My piece at PJM is up now. It got delayed because the story is moving so fast I had to do a bunch of updates this morning after writing it last night.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
An Elderly Anti-Semitic Racist
You’d almost think that Jeremiah Wright was the guy who shot up the Holocaust Museum. I’ll have some more thoughts on leftist/media stereotyping at PJM later this morning.
[Update late morning]
“Socialism represents the future of the west.”
So sayeth the “right wing” Jew hater.
[Bumped]
[Update after lunch]
It just keeps getting better. The guy may have been targetting that well-known bastion of leftist politics, The Weekly Standard. And of course, none of us should be shocked to learn that he was a journalism major…
The Left’s Hatred Of Women
Thoughts from Don Surber:
From left, the women are Katharine Harris, Carrie Prejean, Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, and Michele Bachmann.
These five women are are not the only ones that American liberals ridicule without fear. They are like little boys who cannot handle a strong woman. These women dare challenge them intellectually, and so we get crude counterattacks.
So-called feminists stand on the sidelines like so many Silda Spitzers or Elizabeth Edwardses or Hillary Clintons, standing by their menfolk while the boys treat women like dirt. Heck, Mrs. Edwards even served as her husband’s attack dog against any critic — even as she knew he was sleeping with his mistress of many years.
It’s kind of ironic, because I recall back in the nineties that these same people stupidly told us that we didn’t like Hillary Clinton because we were “threatened” by a “strong woman” (hilariously ignoring our admiration of Jeanne Kirkpatrick and “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher).
He gets this wrong, though:
Letterman will get away with it because liberal misogyny is OK in America. It has the Seal of Approval of the National Organization For Women.
It’s not “liberal” misogyny. These people aren’t liberals, and it’s time we stopped allowing them to get away with slandering true liberals by calling themselves that.
Impromptus
FAQ advice from Jay Nordlinger, on Che, what classical music to listen to, and how to be a journalist. A sample:
I wrote to a Latin America scholar — a superb one — and he said the following: “At one time, I was collecting stuff about Guevara to write a piece of my own, but the subject is so nauseating . . . as if I had to write an article explaining why the Nazis were bad.” Yet such articles are necessary: because the myth-making about Che is strong and mesmerizing. My scholar friend continued, “Are you aware of the fact that there are busts and statues of Che Guevara not just in Central Park but in Vienna and other European capitals?”
Yes, but those busts and statues can be taken down, mentally — with truthful accounts and assessments. With fantasy-puncturing. There is plenty available, for those who wish to see (to see beyond the T-shirt, that is).
My own advice: visit Che-Mart.
He also has an awesome set of classical recommendations, if you’ve never been into it that much.
Which Is Worse?
I don’t think Obama realizes — or, more frighteningly, perhaps he doesn’t care — what this spending is going to do to the economy. After all, the free market is just a rival power center. As Tim Noah says: ‘On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details.”
I’ll have more thoughts on this Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy tomorrow at PJM.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Glenn’s post was motivated by Megan McArdle’s thoughts on deficits, and who to blame for them:
The problem with the budget deficit is not any particular program, or even any particular tax cuts. It is not that George Bush or Obama is a bad person who does bad things. The problem with the budget deficit is that, unlike the deficits George Bush ran, the deficits projected under Obama (and beyond) are actually large enough to potentially precipitate a fiscal crisis. If our interest rates suddenly spiked up, perhaps because lenders were worried about the size of our budget deficits, we’d find ourselves in the kind of nasty fiscal jam that regularly plagues third-world countries. The difference is, no one has enough money to bail us out.
Obama is the one who will have to prevent this. Yet instead of plans, we’re getting fairy numbers from the OMB. That’s worrying, and it’s sure not George W. Bush’s fault. His OMB liked to inflate the deficit projections, so that they could take credit for a mostly imaginary reduction.
It’s almost like he wants to wreck the economy.
The Liberal-Leftist Mind Set
One of Jonah Goldberg’s readers nails it, I think:
Political thought can be described as a straight line with communism occupying the far left position, fascism the far right.
While I’m in agreement with a lot of its positions I’m not a socialist. For instance, I think some income inequality is probably necessary. And while there are parts of communism that I agree with, there are also parts that I have significant misgivings about, like the relative lack of press freedom and free speech.
There is almost nothing I find appealing or I’m in agreement with when it comes to conservatism.
My own views are pretty centrist. I may lean a little to the left but there isn’t anything extreme about my politics, and besides most of the people I know have similar opinions so I must be pretty solidly in the center.Conclusion:
If I’m in the center, and can find more common ground with communism than conservatism then conservatism must be pretty far to the right; if not exactly fascist very much in the same neighborhood.
Note the false premises that lead to the conclusion, starting with the very first one (which has at least two — the notion that politics is expressible on a single-dimensional axis, and that fascism is the opposite of communisim on such an axis). Another is that such views are “centrist” (a term that again implies that there is a single line to be in the “center” of).
But as Jonah says, their problem is that they don’t understand their own intellectual history, and most of them think that “progressivism” and “liberalism” (neither of which term really applies to their belief system) started in the sixties, when they think about it at all.
“Stimulus”
…the 1930s Keynesian model that was used to sell the idea of fiscal stimulus to Americans was eliminated from economics decades ago.
And this abandonment of Keynesian multipliers does not reflect any ideological or partisan issues that divide conservatives and liberal economists. Rather, it is because the old Keynesian model does not come anywhere close to meeting today’s standards for economic analysis…
…modern economic analysis shows that the impact of government spending on the economy depends on what it is being spent on and how it ultimately is paid for.
The upshot of this new research is that multipliers are nowhere near the numbers that were cited in support of ARRA and, in fact, can be negative, depending on how the spending is ultimately financed. Robert Lucas, the 1995 Nobel laureate in economics who specializes in macroeconomics and government policy, recently remarked that the promise of large multipliers presented by private macroeconomic consulting firms in support of ARRA was “schlock economics.”
One of the infuriating things about the rush to passage of that disastrous legislation was the continual lies, from people like Ed Rendell, and Chuck Schumer and others, that most economists agreed that it was essential to recovery when, at best, there was merely a consensus that something should be done to soften the blow of the financial implosion, but not ARRA. And the media, of course, never called them on it. And of course, the president and others trotted out their usual straw men, and false choice, saying that anyone who didn’t want to implement that legislative atrocity wanted to do “nothing.”
Simply suspending the payroll tax for the rest of the year would have been a lot more effective, and cost a lot less, without creating this huge new tidal wave of debt in the out years.
[Lunchtime update]
Rasmussen: 45% say cancel the rest of the stimulus spending. Only 36% disagree. Expect that number to go higher. And that’s not “adults.” It’s likely voters. Democrats will ignore this at their peril next election season.
And note this:
A plurality of government employees believe speeding up the stimulus will be good for the economy. However, those who work in the private sector strongly disagree.
In other words, the people who understand how the economy works (because they’re the ones who make it work) are opposed to this, while the people who get their money from it are in favor. The goal of the Big Government party (on both sides of the aisle) is to increase the latter and decrease the former, not understanding that, eventually, this will cause the collapse of the nation.
[Another update a couple minutes later]
Here’s a nice visualization:
Presidential Misogyny
Speaking of American Sharia, why does Barack Obama have it in for Muslim women?
You haven’t told your parents, but you don’t want to be a Muslim anymore. You hate wearing the hijab and would tear the damn thing up — but you’re afraid of another beating. You don’t discuss Islam with your father — the beating put a stop to that, too. Your friend Susan doesn’t know about the beating, but she says it’s wrong to make you wear the hijab. “This is America. You have rights. Women are equal here.”
True, you think, and we’ve got a new president, Barack Obama. He’s not right-wing, like George Bush. He’s a Democrat who believes in equal rights. He’s black, an outsider, so he’ll know how you feel. And some of his family are Muslim. He says he wants to reach out to Muslims. He’ll speak for you. Then you hear his Cairo speech:
It is important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practicing religion as they see fit — for instance, by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear. We cannot disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretense of liberalism.
You laugh. Not the carefree laugh of your childhood, but a hollow, bitter laugh.
He panders to Islamist sensibilities at the cost of the rights of half the population of “the Muslim world.”
A Warning To Republican Conservatives
Beware of extremists! And principles:
The moderate is the lifeblood of any viable political party. There is no winning without attracting their capricious support. The moderate, though, is a delicate flower that must be cultivated carefully. Its one goal in life is to appear reasonable, but there is no reasonableness that accompanies the adamant demands of conservatives. The conservatives keep asking that the Republican Party abide by its own ideals, but nothing — nothing — scares away moderates like steadfast principles.
Luckily, the Republicans have a friend like Colin Powell to prevent the destructive influence of conservatives and their beliefs. Powell is the ultimate moderate. When his party nominated a squishy moderate for president last year that the base had to hold its nose to vote for, he still voted for the other party. Now that is a moderate we can all learn from. He knows exactly what the American people want: two parties virtually indistinguishable from each other. That way if people ever begin to dislike one party, they can just vote for the other as a protest without having to worry about it differing from their values.
Eventually, people are going to dislike the Democrats — maybe thinking they’re going too far on spending (or not far enough) — and then Powell’s Republican Party will be waiting there as a completely innocuous alternative.
Conservatives could not see this simple wisdom, though. Rush Limbaugh (or “Fatty Fat Fat Stupid Druggy Fat Fat,” as I like to call him) had to pick a fight with Powell. His firm stances on issues scare away moderates like light startles cockroaches (cockroaches who often vote, mind you). All Rush did was point out the differences conservatives have with Powell — like how he supported Obama, is pro-choice, and is for bigger government. If Rush (who is fat and does drugs) had any actual concern for the party, he’d focus on what Powell and conservatives have in common like … uh … um … how they both don’t wear pants on their heads. Can’t we build a party around commonalities like that?
I think that Ross Perot tried it. Except toward the end, he was almost to the point of wearing his pants on his head.
The Dauphin Of Detroit
Some are grumbling about Deese’s lack of relevant experience. (He has driven a car and once slept in the parking lot of a GM plant!) But the real issue isn’t Deese’s resume. The real issue is why anyone should have the power to “rewrite the rules of American capitalism.” Unlike Deese, Treasury Secretaries Paulson and Geithner are men of experience. But what kind of experience could justify the immense, arbitrary power they’ve exercised in the wake of the financial meltdown? Experience centrally planning the global economy?
Deese’s embarrassing rawness is actually welcome, for it draws our attention to the invidious inequalities inherent in a government with unconstrained discretion. Deese isn’t going to pick the colors for the Chevy Malibu. But he could. And Obama can tell us that Congress won’t dictate which factories GM should close. But it will.
Liberals used to care about inequalities in power—and they were right to. Because equality of power ensures freedom. Being equal in our basic rights, no one has a natural right to rule over another. This kind of liberal egalitarianism is the root of the prohibition on titles of nobility found in the American Articles of Confederation. It is also the root of the very idea of limited government—the idea that a government’s power is legitimate only if it is carefully parceled out, well-checked, and limited in scope to tasks only a government can perform.
The answer is simple: they’re not liberals and haven’t been in a long time, if they ever were.
[Update a couple minutes later]
The prescience of Robert Heinlein — he saw the future of the US auto industry.