Steyn on Benghazi: Not to be missed

It's too good to excerpt. Every paragraph is a gem.

The Benghazi Lie
A failure of character of this magnitude corrodes the integrity of the state.

The MSM puts Fox in the Ghetto. Just like Anita Dunn told them to.

Ace:

Why is it so important for the liberals to push out the only reporter who covered Benghazi?

"Ghettoization." If the "neutral media" -- actually liberal as hell -- can present a unified party line on stories, always supporting one another and never showing a crack in the wall, they can sneer at stories they don't like by saying "Only Fox claims that."

R. S. McCain:

All of that ridiculous “PlameGate” nonsense was taken very seriously by the mainstream media, as though it were a real scandal that might implicate the president in High Crimes and Misdemeanors, and yet it was transparently absurd from start to finish.

So fast-forward: Terrorists kill a U.S. ambassador and four other Americans in an attack on the consulate in Benghazi, and Obama administration officials — obviously concerned about political fallout during an election year — begin stacking up lies like cordwood. Everything we know about the matter leads to the conclusion that the administration failed before, during and after the attack, that they consistently lied at every step of the way, and that they’re quite likely still trying to hide the truth, especially in regard to who gave the “stand down” order to cancel a Special Operations rescue.

According to Alex Koppelman, however, this was just a “Republican obsession” until Jonathan Karl of ABC reported it, even though Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard had previously reported the same basic story about the edited Benghazi talking points.

One this week's Reliable Sources, well-traveled hack Margaret Carlson admitted that this is going on:

CARLSON: And rat on the bosses. And say what really happened. We didn't have another face to put on Benghazi and now we have it. The other thing back to your point is that because the right wing went so far on this story, it's Watergate, it's impeachable. We couldn't hear Steven Hayes in the "Weekly Standard." It did take somebody who is just a meat and potatoes reporter.

GERAGHTY: Don't cite the nut job and Steven Hayes is not to be listened to. This is a huge conspiracy. The president should be indicted and aliens are involved and my dog is talking to me. You can find that for any story in the whole wide world. You can use it as an excuse to not cover something.

CARLSON: It was just a constant drum beat and they weren't doing any reporting.

Note, especially, that the MSM is now using the "Bad Fox, Bad Rush" gambit to justify their epistemic barriers to all right-wing writing. Carlson's argument boils down to "Glenn Beck is crazy so I don't read the Weekly Standard".

Speaking of Glenn Beck, I first heard about Anita Dunn and the White House's war on Fox on his old FNC TV show. You remember Anita Dunn right? She was the Obama point woman when the effort to discredit Fox started::

“What I think is fair to say about Fox — and certainly it’s the way we view it — is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party,” said Anita Dunn, White House communications director, on CNN. “They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”

This explains a lot

Presidents of ABC and CBS News Have Siblings Working at White House With Ties to Benghazi

"CBS News President David Rhodes and ABC News President Ben Sherwood, both of them have siblings that not only work at the White House, that not only work for President Obama, but they work at the NSC on foreign policy issues directly related to Benghazi."

So now this makes a lot more sense:

CBSNews Bigs Fret That Sharyl Attkisson is Coming "Dangerously Close to Advocacy"

"Dangerously close to advocacy"

That is CBS speak for "Hey! You're making my brother look bad"

How we live now

Instapundit:

These are the bad old days, come again. Wake up and smell the Chicago.

Daniel Drezner:

So, in all, this has been a pretty crappy week for people who dislike conspiracy theories.

Is there a de-virgining process as well?

The MSM owes Ron Ziegler an apology.

On Friday, Jay Carney put on a display that was breath-taking in its arrogance and dishonesty. Nixon's flack could never muster up the sangfroid Carney showed as he offered up one tedious, bald-faced lie after another. When he was called to account for his own previous deceitful statements ("only stylistic changes", he reached Clintonian depths of cynicism and shamelessness.

It was a bravura performance by a political hack who loves his work.

Here's the thing--

It was not that long ago that Time magazine told us that Carney was an honest, non-partisan seeker after the truth.

They have some explaining to do.

Related:

How does that re-virgining process work again?

A spectre haunts the sleep of the MSM

Is this why Comcast/NBC wants rid of Jay Leno?

The White House has a new slogan when it comes to Benghazi: Hope and Change... the subject. #LenoMono

Benghazi and the other presidential debate

Benghazi figured prominently in the second debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney. In that case, CNN’s Candy Crowley lied her ass off to blunt Romney’s attacks on the Administration’s lies and incompetence. It now turns out that Benghazi figured in the defining moment of the final debate, albeit more as subtext than explicit issue.

In that debate, Romney tried to make the case that the Obama administration was hollowing out America’s defenses:

“Our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917,” Romney said. “The Navy said they needed 313 ships to carry out their mission. We're now at under 285. We're headed down to the low 200s if we go through a sequestration. That's unacceptable to me.”

“I will not cut our military budget by a trillion dollars, which is a combination of the budget cuts the president has, as well as the sequestration cuts,” he added. “That, in my view, is making is making our future less certain and less secure.”

The president parried Romney’s attacks with a combination of snark and lies.

Snark:

“But I think Governor Romney maybe hasn't spent enough time looking at how our military works,” Obama said. “You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed.”

For the record, Obama was factually incorrect about the bayonets.

Obama is wrong. we have hundreds of thousands more bayonets now? than in 1916.

Lies:

“First of all, the sequester is not something that I've proposed,” Obama said. “It is something that Congress has proposed. It will not happen.”

We now know, based on Bob Woodward’s reporting, that sequestration was something the president proposed.

I think the really interesting point is the statement made by Obama as part of his snark offensive:

“We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them,” Obama said. “We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.”

In terms of Benghazi, the Joplin Globe understood the issue six months ago:

Recall the old question that presidents usually asked during times of international tensions: “Where are the carriers and Marines?”

We just had a national crisis in Benghazi. But we have no carriers in the entire Mediterranean Sea.

So, the president was right, we do have these things called aircraft carriers. We just did not have any where we needed them during the Benghazi attack. As the administration pleads their case that there was nothing they could do to save the Americans attacked by terrorists, they are also confessing that Romney was right that their policy had depleted American military forces to a dangerous level.

No way to treat a hero

Moonwalker Buzz Aldrin Used as Photo Prop for Obama

President Obama had nothing to say to the moonwalker and didn’t seem to want to hear anything from Aldrin on the long flight to Florida. So Aldrin sat in the back of Air Force One and never saw Obama – until it landed.

When it landed, Aldrin said he was summoned to the front of the plane. But he found out it was not to talk about space policy. Instead, President Obama wanted Aldrin to emerge from Air Force One next to Obama for a photo op. The moonwalker was to be a mere prop.

Not a unique occurrence:

"You guys make a pretty good photo op,”

Soldiers did not join the military to be props to an egomaniac’s photo-shoot. Soldiers join to protect family, friends, and the Constitution — the foundation of America.

An Isolated Man Trapped in a Collapsing Presidency

Everybody else, including members of his Cabinet, have little face time with him except for brief meetings that serve as photo ops. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner both have complained, according to people who have talked to them, that they are shut out of important decisions.

That's going to leave a mark

Greg Gutfeld wins quote of the day: ‘The media is Obama’s scandal condom’

Everyone should have goals in life. Of course, when the inevitable layoffs come, they are going to need another goal.

I wonder what the interior monologue sounds like.....

Unemployment sucks and no one seems to take my experience seriously. But at least we Journolists were able to keep those awful conservatives from besmirching the Chosen One.

Benghazi: The story they can't kill

Bryan Preston:

7 Things We Learned from the Benghazi Whistleblower Hearing

The hearings turned out to be revelatory.

For instance:

Ambassador Stevens’ reason for going to Benghazi has been cleared up. Hicks testified that Ambassador Stevens traveled to Benghazi to fulfill one of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s wishes. Despite the fact that security was worsening in Benghazi for months leading up to the 9-11 attack, Clinton wanted to make the post there permanent. Her State Department had denied repeated requests from the U.S. team in Libya to upgrade security there, but she wanted to use the permanent post as a symbol of goodwill. Stevens was committed to that goal and told Clinton he would “make it happen.” He was in Benghazi on 9-11 furthering Clinton’s goal. She had denied requests to beef up security at Benghazi and then blamed his death on a YouTube movie. Hicks’ testimony raises the question of Clinton’s competence and grasp on reality, strongly suggesting that she put political perceptions ahead of the facts on the ground in Benghazi.

The hearings also turned over a rock and found another Susan Rice lie:

On Sept. 12, Ambassador Susan Rice told the first of her many untruths, claiming in an email that the FBI investigation into the attack was already underway. It would not actually get underway for 17 days after the attack, by which time the scene of the attack had been compromised and contaminated.

Another reason the Patriot-News deserves its fate

If you are going to call your readers stupid-- make sure your big blue hired gun gets his facts straight.

Columnist Dick Polman denies Gosnell trial cover up, yet misstates charges

An idea too smart for the stupid party

Instapundit:

THE HILL: Republican leader rips the media for ‘shoving us in the corner.’ “House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) ripped the media in a speech Tuesday to the Ripon Society, arguing press coverage is partly responsible for the GOP’s messaging woes.”

You want to punish ‘em? Mandate cable unbundling, which is the right thing to do anyway — and popular, to boot.

Susan Rice and Benghazi

Bryan Preston gets to the heart of the matter with Benghazi:

5 Benghazi Mysteries that Must Be Solved

RTWT. It is the best summary of the key questions/issues that I’ve read.

For example:

During her talk show appearances, Rice claimed that the attack was not premeditated and that it happened due to a spontaneous protest of a barely seen “hateful” movie that had been posted on YouTube months before the attack. Why did Rice mischaracterize the attack? Was she aware of the original talking points, and how they had been altered? Were Rice or Clinton the senior officials on whose behalf State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland had the talking points scrubbed of references to al Qaeda and terrorism? Why was Rice the face of the Obama administration that day, when she was the US ambassador to the UN, not Libya?

As we assess Rice’s role it is worth reading this ABC.com piece:

Who Was UN Ambassador Susan Rice Before Benghazi?

But her tenure at the Clinton Administration was not without controversy. In a 2001 Atlantic Monthly article, Samantha Power, a human rights journalist who is now an Obama administration adviser, criticized Rice's response to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda during her first years in the Clinton administration. Power wrote that Rice wondered on a conference call how the use of the word genocide would affect the November elections if the U.S. failed to intervene, appearing to be more preoccupied with the domestic political ramifications of the tragedy than in stopping the violence.

Rice has since said she deeply regrets the U.S. inaction in Rwanda. …

In 2007, she joined the first Obama presidential campaign as Senior Adviser for National Security Affairs. Rice was a staunch, outspoken surrogate for the president, and according to her detractors, maybe too outspoken.

In a 2008 Huffington Post blog, she sharply criticized Obama's primary opponent, then-Sen. Clinton, for voting for the Iraq war, saying it proved Clinton wouldn't be ready for a "3 a.m. call" in a national security emergency….

Her loyalty and blunt-speaking manner has been appreciated and rewarded by allies, such as Albright and President Obama. When he took office he named Rice as the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations.

From this we learn three critical facts: 1. Susan Rice is a diplomat who had no qualms about considering domestic politics when making diplomatic decisions. 2. She is an Obama loyalist who was an early passenger of the Hope and Change Express. 3. Her loyalty to Obama made her quite willing to kneecap her old patrons the Clintons.

So, are we to believe that the White House ignored all that when they chose Susan Rice to go on the Sunday shows to deflect blame after the disaster at Benghazi?

Niall Ferguson's public burning

Jonah Goldberg:

Keynes Was Gay Not That There’s Anything Wrong with That

What I find interesting about the Ferguson controversy is how disconnected it is from the past. Even academics I respect reacted to Ferguson’s comments as if they bordered on unimaginable, unheard-of madness. I understand that we live in a moment where any negative comment connected to homosexuality is not only wrong but “gay bashing.” But Ferguson was trafficking in an old theory that was perfectly within the bounds of intellectual discourse not very long ago. Now, because of a combination of indifference to intellectual history and politically correct piety he must don the dunce cap. Good to know.

The real reason Rahmbo had to beg the gangs to stop shooting kids

They are a key part of his coalition.

Instapundit pointed to this Chicago Magazine article which details the murderous corruption of Mogadishu on Lake Michigan.

Gangs and Politicians in Chicago: An Unholy Alliance

While they typically deny it, many public officials--mostly, but not limited to, aldermen, state legislators, and elected judges--routinely seek political support from influential street gangs. Meetings like the ones Baskin organized, for instance, are hardly an anomaly. Gangs can provide a decisive advantage at election time by performing the kinds of chores patronage armies once did.

There seems little doubt which group holds the whip hand:

At some of the meetings, the politicians arrived with campaign materials and occasionally with aides. The sessions were organized much like corporate-style job fairs. The gang representatives conducted hour long interviews, one after the other, talking to as many as five candidates in a single evening. Like supplicants, the politicians came into the room alone and sat before the gang representatives, who sat behind a long table. “One candidate said, ‘I feel like I’m in the hot seat,’” recalls Baskin. “And they were.”

The former chieftains, several of them ex-convicts, represented some of the most notorious gangs on the South and West Sides, including the Vice Lords, Gangster Disciples, Black Disciples, Cobras, Black P Stones, and Black Gangsters. Before the election, the gangs agreed to set aside decades-old rivalries and bloody vendettas to operate as a unified political force, which they called Black United Voters of Chicago. “They realized that if they came together, they could get the politicians to come to them,” explains Baskin.

The gang representatives were interested in electing aldermen sympathetic to their interests and those of their impoverished wards. As for the politicians, says Baskin, their interests essentially boiled down to getting elected or reelected. “All of [the political hopefuls] were aware of who they were meeting with,” he says. “They didn’t care. All they wanted to do was get the support.”

It is no surprise, then, the players in the game are compelled to minimize the danger posed by gangs:

Many forms of political corruption--taking bribes, rigging elections, engaging in pay-to-play deals--are plainly unethical, if not illegal. But forming political alliances with gangs isn’t a clear matter of right or wrong, some say. In many Chicago neighborhoods, it’s virtually impossible for elected officials and candidates for public office not to have at least some connection, even family ties, to gang members. “People try to paint this picture of bad versus good--it’s not like that,” says a veteran political organizer based in Chicago who specializes in getting out the vote in minority areas. “Everybody lives with each other, grew up with each other. Just because somebody goes this way or that way, it doesn’t mean you’re just gonna write them off automatically.”

No one wants to insult the real power brokers in the city.

Somehow, I can’t see a reporter accepting such a nuanced picture of killers and criminals if the gang in question was the KKK or Aryan Brotherhood. It’s probably worth quoting the great Stanley Crouch here:

[Between 1980 and 2002] street gangs have killed 10,000 people in Los Angeles, which is three times the number of black people lynched throughout the United States between 1877 and 1900, the highest tide of racial murder in the history of the nation.
(Reconsidering The Souls Of Black Folk)

I’m shocked, SHOCKED, that politicians who are willing to beg for gang support at election time sometimes make questionable decisions:

Most alarming, both law enforcement and gang sources say, is that some politicians ignore the gangs’ criminal activities. Some go so far as to protect gangs from the police, tipping them off to impending raids or to surveillance activities--in effect, creating safe havens in their political districts. And often they chafe at backing tough measures to stem gang activities, advocating instead for superficial solutions that may garner good press but have little impact.

Coddled politicians become corrupt politicians. Corrupt politics leads to dangerous cities.

Two police sources--a former gang investigator and a veteran detective--bluntly acknowledge that even if the police know of dubious dealings between an alderman and a gang leader or drug dealer, there is little, if anything, they can do, thanks to what they say is the department’s unofficial rule: Stay away from public officials. “We can’t arrest aldermen,” says the gang investigator, “unless they’re doing something obvious to endanger someone. We’re told to stand down.” The detective concurs: “It’s the unwritten rule. There’s a two-tier justice system here.”

Meanwhile, the city’s inspector general can’t--by design of the City Council--investigate council members. (In May 2010, the council, under pressure to curb its corruptible ways, created its own inspector general. The job went unfilled for more than 18 months, until last November, when the council picked a New York lawyer for the part-time position, which has a minuscule budget and no staff and which critics have decried as window-dressing.)

Chicago may be an outlier (maybe*) but I think this article helps to explain why Nanny Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns has such appeal to politicians. They cannot address the lawlessness of their cities because the criminals have friends and families who vote. Just as in Chicago, the gangster’s camp followers represent a sizable bloc of voters.

It is so much easier to blame the crime on the gun, not the criminal. After all, the laws MAIG wants to pass mainly target gun nuts outside the city limits. I. e. they can’t vote for mayor.

As I read this report I kept wondering, “what is wrong with the GOP in Illinois?” Why don’t they make Chicago’s lawlessness and corruption an issue in every election? Make the Democrat-gang alliance in Chicago part of the Democratic brand for suburban voters and downstate conservative Democrats.

* Philadelphia has had its own history of corrupt politicians and politically powerful killers.

#ad

And yet Mark Thompson knew nu-think!

Who knew that the New York Times was filled with Sgt. Schultzs?

Yawn: The BBC Had Another Very High-Profile Serial Pedophile/Rapist That It Somehow Failed to Detect

No, the market does not make newspapers liberal

Matt Welch schools Garance Franke-Ruta.

Are Big City Newspapers Inevitably Liberal Due to Market Forces?

He hits on several key points about the evolution of newspapers and the economics of their decline.

The elephant in the room

Ask yourself this: Of all the one-newspaper cities in America, how many are served by a daily that's more conservative than its readership? Pretty hard to come up with one, right?* Now do the same exercises for newspapers that are more liberal than their cities, and see how quickly you run out of fingers and toes.

GF-R argues that newspapers are liberal because they are located in liberal cities. As Welch points out, newspapers lean left no matter what the political climate in their home town. A point also made here:

I’ve lived in a bunch of different places over the years. Some were liberal communities (Madison, Wisconsin) while others were conservative (Carlisle, Charlotte). In every city and town, however, the local paper was and is more liberal than the community it serves.

Consolidation and liberal privilege

Like so many American dailies, including the Los Angeles Times (my former employer, and the plum property in the Tribune roster), the [Houston] Chronicle was a strongly conservative newspaper as recently as the 1950s, before more a more progressive breed of journalist began gaining a foothold in the 1960s. Crucially, the transformation from right to left, from crassly political to high-mindedly "fair," went hand in hand with the paper benefiting from and engaging in newspaper consolidation. It was the classic deal between mostly liberal newsrooms and mostly conservative boardrooms: Close down the competition and use the profits to professionalize the news divisions, instilling a more liberal ethos even while embracing the advertising-friendly pose of objectivity. Then sit back and enjoy the 20 percent profit margins for four decades.

See also here:

Carroll’s golden age coincides with the rise of the one newspaper town. Why was that a good thing? How could New York be better off when the Times did not have to compete with the Herald-Tribune? Why is journalism the rare business where monopolies serve the customer better than competition?

I doubt that the reading public was or is better off. The owners were because monopolies provide a nice stream of predictable earnings. The newsroom liked that the owners were fat and happy because as long as the income statement looked good the owners did not interfere with content. Editors and reporters were free to chases awards, collect bigger paychecks, and indulge their ideological obsessions. Local monopolies also gave journalists bigger megaphones and a de facto victory in “explanation space”.

The golden age, in short, rested on a temporary set of conditions in which economics and technology favored news monopolies. The readers never wanted it. That much became clear when technology began to offer more choices.

The agency problem

Journalists from newspapers all over the country want to work for The New York Times, even if their byline never gets within 100 miles of Gotham. Regional newspapers everywhere pattern their writing, their subject matter, their mores, on the Paper of Record.

Journalists usually justify their career-polishing antics with hoary clichés about telling the public what they need to know, not what they want to here. It is worth noting that such castor oil journalism has no place at the New York Times.

In 2003, Brooks got a call from New York Times editorial-page editor Gail Collins inviting him to lunch. Collins was looking for a conservative to replace outgoing columnist William Safire, but one who understood how liberals think. “I was looking for the kind of conservative writer that wouldn’t make our readers shriek and throw the paper out the window,” says Collins. “He was perfect.”

William Jacobson weighs in here:

Writer aboard Titanic worried about who’s buying other ocean liners

Related:

Clueless in the bubble

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.