Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

The Iran Plot

22 Comments

…some useful thoughts. Bottom line, it’s not a distraction from Justice Department scandals, and it’s not really anything new. It’s just part of the war they’ve been waging, and we’ve been pretending isn’t happening, against us for over three decades.

[Update a few minutes later]

Some questions for the president:

Do you consider the Iranian plot to bomb a U.S. restaurant an act of war? If not, would it have been an act of war had the plot succeeded?

Are you still willing to negotiate with Iran without preconditions? Are you still willing to grant Mahmoud Ahmadinejad entry into the U.S.? Do you maintain that your failure to support the Iranian Green Movement in 2009 was not a significant mistake?

In light of the Iranians’ willingness to plant a bomb in Washington, D.C., do you now consider a nuclear Iran unacceptable? Is a military option to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon off the table?

Nah. All we need is another “reset” button.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Should Liberals Be Skeptical?

8 Comments

…of Occupy Wall Street?

…it is just not the protesters’ apparent allergy to capitalism and suspicion of normal democratic politics that should raise concerns. It is also their temperament. The protests have made a big deal of the fact that they arrive at their decisions through a deliberative process. But all their talk of “general assemblies” and “communiqués” and “consensus” has an air of group-think about it that is, or should be, troubling to liberals. “We speak as one,” Occupy Wall Street stated in its first communiqué, from September 19. “All of our decisions, from our choices to march on Wall Street to our decision to camp at One Liberty Plaza were decided through a consensus process by the group, for the group.” The air of group-think is only heightened by a technique called the “human microphone” that has become something of a signature for the protesters. When someone speaks, he or she pauses every few words and the crowd repeats what the person has just said in unison. The idea was apparently logistical—to project speeches across a wide area—but the effect when captured on video is genuinely creepy.

True liberals certainly should be. But most people who call themselves that these days aren’t. And of course, it’s hard to take very seriously anyone who thinks that Dodd-Frank is “the best liberal hope for improving democratically regulated capitalism.”

[Update a while later]

The Wall Street protesters have been sold a bill of goods:

The narrative that came out of these events—largely propagated by government officials and accepted by a credulous media—was that the private sector’s greed and risk-taking caused the financial crisis and the government’s policies were not responsible. This narrative stimulated the punitive Dodd-Frank Act—fittingly named after Congress’s two key supporters of the government’s destructive housing policies. It also gave us the occupiers of Wall Street.

We have to take back the narrative.