This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Media

  • The Salute to Heroes dust up [Jonn]

    For those of you who are still interested, the post I wrote the other day about the President skipping out on the historical Salute to Heroes Inaugural Banquet & Ball took on a life of it’s own. We got linked to more than 50 other blogs because of the single link I put on Little Green Football’s Link Viewer. Those 50 blogs were little ones and HUGE ones.

    The first guy to pick up on the post was Mr Wolf at Blackfive who also wrote about it at Pajama Media from there it took on a life of it’s own (about 300,000 hits here in two days). On a story I sat on for 18 hours while I decided whether to post it or not.

    Before I posted it, we were actually getting hits from search engines that were asking if President Obama had attended the Ball based on TSO’s first post of that day about his stalking of MOH recipients – so folks were wondering. Finally I decided to run with it.

    Immediately, the first wave of believers applauded, the second wave was the unbelievers. They fanned out across the internet and attacked the story wherever it popped up. Some leftist bloggers accused us of deleting comments (not realizing that I don’t sit here 24 hours every day monitoring the spam and spam-like comments) then the doubters did their superficial Google searches and determined 1) the ball was canceled so we were lying, or 2) the ball was merged with another one so we were lying, or 3) Obama did come to the ball so we were lying, or 4) so what?

    First thing Thursday morning, the American Legion put up an article about another ball. The VFW took down their article about the Ball. This only confounded me because I was trying to prove it actually happened the way I reported it. So my only alternative was to point people to the hotel to prove it had indeed happened. Unfortunately there are two hotels with the same name a few blocks apart and I pointed people to the wrong one – further confounding the process.

    In the interim, other bloggers were dealing with the unbelieving trolls. Finally, I got a frustrated email from Mr Wolf this morning. Eventually, he called the American Legion and he’s now updated his post at both Blackfive and Pajamas Media with what he gleaned from the good folks in the PR office at the Legion.

    Here on this blog, I finally got the right hotel and the right phone number at about the same time as a reader David Bell posted his own email from the Legion. The thread at Little Green Footballs grew to over a 1000 comments, and our thread is over 300 comments long. At PJM, someone even called us the “Scott Thomas Beauchamp of the Right”. Well, I don’t see any apologies from the doubters, so I won’t apologize for my missteps. In fact, the doubters have all fled.

    My regular readers know the extent I will go to for the truth, and newer visitors might not, so I forgive them for doubting me this time. There’s a real interesting story behind all of this confusion that I can’t relate right now. Maybe if you get me drunk at the April get-together.

    But, it demonstrates what we’re in for every time we post something that makes Obama look bad, even if it’s true. And as big a story as this was on the internet, the MSM still hasn’t picked it up. So we have the responsibility to post nothing but the truth and to have a defense lined up before we hit that “send” button.

  • Broder on Bush’s “greatest moral failing”

    The Washington Post’s David Broder writes this morning on “The Call That Bush Didn’t Make“, a typically liberal whine that Bush failed in the war against terror. But Broder reaches for the far edge of the Bush Derangement Syndrome envelope;

    Iraq and Afghanistan are the main fronts in the fourth major war of my lifetime, following World War II, Korea and Vietnam, and the first in which nothing was asked of the civilian population — no higher taxes, nothing to disrupt the comfort of daily life.

    Yes, you read that correctly. We could’ve won the war against terror by now if only President Bush had raised our taxes. Let’s just set aside the fact that Korea and Vietnam were also wars that had little impact on the American homefront, and let’s look at the utter absurdity of the claim Broder makes.

    The comfort of my daily life has been disrupted by the media’s inability to accept even that terrorists can be called terrorists. The comfort of my daily life is disrupted by the fact that the Washington Post and the New York Times habitually leak classified information that puts me and my family in danger. But most of all, the comfort of my daily life is disrupted by dyed-in-the-wool liberal “journalists” who think that the only way the comfort of my daily life can be disrupted to an acceptable level is by raising my taxes.

    Broder continues;

    [T]he president who asked nothing of the country continued to squander the budget surpluses he inherited while pressing larger and larger tax cuts on the wealthiest of his constituents and supporters. Tax cuts became the sovereign remedy for everything in the Bush years, even, or especially, when it became clear that the budgets had turned to deficits and we were borrowing abroad to finance these revenue giveaways.

    Geez, how long are these goofballs going to carry on about the “budget surpluses”? They were year-over-year surpluses, not some fat pile of money sitting in the Treasury building that Bush raided daily for pizza money. And it looks like Obama thinks that tax cuts are a “sovereign remedy”, too. They weren’t “revenue giveaways”, they were allowing people to keep the money they EARNED, you doofus.

    The upside-down logic of borrowing in order to cut taxes pervaded the rest of our public and private economic decision making, feeding the speculative booms that fueled unsustainable “bubbles” in financial and housing markets.

    Now the inevitable crash has come, and the nation is facing a deficit of more than $1.2 trillion — an unimaginable sum — in the current year.

    See that? It wasn’t helping people to buy houses they couldn’t afford that caused the “housing bubble” to burst, it was George Bush’s determination that people should keep their money. Letting us keep our money fed “the speculative boom” meaning that we’re too irresponsible when we’re allowed to keep our own money. No where does Broder advocate cutting government spending in his illogical screed – only making Americans pay for the inefficiency and waste of government regulation financed by more and more of our earnings.

    David Broder should turn off his IBM Selectric typewriter and retire to some park where he can yell his dated and insane rantings at passing ducks. George Bush never made the ducks suffer discomfort over the war against terror either.

  • More on CNN’s Hoax Video

    I posted this video earlier this morning in relation to a Michelle Malkin post on Joe the Plumber.

    Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee characteristically takes the hoax a whole lot further;

    But what marks this story as a hoax, and what elements point to media collusion in promoting this video as propaganda? Please watch the video above again, and we’ll go through those elements step-by-step.

    They are:

    * basic medical procedures are poorly faked
    * known propaganda actors are used in this film
    * the site of the attack is poorly-constructed and inconsistent with a military attack.
    * the body doesn’t act like a body

    First, let’s return to the hospital, and take a look at our medical doctors and the life-saving procedures they are performing.

    Owens pulls in the dope on the European doctor in the clip as well;

    International media reports, including those from the BBC, CBS, CNN and FOX’s sister station Sky News, present Gilbert as an ordinary doctor.

    But a look at his record shows that Gilbert, 61, is a political activist and member of the Norwegian Maoist “Red” party, and he has been involved in solidarity work for the Palestinians since the 1970s. He has criticized the international aid organization Doctors Without Borders for refusing to take sides in conflicts.

    Go read the whole post. For most of us it won’t change our minds about the media (because we already know they’re lying crooks), but it’s got a lot of tips to critically watch the media coverage of this conflict.

  • Israel rejects truce?

    This morning, we read from Reuters that “Israel rejects truce, presses on with Gaza strikes“. It hints that the Palestinians offered a truce after losing more than 300 dead, doesn’t it? Here’s a screen shot of the headline;

    But actually, we find out in the eighth paragraph, the truce appeal didn’t come from Hamas at all;

    The United Nations has called for an immediate truce. But Israeli Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit said “there is no room for a ceasefire” with Hamas until the threat of rocket fire had been removed.

    “The Israeli army must not stop the operation before breaking the will of the Palestinians, of Hamas, to continue to fire at Israel,” he told Israel Radio.

    Oh, so it was the United Nations that asked Israel to unilaterally stop shooting. I wonder if the UN asked Hamas to stop shooting since they’ve been shooting for the last six weeks of the “ceasefire”. In fact, most of the news sources make it sound as if israel is the aggressor here. The Washington Post paints them as lunatic war mongers;

    While previous Israeli assaults on Gaza have pinpointed crews of Hamas rocket launchers and stores of weapons, the attacks that began Saturday have had broader aims than any before. Israeli military officials said Monday that their target lists have expanded to include the vast support network that the Islamist movement relies on to stay in power in the strip. The choice of targets suggests that Israel intends to weaken all the various facets of Hamas rather than just its armed wing.

    The Jerusalem Post reports that the strikes over the weekend were ill-considered acts of near-terrorism;

    The announcement came as sources close to Hamas said that the movement’s armed wing had hardly been affected by the IDF operation that began on Saturday.

    The sources told The Jerusalem Post that many of the casualties in the first two days of the operation were “ordinary” policemen who had been recently recruited to various branches of the security forces.

    “These policemen were being enlisted to direct the traffic and fight crime,” the sources said. “These are not the militiamen who are responsible for the rocket attacks on Israel.”

    This explains why Hamas did not rush to evacuate the headquarters of the “civilian” police force in Gaza City before the IDF offensive.

    Reuters reports that a clerical group in Iran is enlisting volunteers to help Hamas in Gaza;

    A group of Iranian hardline clerics is signing up volunteers to fight in the Gaza Strip in response to Israel’s  airstrikes that have killed  at least 300 Palestinians, a news agency reported on Monday.

    “From Monday the Combatant Clergy Society has activated its website for a week to register volunteers to fight against the Zionist regime (Israel) in either the military, financial or propaganda fields,” the semi-official Fars news agency said.

    Israel patrols the coastal waters around Gaza and has declared areas around the enclave a “closed military zone”.

    The hardline Iranian group, which is headed by some leading clergy, says it has no affiliation with the government and was formed shortly after Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.

    I guess the Iranians are afraid of an Israeli air strike because their head cleric issued a fatwa ordering all Muslims to defend Hamas according to Ynet;

    Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a religious decree to Muslims around the world on Sunday, ordering them to defend Palestinians against Israel’s  attacks on Gaza, state television said.

    “All Palestinian combatants and all the Islamic world’s pious people are obliged to defend the defenseless women, children and people in Gaza in any way possible. Whoever is killed in this legitimate defense is considered a martyr,” state television quoted Khamenei as saying in a statement outlining the fatwa.

    Yeah, so Israel accepting a truce from the UN would do a lot of good, huh?

  • Why newspapers are dying

    The Purple Avenger at Ace of Spades wrote a post yesterday about the editorial board of the Connecticut Post telling their readers which subjects they shouldn’t be writing letters to the paper about. PA writes that their number one complaint about the readers is the fact they constantly blame poor Barney Franks and Chris Dodd for the our current economic problems.

    Further down the piece, the board complains;

    This is a big one — socialism. Really? Did I miss Obama’s plan to nationalize the oil industry?

    Is that the only thing that would earmark the Obama Administration as socialists? He did have a policy plank that called for the nationalization of healthcare. That’s not socialism? Taking money from one group of people to fund another group of people’s poor choices isn’t socialism?

    The notion that the tens of billions of dollars we spend killing people in Iraq could be better spent on schools and hospitals in this country is not radical. Huge majorities in this country support a robust social safety net, so that people who experience a run of misfortune don’t lose everything. All other industrialized nations on the planet have some form of universal health care. None of this is controversial.

    Yeah, well, spending ten of billions of dollars killing “people” is what the Federal government is supposed to be doing. Spending money on schools and hospitals is not something the Constitution says the Federal government should be doing. See the difference? I think if “huge majorities in this country” knew what a “robust social safety net” was going to cost them, they wouldn’t be so huge.

    And those “other industrialized nations” really are socialist entities themselves. Some even put it right in the names of their majority political parties. And they’re beginning to realize what the costs of their follies are, and they’ve begun to cut back on their spending. Please pay attention.

    And helping people who’ve had a “run of misfortune” is why there are charities, but funding a multi-generational lifestyle of sloth is what a corrupt and lazy government does to buy votes for a particular political party.

    Maybe those correspondents who fret about our economic choices are happy with the fact that while this is the richest country in the world, there are 41 nations with lower infant mortality rates. At the same time, most workers in “socialist” Western Europe get four to five weeks vacation to start with. What are we supposed to be scared of again?

    Yeah, those countries that have four to five weeks vacation mainly do that as an accounting trick to reach higher employment. All of those nations have near-double-digit unemployment and lower productivity per worker per hour than the US and that’s why we’re the economic powerhouse we are. But that’s the part the Left wants to change.

    I suppose the Connecticut Post doesn’t want to discuss reality, and they don’t want their readers to be informed beyond the nuggets that the Post tosses them to keep them ignorant. And no one can figure out why the print news industry is failing.

  • Our first day without Brit

    Brit Hume’s last show was Tuesday night. He was probably the most even-handed news anchor in a generation. I know our recent spate of trolls will disagree, but only because Hume told both sides of the story. The Left loves to hate Fox News but only because of shows like O’Reilly and Hannity which aren’t really news shows – shows that I haven’t watched since 2000. Hume’s hour was purely unbiased – anyone who spent time watching it actually learned about a particular issue instead of being fed the party line on how to think about it.

    In case you didn’t know it, Brit Hume was one of the early Berkeley radicals in his college days during the early 60s (according to David Horowitz in his book “Radical Son”). So Hume made the journey to conservatism just like the rest of us.

    I remember one night the fire alarm went off in the studio. As the bureau chief, Hume shooed everyone out of the building, but as anchor, he stayed and did the next segment alone.

    Brett Baier will be taking his place. I met Brett when he was the Fox News Pentagon reporter and he seemed like a nice guy for the few minutes I chatted with him. Out of all of the networks, Baier probably covered the Pentagon better than any other network in the months following the 9/11 attack, but I don’t envy him having to fill Humes shoes.

    Here are the closing moments of last night’s show in case you missed it (from Hot Air, by way of Ace of Spades)

  • Bush accepts some blame for Abu Ghraib

    The Washington Times writes that President Bush, in an interview with a reporter from the Saudi-run Middle East Broadcasting Center accepts some blame for the Abu Ghraib scandal;

    President Bush for the first time took a measure of responsibility for the 2004 Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq, during an interview with an Arabic TV network.

    “Abu Ghraib was a terrible disappointment. And admittedly, I wasn’t there on the site, but I was the Commander-in-Chief of a military where these disgraceful acts took place that sent the absolute wrong image about America and our military,” Mr. Bush said.

    I understand that President Bush is trying to firm up his legacy, but I’m not sure I like this new guy in the White House. Yes, he’s the commander-in-chief, and yes, he bears a small measure of responsibility because he’s the commander, but not to the extent he admits.

    It was a crime committed by seven dimwits who claimed they didn’t know that naked pyramids were  somehow inappropriate. And then they were so stupid, they took pictures of their antics and emailed the photos around to their friends. Their friends knew it was wrong – so why didn’t the perpetrators know it was wrong? They all received the same Law of Land Warfare class in Basic Training.

    Yeah, it did damage the image of the military, but only because the US media ran the pictures day-in-and-day-out – like the flushed Koran fairietale – to purposely damage the country and the military and fan the violence in Iraq.

    I’m waiting 9with unabated breath) for the New York Times and Washington Post apologize for their behavior during this war.

  • AP reads reenlistment figures wrong

    In an Associated Press article, some journalists try their hand at adding narrative to statistics and, of course, they get it wrong;

    They run the scattered quotes from folks who, correctly, choose to stay in the military because of the economy and they quote TSO’s favorite Pentagon employee;

    “We do benefit when things look less positive in civil society,” said David Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. “What difficult economic times give us, I think, is an opening to make our case to people who we might not otherwise have.”

    From what I’m told, Chu is a dick who doesn’t like to spend money on the troops and loves to slash healthcare costs. Although a very few are staying in the military because they’re scared to of the economy, others make the decision based on practical realities.

    If you scroll way down the article, you come to a quote by a very smart lady in uniform;

    Marine Staff Sgt. Angela Mink, who was injured in a helicopter accident in Iraq in 2004 and now works in public affairs at the Corps’ New River air station in North Carolina, said the thought of taking a civilian job “without my fellow Marines just didn’t appeal to me.” Moreover, she had little hope of finding a private-sector job that pays as well as the Marines.

    “Equivalent pay is nonexistent, once you factor in insurance premiums, housing costs,” said Mink, 37. “And we would definitely have had to relocate. I have a child with a disability and what civilian employer is going to take that into consideration when they think of moving you somewhere?”

    And so the married mother of five signed up recently for four more years.

    In other words, the military offered her a better deal than she could find outside – isn’t that more of a reason than a tight job market. Most of her prerequisites for the ideal employer would be difficult to find in any job market. In short, the Sergeant was telling us that she reenlisted because she has a great boss. That remains a constant factor no matter what the economy is like.