Media’s day of reckoning over Obama long overdue
Rex Murphy, in Canada’s National Post, says something out loud in a major media publication that many of us have been saying since before the last presidential election:
As the bad economic news continues to emanate from the United States — with a double-dip recession now all but certain — a reckoning is overdue. American journalism will have to look back at the period starting with Barrack Obama’s rise, his assumption of the presidency and his conduct in it to the present, and ask itself how it came to cast aside so many of its vital functions. In the main, the establishment American media abandoned its critical faculties during the Obama campaign — and it hasn’t reclaimed them since.
Much of the Obama coverage was orchestrated sychophancy. They glided past his pretensions — when did a presidential candidate before “address the world” from the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin? They ignored his arrogance — “You’re likeable enough, Hillary.” And they averted their eyes from his every gaffe — such as the admission that he didn’t speak “Austrian.”
The media walked right past the decades-long association of Obama with the weird and racist pastor Jermiah Wright. In the midst of the brief stormlet over the issue, one CNN host — inexplicably — decided that CNN was going to be a “Wright-free zone.” He could have hung out a sign: “No bad news about Obama here.”
The media trashed Hillary. They burned Republicans. They ransacked Sarah Palin and her family. But Obama, the cool, the detached, the oracular Obama — he strolled to the presidency.
Note the point here. It isn’t that they didn’t do their job on everyone, it’s that they essentially abrogated their responsibility for only one. His point about Palin, regardless of how you feel about her, is dead on. The difference between the treatment of the two is what proves Murphy’s point and validates what many of us have complained about since then.
The media pitched both their credibility and any claim to objectivity under the bus and, to use a Texas Holdem term, went “all in” for Obama.
Murphy spends some time on the Palin/Obama comparison and clearly he’s hitting the crux of the problem with that comparison. We went from the one side where detrimental news was ignored with Obama to a veritable media feeding frenzy where rumor was as good as fact and everything that might possibly hurt a candidate was published.
He concludes:
As a result, the press gave the great American republic an untried, unknown and, it is becoming more and more frighteningly clear, incompetent figure as President. Under Obama, America’s foreign policies are a mixture of confusion and costly impotence. It is increasingly bypassed or derided; the great approach to the Muslim world, symbolized by the Cairo speech, is in tatters. Its debt and deficits are a weight on the entire global economy. And the office of presidency is less and less a symbol of strength.
To the degree the press neglected its function as watchdog and turned cupbearer to a styrofoam demigod, it is a partner in the flaws and failures of what is turning out to be one of the most miserable performances in the modern history of the American presidency.
Irresponsibility has consequences, and I agree with Murphy, the press shares a great deal of responsibility for the election of Barack Obama and the resulting disaster he is as a president.
The media destroyed itself in that election cycle and has really done nothing to regain what shred of credibility it had previous to that time. It still, in many ways, aids and abets this administration’s incompetence.
I’m not sure how they can win back their tattered credibility and the media certainly has no claim to objectivity after that performance. I have to agree, in terms of the media, that it has to be in at least the top 3 “ most miserable performances” … not of the presidency, this one is in the top spot for miserable performances … but of the media in a campaign. And I’m having trouble thinking of the other two that might outrank the disgraceful 2008 media performance.
~McQ
Twitter: @McQandO
Observations: The QandO Podcast for 21 Aug 11
In this podcast, Bruce and Dale discuss Rick perry, the Obama jobs plan, and much more.
The direct link to the podcast can be found here.
As a reminder, if you are an iTunes user, don’t forget to subscribe to the QandO podcast, Observations, through iTunes. For those of you who don’t have iTunes, you can subscribe at Podcast Alley. And, of course, for you newsreader subscriber types, our podcast RSS Feed is here. For podcasts from 2005 to 2010, they can be accessed through the RSS Archive Feed.
Observations: The QandO Podcast for 14 Aug 11
In this podcast, Bruce, Michael, and Dale discuss The Ames Straw Poll and the 2012 election.
The direct link to the podcast can be found here.
As a reminder, if you are an iTunes user, don’t forget to subscribe to the QandO podcast, Observations, through iTunes. For those of you who don’t have iTunes, you can subscribe at Podcast Alley. And, of course, for you newsreader subscriber types, our podcast RSS Feed is here. For podcasts from 2005 to 2010, they can be accessed through the RSS Archive Feed.
Observations: The QandO Podcast for 12 May 11
In this podcast, Bruce, Michael, and Dale discuss Weinergate, Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney.
The direct link to the podcast can be found here.
As a reminder, if you are an iTunes user, don’t forget to subscribe to the QandO podcast, Observations, through iTunes. For those of you who don’t have iTunes, you can subscribe at Podcast Alley. And, of course, for you newsreader subscriber types, our podcast RSS Feed is here. For podcasts from 2005 to 2010, they can be accessed through the RSS Archive Feed.
McCain– Palin can beat Obama
Someone, somewhere has to understand that whatever John McCain says, one should bet their house on the opposite:
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has said he thinks Sarah Palin could defeat President Obama in next year’s presidential election, but he’s far from certain that she will actually jump into the race.
The GOP’s standard-bearer in 2008 also shrugged off his former running mate’s poor standing in many polls, saying she would have the opportunity to turn that around if she did make a bid for the White House.
If Newt Gingrich has more baggage than Delta Airlines, Sarah Palin isn’t far behind. Not necessarily because she earned all the baggage, although she’d done her fair share of contributing to the pile, but right or wrong, she’s loaded with it. While she is and can remain a force in GOP politics, the presidency isn’t in her future. And that’s especially so if John McCain, whose campaign was instrumental in helping the woman begin her baggage collection with the inept way she was handled, says so.
Frankly I’d love to see someone on the Republican side drive McCain to an early retirement (ok, not so early, certainly not early enough, how about just retirement). He’s had his day and needs to be out of the scene. A man more concerned with “campaign finance laws” than free speech has no business in government in a free country.
As for Sarah Palin – rabble-rouse lady, make the left squirm, do all the things you do so well right now. You do that well and I love to see them prove almost daily that they embody what they claim is endemic to the right. The irony is sweet. But run for President? That type of movie is still running in Washington DC as we speak and I don’t care to see a sequel.
Somewhere out there in this great land there has to be someone better than the present GOP field, with or without Sarah Palin. Adding her to it doesn’t improve it one bit. John McCain saying she could beat Obama is as ignorant as many of the other things he’s said in the past, to include saying he prefers clean government over free speech.
Why anyone would give it credence at all is beyond me. All I can figure is Palin must have some pictures she’s holding that has McCain by the short and curlies.
I don’t know of a single well constructed poll anywhere which gives Palin even a ghost of a chance against Obama. So all one can figure is McCain pulled this out of the place his head usually occupies.
~McQ
Twitter: @McQandO
Palin is the Right’s Tank
In the online multiplayer game Final Fantasy, players must collaborate to get very far in the game. Individuals train up at the beginning by fighting weak mythical creatures, but taking on the powerful monsters they meet later requires teams with assigned roles.*
It’s all self-organizing; no one at the game maker assigns a player to a task. Players find roles they are good at, and team up with others who possess other skills.
Teams normally have an interesting role called a “tank”. This player has the capability to attract and hold a monster’s attention, absorb a tremendous amount of damage from the monster, and regenerate quickly from the damage. Other players use the distraction of the tank to attack the monster in various ways, and if the team does their job, eventually the monster succumbs to their combined efforts.
If you’re on a team with a tank, you don’t have to like the tank much. You just have to appreciate the tank’s capabilities. Your main objective is to subdue the monster.
In my mind, this maps very naturally to the role of Sarah Palin in bringing down the monster of collectivism.
OK, OK, this sounds like the kind of high-falutin’, silly comparison that people like Maureen Dowd use for a cheap column in the New York Times. But attend me: this kind of metaphor is going to work a lot better with someone in their twenties than something we old guys would naturally use from a 1960s TV show.
I came around to this comparison as a way of explaining my own opinions of Palin to the younger set that hangs around with my sons. It’s sometime hard for me to explain what I like about her, because I’m not overly impressed with Palin’s leadership potential or her deep thinking about the issues. I haven’t seen much evidence that she possesses leadership or deep thinking in any great quantity.**
I am impressed, though, with her intuition, her courage, and her resilience. She absolutely refuses to be intimidated by the usual post-modern, politically-correct leftist BS. She absorbs anything the self-righteous Olbermann types can throw at her, laughs it off, and “punches back twice as hard”, to follow the advice of a well-known leftist.
The constant, withering attacks from legacy media do cause some damage to her image, according to various surveys and polls. However, she has a core group that regards every such attack as proof that she’s right. These folks have been looking for someone of consequence to tell the left-leaning media to pi$$ up a rope for a long time. The fact that it’s a woman doing it just adds to the frission.
Of course, there’s a core group on the left that regards her as beneath contempt and laps up everything the legacy media hands out. They are joined by the pusillanimous establishment Republican types who still quiver in fear that the Washington Post might say something negative about them, and go into a fan-waving fainting spell when they see someone with enough self-confidence and guts to not give a whit what the lefties at the Post think.
Both groups attack her regularly. Amazingly, though, after the attacks die down and Palin gets back to her tweets and Facebook postings, the damage seems to dissipate. Her unfavorable numbers oscillate around, but the key is that they do oscillate; they don’t go negative and stay there. Plus, the more illogical and mean-spirited attacks sometimes have the opposite effect of damaging the attackers and helping Palin.
So my message to those on the right who are not especially enamored of Palin is this: you need her. She’s the tank on the team. The leftist monster must be slain.***
I’m not the only one thinking along these lines, of course. I first mentioned the tank comparison in a comment at Legal Insurrection last week, and William Jacobson seems to be on the same general page in his post yesterday. This is just my way of explaining why we need her, even if we don’t think she’s perfect.
I have no idea what her chances to become president are, and at this point it’s too early to care. She’s certainly not my top choice, but she comes in well ahead of Mitt “Plastic Fantastic” Romney. (Mike “Worst of Both Worlds” Huckabee isn’t even on the list; if the GOP is stupid enough to nominate him, they might as well prepare for a third party).
As long as she’s highlighting the dishonesty and mendacity of the left, the overall bias of the media, and the cowardice and privilege-protecting mewling of the establishment GOP, she has my support. It will take a team to do what has to be done, and we need a tank. She’s the best one we have right now.
(*) I’ve never playing Final Fantasy, but as the father of two teen boys, it’s a frequent topic of conversation around the house. Actual FF players, please forgive my no-doubt incomplete understanding of the game’s concepts.
(**) Not that these are necessary attributes to be elected president, based on some recent examples.
(***) For civility-obsessed idiots, that’s a metaphor.
Palin, "blood libel", Krauthammer and the left–have we “completely lost our minds?”
What a mess. Watching the political world in the light of the Tucson tragedy has been disheartening and disgusting.
While the President’s speech last night was fine, the venue was awful. And T-shirts? Really? It wasn’t a pep rally, but it seemed like one (I’m primarily talking about crowd reaction). What a more somber Oval Office speech wasn’t proper enough?
And this Sarah Palin thing. Am I ever tired of Sarah Palin. That said, I’m even more tired of the left’s obsession with Sarah Palin. Now she’s in hot water in some oversensitive and uninformed quarters of the left for the use of the term “blood libel”, which apparently has been claimed as a “Jews only” term.
Nonsense. That’s like saying “holocaust” can’t be used except in reference to the horrific Nazi pogrom of WWII. When you have fools on the left, like Jane Fonda, accusing Palin of having “blood on her hands” (talk about irony), then “blood libel” seems more than an appropriate term for the accusations.
I think Charles Krauthammer said it best (via Daily Caller):
“[T]he fact is that even the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League in expressing a mild rebuke to Palin for using this admitted itself in its statement that the term ‘blood libel’ has become part of English parlance to refer to someone falsely accused,” Krauthammer said. “Let’s step back for a second. Here we have a brilliant, intelligent, articulate, beautiful, wife, mother and congresswoman fighting for her life, in a hospital in Tucson, and we’re having a national debate over whether the term ‘blood libel’ can be used appropriately in a non-Jewish context? Have we completely lost our minds?”
Apparently some of us have. Krauthammer also notes that given the unfounded and obvious political attacks by the left on Sarah Palin, she had every right to defend herself. However, when she finally issued her defense, the left had already been soundly “refudiated”:
“I found her speech unobjectionable, unremarkable but unnecessary,” he said. “Of course, anybody who is attacked as she was has the right to defend herself in public. However, it wasn’t as if others hadn’t counteracted the calumny about her and others being responsible in some way for the massacre in Tucson. By the time she had the video on her website, the debate was over. The left, which had launched the accusation, had been completely defeated, ‘refudiated’ if you like, and disgraced over this. There wasn’t a shred of evidence and the battle was over. I mean, it was a rout to make the Pickett’s Charge look like a draw.”
Palin is the left’s favorite target (there I go with that violent rhetoric again) and sometimes it’s just best – especially when it has been convincingly done – to let others fight the fight. That said, it most likely wouldn’t matter a whole bunch. She could just sigh loudly and someone on the left would object to her using more air than others.
I think what Krauthammer is trying to get across is if we’re serious about mourning those lost in Tucson and paying tribute to them, political attacks on others shouldn’t be occurring to begin with.
That said, the “politicization” horse left the gate long ago on this one. In fact, almost immediately after the shooting in Tucson, some on the left were already accusing Palin of being responsible. Then after stirring it all up, they had the temerity to accuse her of “it’s always all about Sarah”.
~McQ
Podcast for 07 Feb 09
In this podcast, Bruce, Michael and Dale discuss the unemployment numbers and Sarah Palin. The direct link to the podcast can be found here.
The intro and outro music is Vena Cava by 50 Foot Wave, and is available for free download here.
As a reminder, if you are an iTunes user, don’t forget to subscribe to the QandO podcast, Observations, through iTunes. For those of you who don’t have iTunes, you can subscribe at Podcast Alley. And, of course, for you newsreader subscriber types, our podcast RSS Feed is here. For podcasts from 2005 to 2009, they can be accessed through the RSS Archive Feed.
The National Political Scene
That scene is incredibly muddled and getting more muddled every day. In some ways, such as the Democrat retirements, it reminds me of the political atmosphere of 1994. Charlie Cook, who knows Democrats and their electoral chances, pretty much writes the Democratic Senatorial majority off as a dead loss after 2010:
Come November, Senate Democrats’ 60-vote supermajority is toast. It is difficult, if not impossible, to see how Democrats could lose the Senate this year. But they have a 50-50 chance of ending up with fewer than 55 seats in the next Congress.
When the Republican in the race for Teddy Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts is competitive, you know the electoral landscape has changed and just about anything is possible.
Of course, in terms of divided government, that’s very good news. The fact that it is Republicans, who for the most part, still don’t seem to have a clue, not so much. Of course that obviously depends on who the Republicans end up running, or winning, those seats. Florida’s race between Crist and Rubio is a good example. Crist is the moderate establishment (business as usual, McCain type Republican) while Rubio is more of the Tea Party conservative.
And it is there that the establishment Republican party seems to be missing the boat – again. After a sweeping victory by Barack Obama and the Democrats, the Republicans quite naturally tried to do a little soul searching and, for whatever reason, came to believe that their problem was they didn’t appeal to enough moderates. Yet in the year that has passed since the Obama administration has been in office and the Congress with prohibitive Democratic majorities has been wreaking its havoc, independents, who establishment Republicans choose to characterize as “moderates”, have been abandoning the Democrats in staggering numbers. And they’re looking for a place to go.
Why are they abandoning the Democrats? Because they bought into a myth a compliant and noncritical media aided and abetted concerning the new administration and now they’re seeing the radical truth. And they don’t like it.
However, what they don’t want is a merely less radical replacement. Democrat lite. What independents are in the middle of doing is rejecting, in toto, the Democratic agenda. Rasmussen and others have been providing these clues for months. In the latest Rasmussen poll:
With Democrats in majority control of both the House and Senate, it’s not surprising to find that 79% of Republicans are not confident that their congressional representatives are actually presenting their best interests, but 74% of voters not affiliated with either party agree. Democratic voters are evenly divided on the question.
74% of voters “not affiliated with either party agree” that their Congressional Rep (obviously that includes some Republicans) is not actually representing their best interests. Now that could be for any number of reasons, but on thing for certain, if 74% aren’t happy with their Rep, I’d guess they’re not happy with what the establishment Republicans are selling either.
Enter the Tea Partiers. First written off as brownshirts, angry whites, red-necks, un-American, ‘teabaggers’ and any other pejorative the left-wing thought it could get away with, the movement has grown into a political force. But make no mistake about it – it’s a populist movement. Regardless it has, to a large degree, managed to tap into this unhappiness with what is going on in Washington and give it some structure.
And what continues to astound me is the establishment Republicans seem to think that they “own” the movement – that when push comes to shove, this group will fall in line and vote for them.
Hello! Crist/Rubio!
There is going to be a war between the Teapartiers and the establishment Republican party. The Teapartiers don’t necessarily support or even like many of the establishment Republicans. As a result that war is going to be waged in primaries. And much like it was on the left (Lamont/Lieberman) it is a war for the soul of that party. Establishment Republicans really don’t seem to understand that – yet. So we see stories like this one where the establishment party is said to have “soured” on Sarah Palin. Love her or hate her, she represents as well as anyone, the populist nature of the movement that the Republicans don’t seem to yet understand. Add the stupidity of the leadership and the visible infighting within the establishment wing of the party, and you hold little hope that they will wake up in time to smell the roses and figure out the formula for electoral success.
What part of this don't Republicans get?
Where’s this all headed? To more polarized politics, if that is possible, with the sides much more differentiated – if the Teapartiers get their way. Republicans are going to be moved in a much more conservative direction, come hell or high water, if they want Tea Party support. And the Tea Party movement is going to attract (has attracted?) enough of the independent voters to make the electoral difference.
Conventional wisdom says the electorally successful win by appealing to their base, picking off enough independents to make the difference and then governing from the center. I don’t think that CW is valid anymore. It appears that the public has finally had the scales removed from their eyes with the present administration. The premise that a centrist government is what America wants has been overcome by events. Those events, products of that centrism, have given us the state of affairs with which we’re now afflicted – a welfare state with huge deficits, a debased currency and a behemoth government that is out-of-control. Listen closely to those who spoke up at the summer town halls. It wasn’t just about Democrats and Republicans, folks – it was about the direction of the country and the realization that both parties had participated in creating the horrendous mess we now enjoy.
All of that to say that CW is ready to be turned on its head and, in fact, people (to include independents) are demanding action to roll back government and reduce spending. That should be right in the Republican’s wheel house. Yet instead of really talking their supposed principles and actions to accomplish them, establishment Republicans still insist that it is more important to ensure they have a “big tent”. That is a complete sell out of their principles. The “tent” is established by those principles. What Republicans have to do is fashion a message that makes that tent attractive and brings people to them. That’s what will make it “big”. Compromising their principles to fill the tent is a sure way to lose – and that’s precisely what they’ve proven over the last few elections.
Politically, 2010 is going to be a very interesting year to watch. For libertarians, the best hope is divided government and a Republican party that rediscovers its primary principles and decides to live up to them. I think we’ll get the divided government. However, my concern is the midterms will see enough Republicans elected, despite themselves and their lack of a principled stand, that the important message about principles will continue to be lost on them – again. That will result in a Senate not much different than we have now, where compromise and collegiality are more important than principle and the people. That means big government, more spending and more deficit. And that means Republicans will remain the minority party and out of the White House in 2012.
~McQ
Laugh of the Day
We’ve had the “Quote of the Day” and the “Headline of the Day“, now its time for the “Laugh of the Day”.
It starts with McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt saying that it would be a catastrophe in 2012 if the GOP picked Sarah Palin as their candidate.
My question is compared to what?
John McCain?
Which segues perfectly into the laugh of the day – John McCain has decided he’s going to remake the GOP:
Fresh from a humbling loss in last year’s presidential election, Sen. John McCain is working behind-the-scenes to reshape the Republican Party in his own center-right image.
Good lord … that’s like Jimmy Carter wanting to reshape the Democratic party. McCain stands for everything that is wrong with the GOP today. If ever there was someone who found the wrong message for presenting the GOP to the voters, it was John McCain. And the economic problems the country has gone thorough since his defeat have only made his message less acceptable. Schmidt can bellyache all he wants about Sarah Palin, but without her McCain’s election night returns would have been much more dismal than they were.
Smaller and less intrusive government, fewer taxes and much less spending is what the GOP must put forward as its platform. John McCain, despite his claims to the contrary, does not represent that platform. And he’s not much of a friend of the First Amendment either. He is a big government Republican.
John McCain was rejected because he was seen as a light version of the Democratic candidate. Why compromise when you can have the real thing? Well now we’ve seen the real thing and voters aren’t going to want anything to do with the toned down “moderate” Republican model. And the base certainly won’t be enthusiastic about him. This is not the time for the GOP to even consider someone like John McCain or a surrogate if the GOP is at all serious about 2012. It’s time for a principled stand to reduce the size and intrusiveness of government and to let the citizens of the US retain more of what they earn and more control over their lives than they now do. Find a candidate to articulate that and lay out the freedom and liberty platform and the GOP has a decent shot in 2012 if what I think is going to happen happens.
John McCain is certainly not the candidate for that platform. Thank goodness, his day has passed. Where and even if Sarah Palin plays into this for Republicans remains to be seen. To many, she’s yet to prove she’s ready for the job. But it certainly isn’t too early now for the GOP to say ‘no’ to John McCain. It’s time for the GOP to take a chance and stand up as the party to return us to our small government roots. Maybe it’s just me, but it sure seems like the timing is right.
~McQ