Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Why The Ambassador Died

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“Ambassador Stevens didn’t die because the White House had a bad night. He died because the White House has bungled North Africa. Would that it were all that they’ve bungled. As I wrote earlier, get ready for the next war, regardless of what happens tomorrow.

[Update a while later]

Actually, it’s not the next war. It’s just the next battle in the current ongoing world war.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Cindy Sheehan

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More thoughts on the disgusting nature of the leftist media:

This is truly awful. Between Chuck Woods and Cindy Sheehan, the MSM chose to elevate the latter, a paranoiac who has, on more than a few occasions, abruptly exploded into a fit of anti-semetic apoplexy in situations where the subject of Jews or Israel wasn’t even being discussed. A woman who has used her son’s tragic death to promote causes that had nothing even tangentially to do with the war in Iraq. A woman who’s undeserved fame and and lack of self-awareness have led her into embarrassing public displays that no normal person could witness without cringing.

Chuck Woods simply wants to know why back-up wasn’t provided for his son on the night of his death. It’s a perfectly relevant question, seeing that Tyrone Woods actually requested help. And Woods pere gotten virtually no help from those whose job it is to challenge power and authority. So far, Jake Tapper is the only MSM journalist willing to ask questions on Chuck Woods’s behalf. But these same people, pathetically, did just about everything in their power to promote a woman whose real objective– as distinct from her stated objective of getting justice for her slain son– was to promote a Chomskyite political programme.

Of course, after Sheehan was no longer useful– after the Democrats had won control of congress, and after it seemed assured that they would win back the presidency– the MSM abandoned her. They abetted her in all of her clownish public behavior and in all of her nauseating pronouncements, they let her act the fool as long as she was useful for good copy and for advancing their political biases– and then, when her usefulness was at an end, they heartlessly abandoned her.

I say “heartless” here because that’s what the MSM’s behavior, at bottom, was. They took advantage of a deeply wounded and vulnerable person. Because in spite of all her political tendentiousness, Sheehan was at heart a grieving mother whose grief had unhinged her. Yes, she was no doubt a radical buffoon before her son’s death, but her obnoxious political activism was just her way of coping. Her behavior was unseemly to most people, but not to herself for the very simple reason that she was without self-awareness. Her grief had killed it. And the MSM took advantage of this lack.

“Heartless” may be an apt description of the MSM’s behavior vis a vis Cindy Sheehan, but on second thought it seems highly insufficient. Words like “monstrous,” “cruel” and “sinister” seem much more appropriate.

Yup.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

The Benghazi Malfeasance Continues In Real Time

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Why did we abandon the compound?

The larger question that is raised here is why the U.S. has abandoned this diplomatic outpost, so that anyone–whether reporters or civilians, friends or foes of the United States–can rummage through its rubble. The jihadists who attacked our consulate were surely hoping to drive us out of Benghazi, and they have now accomplished this purpose. I am at a loss to know why marines were not sent to secure the site of the compound and why efforts have not been made to rebuild. This is yet another failure that gives the people of the Middle East an impression of American retreat.

An impression that is apparently deliberate. But the media wants to pretend it isn’t happening, at least until Wednesday.

[Update a few minutes later]

“All jacket and no bombers“:

Back in Benghazi, the president who looks so cool in a bomber jacket declined to answer his beleaguered diplomats’ calls for help – even though he had aircraft and Special Forces in the region. Too bad. He’s all jacket and no bombers. This, too, is an example of America’s uniquely profligate impotence. When something goes screwy at a ramshackle consulate halfway round the globe, very few governments have the technological capacity to watch it unfold in real time. Even fewer have deployable military assets only a couple of hours away. What is the point of unmanned drones, of military bases around the planet, of elite Special Forces trained to the peak of perfection if the president and the vast bloated federal bureaucracy cannot rouse themselves to action? What is the point of outspending Russia, Britain, France, China, Germany and every middle-rank military power combined if, when it matters, America cannot urge into the air one plane with a couple of dozen commandoes? In Iraq, al-Qaida is running training camps in the western desert. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are all but certain to return most of the country to its pre-9/11 glories. But in Washington the head of the world’s biggest “counterterrorism” bureaucracy briefs the president on flood damage and downed trees.

I don’t know whether Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan can fix things, but I do know that Barack Obama and Joe Biden won’t even try – and that therefore a vote for Obama is a vote for the certainty of national collapse. Look at Lower Manhattan in the dark, and try to imagine what America might look like after the rest of the planet decides it no longer needs the dollar as global reserve currency. For four years, we have had a president who can spend everything but build nothing. Nothing but debt, dependency, and decay. As I said at the beginning, in different ways the response to Hurricane Sandy and Benghazi exemplify the fundamental unseriousness of the superpower at twilight. Whether or not to get serious is the choice facing the electorate Tuesday.

But let him keep the bomber jacket.

He won’t need it much on Oahu.