It does seem they’re ever eager to cover protests of a left-wing bent, even if they draw crowds barely breaking into the double digits. I mean, heck those protests draw more media than protestors.

Need we say anything more about their failure to cover the “tea party” protests.  Heck, at the LA Tea Party I attended, held during the workday at a spot far from centrally located and not well-publicized, we had more people than the combined number of reporters and protesters at the anti-AIG “Richhunt.”

UPDATE:  Seems that the “real energy” is in the “tea party” protests:

Today two events occurred roughly ten miles apart in suburban Connecticut outlining where people stand in their outrage over America becoming Bailout Nation.

I’m sure the MSM won’t report this, but the far bigger demonstration was of fiscal conservatives , not anti-business radicals.

For the better part* of Andrew Sullivan’s career, he was something of an iconoclast.  While he identified himself as a conservative (he still does), he was really more of a conservative by default.  He got his start in American journalism, writing for The New Republic, the flagship magazine of serious liberal thought, but he was anything but an American liberal.  Nor did he fit within the mainstream of conservative thought, yet in his heyday (from about 1989 to 2004), he was philosophically closer to contemporary conservatism than he was to Anglo-American liberalism.

What distinguished him more than anything was that he was the first (or at least the most prominent) gay public intellectual to write about gay issues in a way that challenged the gay orthodoxy.  And for that he earned the scorn of those with whom he liked to socialize.

An intellectual by day, Andrew enjoyed (and I presume still enjoys) frequenting gay haunts at night. He summers in Provincetown, long a retreat for East Coast gays, nearly all of whom (the outspoken ones at least) hold left-of-center political views.  And while Andrew, like all of us (or most of us at least), didn’t push his political ideas during every hour of the day, many of his ideological adversaries were determined to define him by his departures from said gay orthodoxy.

Instead of finding his off-time as a respite from the rigors of his working life, his angry adversaries used it to remind him of his unorthodox opinions.  They insulted him in bars, threw drinks in his face and, if one account is to believed, even spit on him.  Other gay writers and activists were no kinder, regularly ridiculing him as a traitor to the cause.  One such individual made Andrew’s private life a source for public censure.

Such nastiness takes its toll even on the hardiest of human beings.  And Andrew is, if anything, human, very human.

That’s one reason I think he has, in recent years, gone so far to the left, more out of a sense of fatigue at being the outcast among his peers than anything else.

(more…)

I just completed Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression and expect I’ll offer a more complete review as some later date, but for now will offer a more concise review:  Read this book as it shows the many parallels between the actions of President Obama and his predecessor in the 1930s.  Obama, like Franklin Roosevelt, seems to be temporizing in response to the economic meltdown of his day.  Both men borrowed the rhetoric of class warfare and seemed indifferent, if not hostile, to private enterprise.

At the same time that the book points to FDR’s failure to revive the faltering economy of the 1930s, it shows the roots of his later success in leading the nation to victory against the Nazis.  Even as Americans were isolationist, Roosevelt understood the imperative of international engagement.

While troubled by the “godlessness” of Communism, in 1933, “he ended a sixteen-year U.S. policy toward Russia, and recognized the Soviet Union:”

At a moment when people were still hungry, the deal seemed pragmatic–as president, Americans understood, Roosevelt had to choose the lesser evil.  In Danzig, a port city, the Nazis that winter were tossing newspaper editors in jails; they were also taking over the courts of the Saar.  Recognizing Russia was a way of counterbalancing the Germans.

Like Britain’s Churchill, he recognizing early on the threat Nazism posed to Western Civilization.

Much as we conservatives are eager to cite the failure of the New Deal, we must also recognize that Roosevelt was more than his economic policies.  He ranks among the greatest of U.S. presidents for his leadership in helping the nations which would become our Allies before the American people were ready for war.  And for his leadership once they were.

Even as he was flailing around in the 1930s, failing to find a solution to our economic woes, he was showing signs of understanding the geopolitical situation.

Victor Davis Hanson weighs in on the President:

Sorry, I don’t want my President joshing about the Special Olympics on Leno. I don’t want him on Leno at all in his perpetual PR mode. I don’t want him drawing  out his picks for the final four on TV. I don’t want him paid for rewriting/revising/ condensing/whatever his earlier book while he’s supposed to be President, or ribbing Gordon Brown about his tennis game in patronizing fashion, or giving the British a pack of un-viewable DVDs after they, in exchange, offered a tasteful gift of historic importance.

Hanson offers more, much more in his post, all of which merits your attention. But, for now, I wanted to draw you attention to his criticism of President Obama for it offers one of the best short summaries of his failings.

(H/t: Instapundit.)

Today, I realized yet again that I must one day write my memoir, even if no one will ever read it.  Given my fascinatingly strange coming out story, I believe I have something to offer about the gay coming out experience as a metaphor for self-discovery, individuation.

I fear, however, that some who might otherwise warm to my story would reject it because of one element, the political aspect of my journey.  But, that is only one ingredient in the strange mix of my experiences.

The real strangeness of my own experience has nothing to do with my politics, but instead that my coming out story, like many good movies, has a villain who seems drawn from central casting, an arrogant man in perfectly tailored suits who, in the guise of helping me, gave me nothing but bad advice.  And he happened to be gay.

My thought today was on the importance of mentors in our lives which is of course related to the subject of my doctoral dissertation, how the goddess Athena serves as a mentor to nearly all the Greek heroes who achieve success in their endeavors.

She reminds us of the importance of good guidance as we strive, struggle even, to realize our goals.  Perhaps, more on this anon.  My own story shows that bad advice often delays the realization of those goals.