Who's the bully?

Associated Press writer Connie Cass, in her story "Why can't Washington compromise? They're too human," chides House Republicans for "bullying" Obama and Democrats over the cuts scheduled if and when sequestration takes effect. She even quotes Barbara Coloroso, an expert on bullying. 

"Bullying is about contempt for the other person," Coloroso said. "Do you see how that fits with some of the people in Congress? Utter contempt, bullying, wanting to bring somebody down. You cannot resolve a major issue like a budget with name-calling, with disdain for the person you're supposed to be working with."

Some thoughts: 

• Barack Obama to Republicans questioning his stimulus plan, 2009: "I won." 
• Barack Obama to Republicans, 2009: "Shut up and get out of the way." 
• Republican input into the Obama stimulus plan and Obamacare, orchestrated behind closed doors and rammed through by Democrats when they controlled both houses of Congress: Zero.

Obama's and other Democrats' contempt and disdain -- bullying -- of Republicans was on fine display the last four years. Like "bipartisanship," such terms only get tossed around in the media when Democrats don't automatically get everything they want.

Spinning, Spinning

In what must be the bravest attempt ever by the media  to spin a story that I've ever read, the AP and Yahoo News headlined a story "Foreign policy at forefront is a Romney hurdle."

The disasters in foreign policy of the last week, and it's Romney's hurdle?? Not only the actual events themselves, which highlight the failure of Obama's softness toward Islamic extremism, but then the administration's response(s), which included a veiled condemnation of free speech. Add in the purposeful snub of Israel's Prime Minister at a time when Iran is on the verge of developing and deploying nukes toward that country. (These two aspects go together; if America were still perceived as a strong Israel ally, Iran's bravado might not be as blatant.)   

If anything, this past week should destroy anything that could possibly be perceived as Obama's foreign policy "expertise."  Consequences of his policies and actions ought to matter. Yet AP and Yahoo News spin it 180° so that -- once again -- Obama's blunders are invisible. 

Which is a more apt description, a comparison to "The Emperor's New Clothes" or "Don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining"?

The media, esp. NPR, are the Liars

The media have piled on Paul Ryan for his speech at last week's Republican National Convention.  While analyses of such a speech are to be expected, a large number of journalists have done everything but use the word liar to describe Ryan.  This fact was rammed home as I was driving last Saturday.  I happened to tune in to an NPR talk show/roundtable featuring Washington journalists. The host made the statement (paraphrased): "Never has a vice presidential candidate made a speech with so many things that are factually untrue."

I already addressed the Janesville GM plant. The rest of their points centered around nothing that was "factually untrue." Not a single thing. Not one. This is how their arguments went:

RYAN:  "You see, even with all the hidden taxes to pay for the health care takeover, even with new taxes on nearly a million small businesses, the planners in Washington still didn't have enough money. They needed more. They needed hundreds of billions more. So, they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama."
NPR:  "So does Ryan's plan."  (Note: They never disputed the fact that Ryan stated. They merely equated it with Ryan's Medicare proposal.)

RYAN: "He created a new bipartisan debt commission. They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way and then did exactly nothing."
NPR: "Paul Ryan was a member of the Simpson-Bowles Commission and he voted no on that report." (Note: They once again don't dispute the fact that Ryan states, but instead mention how he, one member, voted. And his vote would have made no difference.)

RYAN: "The first troubling sign came with the stimulus. It was President Obama's first and best shot at fixing the economy, at a time when he got everything he wanted under one-party rule. It cost $831 billion – the largest one-time expenditure ever by our federal government...What did the taxpayers get out of the Obama stimulus? More debt. That money wasn't just spent and wasted – it was borrowed, spent, and wasted."
NPR: "Ryan himself asked for stimulus funds shortly after Congress approved the $800 billion plan." Ryan did write letters requesting stimulus funds for Wisconsin entities. Here's his explanation: "After having these letters called to my attention I checked into them, and they were treated as constituent service requests in the same way matters involving Social Security or Veterans Affairs are handled.”  One of his aides said it better: “If Congressman Ryan is asked to help a Wisconsin entity applying for existing Federal grant funds, he does not believe flawed policy should get in the way of doing his job and providing a legitimate constituent service to his employers.” (Final note: Once again, NPR indicates no point of Ryan's statement which can be called "factually incorrect.")

The stance of NPR and the rest of the media -- "Well, we can't actually show anywhere that Ryan actually lied, but nonetheless he lied." 

Ryan's Right

The media wasted no time essentially calling Paul Ryan a liar after his recent speech at the Republican National Convention.  Salon and Yahoo both ran "fact checks" -- Salon even had the gall to call theirs the "definitive fact-check" -- that highlighted points where they (and their masters the Democrat Party) disagreed with Ryan. 

I'm focusing on one example of the egregious malpractice of the Liberal media.  They, along with Democrat carnies such as Al Sharpton, claim that Ryan's comment on Obama and the Janesville, Wisconsin GM plant is either "a lie" or "factually incorrect." 

Here's Ryan's comment: "My home state voted for President Obama. When he talked about change, many people liked the sound of it, especially in Janesville, where we were about to lose a major factor.  A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: "I believe that if our government is there to support you. this plant will be here for another hundred years." That's what he said in 2008.

Well, as it turned out, that plant didn't last another year." 

The various media and Democrat outlets claim that the GM plant shut down in December of 2008, before Obama took office, so he couldn't be blamed for its closing. Even without any defense at all, this point is light years away from showing where Ryan's comment was incorrect.

Here's the bigger problem.  From the Janesville Gazette, dated April 21, 2009:

The plant shut down three months after Obama took office.  He could have taken some action if that was what he wanted to do.  Ryan was correct, the people who disputed his point were wrong, they owe him an apology, and they should swear never again to use the words fact or lie.  

Reductio ad Klanum, in the mainstream media*

MSNBC "award winning journalist" and anchor Thomas Roberts reported that Mitt Romney's slogan "Keep America America" is similar to one the Ku Klux Klan used in the 1920s.  The report includes a graphic stating "ROMNEY'S KKK SLOGAN?"  Roberts made sure to include the fact that the slogan was "a rallying cry for the group's campaign of violence and intimidation against blacks, gays and Jews."  That darn Mormon Romney must have the same intentions, right?  At least that's what MSNBC implied.




* Or at least as mainstream as MSNBC can claim to be with its couple of dozen viewers.

About media bias

Rhetoric vs. Reality

Since racism's in the news

The Daily Caller -- admittedly a right-leaning website -- has recently posted a series of columns illuminating how Liberal media types conspired to promote the Liberal Democrat agenda, and Barack Obama's presidential campaign specifically. The series is explosive and revealing.


The media types, along with Liberal university professors and activists, were members of a now defunct listserv called Journolist. They would post comments in what they considered a private, safe and confidential environment, secure in the knowledge (or so they thought) that their posts would never see daylight. They were wrong.


Some of the participants:
Richard Kim - The Nation
Spencer Ackerman - The Washington Independent
Michael Tomasky - The Guardian
Thomas Schaller -- Baltimore Sun columnist and college professor
Jonathan Stein - Mother Jones
Jared Bernstein - eventual top economist for VP Joe Biden
Holly Yeager - Columbia Journalism Review
Joe Conason - columnist
David Greenberg - Slate contributor
David Roberts - The Grist
Todd Gitlin - journalism professor, Columbia University


Okay, you get the idea. These were people with influence. Literally hundreds of Liberal journalists were members of this listserv. The particular episode I want to address was what these folks did during the brouhaha over Jeremiah Wright during the 2008 campaign. Here are some examples of their postings during that time (with some summary.)

• Chris Hayes of the Nation urged "those in the ostensible mainstream media” who were members of the list.to ignore Wright.
• Spencer Ackerman: "What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear."
• Ackerman again: "...take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists."

Some members of Journolist, disagreed with the tactic, saying that such a gutter fight would hurt the Obama brand. Ackerman's response: "I'm not saying Obama should do this. I'm saying WE should do this."


Makes you rethink all the media talk about Tea Party racism, doesn't it? (And yes, Andrew Breitbart really did offer $100,000 to anyone who could produce a video of Tea Partiers calling black congressmen racial epithets at the protest against the healthcare legislation in March. That money remains unclaimed.)

The Daily Caller also reveals how these same media conspired to ruin Sarah Palin's 2008 VP candidacy. Check it out.

Interesting Thoughts

A twofer:

In his column "Fox Fever -- The Latest Pandemic" Larry Elder gives a bit of perspective on the supposed Conservative bias at Fox News.

In her column "Election 2009: Change I Can Believe In!" Ann Coulter makes a pithy observation: "...Conservatives are more popular than Republicans. By contrast, Liberals are less popular than Democrats. When Conservatives take control of the Republican Party, Republicans win. When Liberals take control of the Democratic Party, Democrats end up out of power for eight to 12 years."

The Sound of Distant Drums

Mirabile dictu, the Yahoo main page displays a headline of "What If Bush Had Done That?" with a link to the story on Politico.

The story's lead:

"A four-hour stop in New Orleans, on his way to a $3 million fundraiser.
Snubbing the Dalai Lama.
Signing off on a secret deal with drug makers.
Freezing out a TV network.
Doing more fundraisers than the last president. More golf, too.
President Barack Obama has done all of those things — and more.

What’s remarkable is what hasn’t happened. These episodes haven’t become metaphors for Obama’s personal and political character — or consuming controversies that sidetracked the rest of his agenda."

Yahoo has been an ardent anti-Bush, anti-Republican, pro-Obama website for a long time. The MSM may finally be coming to grips with the idea that they bought a pig in a poke when they backed (and covered for) Obama for president. We can only hope.

And So It Begins

Another Democratic U.S. senator has gone on record as supporting the reinstatement of the so-called "Fairness Doctrine," adding, "I feel like that's gonna happen." .

These are the words of Michigan Democrat Debbie Stebanow. also known as Mrs. Tom Athans, who was executive vice president of the left-leaning talk radio network Air America. He left the network in 2006, when it filed for bankruptcy, and co-founded the TalkUSA Radio Network. Athans refers to his network as a "viable alternative to Air America...Progressive Talk Radio is a viable format that has great commercial potential..."

Air America is the Liberal radio network that had lower ratings than reruns of static and which went bankrupt a couple of years ago (but not before its executives managed to rip off the Boys and Girls Clubs.)

So Senator Stebanow wants to introduce legislation that would eliminate her husband's competition.

Nope, nothing corrupt there.

Advocating A Jaundiced Eye

Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss won his run-off for the US Senate, preventing Democrats in Washington from achieving a filibuster-proof majority. Good news, but not the point of this post.

Deep in the heart of the AP story on Chambliss's victory comes this paragraph: "Chambliss came to the Senate in 2002 after defeating Democratic Sen. Max Cleland in a campaign that infuriated Democrats. Chambliss ran a TV ad that questioned Cleland's commitment to national security and flashed a photo of Osama bin Laden. Cleland is a triple amputee wounded in the Vietnam War." (Italics added.)

A few points here: 1) Max Cleland served America honorably in the military, and his wounds are tragic and regrettable. 2) The sentence about Cleland has nothing at all to do with Chambliss winning re-election. 3) Max Cleland's wounds were self-inflicted.

The short version of the story is this: Cleland picked up an American grenade on a routine noncombat mission and the grenade exploded. Cleland himself said: "I didn't see any heroism in all that. It wasn't an act of heroism. I didn't know the grenade was live. It was an act of fate." That is why Cleland didn't win a Purple Heart, which is given to those wounded in combat. That Cleland had been wounded in battle was clearly what the AP reporters were trying -- falsely -- to imply. Presumably, that would have meant that he should be immune from a tough campaign.

Even in a story that reports a positive result for Republicans, the AP reporters -- Greg Bluestein, Kate Brumback and Errin Haines -- felt compelled to put in a misleading and irrelevant passage to dilute one of the few bright spots for the Republican party.

When you read news stories from the "Associated Press," remember that those stories are written by reporters, the same ones that have shown such anti-Republican, anti-Conservative bias over the last several years. Read (and watch) the news with a jaundiced eye.