Category Archives: Media Criticism

Obama’s Third Party

The vetting continues, though not by the MSM:

Although his campaign vehemently denied it in 2008, newly obtained documentary evidence now establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that Barack Obama joined the New Party, a leftist third party controlled in Chicago by ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), during his first run for office in 1996.

The New Party’s aim was to transform the United States into a European-style welfare state, with the program of Scandinavia’s social democratic parties serving as a model. Mitt Romney has already identified this as the goal of Obama’s presidency, and the story of Obama’s New Party days lends credence to Romney’s claim.

So while Romney was running Bain Capital, Obama joined a leftist third party controlled by ACORN and dedicated to turning the United States into a massive, European-style welfare state. If Romney’s background at Bain is a fit topic for discussion, so is Obama’s New Party tie. It is now proven that, despite his campaign’s vehement denials in 2008, President Obama gave his allegiance to a party standing far toward the left of the American political spectrum. That is news. Will the press report it?

That Barack Obama is a life-long socialist and far leftist (not to mention a liar, along with his campaign) shouldn’t be news. And his enablers in the press will ensure that it doesn’t become so.

[Update a few minutes later]

“He doesn’t need people.” And all the narcissist’s yes men (and women):

When the media took Obama’s skill at campaigning as evidence of his ability to govern, it was like concluding that just because a person knew how to operate a bulldozer he could operate on a brain tumor. The skills did not necessarily transfer. Perhaps the root cause of the administration’s woes is that it knows how to campaign, but is completely incompetent at governing.

The image one gets is that of an old-time political machine, where a bunch of operators slouch outside the office of the Boss, waiting to be sent on this errand or that, all the while occupying themselves with trivia, racing tame cockroaches across the floor and vying with each other to see who can hit the spittoon across the room. You can run Tammany Hall that way. Maybe even Chicago. But can you govern America in that fashion? Until the administration values competence over spin it will continue to tank.

In other words, it will continue to tank.

The Bradley Effect

I’ve been thinking for quite a while that this might be the case:

the Bradley Effect has resurfaced dramatically in a different manner in the Wisconsin recall vote. The polls — and, yes, the exit polls as well – were showing Scott Walker in a narrow victory. But he won beyond anyone’s prediction.

Apparently, the silent majority of Wisconsin voters didn’t want to admit to nosy pollsters and anyone else that might be listening that they were opposed to runaway unions, runaway spending, or the Democratic administration. They just wanted to cast their votes. And they did.

This Bradley Effect, then, is not like the Bradley Effect of yore. It’s about race to some degree, but I suspect there are much larger components of being fed up with elites of all sorts, interest groups, media groups, union groups, all sorts of groups telling the average citizen what he should and shouldn’t think, openly or covertly threatening to ostracize him or her for not going along with the pervasive liberal status quo. This was a cry of “Ya, basta!”

So if I were a member of the Democratic Party this morning, if I were David Axelrod and his team of so-called wise men, I would be wondering – what if all the polls are wrong? What if this is true across the entire country?

If Axelrod and his team of so-called wise men aren’t making a mess in their underoos this morning, they’re completely out of touch with reality. I think that this also explains the disparity between the president’s approval rating and his “likeability.” People are now willing to say, after over three years of non-stop policy disaster, that they don’t approve of his policies, but they still fear being thought racist if they say they find the egomaniacal condescending incompetent insufferable.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Francis Porretto makes a good point in comments over there — it may not be the Bradley Effect so much as a “thug effect,” in which people are afraid to tell exit pollsters what they really think, given what’s been happening in Wisconsin for a year and a half.

Food Nannyism

Thoughts from Lileks on the new Puritans:

Let’s get one thing clear: when the TV talk-show people lavish praise on the idea, it has nothing to do with some abstract notion of the costs of obesity. They just don’t like fat people. Fat people, at best, are a rebuke their own finicky vanity – I look good, why can’t you? – and at the worst, aesthetically unpleasant. If they all went away, the trim pert types woudl miss them after a while, and realize that people no longer came pre-packaged in a style that made them easy to dismiss.

A thin woman with three children by three men who can’t get by is an object of concern. A fat women with two kids who can’t get by is a toad, and probably a smoker.

A culture that redefines food choices as moral issues will demonize the people who don’t share the tastes of the priest class. A culture that elevates eating to some holistic act of ethical self-definition – localvore, low-carbon-impact food, fair trade, artisanal cheese – will find the casual carefree choices of the less-enlightened as an affront to their belief system. Leave it to Americans to invent a Puritan strain of Epicurianism.

I do have to agree that sugar is bad for you. But people have a right to eat things that are bad for them. Until the rest of us are forced to pay for their health care, of course…

Not Just A Fake Indian

Apparently Lieawatha is a fake scholar, too.

Considering what a heroine Fauxcahontas is (or at least was) to the loony left, this gets more hilarious by the day.

[Update late morning]

Thoughts on Elizabeth Warren, the scholar, from Megan McArdle (who is about to move from The Atlantic to Newsweek — good for Newsweek, hopefully not bad for her):

It matters that we get this stuff right. I am among the majority who would like to see bankruptcies reduced in this country, and we’re not going to be very effective at that if we run around thinking we can cure 2/3 of them by putting a national health care system in place, when in reality a third or less have any strong causal relationship with medical bills. Obviously, this was also held out as an argument for PPACA, making an implicit promise to the American people which I believe to be false.

But it also matters because a large part of Warren’s prominence comes from the fact that she’s an academic. If she came from . . . well, the sort of think tank that publishes this sort of advocacy science . . . she would have considerably less glamor, and power.

And perhaps it mattes most of all because this woman is now under consideration to head a powerful new agency. If this is how she evaluates data, then isn’t that going to hamper her in making good policy? If we’re going to have a consumer financial protection agency, I want one that has a keen eye to the empirical evidence on consumer welfare — not one that makes progressives most happy by reinforcing their prior beliefs.

Well, we know what they want.