Category Archives: History

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Rewriting History

7 Comments

No, WaPo, Richard Nixon was not impeached:

Obama ends his fifth year in office with lower approval ratings than almost all other recent two-term presidents. At this point in 2005, for example, former president George W. Bush was at 47 percent positive, 52 percent negative. All other post-World War II presidents were at or above 50 percent at this point in their second terms, except Richard M. Nixon, whose fifth year ended in 1973 with an approval rating of 29 percent because of the Watergate scandal that later brought impeachment and his resignation.

The resignation was to avoid impeachment (and removal) — he resigned because a group of senators from his own party went to the White House and told him that he’d be convicted if impeached. Because Republicans have the integrity to remove their bad apples, while Democrats circle the wagons around theirs.

Anyway, I’ll bet the reporter who wrote that wasn’t even born at the time.

History, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

Shards

2 Comments

A new essay from Bill Whittle:

Anduril reminds me that there is no Greatest Generation. There is no sword broken; there is no Golden Age lost and locked in the past. There are only shards lying before us, waiting for us to gather the will to reforge and wield them. It’s a decision, not a doom or a destiny, and we have to make it every day.

I don’t know if we can stop the destruction of everything we love in this world. I don’t know that we can destroy this all-seeing eye that seems to watch us all now, day and night, in this once-free land. I don’t know if all of my efforts will amount to anything at all, in the end, and I don’t know if yours will either.

I only know that every day I will make a decision to do everything I can to make sure my land, my realm, my America does not fall into darkness today.

Read all.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

White House Youth

6 Comments

This isn’t creepy at all.

What color shirts do they get to wear?

[Update a few minutes later]

Related: ObamaCare and the totalitarian mindset:

Suppose some inventor hatches an idea for what he thinks would be a great and revolutionary new product. He raises money from investors, sets up office, hires people–and fails spectacularly. The company’s customer service is atrocious, the product is expensive and lousy, and the whole business plan is fundamentally flawed. Who’s to blame?

The news media, of course. After all, journalists could have put out stories touting the virtues of the product and explaining how to navigate the crummy customer-service system, and maybe then the whole business plan would have worked out.

That, at any rate, is the argument Paul Waldman puts forth in an article for the leftist American Prospect. Of course being a good leftist, Waldman is not blaming the media for the failure of a private business. But then neither would any nonleftist. Yet because the enterprise in question is a governmental one–ObamaCare, in case you’ve been away from Earth for the past two months–the argument somehow makes sense to him.

We find it not only wrongheaded but sinister (in every sense of the word). Waldman argues that journalists have a “responsibility” to provide “audiences with practical information that could help them navigate the new system”–and not just that, but to provide such information “repeatedly or people won’t get it.”

Remember, as the Democrats told us last year, government is the only thing we all belong to.