The root causes of Islamophobic hysteria

Brendan O"Neill in the Telegraph

Where is the mob of Muslim-hating Americans going crazy after Boston? It's a figment of liberals' imaginations

Clearly, some observers fear ordinary Americans more than they do terrorists; they fret more over how dangerously unintelligent and hateful Yanks will respond to bombings than they do over the bombings themselves.
[AND]
What this reveals is that liberal concern over Islamophobia, liberal fretting about anti-Muslim bigotry, is ironically driven by a bigotry of its own, by an deeply prejudiced view of everyday people as hateful and stupid. The anti-Islamophobia lobby poses as the implacable opponent of bigotry, yet it spreads a bigoted view of ordinary white folk as so volatile, so brimming with fury, that they are one terrorist bombing away from transforming into an anti-Muslim pogrom.

Howard Kurtz used this week's installment of Reliable Sources to bash hot talk in the wake of the Boston bombings.

Jane Hall, a frequent Kurtz guest, strikes a willfully obtuse pose so she can bash Fox News for Islamaphobia.

But I think there is a difference between endlessly linking this and saying, you know, they're hopefully having visuals that say radical Islam with these young men's pictures and talking about how they should have been shot in the boat and how the wife of one of the suspects should be imprisoned simply because she is wearing a head dress in the Muslim religion.
{AND}
My point. Wait, my point is that we don't know what happened here and, yet, there is a rush to tar all Muslims with radicalism. That's my point. I think it is, in many places, on FOX. I really think if you look at it, it's across a lot of different shows on FOX.

Hall is either a very stupid woman, always a possibility with journalism professors,, or she is deeply dishonest. There may be some who are suspicious of Tamerlan Tsarnaev's widow "because she is wearing a head dress in the Muslim religion". But Hall is flat wrong when she implies that Islamaphobia is the sole driver of such suspicions. Only a fool like Jane Hall or Howard Kurtz would give a pass to the woman who lived in a small apartment where her husband built bombs and plotted terror.

Similarly Hall takes Fox News's attempt to distinguish the killers from the majority of Muslims ("radical" versus "mainstream") and pretends that Fox is trying to paint all Muslim's as radical.

So is she very stupid or dishonest? Kurtz does not care. He is on another mission. He is out to re-establish the post-9/11 media consensus: be sad, not angry.

KURTZ: The coverage of the Boston bombing took a sharp turn this week as the narrative turned to the motivation of the Tsarnaev brothers and whether federal authorities had mangled the case. There was some angry talk about Muslims, as much of the media world picked side, pointed fingers and engaged in ideological sniping....

KURTZ: So, what explains the ugliness that erupted after the marathon was marred by violence?

A couple of posts by William Jacobson shed light on the political agenda of the SPLC and others who are intent on promoting the media meme that the average American is "hateful and stupid".

SPLC doesn’t have the guts to put Bill Maher on its “Anti-Muslim” Hate Watch list


SPLC does not have Maher on its anti-Muslim Hate Watch list even though his statements in the video, which he has made numerous times before, seem to fit squarely within SPLC’s definition. (For the record, I don’t think Maher should be on the list, even though he would be by the SPLC definition.)

It’s not hard to guess the reason. Maher’s base is SPLC’s base. Maher is a liberal with a very large megaphone, a bigger megaphone than SPLC. Maher could do more damage to SPLC’s fundraising than SPLC could do to Maher’s career.


Developer of Eliminationist Narrative still claiming Jared Loughner was “right-wing”

How we live now

The Difference Between Newtown and Boston

We can debate the rights and wrongs of restrictions on gun ownership or calls for more background checks. But the desire to use public grief about Newtown to push for passage of these measures was not rooted in any direct connection between the crime and legislation. Yet almost immediately Newtown was treated as an event with obvious political consequences. Indeed, the desire by gun rights advocates to speak of the issue outside of the context of Newtown was treated as both inherently illegitimate and morally obtuse.

But the reaction to Boston has been very different. Once it became apparent that the perpetrators were “white Americans”—in the memorable phrase employed by Salon.com—but could not be connected to the Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh or any other conservative faction or cause, most liberals have taken it as their duty to squelch any effort to draw the sort of conclusions to which they had almost universally rushed when blood was shed in Newtown. Many in our chattering classes who thought it was patently obvious that the actions of a lunatic should be blamed on the weapons he employed in Connecticut seem deathly afraid of what will happen if we discuss the actual motives of the Boston terrorists.

Confusing fact and fiction

Good piece by Megan McArdle:

Memo: The Aaron Sorkin Model of Political Discourse Doesn't Actually Work

Jed Bartlett doesn't win policy debates because of his amazing tactical skills, his overpowering arguments, or the sheer persuasiveness of his granite-faced brand of urbane folksomeness. He wins them because Aaron Sorkin is a liberal and he wants Republicans to lose on the major issues. Unfortunately for liberals, Tom Coburn and John Boehner don't have their lines faxed over from Hollywood every morning.

In a similar vein, Mother Jones finds the Tsarnaev brothers "confounding."

The 11 Most Mystifying Things the Tsarnaev Brothers Did

MoDo thinks that Washington is like an episode of West Wing. Apparently, MoJo thinks the average terrorist is a villain out of "24" or a "Die Hard" movie. This leaves them "mystified" at the brothers poor tradecraft.

If they had watched a couple of episodes of "The First 48" they would have no cause for surprise. The typical criminal is no brain surgeon. The bombers probably made fewer mistakes than your run of the mill street criminal.

That's what most terrorist are-- at least in part. Strip away the ideological motivation/justification/rationalization, and you find a street thug.

This is not to minimize the danger such terror-gangsters represent. The Mumbai attackers were no geniuses yet they killed 164 people and held a huge city hostage for three days. Terry Nichols hardly fit Hollywood's idea of a terrorist, yet he helped build a bomb that killed 168 people.

She was from the government and was there to help

From Instapundit:

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Female High School Teacher Resigns After Being Charged With Raping Female Student. Oh, who am I kidding? These kinds of incidents only suggest a systemic problem if they happen in the Boy Scouts, or the Catholic Church. Otherwise they’re just isolated incidents, a few bad apples, waddyagonnado?

Common sense gun laws

From Munchkin Wrangler:

MA has extremely restrictive gun laws that can land people in hot water very quickly. If I go to MA and forget a box of range ammo in my van–or even just fired brass for reloading–I am looking at three years in a MA state prison if said state trooper pulls me over, goes through the van with a very fine comb (because HEY, GUN NUT), and finds so much as a single piece of expended brass.

I'm trying to figure out how a group of legislators decides that empty brass is a dangerous object that needs to be banned or restricted.

The real problem with the SPLC

It's bad enough that the SPLC lets Morris Dees indulge in his two great loves: lefty politics and high living.

Even worse is that so many journalists itgore its slipshod methods and questionable fundraising as they crib from its press releases.

As Robert Knight points out, the MSM ignores the SPLC's role in formenting hate and encouraging mass murder:

Getting rich by selling hate

On Feb. 6, Corkins pleaded guilty to three felonies: committing an act of terrorism while armed, interstate transportation of a firearm and ammunition (he bought the gun in Virginia), and assault with intent to kill while armed. At a sentencing hearing on April 29, he faces up to 70 years in prison.

What? You didn’t hear about this? Maybe it’s because a hate-filled activist trying to kill Christians doesn’t fit the media narrative of Christians as bigots and their opponents as Care Bears.

A key aspect of the lightly reported story is the role of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an ultra-rich “civil rights” group. Corkins told investigators that he got the idea of attacking the Family Research Council from the center’s website. He also had the address of the D.C.-based Traditional Values Coalition, another group listed on the organization’s “hate map.”

Perhaps the most worrisome thing is that the government has made the SPLC a partner in its law enforcement and counter-terrorism efforts.

It’s bad enough that the center won’t edit its “hate map” despite a correlation to actual violence, but it’s scarier that the U.S. Justice Department since the Clinton era has been using the organization as its authority to determine what constitutes a “hate group.”

Related:

Does Mark Potok have blood on his keyboard?

Variations on a theme

A paper too stupid to live

The Patriot News doubles down on its anti-gun crusade. The deciders looked at all the commentary available to publish and chose this piece of agitprop by Cynthia Tucker.

Conspiracy theorists and kooks cowed the U.S. Senate

On a slow day this op-ed would be Fisk-worthy. But I’m busy so I’ll just ask one question: Would the Patriot-News or any other serious paper run an op-ed which painted Muslims or gays or immigrants with such broad, vitriolic brush strokes? Note how Tucker characterizes her opponents (enemies?):

“Conspiracy theorists” “kooks” “fanaticism” “lunacy” “lies” “crazies” “easily persuaded” “paranoia”.

To the Patriot-News, this is the language of civil discourse and reasonable compromise.

A question of a different sort: why does the management of a failing newspaper--a paper that has already cutback to a 3 day/week publishing schedule--adopt this extreme editorial tone?

I do not doubt that in some deep blue cities this tone pleases most readers. It seems quite possible that in New York or San Francisco hysterical hoplophobic eloi far out-number serious gun owners and NRA members.

But the Patriot-News operates in a conservative region with a large gun-owning population. Why then do they choose to insult that large bloc of paying and potential customers?

Related:

Waypoints on the path to irrelevance and oblivion

A badge of honor, but maybe not the best business model

How we live now

13 corrections officers indicted in Md., accused of aiding gang’s drug scheme

More than a dozen Maryland state prison guards helped a dangerous national gang operate a drug-trafficking and money-laundering scheme from behind bars that involved cash payments, sex and access to fancy cars, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.

Thirteen female corrections officers essentially handed over control of a Baltimore jail to gang leaders, prosecutors said. The officers were charged Tuesday in a federal racketeering indictment.

The indictment described a jailhouse seemingly out of control. Four corrections officers became pregnant by one inmate. Two of them got tattoos of the inmate’s first name, Tavon — one on her neck, the other on a wrist.

HT: Steve Sailer

Nihilism with a happy face

Ed Driscoll on terrorist chic:

Weimar? Because We Reich You

He quotes Alan Bloom'sThe Closing of the American Mind:

We have here the peculiarly American way digesting Continental despair. It is nihilism with a happy ending.

That's so true is should frighten us. Philosophic despair tends toward narcissistic passivity. The American mutation produces a cheerful, energetic carelessness that can do much more evil.

Sort of like Tom and Daisy Buchanan in the Great Gatsby:

I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done, was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy-- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they made....

in 1998 David Gerlernter wrote about the Unabomber in the Weekly Standard . Some of his points in "Unresolved Evil" are especially relevant given Driscoll's post and the reaction to the Boston bombing:

"What matters is our communal response to the crime. Evil is easy, good is hard, temptation is a given; therefore, a healthy society talks to itself"

"Such ritual denunciations strengthen our good inclinations and help us suppress our bad ones. We need to hear them, and hear good acts praised, too. We need to hear the crowd (hear ourselves) praising good and denouncing evil."

"Goodness is unnatural, and we need to cheer one another on"

"When a terrorist murders a man, it is a meaningless act. There are evil men in every society, and they do evil things; that's all."

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

Our local failing daily newspaper joined in the MSM hissy fit over the defeat of the gun control bill.

A bad week for humankind:

The U.S. Senate’s anti-democratic filibuster rule prevented a majority of senators from passing even a watered-down bill to reduce the odds of future mass murders. Great work, guys and gals: Let’s hear it for the Second Amendment rights of felons and whack jobs to buy guns over the internet and at gun shows! Ninety percent of the American public was on board – but hey, a minority of senators knew better than to heed the will of the people. Where in the constitution does it say the Senate needs 60 votes to pass a bill?

Paranoid Second Amendment fundamentalists poisoned the nation’s gun safety debate, serving up heaping helpings of hysteria and prevarication. They seem to forget their hallowed text includes the term “well-regulated.”

Nothing is more ridiculous than media professionals in high dudgeon and complete ignorance. The Patriot-News KNOWS that it was the EVIL conservatives who thwarted the will of the majority.

They know it, even if it is not true.

From the Wall Street Journal:

A word, first, about that Senate "minority." Majority Leader Harry Reid was free to bring the deal struck by West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin and Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey to the floor for an up-or-down vote, and this background-checks amendment might have passed. It did convince 54 Senators, including four Republicans.

But under Senate rules, a simple majority vote would have opened the measure to up to 30 hours of debate, which would have meant inspecting the details. The White House demanded, and Mr. Reid agreed, that Congress should try to pass the amendment without such a debate.

Majority rules would have also opened the bill to pro-gun amendments that were likely to pass. That would have boxed Mr. Reid into the embarrassing spectacle of having to later scotch a final bill because it also contained provisions that the White House loathes. So Mr. Reid moved under "unanimous consent" to allow nine amendments, each with a 60-vote threshold.

The gun control "debate"

The Gun Rights Consensus

Yet this combination of animus and overreach explains why the post-Newtown gun debate has been such a lost opportunity.

The President might have forged a compromise from the political center out that reduced gun violence at the margins while respecting Second Amendment rights. Instead, liberals cleaned out their ideological cupboards in favor of gun restrictions that would have little practical effect but would have notched a symbolic victory over the National Rifle Association and those benighted rubes in the provinces. By so overreaching, Mr. Obama couldn't even steamroll moderate members of his own party.

Glenn Beck takes a principled stand

It's a sad day when a talk radio guy understands the Constitution better than media-esteemed Senators.

Beck:

I despise this terrorist and all that he has done but we must not lose who we are. HE IS AN AMERICAN. Read him his rights! We are not Russia

Esteemed Senators:

No, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Is Not An Enemy Combatant. He Is A Criminal.

The news judgement of your betters

New York Times: Fox News Skips The President's Gun-Defeat Ordeal In Order to Focus on Some Trivial Deaths of Texans in Nowhweresville

The media here documents its own sick-making bias and arrogance but instead of understanding their own words -- we ignored the destruction of an entire town to focus only on the minor heartburn suffered by our Liberal Messiah -- they use it as a bludgeon for criticizing Fox.

NYT: Can you believe Fox was talking about this fertilizer explosion instead of guns today?

So, one morning show was home to two unabashed, unofficial lobbyists for gun control, and they spent the entire morning lecturing those who had not voted for their favored legislation, with furrowed brows, calling one party “extinct” despite the glaringly obvious political fact that most of 2014′s competitive Senate elections take place in pro-gun territories. The other morning show “focused instead on news about a Texas fertilizer plant explosion.”

Which explosion was that? The massive fertilizer plant explosion that rocked an entire region, with casualties feared in the high double digits and injuries to over 150? The explosion that happened just hours before the broadcast and featured dramatic live and viral video from the scene? The one that sent shock waves 45 miles across the state of Texas and a chill down the backs of citizens too often besieged by fiery, unexpected tragedies this week? The one that was an ongoing threat to surrounding areas because of the highly flammable nature of fertilizer, had not been definitively deemed an accident, and had ATF agents heading down to its location just north of Waco, Texas? That explosion? Because I’m pretty comfortable with that editorial decision.

The problem with libertarianism

From Powerline:

Rand Paul and the limits of Facebook Generation “conservatism”

But Paul has indulged in a fallacy. The Facebook Generation’s alleged “leave us alone” attitude towards government can explain why its members did not embrace (okay, let’s name names) John McCain. It can conceivably explain why they did not embrace Mitt Romney. But it cannot explain the enthusiasm of the Face Generation for Barack Obama, particularly after Obama had spent four years demonstrating that he has no intention of letting anyone alone.

Portions of the Facebook Generation may talk a good self-reliance game. But the voting pattern of this cohort as a whole isn’t promising. Instead, it suggests that they like “free stuff” at least as much as their parents do.

For me, the idea that a Paulist Republican Party could attract enough young voters to offset the destruction of its traditional stool is laughable. Paul’s blue print would make for a great Third Party, but comes nowhere close to charting the course for a Republican resurgence

From the Telegraph

Margaret Thatcher took on the unions. The next Thatcher will need to take on the establishment itself

Libertarians think they can get a Victorian-sized state without Victorian attitudes, but they’re deluded. If you really want a small state that doesn’t tell you what to do and gobble up half your income then start going to church, get involved in voluntary activities, tell the vicar or priest to stop droning on about the cuts and climate change and tell him to start shouting about sin and fornication. Repress yourself, you’ll find it’s good for your wallet.

Were that to happen, then the need for an enormous state apparatus managing vast areas of our life would be reduced.

A must read

Thomas Sowell refuses to stop making sense.

Immigration Sophistry

Pat Summerall RIP

NFL won't ever quite be the same

The NFL forever lost part of its voice on Tuesday, as Pat Summerall passed away at the age of 82. The lead Sunday play-by-play man for CBS and later FOX, Summerall built a legacy that included a record 16 Super Bowls behind the mic and a part of perhaps sports’ greatest broadcasting duo. Along with longtime partner John Madden and NFL Films’ John Facenda, Summerall will be remembered as one of the three voices most associated with professional football.

Perspective (UPDATED)

James Joyner has makes some very good points in these two posts:

Keep Calm and Carry On

While these attacks are thankfully rare, I can’t for the life of me figure out why. The Boston Marathon and the Super Bowl are comparatively easy to secure, because they’re one-offs, generate sufficient revenue to make a security investment reasonable, and obvious targets. It’s simply impossible to protect all of our schools, shopping malls, movie theaters, airports, and other places where hundreds and even thousands of people gather on a daily basis.

Why Terrorist Attacks Are So Rare

This credits government action in preventing crazies from getting the necessary materials rather than a lack of crazies. And that’s a completely plausible explanation for a relative decline in these attempts since 9/11 and OKC. But it’s noteworthy that, even before those attacks, they were pretty rare. Which leads me to think that there just aren’t that many people who simultaneously harbor a strong desire to kill large numbers of their fellow man and possess the skills to actually carry out the act.

Joyner, I think, gets to the heart of the issue here:

Unless you’re awfully good at it–in which case your results can be spectacular–you’re less likely to kill a lot of people with explosives than with a surprise gun attack.

The difference between the typical surprise gun attack and the perpetrator in Boston, is that the typical rampage killer dies in his attack while the bomber in yesterday's attack clearly wanted to live. So i would extend Joyner's point and say that in America we fortunate because there are very few people who simultaneously harbor a strong desire to kill large numbers of their fellow man and possess the skills to actually carry out the act AND ARE WILLING TO DIE IN ORDER TO KILL.

UPDATE

Megan McArdle:

And thankfully, there are not nearly as many lunatics as there are schools, or malls, or even marathons. That's why most of our public spaces are safe from mad bombers--and I'm glad to say, why they will remain so.

Teaching strategy

This is an interesting article by eminent historian John Lewis Gaddis

What Is Grand Strategy?(.PDF)

It is clear from his remarks that he views grand strategy from a perspective closer to Clausewitz than Michael Porter.

Related:

Military Education

Does Mark Potok have blood on his keyboard?

R. S. McCain connects the dots on the mis-investigation of the Texas prosecuter murders.

How the Left’s Online Meme Machine Helped Create a Murder Myth in Texas

And then ask yourself, “Why did it take more than two months after the murder of Mark Haase for officials to arrest Eric Williams? Why was Williams left free for 10 weeks – during which Mike and Cynthia McLelland were also murdered — while investigators reportedly chased a wild-goose theory about the Aryan Brotherhood?”

On Jan. 31, the day after Haase was killed, Mark Potok posted a 1,300-word article entitled, “Texas Prosecutor ‘Involved’ in Aryan Brotherhood Investigation is Slain.” And on April 1, the Monday after the McLellands were murdered, Potok appeared on Martin Bashir’s MSNBC show:

RTWT.

Related:

Variations on a theme

Gosnell, Fluke and media bias

Ace of Spades:

Note that Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a dirty word got a lot of coverage by this reporter, but this story is just a "local crime story."

Like Newtown was. But then Newtown had "national ramifications" for legislation... that the media desired. This story also has national ramifications for legislation... that the media does not desire.

Patheos:

But gosh darn it, can you think of any policy implications to this, uh, “local crime” story? And that’s all it is. Just like a bunch of other local stories the Washington Post also refuses to cover — local crimes such as the killing of Trayvon Martin and the killing of Matthew Shepard and the killing of students at an elementary school in Connecticut. Did the Washington Post even think of covering those local crime stories? No! Oh wait, they did? Like, all the time? Hmm. That’s weird. But did they cover them in terms of policy implications? Asking politicians for their views and such? Oh they did that, too? Hmm. So weird. Oh, and Sarah Kliff herself wrote one of those stories? Well, gosh, I’m so confused.

Patterico:

There is a simpler potential reason for the blackout, and it may be the real reason: if people get outraged about this, they may start thinking to themselves: hey, how is this different from the guy killing the baby inside the womb instead of outside? Does that mean maybe I oppose abortion — or at least late-term abortion?

And we can’t have that!

Our corrupt press

Ed Driscoll:

Rutgers 41, Gosnell 0

North Korea: Jerry Pournelle can say 'I told you so'

He wrote this after the fall of Qaddafi,

One lesson to be learned is, DO NOT LOSE if you are in the dictator business. The US will borrow money to furnish the Brits, French, and Italians with the means to kill you. Understand that, and be sure that you have the means for defending yourself. The more strategic your country the more important it will be to have defenses including personal defenses. Another lesson is, do not renounce your nukes. Get some. Get at least one and let it be known that it will detonate if you don’t talk to it at daily intervals.

Variations on a theme

Alinsky and McCarthy

Leftist charges that someone is aping the late Wisconsin senator, who died in 1957, is a recurring accusation in American politics. The charge of "McCarthyism!" is the left-wingers' favorite tactic for silencing anyone with the temerity to express views they consider anathema. Leftists, however, often practice what they pretend to oppose: reckless, unsubstantiated charges against those they fear, including ad hominem attacks, character assassination, and guilt-by-association.

King of Fearmongers

There is something disconcerting about a private organization spending years monitoring someone who had never committed a serious crime, and something equally disconcerting about trying to connect a rock band to a murder rampage, no matter how racist or otherwise unappetizing the band’s lyrics might have been. Furthermore, it is odd that an organization that characterizes itself as being devoted to civil rights—a phrase that connotes the struggles of individuals to assert their rights against a tyrannical government—devotes its energies to tracking the activities of people who are insufficiently respectful of the government: Obama-loathers, opponents of gun control, politically incorrect metalheads, grandmothers who stash canned goods in their basements because they are certain that the government is about to suspend the Constitution and that anarchy will ensue. Don’t such stances, as long as they fall short of directly inciting violence, fall under the First Amendment’s free-speech protections? When I posed this question to Potok, he replied: “When we list these groups, we’re not predicting that they’ll commit violence. We say very explicitly that we’re listing them solely on the basis of their ideology. We’re foursquare behind the First Amendment. We believe these people can say all these things, but we’re going to call them out. We have never suggested restricting any kind of free speech.”

Goring the correct ox

True confession time. I have no idea what McCarthyism is.

Not the Man and the Era. That i understand. I've read the biographies and the histories. The "Ism", though, that is a problem. It is ill-defined: a buzzword for political attacks instead of a term with concrete meaning. Often it is just short hand for "stuff i don't like."

One reason for my confusion is the hypocritical ambivalence that anti-McCarthyites display toward McCarthy's tactics. When Joe does it, it is evidence of his wanton depravity. When others do it, however, the tactics often pass without condemnation. Almost never are they described as harbingers of a new dark age.

What is McCarthyism? (Part two)

Another component of the "Red Scare hysteria" was the activity of private watchdog groups that tracked and publicized the activities of communists and fellow-travelers. Public exposure frequently resulted in lost jobs, etc.

Conventional wisdom holds that there are two reasons why this public witch-hunting was a bad idea. 1. People should not lose their jobs simply because they held unpopular political beliefs. 2. The private watchdogs frequently tarnished innocent people through guilt by association.

Let's say we accept the conventional wisdom: private sector watchdogs were harmful to civic life and are a stain on our history.

Well, then, what should we make of the Southern Poverty Law Center? They are quick to engage in tactics favored by the red hunters-- guilt by association, name-calling in lieu of rational argument , hyping threats to raise money. Their targets, like many targets of HUAC, have no role in government.

Why, then, is the SPCL treated as a reliable source by the MSM? If the McCarthy-era was so bad, why repeat its methods today?

Chilladelphia

Nutter is entitled to his opinion. What the mayor is not entitled to do is go after others for expressing theirs. In February, The Weekly Standard published “The Sensitivity Apparat,” chronicling the chilling growth and activism of state and local “human rights” or “civil rights” commissions around the country, which have been imposing fines and threatening ordinary citizens for such crimes as expressing Christian moral views or publicly making jokes about politicians. With that in mind, here is the conclusion to Nutter’s letter:

I therefore request that the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations . . . consider specifically whether Philadelphia magazine and the writer, Bob Huber, are appropriate for rebuke by the Commission in light of the potentially inflammatory effect and the reckless endangerment to Philadelphia’s racial relations possibly caused by the essay’s unsubstantiated assertions.

Rachel Maddow endorses the Hollywood blacklist

Toure Neblett's Bonfire of the Vanities

MSNBC’s Touré founded militant anti-white student paper

Related:

Tom Wolfe: Prophet

A great one gone

Margaret Thatcher, RIP

The Telegraph:

Margaret Thatcher dies of stroke aged 87

Baroness Thatcher, Britain's greatest post-war prime minister, has died at the age of 87 after suffering a stroke, her family has announced.

Financial Times

Margaret Thatcher: ‘Iron Lady’ who changed Britain

She changed us all. We went from being a people who saw ourselves as eternally on the downward slide to a nation that was proud to be British again. On the world stage too, she made Britain count once more. She was a startling presence who brought a strong and controversial style to our diplomacy after years of Foreign Office blandness.

Daily Mail

The Iron Lady became Britain's first and only female Prime Minister

Powerline asks a good question

Why Can’t We Sue Politicians For Malpractice?

So we have here the spectacle of a Democratic Congresswoman authoring legislation on a subject where she literally has no idea what she is talking about. She has no idea what a magazine is, or how it works; and yet she has introduced a law that would ban most of the many millions of magazines that are now in use. Is this a rare occurrence? I don’t think so:

Like i said:

Ours is an age of Knowingness Rampant.

When le Carre meets Spillane

Did Boris Berezovsky Kill Himself? More Compelling, Did He Kill Forbes Editor Paul Klebnikov

"I can see Ishtar from my house."

Tina Fey's New Movie Tanks

Michael Porter

The Monitor Group, the top-drawer consulting firm founded by strategy guru Michael Porter, is now part of Deloitte. The bean counters rescued what was left of the company after it declared bankruptcy late last year.

The strategic failure of a strategy company should make for an interesting story. Maybe Mark Bowden or Michael Lewis will take a stab at it.

Two interesting pieces offer contrasting perspectives on the collapse of Monitor:

Farah Stockman: Why did the smartest guys in the room go bankrupt?

Steve Denning: What Killed Michael Porter's Monitor Group?

I posted on Porter and his approach to strategy here:

Waiting for our Clausewitz

Clausewitz (II)

Fad Surfing

A sobering but honest look at the GOP's future

The Double Bind

What stands in the way of a Republican revival?

Republicans.

The man who was Smiley

Journalist, novelist, patriot, spy

When the much younger David Cornwell joined MI5 in 1958, Bingham became his professional mentor and also helped start him on his writing career by introducing him to his literary agent. Bingham’s son Simon records that Cornwell’s pen name, Le Carré, came from the office nickname for his father, ‘The Square’. In a radio interview in 1999 Cornwell revealed that Bingham was a model for Smiley, though in the following year, in an introduction for the re-publication of some of Bingham’s early novels, he says that Bingham was one of two men who went into the making of George Smiley.

But the John Bingham who emerges from the pages of Michael Jago’s book seems, in everything but appearance, to be about as far from Smiley as you could get. Certainly F4, with its nurturing relationship with its agents, many of whom worked for the Service for years and ended with a pension, was a very different place from the nuanced, ethically ambiguous world of Smiley and his colleagues. Le Carré wrote that Bingham felt betrayed by his cynical portrayal of the intelligence services. Bingham himself went on to write a considerable number of successful crime stories, but though he carried on writing until his old age, he never achieved his ambition of producing a spy story to rival the success of Le Carré’s books.

(HT: Paul Davis)

Now they tell us

Barack Obama a 'dithering, controlling, risk-averse' US president

Barack Obama is a "dithering" president whose controlling tendencies and extreme risk-averse attitude to foreign policy has damaged US interests in the Middle East, according to a new book by a senior former State Department adviser....

Vali Nasr, a university professor who was seconded in 2009 to work with Richard Holbrooke, Mr Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, records his profound disillusion at how a "Berlin Wall" of domestic-focused advisers was erected to protect Mr Obama.

"The president had a truly disturbing habit of funnelling major foreign policy decisions through a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisers whose turf was strictly politics," Mr Nasr writes in The Dispensable Nation: America Foreign policy in Retreat.

When all else fails, blame the people

A couple of good posts from Jim Geraghty and Ace:

Our Big Challenge: Do We on the Right Still Trust the People?

"Do We on the Right Still Trust the People?"

Related:

Conservatives and messaging

Five quick points about the conservative tantrum

Why are conservatives mad at the GOP?

GWB and his MBA

A spectre haunts the sleep of the MSM

The nightmare has a name:

Breitbart!

First, a tale of low bars and double-standards

Ana Marie Cox Thinks Breitbart And His ‘Minions’ Are Bad Bad People

Let’s just get this out of the way right up front: Ana Marie Cox built her career on blogging jokes about anal sex at the reprehensible guttersnipe site Wonkette. She presented herself as a rambunctious youngster, but it turned out she was already pushing 30 and just naturally behaves like a annoying, hyperactive juvenile. Both Time and later the Guardian hired her in full knowledge of this colorful journalistic career.

Now that we’ve established Cox’s bona fides as a scribe and scholar…

(HT: The Other McCain)

Something I wrote back when Ana Marie was Wonkette and reveling in butt sex blogging:

How does that re-virgining process work again?

But what happens when she leverages this blogging gig to reenter the world of serious journalism? Will the CSM write about the scandal of falling journalistic standards at Newsweek? Will the Times editorialize about moral failure at the NYRB? Will Joel Klein scold ABC for putting a shameless, partisan scandal whore on its staff?

I think we know the answer. But it still raises an interesting question. How does the process work? What makes a serious journalist? How can you be one yesterday, not one today, and be restored to grace tomorrow?

It’s not just Time, GQ, and the Guardian who helped AMC get back in the Church of Serious Jounalism. Howard Kurtz has used her for years on Reliable Sources as a moral guide for reporters, editors, and readers.

Next, Patterico shows that David Frum is lower than pond slime.

David Frum Dances on Breitbart’s Grave

David Frum is so gosh-darned proud of his broadside last year about Andrew Breitbart, published the day of Andrew’s death, that he reprints the whole thing in full today. Those who have ever read Frum will be less than shocked to learn that Frum’s reprint is prefaced by a self-aggrandizing paean to his own amazing courage in being willing to parrot clueless left-wing criticisms of a deceased family man.

Patterico understands the true essence of this unfortunate Canadian import:

Frum pats himself on the back so often that his own palm print is permanently embedded between his shoulder blades. I can’t think of a single national figure who is more self-absorbed, other than perhaps Meghan McCain, or Barack Obama. His goal could not be more clear: to suck up to the leftists in power in Big Media, and to gain accolades from those who cluck their tongues at the likes of Andrew Breitbart.

This might seem like a good idea, I guess. It will probably get you invited to the desirable soirees. But I believe people can inherently recognize phonies. And David Frum is a phony.

None so blind...

CNN is still recycling the discredited myths of Watergate

Runup to the Oscars: ‘Politically inspired movies’ and the myth of Watergate

How we live now: The rule of the inept experts

A couple of days ago I linked to this post by Photon Courier:

Jousting with Shadows

And, almost always, today’s “progressivism” is about the transfer of power from individuals to credentialed “experts” who will coerce or “nudge” people to do with those experts have decided would be best.

That quote is especially apt in light of Joe Biden’s latest buffoonery:

Joe Biden’s Felony Self-Defense Advice

Following Vice President advice to fire warning shots will likely get you arrested on felony charges. Firing randomly Biden didn’t even state the shots should be fired into a safe direction could get those charges upgraded to assault with a deadly weapon or possibly manslaughter if those shots fired into the air in the dark hits and kills an innocent victim like Rachel Yoder.

Vice President Biden has given defensive gun use advice that may put those who follow it behind bars with a felony conviction. Is he remotely competent to be driving national gun policy?

The distinctive feature of coercive “experts” like Joe Biden or Joe Salazar is that they are credentialed, not proficient. They assume the right to make decisions for others, but that assumption is based on “media consensus” and insider back-scratching. It is not, demonstrably in the case of Biden and Salazar, based on proven expertise or knowledge.

Ours is an age of Knowingness Rampant.

Knowingness, of course, is not knowledge--indeed, is the rebuttal of knowledge. Knowledge was what squares had, or thought they had, and they thought that it was the secret of life. Knowingness is a celebration of the conceit that what the squares knew, or thought they knew, was worthless.

Given his history, it is surprising that the administration allows Biden to speak in public. In a healthy polity, he would be kept under tight wrapsthe political equivalent of the crazy aunt in the attic.

From Mark Steyn in 2008:

By contrast, Biden was glib and fluent and in command of the facts if by "in command of the facts" you mean "talks complete blithering balderdash and hogwash."

Or this gem:

Is Joe Biden a psychopath?
Biden's bizarre question angers father of Navy SEAL who died in Benghazi attack
VP made inappropriate comment to Charles Woods, father of SEAL Tyrone

Or this:

Joe Biden’s big lie

One reason for Biden’s continued viability is the exercise of raw media power. David Warsh notes one role the prestige press plays:

Newspapers reward their culture heroes and presidential favorites, penalize those with whom they disagree, further the activities of which they approve and ignore those which they do not.

A decadent liberal media has to praise a liberal leader like Biden or else the whole rickety structure might collapse.

In a bizarre way, supporting Biden enhances the self-image of reporters and editors

The MSM puts great stock in the value of its insider status. They know things that we outsiders do not. That allows them to see context and nuance that the dirty masses are blind to. What the public might think is favoritism is just superior knowledge. Because they know that Joe Biden is smart and Sarah Palin is dumb, it is AOK for pundits to mock the latter while ignoring the missteps the of Veep.

A number of years ago, a Biden gaffe came up on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” (“Where the Liberal Establishment lets their hair down”). It was only a brief mention because, as serial fabricator Mike Barnicle announced, “We know his heart is in the right place so we give him a pass”.

The assorted deciders at the table murmured their agreement.

As I said, Knowingness Rampant.

This is a mindset we’ve seen before, Stephen Koch, in his book Double Lives* describes how Willi Munzenberg worked to manipulate opinion leaders and built Popular Front support for Stalin’s prison empire:

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.

· We really have to get this book on Kindle so click on the link and request that the publisher consider a Kindle edition.


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The story Piers Morgan does not want you to hear

Rape Survivor: A Call Box Above My Head While I Was Being Brutally Raped Wouldn't Have Helped

Her attacker was James Biela, a serial rapist who raped two other women and murdered another. He attacked her at gun point in a gun free zone. At the time of the attack, Collins was in possession of a concealed weapons permit but was not in possession of her firearm due to university policies prohibiting carrying concealed weapons on campus.

About my headline:

Not surprisingly, CNN's Piers Morgan denied Collins' request to come on his show and tell her story.

What's the matter with California?

Communist killers like Fidel and Che are A-OK, but the US flag is verbotten?

California Dept. of Transportation: ‘Be Sure to Black Out the ‘United States’ and [the] Motto’

LeBard said no thanks and pursued yet another angle. Having learned that CalTrans had sanctioned — as a Transportation Art Program project — the building of Chicano Park in San Diego, where murals feature portraits of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, LeBard decided to reclassify his intended memorial as an art project. He called it, “A Tribute to the Protectors of Freedom.”

At first, CalTrans encouraged the idea. But then, perhaps inevitably, it determined that the words “United States” and “E Pluribus Unum” aren’t nearly so benign as the likenesses of communist revolutionaries; that, unlike such likenesses, the name of our country and the motto on our Great Seal — like our flag itself — have no place on our public lands.

"Disordered to the point of insanity"

James Bowman:

“Harsh truths” kept artificially alive are no longer truths

How we live now

RERUN: JOUSTING WITH A PHANTOM

And, almost always, today’s “progressivism” is about the transfer of power from individuals to credentialed “experts” who will coerce or “nudge” people to do with those experts have decided would be best.

An extraordinary life

'I intend to die in the harness': Chapman Pincher is still on the hunt for spooks

Fast approaching his 99th birthday, the insatiable hack is still working seven days a week. "I won't take a day off because it's a use-it-or-lose-it situation at my age and you lose it quickly. I intend to die in the harness, like the old war-horse.

"I've got this bug, you see, of wanting to know everything there is to know about the spy world," he says in a soft Yorkshire drawl, peering over the top of his spectacles. To this end, every day after breakfast with Billee, he checks his emails before setting to work. Right now he's finishing off the second draft of his autobiography – his 38th book – alongside some "ongoing research".

Why can't the US have journalists this interesting?

A deal and a half

A classic album collection at a bargain price.

I've been listening to it the last couple of weeks.

An inconvenient book (Part two)

Part one: Felt’s game

The problem with sources

Deep Throat is the most famous anonymous source in history. He gets trotted out to justify the passage of reporter shield laws. His name is invoked every time a favored reporter is criticized for using unnamed sources to make unverifiable charges.

“Deep Throat helped Bob Woodward break the Watergate cover-up. Unnamed sources help investigative reporters do the Lord’s work. So shut up!”

Now that we know Deep Throat was the FBI’s Mark Felt, we can make a searching examination of the actions and motives of this renowned source.

Such an examination shreds the conventional narrative and journalistic myth-making. As Max Holland notes, the dance of reporter and source is “a complex, adversarial but ofter symbiotic relationship.” The specific case of Deep Throat/Felt/Woodward is less a story of Fourth Estate virtue and is much more a “cautionary tale” for both reporters and readers.

The tale Holland tells is nothing like the movie version. Mark Felt is not an anguished truth-teller who relies on the press to save the Constitution from Nixon’s designs. Leak gives us a picture of a skilled bureaucratic manipulator who used a young reporter for his private purposes. Felt’s purposes had almost nothing to do with defending the Constitution. He was chiefly concerned with getting rid of L. Patrick Gray and getting himself into John Edgar Hoover’s old chair.

On one level, Woodward and the Post were dealing with problems faced by all reporters. As Scott Shane of the New York Times described his work: "I'm a journalist whose job it is to explain to others things he doesn't understand himself." Edward Jay Epstein put it this way in his 1975 book Between Fact and Fiction:

The problem of journalism in America proceeds from a simple but inescapable bind: journalists are rarely, if ever, in a position to establish the truth about an issue for themselves, and they are, therefore, almost entirely dependent on self-interested 'sources' for versions of reality that they report.

And

Indeed, given the voluntary nature of the relationship between a reporter and his source, a continued flow of information can only be assured if the journalist's stories promise to serve the interests of the witness.

Holland shows that Felt was not just a “self-interested source”; he was a dishonest one. His leaks were carefully calibrated to keep the heat on Gray. For instance, Deep Throat did not tell Woodward about the White House’s attempt to use CIA to stymie the FBI investigation. Nor did he reveal that Alfred Baldwin was cooperating with the Bureau and could tie the burglars to E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. These were bombshells because they tied the White House to both the break-in and the cover-up.

Neither revelation served Felt aims so he let them remain secret. This fact alone is almost conclusive proof that Deep Throat’s agenda was not the Truth and that he saw Bob Woodward as something other than an ally in a crusade for Justice.

In an ideal world, Leak would be a required text at every school of journalism. The keepers of journalistic standards should convene panels of wise men to ponder its revelations and draw some useful lessons for reporters and editors. Back in the real world, however, the profession seems intent on ignoring this book.

Perhaps that should be no surprise. Woodstein’s Watergate reporting remains a foundational myth for the profession of journalism. Holland's research has revealed that much of the standard narrative is half-true at best and fraudulent at worst. Faced with that, the deciders have decided to avert their eyes and stick with the legend.



CSPAN has video of several talks Holland gave on this book, Mark Felt, and Watergate history. See here.


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An inconvenient book (Part One)

WELCOME Instapundit readers!  While you are here, why not check out the archives and maybe subscribe to this blogs feed?  (please?)


Part two: The problem with sources

Max Holland’s Leak might have been the most important book published in 2012. Combining painstaking research with a dogged determination to separate fact from myth, Leak is a careful examination of Mark Felt and his role in Watergate.

As Holland points out, such an examination is long overdue:

"As Christopher Hitchen's wrote in his review of The Secret Man, Watergate 'ranks as the single most successful use of the news media by an anonymous unelected official with an agenda of his own.’ Without a consensus about what that agenda was, there is a gaping hole in the center of the narrative."

For decades, the conventional portrayal of Mark Felt was Hal Holbrook in All the President’s Men. Deep Throat had no agenda beyond truth, justice, and the American Way. He talked to Bob Woodward because he had no choice: leaking to the Washington Post was the only way to stop Nixon and his minions from subverting the Constitution.

Holland shows that almost nothing about this picture is true. Felt had an agenda and it had nothing to do with revulsion at Nixon’s tactics. Deep Throat was a combatant in “The War of the FBI Succession.” Felt wanted to replace J. Edgar Hoover and he was angry that Nixon had appointed L. Patrick Gray as Acting Director after Hoover died.

Deep Throat’s leaks, then, were not a desperate attempt to reveal the truth. They were, instead, just part of the usual Washington game in which bureaucrats use reporters to undercut their rivals.

"Pushing Gray to do the right thing, in other words, cost Felt nothing but was bound to hurt Gray. And there is some evidence that Felt was simultaneously communicating to the White House that everything would be different if he were the director-- that he could accomplish what Gray was either unwilling or incapable of doing."

Holland has described Felt as an “Iago type character” in his relationship with L. Patrick Gray and the evidence supports that characterization. During the day Felt was the loyal G-Man helping his new boss stop the leaks which were driving the White House crazy (and jeopardizing Gray’s career prospects.) At night, Felt was leaking to his favorite reporters in order to undercut Gray and his other rivals for the top job.

That is reporters--plural. Felt did not start leaking after Watergate. He was an accomplished player in that game and fed information to multiple journalists.

This books shatters many of the myths and illusions that surround Watergate. It raises serious questions for both journalists and historians. Sadly, journalists have mostly ignored this book. As Holland notes, they have chosen to follow the lead of the editor in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

CSPAN has video of several talks Holland gave on this book, Mark Felt, and Watergate history. See here.

"We're from the government and we are here to hurt you."

A serious column about a deadly serious subject:

And Your Little Dog, Too

(HT: Quinn Hilyer)

"So, why can't journalists fictionalize no more than screenwriters?"

That's the impertinent question Steve Sailer asks in the wake of the media coverage of Christopher Dorner's rampage.

How movies and videogames are more accurate about recent history than the newspapers

RTWT

Sailer raises an important point about the myopia of newpaper people:

You might think that exploring the ties between rogue cops and some of the most notorious murders of the 1990s (Biggie and Tupac) would be a good way to sell newspapers, but selling newspapers has long been a lower priority than Shaping the Narrative.

For decades, newspapers could sell papers, grow profits, and shape the narrative without breaking a sweat. They owed their privileged position to the decline in competition and the rise of local monopolies. (See here.)

Now, that era of easy living has passed but no one in charge knows how to operate in a challenging environment. The problem is made worse by the power of the guild and the agency problem.

You have to wonder-- does this suggest that there is an opportunity for some enterprising iconoclast who is willing to flaunt the tired conventions and lame narratives?

Related:

I wrote about the LAPD and the MSM narrative here:

LAPD

Worse than Jayson Blair

Radical chic in its dotage

Joseph Epstein:

Radical Unchic and the New York Review of Books

Long ago I claimed that NYRB contributors were mad dogs and Englishmen. Or could it have been that, though I have been a subscriber to the review from its beginning in 1962, last year I canceled my subscription?

I canceled my subscription, not in high dudgeon, the way outraged subscribers tend to do, but because the NYRB had been boring me a fine Matisse blue for at least a decade and maybe longer. The Englishmen among its contributors are now third-rate and the mad dogs have become entirely uninteresting dogs.

Roger Kimball:

The New York Review at 50

Where the Review once featured such A-list intellectuals as W.H. Auden and Hannah Arendt, at their recent 50th anniversary celebration the marquee names included Joan Didion, Daryl Pinckney (who?), and Daniel Mendelsohn.

Ho, I mean to say, hum.

The mighty may have fallen, but the NYRB was a powerful cultural influence for decades. How it achieved this position is an interesting case study.

Epstein:

In the pages of the NYRB, the great cultural figures in effect lent their imprimatur to the political radicalism. … The combination-- high culture admixed with radical politics-- made a fine blend upon which the bien-pensants in the media and academic life happily puffed. When I taught at Northwestern University, every two weeks the professorial mailboxes filled with fresh copies of the NYRB.

Linking politics and high culture proved to be a potent cocktail. The NYRB was only one of many culture warriors who mixed it and served it to an eager audience.

Robert Conquest recounts one example from the 1930s in explaining why Stalinism managed to gain such a foothold among the intelligentsia:

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' [Reflections on a Ravaged Century]

“Prestige, that magical aura which captures the minds of the young in advance of argument and establishes compelling fashions” The young are not the only ones susceptible to fashion and fads. Stephen Koch describes how the Stalinists wielded every tool at their disposal to win influence during the Twenties and Thirties in his book Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas against the West.

For instance, he notes that the Kremlin never thought of Red Hollywood as a propaganda vehicle. Instead, one of its key objectives was to attract movie stars to the right fronts and causes in order to “Stalinize the glamour culture.” Once thoroughly Stalinized, the glamour culture could be used to rally the public to what most suited Bloody Joe’s needs.

Every age, after all, has its low-information voters. Glamour and “sophistication” can sway them far easier than tedious arguments that use facts and logic.

"In a crisis, the president went AWOL"

Powerful op-ed by William Kristol and Peter Wehner:

The Absentee Commander in Chief

And we learned one other thing: Messrs. Panetta and Dempsey both knew on the night of the assault that it was a terrorist attack. This didn't prevent President Obama, Secretary Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice from peddling a false version of events in the days and even weeks that followed, as the administration called the incident spontaneous, said there was no evidence of a coordinated terrorist attack and blamed the violence on an anti-Muslim video. So the White House, having failed to ensure that anything was done during the attack, went on to mislead the nation afterward.

Lest we forget

February 9, 1943: Guadalcanal Secured

A revealing Freudian slip

Piers Morgan lets the mask slip:

PIERS MORGAN: I have an interview coming up with two young women who wrote a piece in which they said they wanted the rights of the AR-15 weapon at home because they feared they would be attacked and they wanted a gun that would guarantee they would murder or would kill their attacker. How do you respond to that particular argument, which is they believe under their second amendment right they should be allowed an AR-15?

The fraud-tarnished former journalist sees no difference between "murder" and legitimate self-defense.

The conventional narrative misleads the public

If you want bigger government, you need to side with big business

The media too often see Washington battles as Big Business vs Big Government. This is usually not the case. Often it’s Big Business & Big Government vs. Small Business.

From 2008:

The greater sin of the elite media is the fairy tale version of Washington they foist upon their readers/viewers. In their telling of the story, the Party of Free Enterprise wages a vicious, partisan war against the Party Opposed to Big Business.

The reality is something far different. Liberal Democrats like Chris Dodd, Barack Obama, and Barney Frank received huge sums of campaign cash from Freddie and Fanny. Joe Biden watches out for the interest of credit card giant MBNA while his family dabbles in running hedge funds.

The fairy tale has been obsolete for decades. The Democrats made their peace with Big Business in 1975 when Phil Burton and Tip O’Neil realized that they could use corporate money to preserve their post-Watergate majorities.

Innovation: Lonely geniuses need not apply

Harvard Professor Finds That Innovative Ideas Spread Like The Flu; Here's How To Catch Them

"What we found was striking," Miller says. More than an individual work, the quality of relationships that a team had was a crucial--especially having someone on the team highly connected to the rest of the network. The most successful teams were the most interwoven, because as Miller says, "If you're doing great work back in a closet somewhere, it doesn't matter."

In this case, too, information--here the process of innovation--acts as contagion. Successful teams were able to spread their ideas through the organization, gathering commentary, criticism, and broader support. Movement of information from person to person and across departments advanced the innovation, Miller says, which couldn't have happened if it stayed on an island. "High-performing people tend to have strong connections, both laterally across departments as well as up and down the hierarchical chain."

Hillary, Benghazi, and the continuing cover-up

Jonah Goldberg:

Hillary Clinton's dodgy testimony

A lot of people in Washington apparently forgot how good Hillary Clinton is at not telling the truth.

Wednesday, in her testimony before both the Senate and, later, the House, Clinton brilliantly fudged, dodged and filibustered. Of course, she's a pro. Clinton was slow-walking depositions, lawyering up and shifting blame when many of her questioners were still civilians down on the farm.

Terence P. Jeffrey:

State Dept. Publicized Names, Photos of Stevens' Benghazi Security Detail Before 9/11/12; Suppressed Their Identities Afterward

This remarkable about-face raises two questions: Why can’t the American people know the names--and hear the stories--of the heroic DS agents who fought the terrorists who attacked our mission in Benghazi? Why can’t these courageous survivors deliver their eyewitnesses accounts directly to the U.S. Congress?

It seems to me, this Watergate parallel still holds:

Now it certainly can be argued that there is no story because there is no scandal. Right now facts are scarce and the big picture is obscure.

The same thing was true of Watergate in 1972. Ben Bradlee worried that the Post might be on a fool’s errand. He was reassured by superlawyer Edward Bennett Williams:

If they’re [the Nixon campaign]clean why don’t they show it? Why are there so many lies? I’ll tell you why. Because you’ve got them.

Essential reading

Aaron Swartz Died For Piers Morgan's Sins

Piers Morgan’s Desperate Attacks on His Critics

A feature not a bug

Sabermetrics goes to college:

Sabermetrics: The Dissertation!

(HT: Steve Sailer)

Interesting how sabermetricians differ from journalists when the subject is steroids. Great line: "at least for this crowd, the body is of little consequence."

I wonder, though, wasn’t this baked into sabertmetrics from its birth?

I read once that Bill James started crunching baseball statistics so he could beat his buddies at Strat-o-matic. (It was on the internet so it must be true.)

S-O-M is a great game, but it does reduce the athlete to a card full of statistical probabilities.

I think that Sabermetrics might owe some of its popularity to the rise of ESPN. The WWL fills the air (both radio and TV) with talk by people whose knowledge is a mile wide and an inch deep. Quoting statistics makes these superficial talking heads sound more expert.

Saying “Ryan Howard is really struggling” sounds obvious. Saying, “since the All Star break Howrd’s OPS is only 0.625” sounds like hard science.

A Nobel laureate's bleak take on his profession

Saving Economics from the Economists

In the 20th century, economics consolidated as a profession; economists could afford to write exclusively for one another. At the same time, the field experienced a paradigm shift, gradually identifying itself as a theoretical approach of economization and giving up the real-world economy as its subject matter. Today, production is marginalized in economics, and the paradigmatic question is a rather static one of resource allocation. The tools used by economists to analyze business firms are too abstract and speculative to offer any guidance to entrepreneurs and managers in their constant struggle to bring novel products to consumers at low cost.