Just caught this at Ace: “To Ask the Question Is To Answer It“:

Charles C. W. Cooke wonders why those who freaked out about the PATRIOT Act and how it might lead to people’s library records being seized aren’t so concerned about the IRS asking conservative groups to hand over their Facebook posts and a list of books they were reading. Or for records of conversations they had or their positions on issues. Shouldn’t the ACLU be as up in arms about the IRS’s intrusion into people’s privacy as they were about Homeland Security looking at suspected terrorist’s use of library computers?

Did the immediate past president — or his henchmen — ever demand that his political adversaries, in order to receive a benefit from the government, reveal the content of their prayers or the names of their members?

When a Republican Senate candidate in Missouri makes a crazy, ignorant statement about rape in an unscripted interview, it generates a flurry of news stories for days, if not weeks on end.  But, when the Senate Democratic leader makes a crazy, ignorant statement about the most dynamic grassroots political movement to emerge in the Obama era, it generates a headline on Yahoo! for one evening:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday equated the Tea Party to a non-violent “anarchist” group because, in his mind, Tea Partiers don’t believe in any form of government. He was speaking about the sequester and other financial issues on the Senate floor.

“We have a situation where this country has been driven by the Tea Party for the last number of years,” Reid said. “When I was in school, I studied government and I learned about the anarchists. Now, they were different than the Tea Party because they were violent. But they were anarchists because they did not believe in government in any level and they acknowledged it. The Tea Partykind of hides that.”

Oh, and the Republican later retracted and apologized his statement.  Don’t expect Mr. Reid to acknowledge his own error, be it a deliberate misrepresentation or an ignorant one.

If Mr. Reid had actually taken the time to study the Tea Party movement, he would know that its leaders harken back to the Founders who, far from being anarchists, recognized the need for government.  But, concerned that governments could become destructive to the ends for which they were instituted, the Founders of this nation and the framers of our constitution sought to create a framework limiting its scope and constraining its power.  And many, if not most, Tea Party activists and leaders embrace those ideals and that vision.  You’d expect that our national leaders would at least recognize that.

It’s unfortunate that our new media don’t hold the most powerful Democrat in the Senate to the same standards they hold Republican candidates.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Roberto wonders “what part of the words limited,’ and ‘small.’ the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid doesn´t understand.” And his failure to understand the difference between the meaning of those two words and the meaning of “none.”

Seems CNN’s Piers Morgan is not much interested in the story of “Matt Salmon, the gay son of a Republican congressman” because the young man “refused to criticize his father, who is not a supporter of same-sex marriage.”  As Paul Mirengoff writes at Powerline:

The rejection of guests because they won’t serve as props to further the host’s simplistic narrative isn’t confined to CNN and MSNBC. I experienced it with a well-known Fox News talk-show host.

But using a son as a prop to bash his father seems to carry the joke too far. Moreover, O’Donnell and Morgan are missing the real story of the Salmons and the Portmans — the loyalty that stems from family love. Matt Salmon is loyal to his father; Rob Portman is loyal to his son.

Wonder who is going to examine the prejudices of Mr. Morgan (and Lawrence O’Donnell at MSNBC).  He seems to be assuming that because a man doesn’t support gay marriage, his son must needs criticize him.

Maybe we’re not as polarized on gay marriage as the sensationalist coverage of the issue makes it appear.

Actually there is a story here, one to which our friends in the media (and on the gay left) seem oblivious, that (most) opposition to gay marriage is not rooted in hate and that an opponent of gay marriage can love a gay child.  And that child can love his parents even when disagreeing with their views on social issues.

How many of us have relatives with whom we often lock horns on politics, but for whom we’d drive through a rainstorm to help them in their hour of need?

With the enactment yesterday in the Wolverine State of right-to-work legislation, freeing individual workers from the obligation to pay union dues, the unions have not reacted in a, well, dignified manner.

Take a gander at how union activists treated one conservative blogger outside the Michigan state capitol:

Via Hot Air.  The same folks knocked down a tent that Americans for Prosperity (with a permit) put up on the state capitol grounds, cheering as it collapsed with people in it.

Yet, neither AOL, Yahoo! nor the Washington Post cover this on their front pages this morning.  Here are some screen-captures of the Post’s front page:

(more…)

Among the many things to fault about then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s 2008 then-celebrated* speech on race was his failure to cite the most important speech on race in American history, Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

That great American dreamt that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”  With that line, King defined the ideal we should all strive for–to judge an individual not by his skin color, but but his character.

That notion seems to be lost to many Democrats attacking Republicans for raising questions about Ambassador Susan Rice’s public statements on Benghazi.  As Victor Davis Hanson put it two days ago:

Susan Rice misleads the country and suddenly her critics are racists and sexists — does not mean that it does not work in deterring critics. A white liberal can all but destroy Condoleezza Rice or Alberto Gonzalez and feel very liberal, but a peep about Barack Obama or Susan Rice from a white male is akin to a KKK slur.

We will have truly realized Dr. King’s dream when defenders of an African-American figure subject to criticism don’t assume that his (or her) critics were motivated by her race.  They may well have been calling her character into question — or her actions.

And they will defend her character — or her actions — rather than make assumptions about her critics’ motives.

* (more…)

Last week, I think it was — or maybe it was the week before,  I caught on Anderson Cooper that helps explains the GOP’s image problem.

That CNN anchor was talking about Todd Akin (does seem our friends in the legacy media devote more time to that failed Senate candidate’s crazy statement on rape than they do to the failure of elected Democratic Senators to pass a budget) and wondering what his defeat meant for the Tea Party, given the support, Cooper claimed, of that dynamic, grassroots movement for the Missouri social conservative.

Fortunately, former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer was on Cooper’s panel and quickly corrected him; Akin was not the Tea Party candidate, in fact, he won the GOP primary earlier this year because he was competing against two candidates who hailed from that wing of the party.

Three points/questions about this exchange stand out:

1. Anderson Cooper’s prejudices; he should have known better; had he bothered to researcht the 2012 Missouri GOP Senate primary, he would have quickly learned that Akin was definitely not a Tea Party candidate.  The supposedly even-handd “news” anchor just assumed that because Akin had some extreme views, he must be Tea Party, that is, he appears to see the Tea Party as an extremist outfit.  And Cooper seems unaware that the Tea Party lacks a social issue focus (as Mr. Akin has).
2. Cooper’s ignorance about the Tea Party seems to help foster popular misrepresentation of the movement.
3. If Fleischer had not been there to correct Cooper, his misrepresentation would have gone unchallenged.  How many other similar media misrepresentations go unchallenged?

Just something to consider.

Last night before bed, I posted a quick write-up of a meet-up I had had yesterday with Glenn Reynolds, his lovely wife Helen Smith and a gaggle of conservative bloggers and friends.  And there I, an openly gay blogger at a blog with “gay” in its very name, found the same (warm) welcome I have found at every gathering of conservative (& libertarian bloggers).

This morning, when I woke up and checked the blog, found this comment in our “pending” (for approval) folder:

How many days have you guys gone without being outright called faggots by the people you suck up to? You should put up a running clock and take bets on who will be the one to break down and share his true feelings with you. It’ll probably be Jim Hoft.

I immediately approved it–wanting to provide evidence of left-wing prejudices against conservatives.  For the record, Jim Hoft has shared his feelings with me, at least three times in person, more via e-mail.  You see, I’ve been reading Jim’s blog for a number of years now and twice when I passed through St. Louis, e-mailed him and suggested we meet.

He agreed and we got together at a local coffee shop and talked politics.  Now, Jim and I may not agree on every issue, but he has never insulted me, has even praised this blog.  He is, in short, a decent guy and has always (always) been friendly toward me.

Neither Jim nor any conservative blogger, in person, in text, in e-mail or any other form of communication, has ever called me a “faggot.”  In fact, the only people who seem to be directing that slur at gay conservatives sit on the political left.

A conservative Facebook friends reports that today the president spoke the following disingenuous words:

If you say women should have access to contraceptive care, but you support legislation that would let employers deny contraceptive care, you might have a case of Romnesia.

Um, Mr, President, which candidate supports legislation that would deny contraceptive care? I do believe there’s a bill out there that would prevent the state from mandating that a private employer pay for his employees’ contraception.

And how exactly could an employer deny contraceptive care?  Does the president really believe they have control over their employees’ private lives?

UPDATE:  Later, responding to my comment, she added:

Our President rhetorically leaps over the chasm between forcing a third party to buy someone else contraception because of a preexisting economic relationship (presumably unrelated to pregnancy causation) versus that person somehow blocking the second person’s access to contraception. It is a dishonest effort to make people think Romney wants their employers to be able to block contraceptives.

Of all the things from the second debate my liberal friends have focused on in their (post-debate) Facebook posts, Mitt Romney’s supposed binder blunder gets the most amount of commentary. As I write this (about 10:53 PST on Wednesday night), one of Yahoo!’s top “News” headlines links to an opinion piece on that very topic:

Democrats, it seems, were looking for a gaffe and came up with this, most likely to blunt Mitt Romney’s momentum with women. Michael Barone observes, that since the first debate, “it appears” that Romney has “made greater gains among women than men.” He cites Democratic pollster Celinda Lake who said that after October 3, women “came out thinking he might understand their lives and might be able to get something done for them.”

And yet the response they cited shows how Romney went out of his way to hire more women to his administration.

Jennifer Rubin thought Romney’s answer to the question about hiring women (where he made the binder reference)

was one of the strongest of the night, and judging from the Obama team’s reaction, his record in hiring women may have gone over quite well.   In the Obama team’s telling, however, the awkward phrasing of “binders full of women” is somehow insulting.

. . . .

As Mark Halperin tweeted, “Dem attempts to make this binder thing into a deal is . . . freakshow (and Ds know it). And/but they will find willing accomplices in much of MSM.”

Indeed, blogs another woman, Leslie Loftis, “the binder meme says the opposite” of what Obama supporters claim: (more…)

in response to an Advocate piece contending that “Former U.N. ambassador John Bolton uses homophobic term to describe President Obama’s foreign policy“, Richard Grenell wrote a letter to the Advocate, taking issue with their assessment.  As the magazine has yet to publish his letter, we are posting it here:

The Advocate’s Michelle Garcia’s latest piece fails to mention that John Bolton has been a consistent defender of gay rights, gay marriage and a critic of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell before it was overturned, Garcia also fails to show how Bolton’s comment describing President Obama as a weak leader is in anyway homophobic.

I also find it ironic that while The Advocate has consistently refused to report on John Bolton’s early support for Log Cabin Republicans and gay rights, they jump to write a phony and purposefully deceptive piece about him – all because he is a Republican. Calling a conservative friend of our community homophobic is a self-inflicted wound. Are Advocate writers so in the tank for the Democrats that they attack a supporter of gay rights just because he’s not a Democrat? Garcia’s story is the perfect example of how the old gay guard and its magazine of choice is out of touch with gay Americans today. Yesterday’s warriors of acceptance have morphed into today’s liberal intolerants. This is the exact faux outrage that makes The Advocate the magazine of your old gay uncle. It isn’t a serious place for news or information.

Please note that I merely cut and pasted the letter without adding — or altering a word.

Barack Obama, wrote David Corn earlier this week, repeating a Democratic talking point, should, in his speech tonight, “Castigate GOP Obstructionism“.

The real story, however, is not one of Republican obstructionism, but of Democratic obstinance.  The Obama team decided early, reports ABC News’s Rich Klein, in his piece about Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book, The Price of Politics,  decided to “to forego bipartisanship for the sake of speed around the stimulus bill was encapsulated by his then-chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel: ‘We have the votes. F— ‘em,’ he’s quoted in the book as saying.”

The day after Democrats celebrate Bill Clinton, Klein reminds us how the current Democratic president differs from his partisan predecessor:

“Obama doesn’t really have the joy of the game. Clinton basically loved negotiating with a bunch of pols, about anything,” [former Clinton Treasury Secretary and Obama economic advisor Larry] Summers said. “Whereas, Obama, he really didn’t like these guys.”

Obama simply put didn’t make the effort to hammer out deals with Republicans as had Clinton.  He even, according to Woodward, had problems working with fellow Democrats.

No wonder he was, as Jennifer Rubin reports in her commentary on the Woodward excerpts, the real obstacle to progress:

The retelling of the debt-ceiling negotiations, and of Obama’s decision to up the ante by $400 billion on taxes, reminds us that Obama, in essence, spiked the deal. He simply did not get the job done. From Woodward’s book: “It is a fact that President Obama was handed a miserable, faltering economy and faced a recalcitrant Republican opposition. . . . But presidents work their will — or should work their will — on important matters of national business. . . . Obama has not.” Or, as Republicans say, he has not lead. (more…)

One wonders if our friends in the legacy media will devote as much time to “fact-checking” the error-prone Vice President’s speech Wednesday night as they did to that of his opponent in the fall campaign.  Perhaps, they will decide to build a narrative on a Romney campaign aide’s tweet.

And that aide will likely have a greater respect for facts that will the author of the tweet which inspired last week’s legacy media frenzy.

“Immediately after Ryan finished delivering the passage on the GM plant in his speech,” reports the Weekly Standard’s Stephen F. Hayes,

. . . top Obama adviser Stephanie Cutter sent this tweet: “Ryan blaming the President for a GM auto plant that closed under Pres Bush—thought he was smarter than that.” With one click after another, Cutter’s false claim became accepted wisdom.

Miss Cutter, as you may recall, “maintained that she was not familiar with the details of Mr. Soptic’s[*] wife’s death even though she was on a conference call that featured Soptic in May.”

Her tweet about Paul Ryan was similarly inaccurate.  The Wisconsin Republican never blamed Obama for closing the GM plant.   Below are Ryan’s remarks about the plant:

[1] My home state voted for President Obama. When he talked about change, many people liked the sound of it—especially in Janesville, [2] where we were about to lose a major factory. [3] A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that G.M. plant. [4-a] Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said, “I believe that if our government is there to support you, this plant will be here for another 100 years.”

[4-b] That’s what he said in 2008. [5] Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. [6] And that’s how it is in so many towns where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight.

Please note I added in the numbers in brackets, each representing a fact which can be checked.  If you wish to dispute the accuracy of Mr. Ryan’s facts, please identify by number the particular fact, then provide evidence demonstrating its inaccuracy.  Ed Morrissey provides video evidence showing that Obama did indeed say what Ryan says he said in 2008 [4].

To truly “fact-check” the speech, you would first need identify the facts, then check each one.

Our “fact-checkers” in the legacy media, however, have a different standard for determining the accuracy of a Republicans remarks.   (more…)

Democrats loves to call Ronald Reagan’s successful economic policies as “trickle-down” economics.  President “Obama [has] criticized the GOP for promoting what he called a ‘top down’ economic system and said those policies were ‘central to Gov. Romney and … central to his running mate.’”

That notion of “top down” economics better describes the policies the Democrats advocate than the ones the Republicans promote.  Democrats’s policies always involve a greater role for government, “stimulating” the economy by directing taxpayer (or borrowed) dollars to favored industries.

In his column on Friday, George Will dubbed these policies “trickle-down government“:

With Americans, on average, worth less and earning less than when he was inaugurated, Barack Obama is requesting a second term by promising, or perhaps threatening, that prosperity is just around the corner if he can practice four more years of trickle-down government.

We need give this notion greater currency.

Just as I was starting work on a post on the jaundiced media narrative of the GOP, I catch sight of Bruce’s latest on the Franklin Center Symposium.  Seems that new media are doing so well largely because people are rapidly losing faith in more traditional sources of news.  According to Gallup, only 25% of Americans have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in newspapers, with only 21% having that kind of confidence in TV news.

That number is unlikely to budge much in the next few days.  Over the past week, we’ve seen our media spending more time obsessing over a Republican Senate candidate repudiated by his party for making a stupid statement (while ignoring a Democratic Senator ignored by her own party after insulting her partisan adversaries and accusing them of a “sickness“) than considering the actual policy statements of the Republican candidates for president and vice president.

Consistent with this coverage, the media, Jennifer Rubin predicts, as the Republican National Convention begins, “will talk about abortion much more than will any speaker.”  These folks aren’t there, she observes “to observe or to report, but to shape, massage and even distort what is said and done.”  (Read the whole thing.)

“The mainstream media comes in to Tampa with one mission,” quips Micey Kaus, “and that’s to subtly give the impression that Romney is floundering” (Via Instapundit).

It seems that for the legacy media crafting a narrative consistent with Democratic talking points is more important the reporting the facts of a dynamic, resurgent and inclusive Republican Party.  No wonder public confidence in our news media continues to decline.

Earlier today, when I clicked on the Charles Krauthammer link atop Jennifer Rubin’s Washington Post blog, instead of getting that sage conservative pundit’s original insight into the events of the day, I got Dana Milbank’s stale repetition of conventional wisdom. (Maybe the Post editors set it up that way because otherwise no conservatives would read Milbank.)

Contending that when “Todd Akin sneezes, Paul Ryan catches a cold“, Milbank offers

The Republicans’ soon-to-be nominee for vice president is supposed to be delivering a message about jobs and the economy, but he’s finding he cannot escape his longtime House colleague, now a national pariah for his exotic views on rape.

Well, perhaps for Beltway denizens like yourself, Dana — and for Democratic partisans, but most Americans will evaluate Mr. Ryan not by words he has deemed “outrageous”, but by the way he carries himself next week at the Republican convention and in the coming months on the campaign trail.

The only reason anyone is connecting Ryan to Akin is because left-leaning pundits and Democratic partisans are dwelling on the issue.  I mean, come on, Dana, who’s asking these questions?  Who’s making this a story?

It ain’t undecided voters in Ohio, Florida and Virginia; it’s self-satisfied pundits in Washington, D.C.

Oh, and by the notion, about the notion circulating among such pundits about Ryan trying to “restrict the definition of rape,” well, that’s based on false New York Times report.  The Times reporters failed “to to provide very basic context about the bill Ryan cosponsored”: (more…)

Disagreeing with the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins’ contention that “the SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center] had given [the FRC shooter] ‘a license to shoot’“, saying the comment “goes too far”, the National Review’s Rich Lowry reminds conservatives that

Nothing the SPLC does sanctions violence, and [the shooter]’s alleged crime is his responsibility and his alone. But the SPLC’s designation of the Family Research Council is intolerant all the same, a bullying attempt to short-circuit free debate.

It’s not as if the SPLC considers the Family Research Council mildly offensive, or barely hateful. Asked if someone addressing a Family Research Council meeting was as guilty as someone addressing an Aryan Nation rally, the SPLC’s research director said “yes.”

I agree with Lowry that the SPLC goes too far in labeling the Family Research Council a “hate group.”  They may put out some pretty strange and generally inaccurate statements/opinions on gay people, but, like many groups with strange opinions, including the SPLC, they don’t advocate violence against the individuals or groups they criticize.  Rich laments that it’s fortunate the outfit . . .

. . . can’t tell the difference between people who hate blacks and people who support the traditional definition of marriage. . . .

The SPLC calls the Family Research Council a “hate group.” This puts it in the same league as the True Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, the Supreme White Alliance, the Old Glory Skinheads and, of course, the American Nazi Party.

As they ask in kindergarten, which of these things isn’t like all the others?

Via Instapundit.  Read the whole thing  Lowry goes on to call the SPLC’s categorizing “profoundly illiberal” and suggest is purpose is to shut down discourse on gay marriage.

They’re not the only group who wants to shut down debate on this topic.  If gay marriage advocates believe they have a strong case to make for state recognition of same-sex marriage, they should welcome criticism as it will afford them a better opportunity to make their case, which (they believe) is the stronger argument (than the case for traditional marriage).

If she were a Republican and even suggested that Democrats don’t love their mothers, it would make national news and she would be butt of jokes on late-night TV, but Mrs. Boxer is a Democrats and so you won’t hear much of this in the media.  Erika Johnson reports that while “speaking at a Planned Parenthood event in California yesterday”, the failed junior Senator from California accused Republicans of waging a war on women:

“There is a war against women, and Romney and Ryan — if they are elected — would become its top generals,” Boxer said calling Akin’s comments a “direct outgrowth” of the extreme positions on abortion held by Republicans.

“Where’s the outrage by Mitt Romney?” Boxer asked, “There is a sickness out there in the Republican Party, and I’m not kidding. Maybe they don’t like their moms or their first wives; I don’t know what it is.”

Outrage, ma’am?  Do you read the news?  Mitt Romney has condemned Akin’s comments and expressed his desire that the Missouri Republican exit the Senate contest.  Sure sounds like outrage to me.

How mean-spirited to suggest that the crazy commentary of one candidate (since repudiated by said candidate–and criticized by all prominent Republicans who have weighed in on the matter) is an outgrowth of the party’s pro-life policies.  Democrats do want to milk this for all its worth.

Ma’am, I know it’s not customary for Democrats to do such things, but an apology is in order.

NB:  Tweaked the title (thrice).

UPDATE:  Twichy has a great roundup of Twitter reaction to Ma’am’s mean mutterings.

“Democrats and liberal journalists“, observes the Washington Examiner’s Timothy P. Carney, comparing Vice President Biden’s recent “chains” comment to other leading Democratic allegations of Republican racism, “into are constantly calling us racists for the crime of being conservative.”

Take a gander of this screen capture I made on AOL’s home page in the wee hours of the morning:
It leads to a post about a bad joke a “long-time Pennsylvania GOP official” made about Obama supporters.  This is a leading national news story?

At the bottom of the article, the folks at the Huffington Post created a slideshow of ”Below-The-Belt Political Attacks”, all but one of which were leveled by Republicans.  No mention made of the recent the ad released (and immediately discredited) Obama Super PAC ad accusing Mitt Romney of killing a steelworker’s wife or of nasty attacks made by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, respectively, the Democratic leaders of the U.S. Senate and House.

The folks at the Huffington post are just trying make Republicans look like they’re playing nasty when, in this electoral cycle, it is the Democrats, from the party’s leadership on down, have made hitting below the belt its stock-in-trade.

Oh, and the local Republican official apologized.  Mr. Reid hasn’t apologized for calling Republicans evil-mongers.  Nor has Mrs. Pelosi apologized for comparing conservative critics to a bacterium causing food poisoning.

One thing John Hinderaker has “never figured out is why, if the Republicans represent only an ‘extremist fringe,’” as claims a certain Mr. A. Arnold Gore, Jr., in a fundraising letter for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), “there is such a grave danger that they will win a majority of the votes in this year’s presidential election.

Does seem some folks on the left are beholden to the notion of the Republican Party as run by a cabal of extremists.  And wonder if their prejudiced read on the GOP compromises its ability to reach out to people dissatisfied with the Democrats.

And compromising that ability is certainly part of the reason folks like Mr. Gore call the GOP extreme.