Category Archives: Media Criticism

The Official Explanation For Gun Walker

…is entirely false:

This is no longer about a ‘sting operation gone bad’ but a deliberate, sinister attempt to manipulate gun statistics in Mexico for political gain.

Given the outcome of effective acts of war on a neighboring country without congressional approval, and many dozens of deaths, on both sides of the border, sounds like a “high crime and misdemeanor” to me.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s more.

[Another update a couple minutes later]

And more at Pajamas Media, uncovered-Obama-scandal central.

The Middle East

Walter Russell Mead just got back, and has a report, apparently the first of more than one:

President Obama fell into a trap when he made a settlement freeze a precondition for talks. Secretly, both Israelis and Palestinian leaders are, I think, delighted that the US is now so tangled up in this demand that it has lost most of its influence over negotiations. The Palestinians are happier than the Israelis; it looks to world opinion as if it is Israeli intransigence on the settlement issue that is the chief obstacle to peace. But the Israeli government — while angry at Obama for making them look even worse than usual to much of the world — is also relieved that the settlement demand is so unpopular in Israel that Prime Minister Netanyahu pays no domestic political price for rejecting it.

This is what happens when one puts a naif in the White House because he gives pretty speeches, and has a nice crease in his pants.

[Update a while later]

Lest anyone think from the excerpt that I provided that it is all about bashing the current president and not bother to read it, I’ll add this as well:

Each of the last three US presidents made poor decisions that have made this tangle worse. President Clinton had good intentions and many accomplishments to his credit, but his final, foolhardy rush to peace in the closing months and days of his administration was perhaps the worst decision made by any US president on this issue since the controversy began. His goal should have been to shore up a faltering peace process rather than pushing it to a premature climax. The failure of his peacemaking effort was predictable and expensive, and the absence of a legitimate peace process has been a serious problem in the region ever since.

President George W. Bush inherited a bad situation and made it worse. On the one hand, he inflamed Arab and world opinion by a confrontational approach on a range of issues and serial failures in both the development and presentation of policy alienated friends and antagonized enemies. His record was not entirely bleak; he managed to nudge the Israelis back toward some kind of negotiating posture and his strengthening of Palestinian institutions and the promotion of a strong West Bank economic miracle helped to reduce tension. Nevertheless, the US agenda was in worse shape when he left office than when he first took the oath.

President Obama added his own contribution to the record of failed US initiatives. While I personally agree with him that an extendable settlement freeze would greatly simplify the task of getting a good peace negotiation going, in the real world to make that demand was to lose all initiative on the issue — and to miss the opportunity to get the Israelis to make less dramatic but quite useful concessions in its place. He has allowed Prime Minister Netanyahu to outmaneuver him diplomatically and in US politics more than once. The US president’s optimistic speeches about building bridges to the Muslim world fell hollow and flat after he linked that effort to progress on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute which his own errors placed out of reach.

Really, read the whole analysis. It’s long, but worth it.

Every Single One

Pajama Media has been very lonely, but very diligent, in uncovering the massive politicization of the Justice Department in this administration. If it were a Republican administration that had packed the department with conservatives, rejecting all others, the New York Times would be caterwauling about it every day, and Pulitzers in the offing for the people who uncovered it. But for this? Not so much.

The Good Life

Why does it end?

When poverty is defined as relative want rather than existential need, states decay and societies decline. In the fifth century, Athenians were content to be paid to go to the theater; by the fourth, they were paid also to vote — even as they hired mercenaries to fight and forgot who won at Salamis, and why. Flash mobbing did not hit bulk food stores. The looters organized on Facebook through laptops and cell phones, not through organizing during soup kitchens and bread lines. Random assaults were not because of elemental poverty, but anger at not having exactly what appears on TV.

Obesity, not malnutrition, is the affliction at Wal-Mart. In our strange culture, that someone drives an overpriced BMW apparently means that our own Toyotas don’t have air conditioners or stereos. But that John Edwards or John Kerry or Al Gore has a huge house doesn’t mean that mine is inadequate — or the tract homes that sprout in my community for new arrivals from Mexico are too small.

Of course, the elite have responsibility to use their largess wisely and not turn into the Kardashians. But that a fifth of one percent of the taxpayers are finding ways not to pay at the income tax rate on their large incomes does not hurt the republic as much as 50% of the population paying no income tax at all. The latter noble sorts do not bother us as much, but their noncompliance bothers the foundations of our society far more than that of the stingy, but minuscule, number of grasping rich.

Yup.

The New Deal Was “A Wrong Turn”?

Of course it was.

It’s apparently politically unacceptable to point out that truth, but that’s largely because of decades of political indoctrination in state-run lower and higher education. We were taught in school that Roosevelt “saved capitalism,” which always struck me as a similar phrase to the Vietnam-era “we had to destroy the village to save it.” It started us down the wrong road, and we’re rapidly approaching a cliff if we can’t bushwhack our way back to the right path.