called elite began to appreciate what General Booth's movement had done for the uneducated, pauperized, and drink-sodden masses which Social Darwinism had complacently allowed to find their place under the heel of fitter men. Then it was seen that neither the fatalism of biological evolution nor the fatalism of 'scientific' socialism could withstand a vigorous assault by people who believed in the power of the human will and had the wits to combine religion, social work, army discipline, and rousing tunes.

Jacues Barzun, Dawin, Marx, and Wagner

Hit the kettles early and often. Cyber shoppers can go here.

4. Two more charities that do good work

Christian Appalachian Project

Charlotte Rescue Mission

Of gold she would not wear so much as a seal-ring, choosing to store her money in the stomachs of the poor rather than to keep it at her own disposal.

Saint Jerome: Letter 127

Tarawa

First posted 11/20/2013


On this day in 1943 the US Marines invaded the Tarawa atoll in the Gilbert Islands. For the Marines and Navy, this was the first great battle in the Central Pacific offensive.

Col. Joseph H. Alexander:

The vast oceanic expanses of Micronesia also dictated a change in naval tactics. Most of the previous amphibious assaults in the Solomons and New Guinea had been executed against large land masses which offered penetration by surprise at undefended points. These scenarios featured relatively short distances between launch bases and target objectives, often short enough to enable a shore-to-shore landing without amphibious transports. After Guadalcanal, American commanders in the South and Southwest Pacific theaters conducted every amphibious landing fully within the protective umbrella of land-based air support.

These conditions were generally absent in the Central Pacific. Operation Galvanic, the campaign to seize the Gilberts, would feature unprecedented advancves in long-range, fast carrier strike forces; large-scale, self-sustaining amphibious expeditionary units; and mobile logistic squadrons designed to sustain the momentum of those new forces. Admiral Nimitz was forming the elements of a 'sea-going blitzkrieg' that would hold tremendous significance for the outcome of the Pacific War. But much would ride on the amphibious seizure of Tarawa.

The main island, Betio, was heavily fortified. No larger than Central Park, the 4,500 defenders had constructed a dense network of pillboxes and trenches. As Alexander notes, “Yard for yard, Betio was the toughest fortified position the Marines would ever face." The Japanese commander, Rear Admiral Keiji Shibasaki announced to his men "A million men cannot take Tarawa in a hundred years"

The 2d Marines took Betio in four days.

It was no cake walk. One thousand Americans died and another 2,100 were wounded. The American public was shocked at the high cost of taking such a small speck of land.

Shocked, but not deterred. Alexander:

Once the American public came to deal with the shock of the bodies floating in the shallows along Red Beach, the national mood became one of grim determination.

That resolution represented doom for Japan. Her war strategy was premised entirely on the idea the Americans would tire of the war and refuse to pay the price to roll back Tokyo’s conquests. This, in turn, would open the way to a negotiated settlement. Tarawa demonstrated that this premise was a pipe dream.

Later invasions in the Marshalls and Marianas benefited greatly from the lessons learned at Tarawa. At those battles, the Navy and Marines went into action with better doctrine, better weapons, and superior numbers. On Betio, they depended on guts, courage, and the initiative of enlisted men and junior officers.

Two telling sketches from Robert Leckie. The first from the day of the invasion:

In another Amtrack was a stocky corporal named John Joseph Spillane, a youngster who had a big-league throwing arm and the fielding ability which had brought Yankee and Cardinal scouts around to talk to his father. The Old Lady and Corporal Spillane went into Betio in the first wave, a load of riflemen crouching below her gunwales, a thick coat of hand-fashioned steel armor around her unlovely hull. Then she came under the sea wall and the Japanese began lobbing grenades into her.

The first came in hissing and smoking and Corporal Spillane dove for it. He trapped it and pegged it in a single, swift practiced motion. Another. Spillane picked it off in mid-air and hurled it back. There were screams. There were no more machine-gun bullets rattling against The Old Lady's sides. Two more smoking grenades end-over-ended into the amtrack. Spillane nailed both and flipped them on the sea wall. The assault troops watched him in fascination. And then the sixth one came in and Spillane again fielded and threw.

But this one exploded.

Johnny Spillane was hammered to his knees. His helmet was dented. There was shrapnel in his right side, his neck, his right hip, and there was crimson spouting from the pulp that had been his right hand.

But the assault troops had vaulted onto the beach and were scrambling for the sea wall. Though Johnny Spillane's baseball career was over, he had bought these riflemen precious time, and he was satisfied to know it as he called, 'Let's get outta here,' to his driver and the squat gray amphibian backed out into the water to take him out to the transport where the doctor would amputate his right hand at the wrist.

On 24 November, Marine Generals Holland Smith and Julian Smith toured Tarawa:

The generals Smith began to tour the island. Even Julian Smith, who had been on Betio since November 22, was stunned by what he saw. Both generals understood at last why pillboxes and blockhouses which had withstood bombs and shells had eventually fallen. Within each of them lay a half-dozen or more dead Japanese, their bodies sprawled around those of three or four Marines. Julian Smith's men had jumped inside to fight it out at muzzle range.

Many of the pillboxes were made of five sides, each ten feet long, with a pair of entrances shielded against shrapnel by buffer tiers. Each side was made of two layers of coconut logs eight inches in diameter, hooked together with clamps and railroad spikes, with sand poured between each layer. The roof was built of two similar layers of coconut logs. Over this was a double steel turret, two sheathings of quarter-inch steel rounded off to deflect shells. Over this was three feet of sand.

'By God!' Howlin' Mad exclaimed. 'The Germans never built anything like this in France. No wonder these bastards were sitting back here laughing at us. They never dreamed the marines could take this island, and they were laughing at what would happen to us when we tried it'. Howlin' Mad shook his head in disbelief. 'How did they do it, Julian?', he began, and then, below and above the sea wall he found his answer.

Below it as many as 300 American bodies floated on that abundant tide. Above it, leaning against it in death, was the body of a young Marine. His right arm was still flung across the top of the sea wall. A few inches from his fingers stood a little blue-and-white flag. It was a beach marker. It told succeeding waves where they should land. The Marine had planted it there with his life, and now it spoke such eloquent reply to that question of a moment ago that both generals turned away from it in tears.

'Julian,' Howlin' Mad Smith went on in soft amendment-- 'how can such men be defeated?'

We still need better press critics

First, an honest journalist pushes back against a media myth.

Gary Webb was no journalism hero, despite what ‘Kill the Messenger’ says

An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof. That old dictum ought to hang on the walls of every journalism school in America. It is the salient lesson of the Gary Webb affair. It might have saved his journalism career, though it would have precluded his canonization in the new film “Kill the Messenger.”

The Hollywood version of his story a truth-teller persecuted by the cowardly and craven mainstream media is pure fiction. But Webb was a real person who wrote a real story, a three-part series called “Dark Alliance,” in August 1996 for the San Jose Mercury News, one of the flagship newspapers of the then-mighty Knight Ridder chain. Webb’s story made the extraordinary claim that the Central Intelligence Agency was responsible for the crack cocaine epidemic in America. What he lacked was the extraordinary proof. But at first, the claim was enough. Webb’s story became notable as the first major journalism cause celebre on the newly emerging Internet. The black community roiled in anger at the supposed CIA perfidy.

Then it all began to come apart. The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, in a rare show of unanimity, all wrote major pieces knocking the story down for its overblown claims and undernourished reporting.

Next, CNN’s so-called press critic decides to promote the myth and the movie.

Brian Stelter is far more critical of the media outlets who tried to get the story right than the troubled reporter who got all the big things wrong.

It’s also a little weird that he cannot tell the difference between a couple of Hollywood-types and serious scholars or reporters.

After watching Stelter since he took over from Howard Kurtz, I think I’ve gotten a fair idea of his MO.

--- He gives lip-service to the idea of objective, non-partisan journalism. This is not a firm conviction so much as it is spin designed to advance CNN’s brand positioning.

--- When Stelter praises traditional standards he does so as a PR flack helping his employer and disparaging its competitors.

--- The real Stelter has no time for such niceties. He is most critical of the press when it strays off the left-wing reservation. He sees the role of the media critic as that of PC kommissar and SJW.

Thus, Gary Webb was right because he attacked CIA and the Contras, the rest of the media was wrong because they placed facts above press solidarity, and movies are good when they ignore history in favor of myths and legends.

IRS, Lois Lerner, and the end of the Republic

This piece from 2013 is still astute about the issues at stake in the IRS scandal:

Mark Steyn: The Lois Lerner Defense

He makes an important point about the power of weaponized justice:

When the most lavishly funded government on the planet comes after you, eventual guilt or innocence is irrelevant: The process is the punishment.

Plus, here is an insight hidden in plain sight that completely escaped the best minds in the MSM:

Americans are fearless if some guy pulls some stunt in a shopping mall, but an IRS assault is brutal and unending. Many activists faded away, and the media began writing stories about how the Tea Party had peaked; they were over; they wouldn’t be a factor in 2012. And so it proved. As Rush Limbaugh pointed out the other day, the plan worked.

Some times we need to read something more important than political ephemera

From the reviews: "A delightful and witty book."

Which is no surprise to anyone who has read her blog.

Which story is more likely to lead CNN on Wednesday?

Obama suffers historic defeat in midterms
GOP net gains largest in 64 years

Or

Tea Party extremists cost Republicans
GOP loses dog catcher race Cleveland marking another red state defeat