Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Did The NRA Kill The Gun Bill?

4 Comments

Or was it the Tea Party?

Either way, good for them.

[Update a couple minutes later]

This seems related. Why community-organizer tactics don’t work for the president:

Community organizers’ main efforts are to stir up public sentiment to achieve special goals without implementing any solutions. Solutions are the province of someone else. The present administration has used this tactic endlessly, most noticeably with the White House tour shutdown during spring break and now flight-controller furloughs. This is definitely not an effort to solve problems but rather an attempt to stampede citizens to a desired result. We don’t need a community organizer in the White House. We need an executive, but of course Mr. Obama abhors that category of human endeavor.

Though actually, was he really even a good community organizer?

[Update a few minutes later]

The Barry Munchkin syndrome:

Barack Obama knows how to do one thing: elect Barack Obama to public office. And that’s not ‘elect Democrats.’ Or ‘elect liberals.’ Or even ‘elect people that Barack Obama likes.’ It’s just him: his team is trying pretty hard right now to figure out how to use their over-specialized skill more generally, but they don’t have much time to figure it out and the system is actually rigged against them in this case. Barack Obama certainly doesn’t know how to govern effectively; take away a Congress that will rubber-stamp the Democratic agenda and he flails about. He’s so bad at this, in fact, that when confronted with a situation where all he had to do was do nothing to fulfill a campaign promise (the tax cuts) we somehow ended up with a situation where Obama gave in on 98% of those tax cuts and voluntarily signed up to take the blame for the AMT fix. In short: Obama was woefully unprepared for the Presidency, and he hasn’t really spent the last four years trying to catch up. Instead, he goes from situation to situation either trying to recast the problem in ways that he does have some skill in (permanent campaigning for office), or else… flail about on the scene while hitting people’s buttons quickly and/or at random, in the hopes that eventually the laws of probability will allow him to bull on through anyway.

Actually, the Barry Munchkin syndrome sounds like the title of an episode of the Big Bang Theory.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Benghazi

3 Comments

The difference it makes:

Maybe there’s an explanation in the internal processes of the State Department. And, it should be said, high officials often make decisions that with hindsight seem obvious mistakes. But she has given us just an exclamation, not an explanation.

And, as the Interim Report goes on to explain, the accounts given by the Obama administration at the time were misleading — deliberately so.

It notes that State immediately reported the attack to the White House Situation Room and two hours later noted an al Qaeda affiliate’s claim of responsibility. There was no mention of a spontaneous protest of an anti-Muslim video.

Yet President Obama, Clinton and press secretary Jay Carney spoke repeatedly for days later of a video and a protest. Clinton assured one victim’s family member that the video-maker was being prosecuted.

Because they had to maintain the false narrative for the election.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Newtown Versus Watertown

3 Comments

What is the difference?

The contrast between the political exploitation of Newtown and the way in which the same media outlets have gone out of their way to avoid drawing the obvious conclusions about Boston could not be greater. In one case, the media helped orchestrate a national discussion in which hyper-emotional rhetoric about the fallen drove a political agenda. In the other, they are seeking to ensure that no conclusions — even those that are self-evident — be drawn under any circumstances.

We’re living in politically correct, and culturally suicidal times.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

The Nerdprom Love Fest

3 Comments

Thoughts from Ann Althouse:

I really do find the shots of the audience quite sickening. Do they not realize how they look? It’s an anti-advertisement for the services they’d like to sell us. They seem utterly unprepared to confront power. I’m thinking: This is something that should be done in private, like masturbation. Then I realize: This is the public show. Imagine what they do in private.

I’m going to try not to. Apparently they have absolutely no self-awareness of how they look to those of us not so smitten.

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

Global Warming Theory

11 Comments

…is the new Lysenkoism:

All the climate alarmist organizations simply rubber stamp the irregular Assessment Reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). None of them do any original science on the theory of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming. But the United Nations is a proven, corrupt, power grabbing institution. The science of their Assessment Reports has been thoroughly rebutted by the hundreds of pages of science in Climate Change Reconsidered, and Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report, both written by dozens of scientists with the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, and published by the Heartland Institute, the international headquarters of the skeptics of the theory of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming.

Again, check it out for yourself. You don’t have to read every one of the well over a thousand pages of careful science in both volumes to see at least that there is a real scientific debate.

The editors of the once respected journals of Science and Nature have abandoned science for Lysenkoism on this issue as well. They have become as political as the editorial pages of the New York Times. They claim their published papers are peer reviewed, but those reviews are conducted on the friends and family plan when it comes to the subject of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming. There can be no peer review at all when authors refuse to release their data and computer codes for public inspection and attempted reconstruction of reported results by other scientists. They have been forced to backtrack on recent publications relying on novel, dubious, statistical methodologies not in accordance with established methodologies of complex statistical analysis.

Formerly respected scientific bodies in the U.S. and other western countries have been commandeered by political activist Lysenkoists seizing leadership positions. They then proceed with politically correct pronouncements on the issue of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming heedless of the views of the membership of actual scientists. Most of what you see and hear from alarmists regarding global warming can be most accurately described as play acting on the meme of settled science. The above noted publications demonstrate beyond the point where reasonable people can differ that no actual scientist can claim that the science of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming has been settled or that there is a settled “consensus” that rules out reasonable dissent.

My emphasis.

Climate “science” doesn’t seem to have very many actual scientists involved with it.