Category Archives: Media Criticism

Lies From The AP

The news service is attempting to rewrite history (again):

The administration of former US President George W. Bush had hastily linked Saddam Hussein, the ousted Iraqi dictator, to the 9/11 attacks.

That was one of the justifications for the 2003 US-led invasion, but the argument has since been widely dismissed.

No one in the administration claimed that Saddam was involved in 911, despite ongoing leftist lies to the contrary at the time, for which AP and others were happy to (and apparently remain happy to) be stenographers. The administration claimed operational links between Saddam and Al Qaeda, which did in fact exist.

The irony, of course, is that the reporter perpetuates this historical lie in the service of accusing Leon Panetta of a “gaffe.”

An Even Scarier Jobs Chart

Remember the one I showed this weekend? Well check this one out:

Scariest Jobs Chart Yet

I remember when James Carville demagogued Bill Clinton into office in 1992 with continuous lies that it was “the worst economy in fifty years.” Well, folks, this is the worst economy seventy years. And it won’t improve until we remove from office the people determined to keep wrecking it, who first took power five and a half years ago. There are a lot more scary charts at the link, if that’s not enough for you.

Stealing You Blind

How Government Fat Cats Are Getting Rich Off You:

A new book on corruption and rent seeking by my colleague at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Iain Murray, launches today.

[Update a few minutes later]

An explanatory editorial from the author.

…my new book, Stealing You Blind: How Government Fat Cats Are Getting Rich Off of You, doesn’t just talk about the excesses of government pay. It looks at how the modern American state has rigged the rules to support itself at our expense. The Internal Revenue Service is allowed to ignore the Constitution. Regulations cost our economy more than the federal deficit without anyone batting an eyelid, as they turn ordinary Americans into criminals. Worst of all, our education system has ceased to educate our children and now only works to benefit the education establishment—unionized teachers and administrators.

And teach them to allow the statists to continue to rob us blind.

The Crazy Years

Victor Davis Hanson reviews the last seven years:

…the mad hatred turned to the mad worship. Do we remember the great campaign of 2008? The madness now metamorphosized, as an obscure, heretofore unremarkable rookie senator became the Great Savior who would deliver us from Bush. Newsweek declared him a god; almost nightly we heard of leg tingles and speeches comparable to the Gettysburg Address. To doubt was racist, to really doubt was un-American. But now there was no shrieking, shrill Hillary Clinton to scream that such dissent was not really un-American.(She would soon charge that doubt about Libya was a sort of un-American support for Gaddafi.)

Denial was part of the madness. Bill Ayers and Rev. Wright were right-wing slurs. “No more disown Rev. Wright than…,” “typical white person,” “cling to their guns…” either never were uttered or were irrelevant. Soon the Pied Piper had everyone leaving Hamelin into the Weser. I rode a bike in the Palo Alto suburbs and watched as Obama signs on lawns were replaced each month by larger ones, until this “keeping up with the Joneses” reached billboard proportions — the more and larger they sprouted, the more the Stanford-affiliated community felt less guilty about never venturing into nearby downtown Redwood City or East Palo Alto.

The liberal press warned darkly of the dangerous months to come between November and January, the scary 80 days in which the discredited lame duck Bush might do terrible things (start another war somewhere like Libya? Make some dreadful Van Jones appointment?), until the savior came at last down from the mountain top. So we waited in terror until the danger passed and the salvation arrived in January. “Cool,” “competent,” “assured” were the media epithets; “reset” became the national motto.

In this second-stage madness, suddenly mediocrities like Timothy Geithner were deemed messiahs, tax-cheating or not. Tax-delinquents Hilda Solis and Tom Daschle were not quite tax delinquents. Geniuses like Peter Orszag, Larry Summers, Christina Romer, and Austin Goolsbee (as either formal or informal advisors), were going to apply Paul Krugman-like Keynesian borrowing (“stimulus”) to save us from the Bush “he did it” meltdown. Money was a construct and need not be paid back — whether at the Federal Reserve or at your own credit card, home mortgage, or tax problem level.

Relief was finally here. You see borrowing was not really printing money but a new sort of math in which the “people” would be saved from Wall Street chicanery by brilliant new stimulatory theories. Borrowing money “created” more money; spending “money” was stimulus that made even more money. Most of the debate centered around the pitifully small size of the new deficits: a three-year plan to print $5 trillion was deemed conservative or too timid by many of the Obama geniuses. Joe Biden, given his sterling credentials and vast knowledge (re: his call for Bush to rally the people — as FDR supposedly did as president “in 1929″ and “on television” no less) would oversee the trillion-dollar borrowing to ensure it was “shovel-ready.”

We only started to come to our senses last November. We still have a ways to go.

[Update a couple minutes later]

It’s the economy, stupid:

Last year, Obama used Pennsylvania’s Allentown Metal Works as a backdrop to tout his stimulus and job-creation success. A couple of months later, the plant closed.

Vice President Joe Biden told a Pittsburgh crowd that 250,000 to 500,000 jobs would be created each month by the start of last summer. The numbers never even came close.

To date, this administration’s handling of our economy is a failure.

“Excepting some unanticipated major event, the election will largely ride on the state of the economy and public perceptions of how Obama has handled it,” said Mark Rozell, a professor of public policy at George Mason University.

I never had confidence that these people knew their fundaments from a hole in the ground when it came to economics. What I don’t understand is why anyone did.