Ever since someone gave me Tom Friedman’s book From Beirut to Jerusalem in the early 1990s, I’ve been trying to figure out the journalist’s appeal. To be sure, he can write well and offers some interesting anecdotes from his “decade of reporting in the strife-ridden Middle East.”  But then, so do a lot of journalists writing about the regions they’ve covered.

Perhaps, it’s because the Mideast is such a hot spot that caused his book to stand out.  But, just because he writes well about aninteresting region doesn’t mean he’s a particularly gifted pundit.  I never really got his reputation as being one of the most, if not the most, thoughtful columnists in America.

Whenever I read his column, even when I do manage to finish it, I rarely find that he offers an original  – or even interesting — insight.  He tends to repeat the conventional wisdom with just a little bit of a twist.  It’s almost as if people believe him to be an insightful and original pundit because they’ve heard that he’s an insightful and interesting pundit.

Calling Friedman “one of the most overrated people in the world“, John Hinderaker cites Rob Long’s post on Ricochet reminding us of a 1999 column where the supposedly sage columnist warned of the coming demise of amazon.com.

And then there’s his infatuation with the People’s Republic of China.

To be sure, he’s not the first columnist to get something wrong.  Look, maybe I’m missing something, but it just seems Tom Friedman is not so much a penetrating and thoughtful analyst of world affairs as he is perceived to be just such a pundit.

RELATED: Hold the accolades on China’s ‘green leap forward’

How liberals argue:

Via Powerline.

On his Facebook page, a reader poses the questions which, by answering, we come to understand modern liberalism:

Why are the billionaire Koch brothers evil and the billionaire Soros is not?

RELATED:  Understanding left’s all-out assault on Koch Brothers through prism of liberal prejudice

Oh yeah, well besides a strong American President…

No, it is something else.  Can’t quite put my finger on it….

*snap*

OH YEAH!

Why aren’t left-wing progressive actor Sean Penn & left-wing liberal Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) in Cairo defending Mubarak against regime change like they did for Saddam?  Does that mean Penn & McDermott tacitly support The Muslim Brotherhood — the group that assassinated Anwar Sadat?   Or is Muburak “their kind of dictator”… and Saddam Hussein was not?

Just askin’ the tough questions that Katie Couric won’t, folks.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Current House Majority Leader (soon to be Minority Leader) Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said the following on this past Sunday’s “Face The Nation” on CBS (11/21/10):

[Hoyer] suggested trying inmates at Guantánamo with military commissions or Article III courts. “You don’t have to bring them to the United States,” he said.

Hoyer brushed off the suggestion that it would be hard to get juries there to hear the cases. “It’s a Carribbean island,” he said. “It’s not like you’re sending them to an archipelago or Siberia.” 

Not much more than 24 hours later… this clue appeared on the syndicated show Jeopardy under the category “Cuba, Si”. (11/22/10 episode)

While none of the contestants got it right, the correct question was “What Is The West Indies?”  (Needless to say, I nearly broke my kneecaps scrambling over the coffee table to capture the image above)

Obviously being a smug Democrat House leader doesn’t make you intelligent.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

There was a brief moment when I really did think that Obama might upend American politics, helping forge a permanent Democratic majority.  I was largely impressed with the way he conducted his transition and thought that he would tack to the center and so marginalize a (then-)dispirited Republican base.

But, when he showed no sign of scaling back the “stimulus” cooked up in the back rooms of Democratic congressional offices, I began to sense that he might be more of a transitional than a transformational figure, foisting (far) left-of-center policies on a center-right nation. Considering that Democrats are, by and large, not campaigning on the legislative initiatives of the past two years, it seems they now realize how out-of-step his agenda is with the mood of the nation — yesterday, Glenn Reynolds linked a Rasmussen poll finding that “Only 25% Prefer a Government With More Services, Higher Taxes“.

No wonder Democratic attacks are becoming increasingly personal.  It’s the only tactic that might work in the current climate. Indeed, Ed Morrissey poins out, citing a Howard Kurtz piece in the Daily Beast, “those highly personal attacks are more the norm than the exception“.

Maybe it’s not just a campaign tactic, maybe as P.J. O’Rourke opines, “They hate our guts“:

They don’t just hate our Republican, conservative, libertarian, strict constructionist, family values guts. They hate everybody’s guts. And they hate everybody who has any. Democrats hate men, women, blacks, whites, Hispanics, gays, straights, the rich, the poor, and the middle class.

Democrats hate Democrats most of all. Witness the policies that Democrats have inflicted on their core constituencies, resulting in vile schools, lawless slums, economic stagnation, and social immobility. Democrats will do anything to make sure that Democratic voters stay helpless and hopeless enough to vote for Democrats.

So, that’s why they pushed an unpopular agenda.  They don’t love us so much as they love power.  Read the whole thing.

Help Mick Mulvaney GET RID of John Spratt and Nancy Pelosi.  DONATE NOW!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

From CNN:

Organizers claim a wide range of supporters, some of whom are already associated with liberal causes — like union workers, environmentalists, gay activists and student leaders. But “One Nation” also claims backing from less obvious quarters — like senior citizens, veterans and faith leaders.

As GatewayPundit reports, “despite the fact that thousands of supporters were given free rides by unions and the NAACP to the rally”, they couldn’t muster a very substantial crowd.

For the Glenn Beck/Sarah Palin rally in August, the crowds filled in both sides of the Reflecting Pool.

UPDATE:  From a news source which leans left:

Organizers claimed they had as many participants as Beck’s rally.  But Saturday’s crowds were less dense and didn’t reach as far to the edges as they did during Beck’s rally. The National Park Service stopped providing official crowd estimates in the 1990s.

Damnnnnnnnnn.  I’m not sure King Barack I has ever been dressed down like this since maybe prep school in Indonesia.

Damnnnnnnnnn!  Too bad the video doesn’t show how he answered.  My guess is that it went something like this… “well, uhhhhhhh…..aaaaaand…. I inherited this mess….uhhhhhhhh…. hope and change…. aaaaaaaaand….. uhhhhhh…. Republicans are evil.”

I know, I know… the lady must be racist.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Here’s your guffaw moment of the day…. (via RealClearPolitics)

“Will the Democrats running for the House re-election, they’re all running for re-election under the Constitution and the Senate candidates, will they run away from President O’Carter? I mean, will they run away.”

I apologize, but I cannot find a way to embed the video.  It is worth watching for the full laugh.

UPDATE:  There’s even a T-Shirt!  (h/t – Instapundit)

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

On Wednesday, I wrote that when crafting their narratives about the right, many on the left dispense with the facts and adhere to their prejudices (about conservatives).  This morning, Glenn Reynolds links a video which provides further evidence of that mind-set: Protesters Claim Tea Party is Racist, Can’t Point to Any Evidence.

RELATED (also via Instapundit):  Left-wing blog uses clip of racist infiltrator at Tea Party, claims he represents Tea Parties.

This morning, I posted the piece about Eleanor Clift’s lament that Obama is just plain not blaming Bush enough largely on a lark.  It amused me that a left-of-center columnist is as obsessed with the former Republican president as is his Democratic successor such that she just makes up facts about other Republican presidents (you know, those with names beginning with “R”) she also resents.

That said, her lament does provide a wonderful window in the world view of Eleanor and her ilk.

First, her response assumes that people hate George W. Bush as much as she and her peers do.  Sure, the Republican left office with low approval ratings, but most people who, in late 2008, didn’t approve of the job he was doing don’t spend their days, in 2010, obsessing about the man and blaming him for Obama’s failures.

Second, this shows the readiness of such commentators to blame Bush in specific (and Republicans in general) for all manner of the nation’s woes.  Even though the Democrats have been in power for 18 months (longer if you count their congressional majorities as of January 2007), it just can’t be their fault that the economy has not yet recovered and jobs are not in abundance because Democrats are good smart, people who have all the right answers to all the world’s problems.  And Republicans are just bad, mean (not very bright) people neglecting the common good to coddle their corporate cronies.

They just think that when things go poorly, the buck must necessarily stop with Republicans.

Democrats attack Wall Street while prominent Democrats rake in case from the financial sector, their allies in the media continue to trash the GOP as the party of big business, even as the big-government policies more readily favored by Democrats (and all too frequently by all too many Republicans) do seem to help big businesses (and big banks) maintain their size and increase their market share.  They have crafted this narrative of a big business/big bank/Republican axis.

And Katrina vanden Heuvel, “editor of the liberal Nation magazine,” has become the latest pundit on the left to repeat this notion.  After she accused Missouri Republican Roy Blunt of standing “with the insurance and drug companies against health-care reform“, the Washington Examiner‘s Timothy P. Carney set the record straight and took his leftist counterpart to task:

It’s a knee-jerk reaction for many liberals — they hate industry and they love government, and so they just assume that big business is against big government. But they’re wrong. Sometimes, they’re very wrong.

It seems this liberal “narrative,” like the notion of “racist” Tea Parties (as if racism must needs be behind every popular movement on the right) is based on prejudice rather than evidence.

Just contrast the two writers.  Ms. vanden Heuvel fails to marshal any facts to buttress her accusation about those who stood with Mr. Blunt (not, I might add, against health care reform per se, but against the Democrats’ massive health care overhaul.)   Furthermore, she provides no evidence whatsoever to support her contention that Republicans “have served as the guardians of entrenched corporate interests, as opposed to the common good.”  I wonder if she has even the faintest understanding of the ideas undergirding Republican opposition to the bill what she deems reform.

That she would suggest they aren’t interested in the “common good” betrays her real prejudices against her ideological adversaries.

Carney, on the other hand, provides abundant links to show just how the drug lobby did double time to move the passage of Obamacare.

UPDATE: (more…)

If this is recovery, I hate to see a Depression! 

• Near 10% unemployment for months on end
• Housing starts plummeted in June
• Americans are clutching onto what little savings they have
• Consumer Confidence plunged…

All of which led to this:

No matter where they look, investors are seeing economic trouble.

Stocks and interest rates tumbled Tuesday after signs of slowing economies from China to the U.S. spooked traders who were already uneasy about a global recovery.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 268 points, or 2.7 percent, and dropped below 10,000. The benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 index closed at its lowest level since October.

Interest rates fell in the Treasury market after demand for the safety of government debt grew. The yield on the 10-year note dropped to as low as 2.96 percent, the first time it has fallen below 3 percent since April 2009. The yield is used as a benchmark for many consumer loans and mortgages.

The markets began the day by following Asian and European markets lower. Asian stocks fell after an index that forecasts economic activity for China was revised lower. European indexes continued the slide after Greek workers walked off the job to protest steep budget cuts.

Then, shortly after U.S. trading began, the market was hit with news that consumer confidence fell sharply this month because of worries about jobs and the overall economy. The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index fell to 52.9 from a revised 62.7 in May. It was the steepest drop since February and economists polled by Thomson Reuters had forecast only a modest dip.

Nice work, Barry!  He may have inherited th problem, but the Stimulus & Healthcare Spending Us Into Debt Acts are killing the private sector recovery.

On a completely related and weird note, I pulled all of my current and future 401K holdings out of stocks & bonds Sunday evening and put them into a Fixed Interest account.  I just had a funny feeling that this week folks would finally realize that the worst is yet to come.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

One of their leaders, Robert Byrd (DEMOCRAT-WV), has met his maker (whomever that may be).  Brief anecdote from Byrd’s resume:

Well-respected by the Democrat Party and liberals, Byrd is often given a “pass” on his earlier affiliation with a white supremacist group. Senator Byrd served as an active member of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) attaining the offices of Kleagle (recruiter) and  Exalted Cyclops.

Byrd joined the KKK when he was 24 in 1942. His local chapter unanimously elected him the top officer of their unit.

According to Byrd, a Klan official told him, “You have a talent for leadership, Bob… The country needs young men like you in the leadership of the nation.” Byrd later recalled, “Suddenly lights flashed in my mind! Someone important had recognized my abilities! I was only 23 or 24 years old, and the thought of a political career had never really hit me. But strike me that night, it did.”

I cannot shed a tear on the passing of this man.  Sometimes evil is in the heart of man and displayed for all to see. 

I feel sorry for the state of WV who didn’t have adequate Senate representation during the past 20 years while Byrd’s brain turn to mush.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Forget the oil slick, TN floods (oh, Obama forgot already), the Grecian Formula for Disaster, or the Hung Parliament.

At least for the next 48 hours — it will be Elena Kagan 24/7.  So we might as well get the ball rolling.

Rick Klein of ABC’s The Note has the morning pre-game activities summed up well.

And so it begins, again and anew, with everything different, but more or less the same.

President Obama makes his selection of Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court official at 10 am ET Monday — thus concluding the period of time where the White House holds ownership over the all-important narrative.

Supreme Court confirmation battles have become storytelling contests in recent decades. Neither side wants to, or will, give up the chance to tell its own story — and the nominee him- or herself is only a bit player in many of these scripts.

The first chapter belongs to Kagan herself — she’d be the third woman on this court, the first justice named in nearly 40 years never to have been a judge, a legal whiz without a reputation as an ideologue, respected and liked by prominent lawyers and judges on both sides of the political divide.

As for the man making the decision: This is a choice that leans toward caution, from a president who knows full well there are enough other big fights out there than to see the need to pick a new one.

Yet Kagan will find herself wrapped up in the volatile politics of the moment: raging debates over the roles of the courts and the entire federal government; passion over Obama’s agenda, particularly against it; and just a bit of frustration nagging at the president from his left.

In the bigger picture — will she become a justice? — this is an environment where 59 votes are almost certainly plenty. It’s also an environment where one of the 41 on the other side just found out he’s not coming back, for reasons that don’t encourage accommodating anything the president wants to do these days.

Please READ THE WHOLE THING!  Rick does the work, so you don’t have to!

[RELATED: Gay Lefties Ponder -- "Is She, or Isn't She?"]

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Okay, so let me get this straight:

The ever-so nuanced and most brilliant leader in a generation, President Obama, comes out after the passage of Obamacare and declares that:

I’m not exaggerating…Leaders of the Republican Party … called the passage of [The Stalinization of Health Care Act of 2010] “Armageddon.”…

So after I signed the bill, I looked around to see if there were any asteroids falling or some cracks opening up in the earth. Turned out it was a nice day. Birds were chirping. Folks were strolling down the Mall.

(my emphasis)

Now there’s a guy who knows the power of words. Or something. We’re to believe the leader of the Free World and what they’d have us believe is the most eloquent speaker of our generation is so dense he can’t tell a rhetorical flourish when he hears one? He can’t discern methaphorical language? Perhaps it’s a certain font on the TelePrompter, and if he’s not reading it, he doesn’t recognize it.

Anyway, comes now the toadies in the left to once again jump on an actual professional speaker, Rush Limbaugh.

In a mockery of the mockery, Rush has this to say:

You know, a couple of days after the health care bill had been signed into law Obama ran around all over the country saying, ‘Hey, you know, I’m looking around. The earth hadn’t opened up. There’s no Armageddon out there. The birds are still chirping.’ I think the earth has opened up. God may have replied. This volcano in Iceland has grounded more airplanes — airspace has more affected — than even after 9/11 because of this plume…Earth has opened up. I don’t know whether it’s a rebirth or Armageddon. Hopefully it’s a rebirth.

How does the Left play this? deadpan serious and completely without irony.

It’s not the president to them who looks like the jackass by completely missing the point and condescendingly belittling those who’d rather not have Kathleen Sebelius determine thier health care needs. It’s Rush Limbaugh for pointing it out.

Coming next? Criticism for Limbaugh saying “Obama ran around all over the country”. Technically, he flew on Air Force One. Sheesh, doesn’t this guy do any fact-checking before he shoots his mouth off?

Score another one for the death of Poetry.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from TML)

UPDATE (from Dan, trying to be funny):  But, doesn’t Obama realize that the bill doesn’t kick in until 2014.  Guess he wanted to give us time to prepare for Armageddon.

Looks like Barney is now doing his best impression of Marie Antoinette.

The Boston Globe’s Names Blog, an online gossip column, reports that Rep. Barney Frank found himself in an impromptu town-hall meeting on a flight from Los Angeles to Boston. A pair of ophthalmologist sisters wanted to air their grievances about ObamaCare, but Frank was having none of it:

“They wanted to talk to me, but I apologized and said I like to read and watch on planes,” Frank told us today. “They began to talk louder and that’s when Jimmy (Ready) [Frank's domestic partner] said, ‘If you’re trying to be bitchy, you’re doing a good job.’ ”Needless to say, the women didn’t appreciate the remark, and things got heated. (Attempts to locate or ID the women were unsuccessful.) [Passenger Brooke] Sexton, who’s an HR director for the UK-based retailer All Saints Spitalfields, said flight attendants weren’t working hard enough to defuse the situation, so she got involved.

“The women had been drinking, and they were crying and shouting,” Sexton said. “They were clearly the antagonizers, and Mr. Frank was kind of minding his own business.” (She said Ready also upset another passenger, calling him “Santa Claus.“) Finally, the parties calmed down and remained quiet for the rest of the flight. (Sexton was offered some complementary [sic] wine for her trouble.)

Barney Frank: Oh yeah, those annoying constituents are such buzzkills.  Especially those damn doctors who have to implement ObamaCare.  Just a bunch of drunk Tea Partiers, I tell you.  Now away with you while my partner Jimmy annoys other people on the plane — like having me here isn’t bad enough!

Keep it classy, Jimmy.  It is not a good idea to insult your Sugar Daddy’s constituents.

Guess what Barney: This is part of your job.  Take Harry Truman’s advice.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

When I received my latest e-mail from “Equality California,” (EqCA) the gay auxiliary to the Golden State’s Democratic Party, masquerading as a civil rights organization, its Executive Director Geoff Kors was all abuzz about “the critical fight for equality in California.”  I wondered, as I often do when I hear about such pushes for “equality,” what exactly that critical fight entailed.

And lo and behold, the contents gave me a clue.  His left-wing outfit is “sponsoring 13 pieces of groundbreaking legislation”.  Huh?  More legislation?  How many laws do we need?  How long has Kors been bragging about how many bills EqCA has shepherded through the state legislature?  And still he’s got more up his sleeve?

Deeper in the e-mail, we learn Kors real agenda, keeping government growing and Republicans from winning election.  This year, he says, they’ll be doing lots:

At the ballot box, we have an election that will determine whether we have a governor and legislature that will stand up for equality and oppose budget cuts that could threaten the health of our community. Electing a governor who supports full equality — and defeating a candidate who was a vocal Yes on 8 supporter — will be vital to our success in repealing Prop. 8.

Now, first will he please tell me what he means by “full equality.”  And when will we know it’s been achieved so we can stop legislating?

At least the above paragraph does give us an idea what he means by “equality,” linking that notion to opposing budget cuts.  In other words, “equality” is just a fancy name for big government.  (Wonder if he has any plans for addressing our multi=billion dollar budget deficit.)  No wonder he wants the state government to keep legislating.  The more bills the Democratic legislature passes, the greater power they give to the state, the less freedom we have.

It’s the same thing with other words the left uses to describe themselves and their agenda.  When they talk about progress, they mean greater government control.  ”Social justice” is achieved through state intervention.

If “equality” means greater government regulation of our lives, then it’s not what I seek nor what most gay people really want.  We want to be left alone, free from state interference.  But, those selling us equality aren’t interested in leaving us alone.  In the name of progress and “social justice,” they want to cede greater power and devote more resources to government at all levels.

And that means more meddling in our live.

Today marks the first day since I graduated college in 1990 that I’m not a regular subscriber to my local newspaper.  Fair enough — I had given up daily service a few years ago an only opted for Friday, Saturday & Sunday.

But it is time to say goodbye to the dinosaur.  As of today, The Charlotte Observer is not getting anymore of my money.

Why, you may ask?  Because of what is plaguing other local newspapers — editorial bias influencing their “news reporting”.

The past few days have been the last straw.  Part of the Observer’s problem is that they are a McClatchy Newspaper — a well-known liberal publisher.  And these two straws are mostly McClatchy-generated.  But nonetheless they are a symptom of the Observer’s cancer.  They do not report “news”, they advocate for their point of view.  That is fine on the Editorial Page.  But not Section A or the Local News Section.

First straw: Front Page Lies About The Iraq War in Sunday’s paper (posted on the Web last Friday)

When the Bush administration invaded Iraq seven years ago, it pledged to leave behind a democracy that would be a model for the entire Middle East. Instead, it now appears that the United States will leave behind a big question mark.

Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Iraq will start the clock on the withdrawal of U.S. troops, with 50,000 soldiers remaining in an advisory role after Aug. 31 and all of them gone by the end of 2011, if current plans hold.

The elections are, in a sense, the final act of a U.S.-led invasion that the George W. Bush White House sold on false pretenses - nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, an imaginary nuclear-weapons program and fictional al-Qaida ties – and that has cost nearly 4,400 American lives, at least 100,000 Iraqi ones, as much as $3 trillion and untold political capital.

The bolded part is not only editorializing — it is a lie.  ALL of the Western intelligence services concluded the same thing the CIA did: There were WMD, an active nuclear program, and ties to al-Qaida in Saddam’s Iraq.  The phrase “false pretenses” suggests (as most liberals do) that “Bush Lied.”  Was Iraq an intelligence failure?  Certainly.  But everyone who supported the Iraq war did so in a post-9/11 mindset and sincerely believing the intelligence they were given.  That includes Al Gore, Bill & Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry.

Second straw: A Biased Profile of the SC 2nd District Race (Joe Wilson)

You can read the story itself.  Every mention of Wilson is negative, every mention of his opponent is positive.

The Observer can print this drivel on their “news” pages and pretend they aren’t biased.  But I don’ t have to pay for it.

After all, thanks to Obama this economy is even worse than under Bush. THAT is a fact.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)