During the presidential campaign last fall, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich speculated that no “elite television journalist” ever asked Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin about her “actual career in Alaska”:

The media paid as little attention to her record in office as they did to that of their preferred candidate, Barack Obama, choosing instead to craft an image for each of them.  Perhaps Todd Purdum’s recent hit piece on the accomplished Alaska Governor prompted this thought from our reader Leah, expressed in an e-mailed:

Obama and Palin as two sides of the same coin, their records and accomplishments (or lack thereof) are ignored, one is loved for being handsome, young and debonair, the other hated for being young, beautiful and very talented.

Pretty much sums it up.  Like columnists for Hollywood fan magazines, the better part of the reporters covering the 2008 presidential campaign and now currently covering the President and the Governor of Alaska are more interested in image than substance.  Obama is cool and hip, uses a blackberry, Palin is, her looks notwithstanding, old-fashioned and hypocritical, with trailer-trash in-laws.

I really don’t need bother reading Purdum’s piece because he’s not interested in reporting honestly on the Governor of Alaska, but feeding the media narrative about the incompetence and arrogance of this good-looking, happily married conservative woman.  I mean, can you trust a guy who claims that, as Bill Kristol puts it (quoting Purdum)

. . . “several” Alaskans independently told Purdum that they had consulted the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders? I don’t believe it for a moment. I’ve (for better or worse) moved in pretty well-educated circles in my life, and I’ve gone decades without “several” people telling me they had consulted the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Noting how different reporters how come to different conclusions about Palin’s mood, Jim Geraghty, paraphrasing the President’s words about himself*, wonders if “Sarah Palin is now a blank slate, upon which national magazine writers project whatever negative narrative they prefer“.   Just as much “news” reporting about Obama says more about those doing the reporting than does it does about the President, so does much journalism about Palin say more about the journalist than it does about the Governor of Alaska.

In his Palinpalooza, Robert Stacy McCain finds finds this all relates to the media’s double (or triple, as it were in 2008) standard: (more…)

GayPatriot reader Jeff Fenner sent me this “letter to the editor” for publication.  I have reprinted in its entirety.

All I can say is…. AMEN, brother!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

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Call me crazy, but I don’t see anywhere in the United States Constitution that gives anyone the right to marry, least of all, heterosexuals. What I do see is that each man was created equal and is to be treated equal and be allowed the pursuit of happiness.

Why don’t gay marriage advocates chase the simple idea that only married heterosexuals get tax breaks, next of kin benefits, and partner benefits? It’s wholly unconstitutional that only hetero’s get these benefits. No where in the Constitution is it written ‘only heterosexuals’.

There isn’t even a definition of marriage IN the Constitution, at least, not yet. I truly believe that gay marriage advocates would get FAR more traction, politically, attacking the tax breaks and other benefits that ONLY heterosexually married couples get. Why should they pay fewer taxes than single people? Why not pull in the single voting public. Surely the voice would be louder and tougher to ignore?

This is a prime example of Religion getting too close to government and getting a government sanction for their dogma. Most religions recognize marriages between a man and a woman. This is an example of religion reaching too far into our government. Why don’t we look at that, and even the reasons for the tax breaks given?

It is my belief that these tax breaks were born out of the idea that the federal government needed and continues a need to encourage marriage between a man and a woman so that it can ‘grow’ a future tax base. A married couple can use the ‘tax break’ to grow their family with more affordability. If this same tax break is given to a straight single person, or couple that aren’t living together romantically where’s the incentive to ‘grow a family’…a family of individuals that would eventually be taxpayers.

In short, it’s far more unconstitutional to give a tax break to married couples than to bar gay people from being married. Single people should join the fight and demand the same tax breaks given to married people, or that the IRS disallow a tax break for heterosexually married people. Imagine the increase in the tax base if this benefit was removed!

As you might imagine, I don’t believe it’s the government’s place to determine what marriage is. I don’t believe it’s my government’s place to give one group of benefits that it freely and loosely gives another group of people.

I task all my readers to ask their feminist friends how they would rate the following hypothetical woman:

While a housewife, having only been elected to local office, this woman helped expose the corruption and/or end the political careers of three white male Republican politicians holding statewide office.

Ask them if they believe such a woman should be celebrated for her achievements, perhaps even a candidate for higher office.  Make sure to take down their responses.  Once they have expounded on this (supposedly) hypothetical woman, you can tell them that she’s not so hypothetical.  For such a woman does exist.  She is currently (more…)

In his short biography on the greatest man of the century just concluded, British historian John Keegan writes:

It is now often thought that Churchill became prime minister because of the success of the German blitzkrieg, which produced the strategic catastrophe against which he had warned throughout the appeasement years.  It is ironic, in retrospect, to perceive that the appeasers were brought down by their mishandling of the comparatively insignificant sideshow in Norway, leaving Churchill to inherit the catastrophe he had argued so long to avert, during the first hours of its unrolling.

Emphasis added.

In May of 1940, Wintson Churchill inherited a crisis far worse than would Barack Obama nearly sixty-nine years later.  Not just that, repeatedly throughout the 1930s, that great man had warned of just such a catastrophe and had urged his colleagues in Parliament to take action to avert the crisis–on numerous occasions.

By contrast, while then-Senator Obama did write one letter expressing concern about the mortgage mess, he never proposed (or even signed onto) legislation designed to avert the financial meltdown.  Churchill thus had more reason to whine about the crisis he had “inherited,” but never did. Churchill warned repeatedly before the catastrophe.  Obama whines repeatedly after he was elected in large part because Americans had better confidence in  him to deal with the consequences of the catastrophe.

Maybe Obama should ask our friends across the pond to return the bust of Churchill he recently returned to he can ponder the last lion‘s lesson of leadership.

Back in the late 1970s, just after Howard Hughes passed, people would regularly come forward saying with fantastic stories detailing how they  met the reclusive billionaire, with him promising them part–or all–of his fortune.

Most, if not all of those stories turned out to be fabrications.  As I read the various (and often conflicting) stories on Michael Jackson’s final days (with one report say he was too feeble to rehearse for his upcoming London concerts, while others saying that he was performing in practice at the same level as he had danced in his heyday), I suspect we’ll be subject to the same sort of storytelling about the late King of Pop.

It seems the eccentricity of certain celebrity icons inspires stories even more outlandish than the actual facts of their lives.

CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE:  This idea came to me the other day when reading Jim Geraghty’s, Michael Jackson and the Birth of Celebrity Culture.

I’m ambivalent about gay marriage in part because, in studying the history of the institution, we learn it is defined by gender difference.  Up until the 1990s, those cultures which have recognized same-sex unions either called  them something different than marriage or, if they did call them marriage, required one partner to live in the guise of the opposite sex.

And while today, we do not define gender roles as strictly as did most societies until the second half of the century just concluded — and as do many nations around the world, particularly the Islamic world, we can still see differences between the genders, particularly in the gay community.  Just contrast how gay men and lesbians relate to one another.

Despite these noticeable differences, the politically correct voices in academia and the gay movement, balk at acknowledging the reality of this experience.  In one breath, they tell us gender is a social construct, but in the next, they tell us sexual orientation is predetermined, it is, so speak, encoded in our DNA, leading blogger Gregory of Yardale to ask:

How is it the left can simultaneously claim that gender is a purely social construct, but homosexuality is determined by genetics?

Gender differences are more than just physiological, and our sexual orientation may well develop from a great variety of factors, some nature, some nurture.