Who really killed the radio star?

Daniel J. Flynn argues that AM is dying from self-inflicted woulds

AM Radio, Signing Off

An autopsy of a great American medium.

Criminals and moral responsibility

Criminal Justice Quote: Self-Deluding Criminals

They blamed bad luck, coincidence, unforeseen circumstances--the victims shouldn't have been there, the cops shouldn't have shown up. The inmates could not explain what they did in terms of their own moral choices; they had to explain it in terms of forces beyond their control.

The detective and the rule of law

Allan Griffith::

Detective Stories, Democracy, and Rule of Law

In his classic book on Golden Age mysteries, Murder for Pleasure, the critic Howard Haycraft makes the claim that the detective story can exist only in a democracy. The reason for this, he states, is that autocratic governments don’t care about punishing the right person, the individual who actually committed the crime. And of course autocratic governments don’t provide any protection for individual rights, whereas in a democracy there are strict rules of evidence and other means of protecting the rights of individuals.

Stephen Koch, Double Lives:

An essential tenet of the NKVD was that the system needed the arrest, torture, and death of thoroughly obedient-- therefore 'innocent'-- people, since without random terror, the innocent would never be afraid, and (even ideologically) the Soviet state was made coherent by fear. From this perspective, some of the motiveless malignity falls into place.

This point is the central premise of the British series Foyle's War which is set in World War Two. The very British detective takes it as a given that murderers must be caught and punished even when thousands are dying in the war.

A scumbag is dead

Jacques Vergès

Jacques Vergès, who has died aged 88, was a controversial French barrister and one of the most secretive public figures in France, where he was known as “the Devil’s advocate” for his willingness to defend terrorists, war criminals and dictators.

For many years suspected by the French DST (counter-espionage service) of being involved in international terrorism, Maître Vergès always denied this allegation. But in 1995 East German secret police (Stasi) files were leaked in Paris, and they disclosed the lawyer’s long-standing links with the terrorist group led by “Carlos the Jackal”. His Stasi code name had apparently been “Paula”.

During the Reagan administration, CIA dismissed the idea that the Soviet-bloc was supporting terrorist groups. We now know that they were doing exactly that:

When Vergès returned to Paris in 1979 to resume his legal practice his first prominent clients were two members of the Revolutionary Cells, a group of West German terrorists based in Frankfurt, two of whose members had been arrested in possession of explosives in France. One of his clients, Magdalena Kopp, received a four-year prison sentence. She happened to be the mistress of Carlos, who promptly started a bombing campaign solely to obtain her release....

While these attacks were going on Vergès offered his services to the French government as a mediator with the Cells, one of whose members was also a Stasi agent.

Albert Murray, RIP

A nice appreciation by Larry Kaufman:

Murray was himself a humane and learned man, with an abiding love for America’s diverse range of literary and musical expression.

RTWT.

The Omni-americans is an extraordinary book and makes my list of most influential books.

Why should anyone take The Nation seriously?

Washing White

The Nation Persists in Espionage Denial

One conclusion we have reached is that many of those who continue to write historical nonsense about Soviet espionage and communism are not consciously dishonest. It is not a matter of them knowing the truth and lying about it (although there is some of that). More frequently, we are dealing with intellectual “true believers,” ideological zealots who are mentally incapable of accepting or processing information that undermines their historical world view. To use a metaphor coined by the historian Aileen Kraditor, it is as if they wear special glasses that can only see what conforms to their world-view. Information that contradicts their fiercely held view is denied, explained-away, or, most often, simply ignored.

A recent example of espionage denial is James M. Boughton’s review of Benn Steil’s The Battle of Bretton Woods, published in The Nation magazine. A former Indiana University professor and historian of the International Monetary Fund, Boughton has long denied that Harry Dexter White ever cooperated with Soviet espionage; a section of In Denial was devoted to exposing his fallacious arguments. Similarly, The Nation has a long history of refusing to accept that such left-wing icons as White, Alger Hiss, or Julius Rosenberg could be guilty as alleged. Not until 1995 did it offer a concession about Rosenberg, although even then it resisted the claim that he was a major atomic spy. While The Nation has published letters-to-the-editor objecting to its distortion of history, such communications cannot lay out in detail just how mendacious its authors are and how much evidence they ignore.

It is also worth noting that the long-time editor of the Nation was not only a long-time apologist for the Rosenbergs, Hiss, et. al. He is also a long-time professor of journalism at Columbia and chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review.

Watergate: Even the bad guys deserve due process

The Watergate Cover-Up Trial: Justice Denied?

As a result of some recent discoveries I made while researching a book on the Watergate trials, my concern has been vindicated. It turns out that the notion that “no man is above the law” somehow didn’t apply to judges or prosecutors involved in the cover-up trial. Documents I have uncovered indicate that the efforts to punish the wrongdoings of Watergate led to further wrongdoing by the very officials given the task of bringing the Watergate defendants to justice.

The new documents suggest that defendants in the Watergate cover-up trial, held before Judge John Sirica, received anything but a fair trial. Indeed, they suggest prosecutorial and judicial misconduct so serious –- secret meetings, secret documents, secret collusion -- that their disclosure at the time either would have prevented Sirica from presiding over the trial or would have resulted in the reversal of the convictions and the cases being remanded for new trials.

Unlike the White House, John Sirica and the Watergate Special Prosecutors were able to keep their misdeeds under wraps when it mattered.

West v. Radosh, Horowitz, et. al.

Ronald Radosh writes a lengthy review of Diana West’s American Betrayal:

McCarthy On Steroids

Radosh does a thorough job demolishing West’s arguments and her facts. He explains why he felt compelled to take on the book here:

Why I Wrote a Take-Down of Diana West’s Awful Book

while David Horowitz explains why Frontpage Magazine ran the review here:

Editorial: Our Controversy With Diana West

Diana West replies here:

If Frontpage Lies about This, They'll Lie about Anything, Pt. 2

Radosh is somewhat overwrought in his criticism, but he is sount on the main issue. West pushes her argument way beyond what the evidence supports. She is quick to blame communist subversion for bad outcomes to the exclusion of other causes. Radosh offers several examples in his review.

A further example is found in the first excerpt she posted at Breitbart:

Why Did FDR Fail to Relieve MacArthur and 151,000 Troops Fighting the Japanese in the Philippines?

Could the decision to abandon US forces to death or the horrors of Japanese POW camps by giving uninterrupted priority to the Red Army have had anything to do with the influence of the scores of Soviet agents and assets within reach of the levers of power inside the US government? How about the man driving military supply policy, the man behind Lend Lease?

I know of no serious military historian who believes that there was ever a chance that the US Navy could have relieved the Philippines in the spring of 1942. Those troops were not doomed because communists diverted resources into Lend-Lease for the USSR. They were in a hopeless position because the Imperial Japanese Navy was more powerful that any and all forces that could be mustered against it.

Max Hastings puts it bluntly in Inferno:

The US Navy would have suffered a catastrophe had it attempted to assist Wainwright in the face of overwhelming Japanese air and naval strength.

The modern journalist

They stick to their narrative like a barnacle on a rotting ship.

From the comments here:

The Ghost of Stephen Glass Haunts the Halls of The New Republic But Mostly Just Offers Them Advice on How to Cook a Story

Egypt and the Army War College

War College connection gives U.S. influence in Egypt's struggle

When the Egyptian military removed the country’s divisive but democratically-elected president, Mohammed Morsi, the action was led by a general who had studied for almost a year at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle.

The close personal relationships General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi developed through his time at the War College could help the U.S. influence the course of events there, according to retired Col. Stephen Gerras, who teaches at the college.

I wrote this a while back:

Since World War II, the US military has used its schools to strengthen our alliances and to integrate allies into our military structure. Students from allied countries can be found at all levels-- from the service academies to the war colleges. Similarly, each branch opens the doors of its war college to members of the other branches.

The benefits are obvious. It is much easier to cooperate with Peru on counter-insurgency if the Peruvian generals have been exposed to American doctrine and methods. The cooperation can be even more effective if some of the officers know each other from their time in the classrooms at Leavenworth or Newport.

In many cases, study at the American military schools helps foreign officers in their quest for promotion. Over the long-term this strengthens the ties with allied forces: the top ranks of their services are populated with graduates of our schools.

One more not so innocent victim of McCarthyism

How a Stealth communist wrote the New Deal National Labor Relations Act, and Hid his True Beliefs

Florida's Nifong

A must read article on Angela Corey

Angela Corey’s Checkered Past

Corey's history is the sort of juicy story that the MSM claims they love.

Yet, somehow, they are wholly uninterested.

No bias, you understand. Just, well, SHUT UP!

Rick Scott and Pam Bondi have a lot of explaining to do.

Variations on a theme

Joseph Epstein

Worldliness, alas, pales and very quickly stales. It is a fine thing to know the score; but the problem is, the score is always changing.

Harvey Mansfield

What Bowdoin produces in its students, according to the study, is a certain "knowingness," a word that nicely captures an attitude I see a lot of at Harvard. Students have learned that to see means to see through, instead of to have a good look.

Michael Kelly

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. In The Graduate the career advice ("Plastics") of a family friend, Mr. McGuire, to Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, is classic square knowledge. Benjamin's mute disdain toward that advice—and his elaborately played out disdain for all that McGuire and the Robinsons represent—is classic anti-square knowingness.

You can see in this example the problem that a return to square poses: anti-square is so much easier and more fun. Knowledge, even on McGuire's level, is notoriously difficult to acquire. Sixteen years of hard, slogging schoolwork, and what do you know? Not enough to carry on ten minutes of intelligent conversation on any subject in the world with any person who actually knows something about the subject. Knowingness, though—a child can master that. (Can and does: there is an obvious inverse relationship between age and knowingness; the absolute life peak of knowingness generally arrives between the ages of twelve and sixteen for females, fourteen and eighteen for males—whereas, as these cohorts can attest, grown-ups don't know anything.)

This is why Benjamin Braddock had to ignore, with prejudice, Mr. McGuire. McGuire may have been a fool, but he was, in the limited area of business and economic trends, probably a knowledgeable fool. Had Benjamin been obliged to respond to McGuire's advice in terms of knowledge, he would have been utterly lost—he would have been the one exposed as a fool. But for Ben—and more to the point, for the movie's audience—knowingness offered a lovely way to not only counter McGuire's knowledge but also trump it. Ben didn't have to know anything about McGuire to show himself intellectually (and aesthetically, and even morally) superior to McGuire. He only had to know that what McGuire thought he knew was a joke and McGuire was a joke because—because the McGuires of the world are definitionally jokes, and if you don't understand that, I can't explain it to you, because you are a McGuire. That's knowingness, and for no-sweat self-satisfaction you can't beat it.

Photon Courier

Why is theory (which would often more accurately be called meta-theory) so attractive to so many denizens of university humanities departments? To some extent, the explanation lies in simple intellectual fad-following. But I think there is a deeper reason. Becoming an alcolyte of some all-encompassing theory can spare you from the effort of learning about anything else. For example: if everything is about (for example) power relationships--all literature, all history, all science, even all mathematics--you don't need to actually learn much about medieval poetry, or about the Second Law of thermodynamics, or about isolationism in the 1930s. You can look smugly down on those poor drudges who do study such things, while enjoying "that intellectual sweep of comprehension known only to adolescents, psychopaths and college professors" (the phrase is from Andrew Klavan's unusual novel True Crime.)

Harvey Mansfield:

Political correctness with its present-minded exactness, its not quite selfless objectivity, and its esoteric jargon is science for non-scientists.

Robert Heinlein:

The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.

"Shut up", they explained

Instapundit:

Like Obama, when Holder says “conversation,” he means “shut up while I lecture.”

Flashback to the Duke lacrosse case:

It is embarrassing to be caught short on facts by the audience you intend to lecture. Preachers and priests do not go to the pulpit to debate; they go to preach and admonish.

Leonard Garment, RIP

Leonard Garment, former adviser to Richard Nixon at height of Watergate, dies in NY at 89

Garment lived an interesting and eventful life which he wrote about in an incredibly engaging memoir.

Barbara Walters adds to her legacy

Michael Moynihan:

It's good to see The View getting back to its Rosie O'Donnell-era roots by hiring a dumb, unfunny conspiracy theorist

Moneyball: Now you know the rest of the story

Steve Sailer:

Moneyball A's celebrate 28th year as PED pioneers

Everybody knows that the Oakland A's baseball team are plucky underdogs who use advanced statistics to outsmart the big budget teams, as Brad Pitt showed when playing Oakland general manager Billy Beane in 2011's hit movie Moneyball.

Of course, when statistical analysis isn't enough (and when is it?), the A's just cheat, like they've been doing since Jose Canseco came up in 1986.

The iconoclast as willing idiot (UPDATED)

Jack Shafer is a contrarian. That usually makes his media column a valuable read. But in his latest offering, he pushes so hard against the conventional wisdom that he comes off as obstinately perverse.

In praise of tabloid TV

If you read HLN’s transcripts from Nancy Grace’s shows about the Zimmerman case, you’ll absorb enough information about how the criminal justice system works to write a MOOC on how to defend or prosecute a murder case. Most of what a layman needs to know about police investigations, police interrogations, witness rights, evidentiary standards, jury selection, and courtroom strategy can be found in Grace’s shriekings and those of her commentators. A week’s worth of her Zimmerman coverage probably contains as much civic education as any half-dozen Frontline documentaries on PBS.

Any one who has watched Nancy Grace in action knows that this is bull.

First, Frontline documentaries actually uncover and convey information to their audience. The cable tabloid shows are all about holding an audience when you have little or no information to impart.

Related:

Cable news, vox populi, and professional sleaze

Cable news: get it fast, get it wrong

Media's Shifting Business Model

Nancy Grace differs from her sleazy competitors only in the particular and malignant bias she brings to the story. When Grace sets her sights on a defendant, truth and fairness go out the window. The facts presented and the commentary are as fair and balanced as a Stalinist show trial.

UPDATE:

Jay Rosen replies to Shafer here:

Criticizing CNN: Goodbye to that

Also Dan Gilmor:

CNN’s transition is now complete. The entire channel is basically a version of the Nancy Grace show.

Which raises a question for Comcast, et. al. Why  are cable customers forced to pay for both networks when they have merge-morphed into the same channel?

James Joyner:

Shafer is right: journalism is a first and foremost a business and ignoring the wants of the audience is a surefire way to go out of business. But, at some point, you’re no longer in the news business at all. And it’s quite possible CNN has reached that tipping point.

Hey, MSM! The Watergate lessons still hold true

Today's news:

Lookout List’ Not Much Broader Than Originally Thought, Contrary to Reports

Acting IRS commissioner Danny Werfel on Monday told reporters that the now-infamous “Be On The Lookout” list was far broader than was originally disclosed in the Treasury Department inspector general’s report. Reports from outlets including the Associated Press, which I cited in my original report, and now Bloomberg News, confirmed Werfel’s account, indicating that various versions of the list not only included terms like “tea party,” but also “progressive,” “Occupy,” and “Israel.”
=========
Based on the lookout list examined by NRO, however, it is inaccurate to say that progressive and liberal groups were subjected to the same or similar scrutiny as tea-party groups, or even that a surprisingly broad array of criteria was applied to screen applications for tax exemption.

Those useful lessons:

We also have the same bread crumbs the Washington Post followed when they were the only paper on the Watergate trail:

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

The last four days make this David Halberstam quote especially pertinent:

Time was on the side of Woodward and Bernstein. A story like Vietnam or Watergate has a balance of forces of its own. At first the charges are deniable, the existing structure holds, powerful men with powerful positions can keep their troops in line. All the weight is on one side, and reporters like Woodward and Bernstein are a tiny minority, seeming puny by comparison. But there is the momentum, The denials slowly weaken, events undermine the denials so there have to be more denials, and each denial is a little weaker than the previous one. … Slowly the people who are issuing denials lose credibility, and the reporters begin to gain credibility.

Our corrupt press

This is why Comcast/MSNBC should have sent David Gregory to Cleveland.

David Gregory tries to read Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian out of the journalism club

It's obvious yet so few are willing to say it

Why Latinos All Vote GOP

It’s gratitude for the amnesty bill signed by Reagan in the 1980s.

This logic brought to you by your local establishment GOP stooge.

Amanda Knox

Barbie Latza Nadeau on the latest twists of the case:

Italian Court Explains Why It Overturned Amanda Knox’s Acquittal

This is a stubborn fact that the American media often ignores:

Rudy Guede, a native of the Ivory Coast, was convicted for his role in Kercher’s murder in October 2008 in a fast-track trial that lasted just one month. Even though he was tried alone, he was convicted as one of a group of assailants, and was never considered by any court to have acted as a lone wolf.

If Guede did not act alone, then who was with him? The investigation did not turn up any evidence of another intruder in Meredith Kercher's apartment.

Romney-Rubio

The Republican Oblivion Tour

The Veiled Anti-American Sentiment of Open Borders Politicians

Look, many of us are willing to accept that there is a targeted and finite labor shortage in specific sectors. But to suggest that at a time when there are millions of Americans looking for jobs, there is also a labor shortage that even the 55 million new immigrants and guest workers in this bill cannot satisfy, is simply asking us to suspend our commonsense.

What is really driving this indefatigable push for mass amnesty, precipitous immigration, and open borders is the desire on the part of big business for an endless supply of cheaper workers – be it low, middle, or high skilled. As the inimitable Thomas Sowell explains in his recent column, Economics vs. Need, we all have desires that are communicated in terms of “needs.” The Ag industry says it needs millions upon millions of immigrant workers. But that need, especially to the degree to which they are exaggerating it, is nothing more than a desire for government to guarantee them a maximum wage support, much like the price support scheme they are getting in the upcoming farm bill.

Rick Santorum and the Type A voters

Symbolism is important, too. As Santorum observed, it matters that a candidate secures the endorsement of average people and puts a spotlight upon them. This is really Politics 101, but somehow a lot of Republicans have forgotten it, deeming it silly or condescending. (Or maybe they’re worried their opponents will label them condescending.) It’s not that the Romney campaign was utterly devoid of such supporters, but he didn’t use them effectively. And he had a tendency to say things that played into his biggest weakness, like the “47 percent” comment, or his observation that he was “not concerned about the very poor.” There was more to the context of these remarks than the killer sound bites extracted by the media and Obama’s campaign team… but when will Republican candidates learn that they don’t control the transmission of “context?”

Marco Rubio can save his career by answering two simple questions

1. What was the name of the idiot aide?

2. At what time did you fire him?

Rubio aide on immigration: Let’s face it, some American workers just can’t cut it

UPDATE:

Looks like Rubio would rather be temporary buds with Chuck Schumer than have a future with the GOP.

Who knew that Kristie Kreme was his role model.

Rubio Doubles Down into Disaster

This Aide to Marco Rubio Really Isn’t a ‘Star Performer’

History is a trickster (UPDATED)

In 2008 Ross Douthat wrote an essay in the Atlantic on Hollywood's nostalgia for the 1970s. In it he noted that "the thing that actors and directors seemed to miss the most about the 1970s—the mood of the decade, the mix of paranoia and pessimism and ambivalence about America itself."

The ’70s were in many ways dreadful years for America, but they’re remembered much more fondly in the film industry. There’s no surer way to establish your artistic (and political) bona fides than to name-drop a ’70s movie—whether it’s George Clooney bringing up All the President’s Men (1976) while promoting Michael Clayton, or Stephen Gaghan remarking that of course he was “thinking about The Parallax View and also Three Days of the Condor” while making Syriana. The suggestion is always the same—that the age of leisure suits and sideburns was also the high tide of politically engaged filmmaking, before the studios embarked on the relentless pursuit of the blockbuster and the Reagan reaction pushed American culture steadily to the right.

So now, Hollywood has a public mood suffused with "paranoia and pessimism". The only problem is, the emblematic figures of the age are not glowering old squares like Nixon, Mitchell and Haldeman. The Second Golden Age of Decline is happening under the unwatchful gaze of Hollywood favorites Obama and Clinton.

UPDATE:

Ed Driscoll notes that Hollywood might get a bigger does of pessimism than they bargained for.

Hollywood ‘Completely Broke.’ But That’s Good News, Right?

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

"It all started with a third-rate break-in into a reporter's computer..."

June 18, 1972 Revisited?

GOP future: It’s not the “messaging”

This is an insightful analysis by a semi-insider of the Romney campaign.

Gabriel Schoenfeld: A Bad Day on the Romney Campaign

In my e-book, A Bad Day on the Romney Campaign, I try to account for a long chain of mistakes that led the campaign to misfire in the middle of the national-security crisis that erupted in Cairo and Benghazi on September 11, 2012. As I attempt to show, the errors made in that episode did not happen in a vacuum. Rather, they were one of the consequences of a vision of American politics embraced by Romney and his top strategists. The problem before them in the quest for the presidency was, at its core, conceived of as an advertising and marketing challenge.

That vision of politics failed and the consultants Romney hiredif not political consultants as a classare now fighting for their livelihoods, if not their lives. “Should We Shoot All the Consultants Now?” was the title of a panel discussion held at a recent conservative conclave. As that blunt question makes plain, at least some Republicans comprehend that turning politics into nothing more than a subsidiary of the advertising and marketing business, as the Romney campaign attempted to do, is the path to repeated failure.

Yet so strong is the Republican death wish that the RNC’s blueprint for the future is more of the same.

But the trouble is that the consultants are deeply entrenched in the Republican Party. And they are using their entrenched position to fight to retain their grip on resources and power. Evidence of their struggle can be found in the Republican National Committee’s Growth & Opportunity Project, the official Republican autopsy on the Romney campaign.

The RNC postmortem does not beat around the bush. Politics, in its vision, is the art of best matching a candidate’s positions to the preferences of voters as those preferences are revealed in polls and focus groups. To this end, great weight is placed in the report on the urgency of gathering ever more information about the electorate. In particular, explains the report, “we need to know what language is most likely to motivate a donor or a voter and convert them into a vote for Republican candidates.” To discover exactly the right collection of wordsthe magical incantation for getting votes, the “use of data and measurement is critical.”

Yes, indeed. Let’s have more of the stuff that did not work last time.

But wait, this time it will be different because… BIG DATA!!!

To implement this technocratic vision, the RNC recommends that the Republican Party become a “data-driven” party. To accomplish this, a high priority must be that “voter and volunteer data, fundraising and donor data, digital data, consumer data, and media habits” all be integrated, analyzed, and made accessible to candidates by means of “application programming interfaces (APIs).” These APIs in turn can be used to “facilitate more user interfaces (UIs) to address all manner of campaign function and level of sophistication including file selections, modeling and analysis, and the feedback of touch-point and response to marketing initiatives.”

Such technobabble continues for pages of the report.

The RNC’s “vision’ is not just bad, unprincipled politics; it is also short-sighted, ignorant marketing.

Our country’s greatest presidents, from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan, did not need to bend to the whims of the electorate. By dint of their principled statesmanship, they bent the electorate to their will. They educated it. They persuaded it. They brought it along. They certainly did not need application programming interfaces to get elected and to accomplish what they accomplished. Nor did Abraham Lincoln need to hire a “messaging professional” to write the Gettysburg Address.

Advertising great Bill Bernbach would agree whole-heartedly:

We are so busy measuring public opinion that we forget we can mold it. We are so busy listening to statistics we forget we can create them.

If we are going to talk about politics and marketing, Bernbach has couple of lessons the GOP might want to ponder.

I think the most important element in success in ad writing is the product itself. And I can’t say that often enough. Or emphasize it enough. Because I think a great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it’s bad.

Advertising doesn't create a product advantage. It can only convey it.

Mary Wells Lawrence, another legend of advertising and marketing agrees:

Great advertising, the kind that works, almost always comes out of the product you are going to advertise

It is no surprise that the RNC and its consultants want to ignore these fundamental insights. They cast a bad light on the GOP consultant-pundit class and the campaign they ran in 2012.

For instance, you don’t need to crunch through terabytes of data to know that President Obama’s greatest vulnerability was the economy and jobs. The Romney campaign made this issue #1.

The fatal flaw in this strategy was simple: Mitt Romney was the worst possible candidate to raise that issue. His ties with Bain Capital and the off-shoring jobs was a tremendous negative and made him less than credible as a tribune for the American worker. His frequent gaffes (“I like to fire people”) made the problem worse.

This is not Monday morning quarterbacking. Romney’s vulnerabilities on this point were apparent over a year before the election:

Numbers that should scare Mitt Romney and the tools at Fox News

These numbers also suggest that Romney could be terribly vulnerable to Obama in the general election. Big donors might like his resume, but voters might find it repellent. His personal connections to outsourcing, Wall Street, and management snake oil could prove fatal.

I think we might have seen a a preview of the problem here in Pennsylvania in 2010. At the end of the campaign, the Sestak campaign hit Pat Toomey hard on the "jobs to China" issue. It seemed to get traction. Toomey ran 3.5 percentage points behind Corbett (the Republican candidate for governor). He squeaked out a win (51%-49%) against an underfunded candidate in a profoundly Republican year.

So that makes it look like Pennsylvania is out of reach for Romney.

Even more scary for the GOP is the way that Toomey under-performed across the board. He trailed Corbett in blue-collar Democratic counties like Allegheny and Beaver. He also saw a similar drop-off in hard-core conservative areas like Adams and Armstrong counties.

That suggests to me that Romney might have a problem recapturing all the Bush states that flipped in 2008 (like Ohio).

The issue that fired up the conservative base was Obamacare. Here again, Romney could not take full advantage of this issue because he had signed Romneycare as governor of Massachusetts.

Despite these two enormous weaknesses, the “professionals” kept telling us that Romney was the most electable candidate in the primaries. This does not reflect well on the “professionals” professional competence.

Once again, not everyone was fooled by the emperor’s new clothes (see here.)

Is it unfair to mention that some of the professionals who are promoting the Big Data solution had a hand in this:

The Unmitigated Disaster Known As Project ORCA

Orca aground: Romney’s high-tech ‘Get Out the Vote’ failure

Related:

Conservatives and messaging

Conquest's Law

Some leaks or more equal than others

Jack Shafer:

Edward Snowden and the selective targeting of leaks

Yet even as the insults pile up and the amateur psychoanalysis intensifies, keep in mind that Snowden’s leak has more in common with the standard Washington leak than should make the likes of Brooks, Simon and Cohen comfortable. Without defending Snowden for breaking his vow to safeguard secrets, he’s only done in the macro what the national security establishment does in the micro every day of the week to manage, manipulate and influence ongoing policy debates. Keeping the policy leak separate from the heretic leak is crucial to understanding how these stories play out in the press.

Secrets are sacrosanct in Washington until officials find political expediency in either declassifying them or leaking them selectively. It doesn’t really matter which modern presidential administration you decide to scrutinize for this behavior, as all of them are guilty. For instance, President George W. Bush’s administration declassified or leaked whole barrels of intelligence, raw and otherwise, to convince the public and Congress making war on Iraq was a good idea. Bush himself ordered the release of classified prewar intelligence about Iraq through Vice President Dick Cheney and Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to New York Times reporter Judith Miller in July 2003.

I think he is exactly right with his conclusion:

The willingness of the government to punish leakers is inversely proportional to the leakers’ rank and status, which is bad news for someone so lacking in those attributes as Edward Snowden. But as the Snowden prosecution commences, we should question his selective prosecution. Let’s ask, as Isikoff did of the Obama administration officials who leaked to Woodward, why Snowden is singled out for punishment when he’s essentially done what the insider dissenters did when they spoke with Risen and Lichtblau in 2005 about an invasive NSA program. He deserves the same justice and the same punishment they received.

Related:

Do we know there's a war on?

The looking glass war

Mark Steyn is still right

He wrote this last year after Mohammed Merah murdered seven people in France.

Lather, Rinse, and Repeat

The killer of French schoolchildren and soldiers turns out to be a man called Mohammed Merah. The story can now proceed according to time-honored tradition:

Stage One: The strange compulsion to assure us that the killer is a “right wing conservative extremist,” in the words of NRO commenter ExpatAsia, echoed by Chrisman and Galt’s Bain. Up north, this view was shared by Canada’s most prominent establishment Jew and the Liberal Party attack poodle Warren Kinsella (whom NR readers may recall from my free-speech cover story, which mentioned the groveling apology he was forced to make to “the Chinese community” after an unfortunately sinophobic cat joke). The insistence that the killer was emblematic of an epidemic of right-wing hate sweeping the planet is, regrettably, no longer operative. Instead, the killer isn’t representative of anything at all.

So on to Stage Two: Okay, he may be called Mohammed but he’s a “lone wolf.” Sure, he says he was trained by al-Qaeda, but what does he know? Don’t worry, folks, he’s just a lone wolf like Major Hasan and Faisal Shahzad and all the other card-carrying members of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves. All jihad is local.

On to Stage Three: Okay, even if there are enough lone wolves around to form their own Radio City Rockette line, it’s still nothing to do with Islam. I’m sad to see the usually perceptive Ed West of the London Telegraph planting his flag on this wobbling blancmange.

And then, of course, Stage Four: The backlash that never happens. Because apparently the really bad thing about actual dead Jews is that it might lead to dead non-Jews: “French Muslims Fear Backlash After Shooting.” Likewise, after Major Hasan’s mountain of dead infidels, shooting Raises Fears For Muslims In US Army Likewise, after the London Tube slaughter, British Muslims Fear Repercussions After Tomorrow’s Train Bombing Oh, no, wait, that’s a parody, though it’s hard to tell.

This is exactly the sequence we saw after the bombing at the Boston Marathon. With the brutal murder of Pvt. Lee Rugby, the perpetrators surrendered on the scene so we didn't have time for stage one. But the MSM followed steps two through four like well trained lab rats in a familiar maze.

Compare and contrast

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
"The Valley of Fear"

American Narcissus

Obama said that he liked being surrounded by people who expressed strong opinions, but he also said, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.” After Obama’s first debate with McCain, on September 26th, [campaign political director Patrick] Gaspard sent him an e-mail. “You are more clutch than Michael Jordan,” he wrote. Obama replied, “Just give me the ball.”

Related:

Benghazi: The high price of rampant knowingness

Bryan Preston busts a concern troll

If the Dems Really Believe Republicans are Going to ‘Overreach’ on the Obama Scandals, Why Don’t They Just Let Them Do It?

If Axelrod et al really believed that the scandals would result in real Republican overreach, they would just let it happen. Just sit back and watch the fun. Pop some popcorn. Because it would save his pal Barack and all their mutual friends from the quagmire they’re all in. And because he’s paid to help Democrats, not Republicans. Just follow the money that flows to Axelrod, and observe common sense.

If his enemy is destroying itself, why would Axelrod get ever think of getting in its way? Hm, Dave? Why? Where did that altruistic streak come from all of a sudden?

With all this “overreach” noise, David Axelrod is acting guilty, as if he has something to hide.

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

The IRS gets to use tax payer dollars.

‘Rogue’ IRS agent who wrote threatening letters gets promotion

President Obama may have promised “to hold the responsible parties accountable” for the Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative non-profit groups, but one of the agents at the center of the scandal was recently promoted, an IRS source tells The Washington Examiner.

UPDATED: IRS tax exemption/Obamacare exec got $103,390 in bonuses; Did Obama OK them?

Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS executive in charge of the tax exempt division in 2010 when it began targeting conservative Tea Party, evangelical and pro-Israel groups for harassment, got more than $100,000 in bonuses between 2009 and 2012.

More recently, Ingram was promoted to serve as director of the tax agency's Obamacare program office, a position that put her in charge of the vast expansion of the IRS' regulatory power and staffing in connection with federal health care, ABC reported earlier today.

Lois Lerner gets taxpayer funded vacation – paid administrative leave

What do you give Lois Lerner, an arrogant IRS official who totally blew her fifth amendment rights during congressional testimony? IF you are Obama, you give her a nice tax payer funded vacation of course.

"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."

Jerry Pournelle indirectly makes Orwell's point by bringing up inconvenient but relevant facts that are normally left out of MSM stories of the IRS scandals.

Ground Games and Education Credentials

It comes as no surprise to anyone who studies such matters that the IRS hounded Tea Party and Patriot get out the vote organizations, and President Obama won re-election largely through the operations of Democratic get out the vote activities. When I was in the campaign management business, I always stressed the importance of what we called the ground game – getting voters willing to vote for your candidate actually to do so.

-------

The Obama election strategy was to attack Romney and discourage Republican voters. Since it was obvious that the 2010 Congressional election was dominated by the Tea Party and Patriot groups, and had been obvious since 2004 that Patriot and Tea Party Get Out the Vote organizations were the shock troops and mainstay of the Republican ground game, it took no Presidential order to get the unionized IRS public employees to understand the stake they had in this game – even if the IRS Acting Commissioner had more recorded official visits to the White House than the Secretaries of State and Defense combined during the year leading up to the 2012 election.

Battle of Midway

Some great stuff over at the Naval History blog.

Sharing the Naval History Narrative: Battle of Midway

I blogged about Midway here, here, and here.

We still need better media critics

Three lies in nineteen words.

NPR’s On the Media tackled the Obama scandals and the media coverage surrounding them.

The Three-Headed Scandal Monster

Actually OtM tackled the “scandals”: Like the White House they decided that there was no there there.

Unfortunately, their incisive commentary rested on a foundation of ignorance and disinformation.

The IRS scandal centers on a feckless, unsupervised, overworked office in Cleveland tasked with assessing a group's nonprofit status.

That is an astounding sentence. Brooke Gladstone manages to make three mistakes in 19 words. She is even confused about the location of the IRS office. Anyone who has spent fifteen minutes on this story knows that the IRS office was in Cincinnati, not Cleveland.

The rest of Gladstone’s work leads me to believe that she did not spend even fifteen minutes researching the story. The piece sounds like she read the early journolist talking points dismissing the matter and decided to do a story about media-driven summer “scandals”.

In other words, a news anchor calls something a scandal without quotes, a newspaper puts it in a headline and it's a scandal because we say it is.

Had Gladstone really tried to keep up with the story she would have known that the “overworked” and “unsupervised” excuses were now inoperative. Nor would she have suggested that the Tea Parties were over-reacting:

The IRS Chief, later fired, said that the profiling wasn’t political. Keywords were used to shortcut the process. And it turns out some liberal groups with “progress” in their names were mistreated too.

Gladstone did not want to analyze the story as it unfolded. She had other objectives.

If you want to do a piece of high-brow agit-prop explaining that your boy friend in the Oval Office did nothing wrong--- COULD DO NOTHING WRONG--then those obsolete lefty talking points were all the research you need. They are just the thing to reassure your listeners that the “scandal monster” was the creation of those mean, old Republicans.

The NPR bubble is a wondrous thing.

Just a coincidence, I'm sure

Ace:

"The System Worked:" Former EPA Head Lisa Jackson Hired by Apple, Which Was Just Beaten Up By Democratic Politiicans

Obama and Nixon (UPDATED:

Ryan Lizza tried to bring perspective to this weeks Reliable Sources:

LIZZA: Can I just -- at the risk of being in the position of the scandal I care about is more important than the scandal you care about, the IRS and Benghazi are very important. Long-term, though, what the Justice Department did the search warrant, they crossed a line that no administration has ever crossed. The Nixon administration didn't do it, the Bush administration considered doing it and there was an uproar --

(CROSSTALK)

KURTZ: And in talking about that line, let's make that line bright, red, and clear. This search warrant referred to James Rosen, widely respected FOX News correspondent, as a co-conspirator or potential co- conspirator. He hasn't been charged. He's not going to be charged. It was a way of getting at his e-mails to track this leak investigation.

That in and of itself is a sea change you're saying?

LIZZA: It's a sea change. I would challenge the last parted of that, Howie. I think if you look at all -- everything they did in the early parts of this investigation, they were pursuing a criminal conspiracy between James Rosen and Kim. Some people are saying, oh, they were never going to charge Rosen to begin with. I'm not so sure about that. If you read the language of the warrant, they were saying this guy is engaged in espionage with the State Department official and we've got to go get his e-mails.

If you look at what separately they went into federal court and they said we can't tell Rosen ever about the search warrants because we may need to go back and monitor his e-mail account indefinitely if we find evidence of further crimes.

So, that's the line that they crossed. They suggested that potentially you could indict a member of the media for doing routine reporting.

John Mitchell's DOJ never tried to criminalize reporting. J. Edgar Hoover wasn't willing to use the Espionage Act to go after leaks like the Pentagon Papers. No FBI man was willing to go before a judge and claim that Jack Anderson was a dangerous spy.

If Nixon had had Eric Holder, Ronald C. Machen, Jr, Bob Mueller and Special Agent Reginald Reyes on his team, there would have been no need for the Plumbers. No Plumbers, no "White House horrors", hence no White house cover-up of the Watergate break-in.

No impeachment.

Eric Holder believes that Nixon could have got what he wanted legally.

It's bizarro world.

UPDATE:

Obama 'worse than Nixon' for press freedoms

President Barack Obama is the biggest threat to press freedom, one of the hallmarks of a true democracy, the United States has seen since former President Nixon, according to attorney James Goodale, widely seen as “the father of reporters' privileges.”

Goodale is best known for using the First Amendment of the US Constitution to successfully defend the New York Times after the paper published the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

Benghazi: The high price of rampant knowingness

A couple weeks ago I posted this:

How we live now: The rule of the inept experts

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.

I suspect that this is one of the reasons for the Benghazi disaster. Three clews for consideration by your inner Sherlock:

Benjamin Rhodes. Failed novelist. Key national security advisor.

ABC’s reporting revealed that Ben Rhodes, who has a masters in fiction from NYU, called a meeting to discuss the talking points at the White House on September 15, 2012….

Ben Rhodes, a 35-year old New York City native and former Giuliani staffer who has worked for Obama since the president’s tenure in the U.S. Senate, has established himself as a hawkish force on the Obama foreign policy team, advocating for military intervention in Libya during the president’s first term and reportedly advocating for intervention in Syria, as well.

But despite his hawkish views, Rhodes identifies himself first and foremost as a strategist and mouthpiece for the president’s agenda.

Tommy Vietor. Bus driver. NSC spokesman. Decision-maker?

The Counterterrorism Security Group: Not convened

Under presidential directive, an interagency task force called the Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG) is to be convened when emergency terrorist events are suspected. According to a public military document, it's part of a plan to "synchronize the efforts of all the government agencies that have a role to play in the Global War on Terrorism." But on Sept. 11, 2012, the Obama administration did not convene this body of terrorism expert advisers.

One official associated with the State Department now acknowledges that the CSG would probably have advised decision makers that FEST "was not just backup generator and radios." Said the official: "the CSG could have made the argument, they were upset that they weren't heard." Another former Defense Department official says he finds no merit to using the CSG. "I'd like to hear them say what they could have done."

Last October, National Security Council (NSC) Spokesman Tommy Vietor told CBS News that the CSG wasn't needed because consultations were quickly underway at the highest levels. He indicated that, under the Obama administration, the function of the CSG has become a "lower level group" that "does different tasks" than under the Bush administration. "From the moment [President Obama] was briefed on the Benghazi attack, the response effort was handled by the most senior national security officials in government. Members of the CSG were of course involved in these meetings and discussions to support their bosses," said Vietor.

However, absent the CSG's collective advice, there's evidence that some high-level decision makers were unaware of all available resources. In October, on a phone call that included then-Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough (now White House Chief of Staff), Vietor initially told CBS News: "I don't know what [FEST] is... it sounds antiquated."

Bryan Preston (a one man Woodward and Bernstein on this story):

By the way, this National Security Council spokesman, Tommy Vietor, does not hail from the military or any intel agency or even the State Department. He’s a lifelong Obama loyalist who started out as Barry’s bus driver.

We’re in the very best of hands, indeed.

The man in the Oval Office:

American Narcissus

But Obama’s faith in his abilities extends beyond mere vote-getting. Buried in a 2008 New Yorker piece by Ryan Lizza about the Obama campaign was this gob-smacking passage:

Obama said that he liked being surrounded by people who expressed strong opinions, but he also said, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.” After Obama’s first debate with McCain, on September 26th, [campaign political director Patrick] Gaspard sent him an e-mail. “You are more clutch than Michael Jordan,” he wrote. Obama replied, “Just give me the ball.”

In fairness to Obama, maybe he is a better speechwriter than his speechwriters. After all, his speechwriter was a 27-year-old, and the most affecting part of Obama’s big 2008 stump speech was recycled from Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, with whom he shared a campaign strategist. But it’s instructive that Obama thinks he knows “more about policies on any particular issue” than his policy directors. The rate of growth of the mohair subsidy? The replacement schedule for servers at the NORAD command center? The relationship between annual rainfall in northeast Nevada and water prices in Las Vegas?

How Barack Obama’s ‘Tone’ Left Americans Defenseless and Abandoned in Benghazi

Barack Obama and many of his supporters believed that his election to the presidency would essentially end the war on terrorism. That belief rears its head here. What other tasks besides counterterrorism and security should the Counterterrorism Security Group be doing? Why was it pushed down the food chain? What are its current tasks? If they’re not counterterrorism and security, why does it still exist?

Tommy Vietor keeps turning up conspicuously in the Benghazi scandal, in part because the president sets the tone. Obama’s loyalist bus driver was heavily involved in the talking points discussion, playing the pivotal role of looping the State Department into what started as a vetting of intelligence-based talking points and quickly became a political discussion. The eventual outcome of that was a product that was useless on the facts, misleading to the public, but helpful to Obama and his tone on terrorism….

Here we’re seeing the effect that even just setting the tone is having. Barack Obama really believes that his election was so transformative that it would end the war. It hasn’t, but this president consistently downplays terrorism and demotes its importance in his government to convince Americans that it has. His government plays games with words and organizational charts to wish the war away.

When crisis struck and one of his ambassadors may have become a hostage to jihadists, the choices that flowed naturally from the tone Obama had set had serious consequences. Four Americans including that ambassador were murdered.

Related:

Is it possible that David Brooks was wrong?

Remember Dealer-gate?

Michelle Malkin from 2009:

The statistical gurus at financial blog Zero Hedge have taken a hard, long look at the question of Dealergate and cronyism. They’ve made their preliminary findings available here. Using regression analysis, they tackled the relationship between dealership survival and Clinton donor status – and found a significant correlation

See also here.

Michael Barone in 2011:

Punishing enemies and rewarding friends -- politics Chicago style -- seems to be the unifying principle that helps explain the Obamacare waivers, the NLRB action against Boeing and the IRS' gift-tax assault on 501(c)(4) donors.

They look like examples of crony capitalism, bailout favoritism and gangster government.

One thing they don't look like is the rule of law.

Hmmm. Vast governmental power wielded to punish enemies and reward friends. It is almost as if the IRS scandal is not the first time this White House has played this game.

In the words of Auric Goldfinger:

Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: 'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action.'

Making (big) government work

Jonah Goldberg:

Obama's "Idiot" defense

But, suddenly, when the administration finds itself ensnared by errors of its own making, the curtain is drawn back on the cult of expertise and the fantasy of statist redemption. Early on in the IRS scandal, before the agency's initial lies were exposed, David Axelrod defended the administration on the grounds that the "government is so vast" the president "can't know" what's going on "underneath" him. Of course, it was Obama who once said, "I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors."

That is, when things are going relatively well. When scandal hits the fan, he goes from "the government is us" to talking of his own agencies the way a czar might dismiss an injustice in some Siberian backwater. The hubris of omnicompetence gives way to "lighten up, we're idiots."

This brings to mind a point David Gelernter makes in his book 1939: The Lost World of the Fair

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

Gelernter offers us a picture of what ‘genius’ looks like in the person of New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia.

La Guardia the crusading and compassionate liberal was also in the habit, when he witnessed city workers great or small behaving incompetently, of firing them on the spot. (Sample story: He finds a group of park workers lounging during working hours. He fires sixty of them for "loitering.") The city is to be run tautly, seriously, and whining drives La Guardia the crusading liberal crazy. I pay no attention, he declares, to "political whiners." Merit is a sacred idea to La Guardia the compassionate liberal.

I suspect that La Guardia would not have found out about Lois Lerner’s campaign against conservatives by listening to MSNBC. Nor would he have stopped with routine expressions of outrage.

At a Lower East Side relief station, La Guardia dropped in unaccounted. He was enraged by lackadaisical bureaucrats he discovered. A supervisor wandered over to see what the fuss was, and mistook the visitor for another out-of-work troublemaker. The mayor knocked the hat off his head. 'Take off your hat when you speak to a citizen."

BTW, La Guardia fired his surly, lazy bureaucrat on the spot.

OTH, maybe the White House reacts as it does because its big government liberalism differs from La Guardia’s crusading, compassionate, and pragmatic liberalism.

James Pierson offers an interesting take on liberalism’s evolution over the last half century in Camelot and Cultural Revolution. He argues that FDR/La Guardia style liberalism has been replaced by “Punitive Liberalsm.”

In the years after Kennedy’s death, liberals recast their understanding of reform from an instrument of progress to an instrument of for punishment…. The idea developed that the nation deserved punishment and chastisement for its manifold failures to live up to its stated ideals. From this point of view, reform was called for as an instrument for corrections.

---

The new liberals now held that Americans had no good reason to feel pride in their country’s past or optimism about its future. The began to argue that the purpose of national policy was more to punish the nation for its sins than to build a brighter and more secure future for all.

For a punitive liberal, the IRS did exactly the right thing to exactly the right people.

Mark Steyn on the Woolwich attack

To the Slaughter
British lions come up lambs in Woolwich.

To David Cameron, Drummer Rigby’s horrific end was “not just an attack on Britain and on the British way of life, it was also a betrayal of Islam. . . . There is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act.”

How does he know? He doesn’t seem the most likely Koranic scholar. Appearing on David Letterman’s show a while back, Cameron was unable to translate into English the words “Magna Carta,” which has quite a bit to do with that “British way of life” he’s so keen on. But apparently it’s because he’s been up to his neck in suras and hadiths every night sweating for Sharia 101.

It is worth noting that politicians rarely make these reflexive defenses of other faiths when their adherents place them in a bad light.

How many non-Catholics race to the microphones to remind us that a few bad priests should not tarnish the image of the Church?

Related:

The root causes of Islamaphobic hysteria

Re: Victoria Nuland

Ace:

It's very odd how those who lie are promoted and those who tell the truth are demoted.

Truly the tweet of the day

#fact DOJ had more surveillance of @JamesRosenFNC than Tsarnaev brothers.

HT: Instapundit

Related:

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

Speaking of Dunn:  In light of the DOJ actions, are we sure that she was really being ironic when she proclaimed her Mao love?

Why does Candy Crowley still have a job?

And why is CNN treated as a serious news organization?

Austin Bay:

Four Pinocchios: A Cute Way of Saying Obama Lied

Glenn Kessler, who writes the Washington Post's fact-checker column, now informs his readers that the president's claim he called the Benghazi attack an "attack of terrorism" rates four Pinocchios. That's Kessler's cute way of calling our president a complete and thorough liar.

So now that claim is the worst sort of falsehood according to our professional fact checkers. What are we to say about Candy Crowley’s debate “moderation” when she “fact-checked” those lies as though they were true and Mitt Romney was misleading the public?

And remember—her network and most of her media peers supported her actions.

CNN circles the wagons (UPDATED)

Susan Rice and the Talking Points

This Politico story purports to explain why Amb. Susan Rice was the sacrificial lamb who who had to go on five Sunday talk shows to push the discredited talking points.

Why Hillary Clinton didn’t do Sunday shows after Benghazi

Throughout the piece Glenn Thrush puts the most benign interpretation possible on the facts in front of him.

Why did Hillary refuse to do the interviews?

“[Hillary] has a standing refusal [to do Sunday shows]. She hates them. She would rather die than do them,” said one aide on condition of anonymity. “The White House knows, so they would know not to even ask her.”

Could Hillary have political reasons for avoiding interviews where Benghazi would be topic 1, 2 and 3?

None of the officials was willing to speculate on why the secretary wouldn’t make an exception after such an extraordinary event — or whether Clinton had wanted to avoid a controversy that could have compromised her political future.

Thrush asked three people, couldn't get an answer, and decided to drop the subject. See, that's big league journalism, boys and girls.

Why Susan Rice?

Rice, who was close to the president’s team and regarded as a disciplined messenger who could be relied on to the deliver the talking points without going off message.

Thrush takes no notice of Rice's past history which might have made her the ideal choice for the White House's purposes:

Susan Rice and Benghazi

Our fearless journalist does give us two nuggets of pure gold. First, Rice was asked to "take one for the team" by "her friend Ben Rhodes, an influential National Security Council aide entrusted with Benghazi push-back duties." That would be the same Ben Rhodes who is the brother of the president of CBS News.

The second nugget explains why General Petraeus was a bad choice to repeat the talking points:

It was common knowledge around the West Wing and Foggy Bottom that Petraeus thought the sanitized talking points — scrubbed of references to Ansar al-Sharia, a Libyan group suspected in the attack, at the request of a Clinton subordinate — were “a joke” and “utterly useless,” as one former administration official told POLITICO.

In a September 15th email obtained by CBS News, Petraeus wrote that “he doesn’t like the talking points” and he would prefer the administration “not use them.”

So the White House knew that the head of CIA thought the "CIA Talking Points" were a joke after State got through revising them. Yet, they sent Rice out there to repeat the "utterly useless" talking points.

And no one at the White House was willing to force Hillary Clinton to stand behind those talking points after her department turned them into a joke?

Thrush never raises the possibility that Hillary shared Petraeus's view of the revised talking points. That's a shame. It seems like an important question.

Why Benghazi is not Watergate

Last June, the Washington Post convened a series of panels to discuss Watergate on the fortieth anniversary of the break-in. Fred Thompson was on one of the panels and said that four factors caused Watergate to end in Nixon’s resignation. (Watch here)

1. An aggressive press eager to pursue the story.

2. Deep Throat--A highly placed source whose leaks could keep the story alive and moving forward.

3. John Dean’s public testimony.

4. The Watergate tapes--Incontrovertible evidence of Nixon’s wrong-doing.

It is no surprise that Benghazi lacks heft as a scandal because the MSM has been anything but aggressive. Most of it has been bored by the story and too lazy to dig into the details. A significant minority has advanced the White House’s spin and abetted the cover-up.

They are happy to play the role of scandal condom for the Obama administration.

If we look at Thompson’s other points, it is clear that Benghazi has ripened faster than the Watergate scandal. We have three public whistle-blowers who are not tainted as Dean was by participating in the cover-up. Gregory Hicks, Mark Thompson, and Eric Nordstrom are willing to tell their stories in front of the Congress and the whole world; they eschewed anonymous leaks and late night meetings in parking garages.

We also have the same bread crumbs the Washington Post followed when they were the only paper on the Watergate trail:

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

The last four days make this David Halberstam quote especially pertinent:

Time was on the side of Woodward and Bernstein. A story like Vietnam or Watergate has a balance of forces of its own. At first the charges are deniable, the existing structure holds, powerful men with powerful positions can keep their troops in line. All the weight is on one side, and reporters like Woodward and Bernstein are a tiny minority, seeming puny by comparison. But there is the momentum, The denials slowly weaken, events undermine the denials so there have to be more denials, and each denial is a little weaker than the previous one. … Slowly the people who are issuing denials lose credibility, and the reporters begin to gain credibility.

Benghazi ARB: The return of the modified, limited hang out

Victoria Toensing:

Administration Relying on Shoddy Benghazi Report to Absolve Itself of Blame

Powerline:

Accountability, Clinton style