Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Obama’s Presidency

…and the government’s damaged brand:

Believing that government officials break the law is one thing; believing that they face no consequences when they’re caught and it becomes public is another. Not only is this a sort of “broken windows” signal to other bureaucrats — hey, you can break the law and get away with it — but it’s particularly damaging where the IRS is concerned.

America’s tax system, despite the feared IRS audit, is fundamentally based on voluntary compliance. If everyone starts cheating, there aren’t enough IRS agents to make a dent. Beyond taxes, that’s true regarding compliance with the law in general. Moral legitimacy is what makes honest people obey the law even when they can get away with breaking it. Undermine that and you get a country like, say, Italy, where tax evasion is a national sport.

Meanwhile, there’s another bit of bad news buried in that poll, this time for Democrats. The bad news is that a majority of Americans thinks the IRS broke the law even though the news media have consistently downplayed the scandal. But as the scandal has dragged on for months, word has filtered out anyway. Come 2014, the government’s damaged brand will reflect poorly on members of the president’s party, regardless of media efforts to protect them.

Let’s hope.

Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Your Hockey Stick

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Time to get it tied:

Eschewing procreation in order to spread their message only through conversion? Well, it worked for the Shakers…

Meanwhile, Joe Bastardi is upset at Michael Mann’s slam at Judith Curry (among others). James Taranto is entertained by the vasectomizing twit:

Ed Driscoll has a lot more.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Democrats’ Demagoguery

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I’m less amazed that they do this (it’s who they are, it’s what they do) than that the media lets them get away with it.

It’s hard to say which is worse: that so many prominent Democrats believe they aren’t responsible for any of Washington’s gridlock—or that they’d say these things anyway. Not all that long ago, a presidential spokesman using this language would be talking about murderers who hijacked airplanes or drove explosive-laden trucks into the barracks of U.S. Marines—not political opponents with differing notions about federal spending.

With suicide bombs going off daily around the world and funerals for the Washington Navy Yard victims still taking place, one might expect a modicum of rhetorical restraint from inside the White House. No such luck. For five years now, such metaphors have been the cudgel of choice for administration officials, along with their fellow Democrats on Capitol Hill and journalistic fellow travelers.

It all starts with President Obama, who routinely accuses Republicans trying to thwart his spending plans by putting “party ahead of country.” Last January, when talking—as Dan Pfeiffer was this week—about GOP insistence on trading spending cuts for agreeing to raise the nation’s debt limit—the president said he wouldn’t negotiate with those holding “a gun at the head of the American people.”

Joe Biden asserts Republicans are holding the country “hostage” with their spending stance, and in a 2011 meeting with congressional Democrats the vice president agreed with the suggestion that Tea Party groups were “terrorists.”

Among Democrats on Capitol Hill, it starts at the top, too.

On This Week this morning, they were shameless about saying that the lying president of Iran was “more reasonable” than Republicans. But I guess that’s who they are and what they do, too. At least Jake Tapper called them on it.

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Diagnosing the IPCC

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It’s suffering from permanent paradigm paralysis, and it’s time to put it down:

Paradigm paralysis is the inability or refusal to see beyond the current models of thinking. The vast amount of scientific and political capital invested in the IPCC has become self-reinforcing, so it is not clear how move past this paralysis as long as the IPCC remains in existence. The wickedness of the climate change problem makes if difficult to identify points of irrefutable failure in either the science or the policies, although the IPCC’s insistence that the pause is irrelevant and temporary could provide just such a refutation if the pause continues. In any event, there is a growing realization of that neither the science or policy efforts are making much progress, and particularly in view of the failure climate models to predict the stagnation in warming, and that perhaps it is time to step back and see if we can do a better job of understanding and predicting climate variability and change and reducing societal and ecosystem vulnerabilities.

Read the whole thing.