Lead and Gold

Susan Rice and the Talking Points

2013-05-15T08:27:00.004-04:00

This Politico story purports to explain why Amb. Susan Rice was the sacrificial lamb who who had to go on five Sunday talk shows to push the discredited talking points.

Why Hillary Clinton didn’t do Sunday shows after Benghazi

Throughout the piece Glenn Thrush puts the most benign interpretation possible on the facts in front of him.

Why did Hillary refuse to do the interviews?

“[Hillary] has a standing refusal [to do Sunday shows]. She hates them. She would rather die than do them,” said one aide on condition of anonymity. “The White House knows, so they would know not to even ask her.”

Could Hillary have political reasons for avoiding interviews where Benghazi would be topic 1, 2 and 3?

None of the officials was willing to speculate on why the secretary wouldn’t make an exception after such an extraordinary event — or whether Clinton had wanted to avoid a controversy that could have compromised her political future.

Thrush asked three people, couldn't get an answer, and decided to drop the subject. See, that's big league journalism, boys and girls.

Why Susan Rice?

Rice, who was close to the president’s team and regarded as a disciplined messenger who could be relied on to the deliver the talking points without going off message.

Thrush takes no notice of Rice's past history which might have made her the ideal choice for the White House's purposes:

Susan Rice and Benghazi

Our fearless journalist does give us two nuggets of pure gold. First, Rice was asked to "take one for the team" by "her friend Ben Rhodes, an influential National Security Council aide entrusted with Benghazi push-back duties." That would be the same Ben Rhodes who is the brother of the president of CBS News.

The second nugget explains why General Petraeus was a bad choice to repeat the talking points:

It was common knowledge around the West Wing and Foggy Bottom that Petraeus thought the sanitized talking points — scrubbed of references to Ansar al-Sharia, a Libyan group suspected in the attack, at the request of a Clinton subordinate — were “a joke” and “utterly useless,” as one former administration official told POLITICO.

In a September 15th email obtained by CBS News, Petraeus wrote that “he doesn’t like the talking points” and he would prefer the administration “not use them.”

So the White House knew that the head of CIA thought the "CIA Talking Points" were a joke after State got through revising them. Yet, they sent Rice out there to repeat the "utterly useless" talking points.

And no one at the White House was willing to force Hillary Clinton to stand behind those talking points after her department turned them into a joke?

Thrush never raises the possibility that Hillary shared Petraeus's view of the revised talking points. That's a shame. It seems like an important question.

Why Benghazi is not Watergate

2013-05-14T09:46:00.003-04:00

Last June, the Washington Post convened a series of panels to discuss Watergate on the fortieth anniversary of the break-in. Fred Thompson was on one of the panels and said that four factors caused Watergate to end in Nixon’s resignation. (Watch here)

1. An aggressive press eager to pursue the story.

2. Deep Throat--A highly placed source whose leaks could keep the story alive and moving forward.

3. John Dean’s public testimony.

4. The Watergate tapes--Incontrovertible evidence of Nixon’s wrong-doing.

It is no surprise that Benghazi lacks heft as a scandal because the MSM has been anything but aggressive. Four eith months the MSM has been anything but aggressive. Most of it has been bored by the story and too lazy to dig into the details. A significant minority has advanced the White House’s spin and abetted the cover-up.

They are happy to play the role of scandal condom for the Obama administration.

If we look at Thompson’s other points, it is clear that Benghazi has ripened faster than the Watergate scandal. We have three public whistle-blowers who are not tainted as Dean was by participating in the cover-up. Gregory Hicks, Mark Thompson, and Eric Nordstrom are willing to tell their stories in front of the Congress and the whole world; they eschewed anonymous leaks and late night meetings in parking garages.

We also have the same bread crumbs the Washington Post followed when they were the only paper on the Watergate trail:

If they’re clean why don’t they show it? Why are there so many lies? I’ll tell you why. Because you’ve got them.

The last four days make this David Halberstam quote especially pertinent:

Time was on the side of Woodward and Bernstein. A story like Vietnam or Watergate has a balance of forces of its own. At first the charges are deniable, the existing structure holds, powerful men with powerful positions can keep their troops in line. All the weight is on one side, and reporters like Woodward and Bernstein are a tiny minority, seeming puny by comparison. But there is the momentum, The denials slowly weaken, events undermine the denials so there have to be more denials, and each denial is a little weaker than the previous one. … Slowly the people who are issuing denials lose credibility, and the reporters begin to gain credibility.

Benghazi ARB: The return of the modified, limited hang out

2013-05-13T13:45:00.001-04:00

Victoria Toensing:

Administration Relying on Shoddy Benghazi Report to Absolve Itself of Blame

Powerline:

Accountability, Clinton style

Steyn on Benghazi: Not to be missed

2013-05-13T11:50:00.001-04:00

It's too good to excerpt. Every paragraph is a gem.

The Benghazi Lie
A failure of character of this magnitude corrodes the integrity of the state.

The MSM puts Fox in the Ghetto. Just like Anita Dunn told them to.

2013-05-13T03:27:00.003-04:00

Ace:

Why is it so important for the liberals to push out the only reporter who covered Benghazi?

"Ghettoization." If the "neutral media" -- actually liberal as hell -- can present a unified party line on stories, always supporting one another and never showing a crack in the wall, they can sneer at stories they don't like by saying "Only Fox claims that."

R. S. McCain:

All of that ridiculous “PlameGate” nonsense was taken very seriously by the mainstream media, as though it were a real scandal that might implicate the president in High Crimes and Misdemeanors, and yet it was transparently absurd from start to finish.

So fast-forward: Terrorists kill a U.S. ambassador and four other Americans in an attack on the consulate in Benghazi, and Obama administration officials — obviously concerned about political fallout during an election year — begin stacking up lies like cordwood. Everything we know about the matter leads to the conclusion that the administration failed before, during and after the attack, that they consistently lied at every step of the way, and that they’re quite likely still trying to hide the truth, especially in regard to who gave the “stand down” order to cancel a Special Operations rescue.

According to Alex Koppelman, however, this was just a “Republican obsession” until Jonathan Karl of ABC reported it, even though Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard had previously reported the same basic story about the edited Benghazi talking points.

One this week's Reliable Sources, well-traveled hack Margaret Carlson admitted that this is going on:

CARLSON: And rat on the bosses. And say what really happened. We didn't have another face to put on Benghazi and now we have it. The other thing back to your point is that because the right wing went so far on this story, it's Watergate, it's impeachable. We couldn't hear Steven Hayes in the "Weekly Standard." It did take somebody who is just a meat and potatoes reporter.

GERAGHTY: Don't cite the nut job and Steven Hayes is not to be listened to. This is a huge conspiracy. The president should be indicted and aliens are involved and my dog is talking to me. You can find that for any story in the whole wide world. You can use it as an excuse to not cover something.

CARLSON: It was just a constant drum beat and they weren't doing any reporting.

Note, especially, that the MSM is now using the "Bad Fox, Bad Rush" gambit to justify their epistemic barriers to all right-wing writing. Carlson's argument boils down to "Glenn Beck is crazy so I don't read the Weekly Standard".

Speaking of Glenn Beck, I first heard about Anita Dunn and the White House's war on Fox on his old FNC TV show. You remember Anita Dunn right? She was the Obama point woman when the effort to discredit Fox started::

“What I think is fair to say about Fox — and certainly it’s the way we view it — is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party,” said Anita Dunn, White House communications director, on CNN. “They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”

This explains a lot

2013-05-12T13:15:00.001-04:00

Presidents of ABC and CBS News Have Siblings Working at White House With Ties to Benghazi

"CBS News President David Rhodes and ABC News President Ben Sherwood, both of them have siblings that not only work at the White House, that not only work for President Obama, but they work at the NSC on foreign policy issues directly related to Benghazi."

So now this makes a lot more sense:

CBSNews Bigs Fret That Sharyl Attkisson is Coming "Dangerously Close to Advocacy"

"Dangerously close to advocacy"

That is CBS speak for "Hey! You're making my brother look bad"

How we live now

2013-05-11T21:09:00.006-04:00

Instapundit:

These are the bad old days, come again. Wake up and smell the Chicago.

Daniel Drezner:

So, in all, this has been a pretty crappy week for people who dislike conspiracy theories.

Is there a de-virgining process as well?

2013-05-11T21:00:00.004-04:00

The MSM owes Ron Ziegler an apology.

On Friday, Jay Carney put on a display that was breath-taking in its arrogance and dishonesty. Nixon's flack could never muster up the sangfroid Carney showed as he offered up one tedious, bald-faced lie after another. When he was called to account for his own previous deceitful statements ("only stylistic changes", he reached Clintonian depths of cynicism and shamelessness.

It was a bravura performance by a political hack who loves his work.

Here's the thing--

It was not that long ago that Time magazine told us that Carney was an honest, non-partisan seeker after the truth.

They have some explaining to do.

Related:

How does that re-virgining process work again?

A spectre haunts the sleep of the MSM

Is this why Comcast/NBC wants rid of Jay Leno?

2013-05-11T20:39:00.002-04:00

The White House has a new slogan when it comes to Benghazi: Hope and Change... the subject. #LenoMono

Benghazi and the other presidential debate

2013-05-10T09:05:00.005-04:00

Benghazi figured prominently in the second debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney. In that case, CNN’s Candy Crowley lied her ass off to blunt Romney’s attacks on the Administration’s lies and incompetence. It now turns out that Benghazi figured in the defining moment of the final debate, albeit more as subtext than explicit issue.

In that debate, Romney tried to make the case that the Obama administration was hollowing out America’s defenses:

“Our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917,” Romney said. “The Navy said they needed 313 ships to carry out their mission. We're now at under 285. We're headed down to the low 200s if we go through a sequestration. That's unacceptable to me.”

“I will not cut our military budget by a trillion dollars, which is a combination of the budget cuts the president has, as well as the sequestration cuts,” he added. “That, in my view, is making is making our future less certain and less secure.”

The president parried Romney’s attacks with a combination of snark and lies.

Snark:

“But I think Governor Romney maybe hasn't spent enough time looking at how our military works,” Obama said. “You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed.”

For the record, Obama was factually incorrect about the bayonets.

Obama is wrong. we have hundreds of thousands more bayonets now? than in 1916.

Lies:

“First of all, the sequester is not something that I've proposed,” Obama said. “It is something that Congress has proposed. It will not happen.”

We now know, based on Bob Woodward’s reporting, that sequestration was something the president proposed.

I think the really interesting point is the statement made by Obama as part of his snark offensive:

“We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them,” Obama said. “We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.”

In terms of Benghazi, the Joplin Globe understood the issue six months ago:

Recall the old question that presidents usually asked during times of international tensions: “Where are the carriers and Marines?”

We just had a national crisis in Benghazi. But we have no carriers in the entire Mediterranean Sea.

So, the president was right, we do have these things called aircraft carriers. We just did not have any where we needed them during the Benghazi attack. As the administration pleads their case that there was nothing they could do to save the Americans attacked by terrorists, they are also confessing that Romney was right that their policy had depleted American military forces to a dangerous level.

No way to treat a hero

2013-05-10T08:27:00.001-04:00

Moonwalker Buzz Aldrin Used as Photo Prop for Obama

President Obama had nothing to say to the moonwalker and didn’t seem to want to hear anything from Aldrin on the long flight to Florida. So Aldrin sat in the back of Air Force One and never saw Obama – until it landed.

When it landed, Aldrin said he was summoned to the front of the plane. But he found out it was not to talk about space policy. Instead, President Obama wanted Aldrin to emerge from Air Force One next to Obama for a photo op. The moonwalker was to be a mere prop.

Not a unique occurrence:

"You guys make a pretty good photo op,”

Soldiers did not join the military to be props to an egomaniac’s photo-shoot. Soldiers join to protect family, friends, and the Constitution — the foundation of America.

An Isolated Man Trapped in a Collapsing Presidency

Everybody else, including members of his Cabinet, have little face time with him except for brief meetings that serve as photo ops. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner both have complained, according to people who have talked to them, that they are shut out of important decisions.

That's going to leave a mark

2013-05-09T16:21:00.001-04:00

Greg Gutfeld wins quote of the day: ‘The media is Obama’s scandal condom’

Everyone should have goals in life. Of course, when the inevitable layoffs come, they are going to need another goal.

I wonder what the interior monologue sounds like.....

Unemployment sucks and no one seems to take my experience seriously. But at least we Journolists were able to keep those awful conservatives from besmirching the Chosen One.

Benghazi: The story they can't kill

2013-05-09T11:16:00.003-04:00

Bryan Preston:

7 Things We Learned from the Benghazi Whistleblower Hearing

The hearings turned out to be revelatory.

For instance:

Ambassador Stevens’ reason for going to Benghazi has been cleared up. Hicks testified that Ambassador Stevens traveled to Benghazi to fulfill one of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s wishes. Despite the fact that security was worsening in Benghazi for months leading up to the 9-11 attack, Clinton wanted to make the post there permanent. Her State Department had denied repeated requests from the U.S. team in Libya to upgrade security there, but she wanted to use the permanent post as a symbol of goodwill. Stevens was committed to that goal and told Clinton he would “make it happen.” He was in Benghazi on 9-11 furthering Clinton’s goal. She had denied requests to beef up security at Benghazi and then blamed his death on a YouTube movie. Hicks’ testimony raises the question of Clinton’s competence and grasp on reality, strongly suggesting that she put political perceptions ahead of the facts on the ground in Benghazi.

The hearings also turned over a rock and found another Susan Rice lie:

On Sept. 12, Ambassador Susan Rice told the first of her many untruths, claiming in an email that the FBI investigation into the attack was already underway. It would not actually get underway for 17 days after the attack, by which time the scene of the attack had been compromised and contaminated.

Another reason the Patriot-News deserves its fate

2013-05-09T11:06:00.002-04:00

If you are going to call your readers stupid-- make sure your big blue hired gun gets his facts straight.

Columnist Dick Polman denies Gosnell trial cover up, yet misstates charges

An idea too smart for the stupid party

2013-05-09T11:03:00.003-04:00

Instapundit:

THE HILL: Republican leader rips the media for ‘shoving us in the corner.’ “House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) ripped the media in a speech Tuesday to the Ripon Society, arguing press coverage is partly responsible for the GOP’s messaging woes.”

You want to punish ‘em? Mandate cable unbundling, which is the right thing to do anyway — and popular, to boot.

Susan Rice and Benghazi

2013-05-08T14:04:00.002-04:00

Bryan Preston gets to the heart of the matter with Benghazi:

5 Benghazi Mysteries that Must Be Solved

RTWT. It is the best summary of the key questions/issues that I’ve read.

For example:

During her talk show appearances, Rice claimed that the attack was not premeditated and that it happened due to a spontaneous protest of a barely seen “hateful” movie that had been posted on YouTube months before the attack. Why did Rice mischaracterize the attack? Was she aware of the original talking points, and how they had been altered? Were Rice or Clinton the senior officials on whose behalf State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland had the talking points scrubbed of references to al Qaeda and terrorism? Why was Rice the face of the Obama administration that day, when she was the US ambassador to the UN, not Libya?

As we assess Rice’s role it is worth reading this ABC.com piece:

Who Was UN Ambassador Susan Rice Before Benghazi?

But her tenure at the Clinton Administration was not without controversy. In a 2001 Atlantic Monthly article, Samantha Power, a human rights journalist who is now an Obama administration adviser, criticized Rice's response to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda during her first years in the Clinton administration. Power wrote that Rice wondered on a conference call how the use of the word genocide would affect the November elections if the U.S. failed to intervene, appearing to be more preoccupied with the domestic political ramifications of the tragedy than in stopping the violence.

Rice has since said she deeply regrets the U.S. inaction in Rwanda. …

In 2007, she joined the first Obama presidential campaign as Senior Adviser for National Security Affairs. Rice was a staunch, outspoken surrogate for the president, and according to her detractors, maybe too outspoken.

In a 2008 Huffington Post blog, she sharply criticized Obama's primary opponent, then-Sen. Clinton, for voting for the Iraq war, saying it proved Clinton wouldn't be ready for a "3 a.m. call" in a national security emergency….

Her loyalty and blunt-speaking manner has been appreciated and rewarded by allies, such as Albright and President Obama. When he took office he named Rice as the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations.

From this we learn three critical facts: 1. Susan Rice is a diplomat who had no qualms about considering domestic politics when making diplomatic decisions. 2. She is an Obama loyalist who was an early passenger of the Hope and Change Express. 3. Her loyalty to Obama made her quite willing to kneecap her old patrons the Clintons.

So, are we to believe that the White House ignored all that when they chose Susan Rice to go on the Sunday shows to deflect blame after the disaster at Benghazi?

Niall Ferguson's public burning

2013-05-08T14:00:00.000-04:00

Jonah Goldberg:

Keynes Was Gay Not That There’s Anything Wrong with That

What I find interesting about the Ferguson controversy is how disconnected it is from the past. Even academics I respect reacted to Ferguson’s comments as if they bordered on unimaginable, unheard-of madness. I understand that we live in a moment where any negative comment connected to homosexuality is not only wrong but “gay bashing.” But Ferguson was trafficking in an old theory that was perfectly within the bounds of intellectual discourse not very long ago. Now, because of a combination of indifference to intellectual history and politically correct piety he must don the dunce cap. Good to know.

The real reason Rahmbo had to beg the gangs to stop shooting kids

2013-05-03T12:41:00.000-04:00

They are a key part of his coalition.

Instapundit pointed to this Chicago Magazine article which details the murderous corruption of Mogadishu on Lake Michigan.

Gangs and Politicians in Chicago: An Unholy Alliance

While they typically deny it, many public officials--mostly, but not limited to, aldermen, state legislators, and elected judges--routinely seek political support from influential street gangs. Meetings like the ones Baskin organized, for instance, are hardly an anomaly. Gangs can provide a decisive advantage at election time by performing the kinds of chores patronage armies once did.

There seems little doubt which group holds the whip hand:

At some of the meetings, the politicians arrived with campaign materials and occasionally with aides. The sessions were organized much like corporate-style job fairs. The gang representatives conducted hour long interviews, one after the other, talking to as many as five candidates in a single evening. Like supplicants, the politicians came into the room alone and sat before the gang representatives, who sat behind a long table. “One candidate said, ‘I feel like I’m in the hot seat,’” recalls Baskin. “And they were.”

The former chieftains, several of them ex-convicts, represented some of the most notorious gangs on the South and West Sides, including the Vice Lords, Gangster Disciples, Black Disciples, Cobras, Black P Stones, and Black Gangsters. Before the election, the gangs agreed to set aside decades-old rivalries and bloody vendettas to operate as a unified political force, which they called Black United Voters of Chicago. “They realized that if they came together, they could get the politicians to come to them,” explains Baskin.

The gang representatives were interested in electing aldermen sympathetic to their interests and those of their impoverished wards. As for the politicians, says Baskin, their interests essentially boiled down to getting elected or reelected. “All of [the political hopefuls] were aware of who they were meeting with,” he says. “They didn’t care. All they wanted to do was get the support.”

It is no surprise, then, the players in the game are compelled to minimize the danger posed by gangs:

Many forms of political corruption--taking bribes, rigging elections, engaging in pay-to-play deals--are plainly unethical, if not illegal. But forming political alliances with gangs isn’t a clear matter of right or wrong, some say. In many Chicago neighborhoods, it’s virtually impossible for elected officials and candidates for public office not to have at least some connection, even family ties, to gang members. “People try to paint this picture of bad versus good--it’s not like that,” says a veteran political organizer based in Chicago who specializes in getting out the vote in minority areas. “Everybody lives with each other, grew up with each other. Just because somebody goes this way or that way, it doesn’t mean you’re just gonna write them off automatically.”

No one wants to insult the real power brokers in the city.

Somehow, I can’t see a reporter accepting such a nuanced picture of killers and criminals if the gang in question was the KKK or Aryan Brotherhood. It’s probably worth quoting the great Stanley Crouch here:

[Between 1980 and 2002] street gangs have killed 10,000 people in Los Angeles, which is three times the number of black people lynched throughout the United States between 1877 and 1900, the highest tide of racial murder in the history of the nation.
(Reconsidering The Souls Of Black Folk)

I’m shocked, SHOCKED, that politicians who are willing to beg for gang support at election time sometimes make questionable decisions:

Most alarming, both law enforcement and gang sources say, is that some politicians ignore the gangs’ criminal activities. Some go so far as to protect gangs from the police, tipping them off to impending raids or to surveillance activities--in effect, creating safe havens in their political districts. And often they chafe at backing tough measures to stem gang activities, advocating instead for superficial solutions that may garner good press but have little impact.

Coddled politicians become corrupt politicians. Corrupt politics leads to dangerous cities.

Two police sources--a former gang investigator and a veteran detective--bluntly acknowledge that even if the police know of dubious dealings between an alderman and a gang leader or drug dealer, there is little, if anything, they can do, thanks to what they say is the department’s unofficial rule: Stay away from public officials. “We can’t arrest aldermen,” says the gang investigator, “unless they’re doing something obvious to endanger someone. We’re told to stand down.” The detective concurs: “It’s the unwritten rule. There’s a two-tier justice system here.”

Meanwhile, the city’s inspector general can’t--by design of the City Council--investigate council members. (In May 2010, the council, under pressure to curb its corruptible ways, created its own inspector general. The job went unfilled for more than 18 months, until last November, when the council picked a New York lawyer for the part-time position, which has a minuscule budget and no staff and which critics have decried as window-dressing.)

Chicago may be an outlier (maybe*) but I think this article helps to explain why Nanny Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns has such appeal to politicians. They cannot address the lawlessness of their cities because the criminals have friends and families who vote. Just as in Chicago, the gangster’s camp followers represent a sizable bloc of voters.

It is so much easier to blame the crime on the gun, not the criminal. After all, the laws MAIG wants to pass mainly target gun nuts outside the city limits. I. e. they can’t vote for mayor.

As I read this report I kept wondering, “what is wrong with the GOP in Illinois?” Why don’t they make Chicago’s lawlessness and corruption an issue in every election? Make the Democrat-gang alliance in Chicago part of the Democratic brand for suburban voters and downstate conservative Democrats.

* Philadelphia has had its own history of corrupt politicians and politically powerful killers.

And yet Mark Thompson knew nu-think!

2013-05-03T12:31:00.005-04:00

Who knew that the New York Times was filled with Sgt. Schultzs?

Yawn: The BBC Had Another Very High-Profile Serial Pedophile/Rapist That It Somehow Failed to Detect

No, the market does not make newspapers liberal

2013-05-01T09:40:00.000-04:00

Matt Welch schools Garance Franke-Ruta.

Are Big City Newspapers Inevitably Liberal Due to Market Forces?

He hits on several key points about the evolution of newspapers and the economics of their decline.

The elephant in the room

Ask yourself this: Of all the one-newspaper cities in America, how many are served by a daily that's more conservative than its readership? Pretty hard to come up with one, right?* Now do the same exercises for newspapers that are more liberal than their cities, and see how quickly you run out of fingers and toes.

GF-R argues that newspapers are liberal because they are located in liberal cities. As Welch points out, newspapers lean left no matter what the political climate in their home town. A point also made here:

I’ve lived in a bunch of different places over the years. Some were liberal communities (Madison, Wisconsin) while others were conservative (Carlisle, Charlotte). In every city and town, however, the local paper was and is more liberal than the community it serves.

Consolidation and liberal privilege

Like so many American dailies, including the Los Angeles Times (my former employer, and the plum property in the Tribune roster), the [Houston] Chronicle was a strongly conservative newspaper as recently as the 1950s, before more a more progressive breed of journalist began gaining a foothold in the 1960s. Crucially, the transformation from right to left, from crassly political to high-mindedly "fair," went hand in hand with the paper benefiting from and engaging in newspaper consolidation. It was the classic deal between mostly liberal newsrooms and mostly conservative boardrooms: Close down the competition and use the profits to professionalize the news divisions, instilling a more liberal ethos even while embracing the advertising-friendly pose of objectivity. Then sit back and enjoy the 20 percent profit margins for four decades.

The root causes of Islamophobic hysteria

2013-04-30T17:03:00.001-04:00

Brendan O"Neill in the Telegraph

Where is the mob of Muslim-hating Americans going crazy after Boston? It's a figment of liberals' imaginations

Clearly, some observers fear ordinary Americans more than they do terrorists; they fret more over how dangerously unintelligent and hateful Yanks will respond to bombings than they do over the bombings themselves.
[AND]
What this reveals is that liberal concern over Islamophobia, liberal fretting about anti-Muslim bigotry, is ironically driven by a bigotry of its own, by an deeply prejudiced view of everyday people as hateful and stupid. The anti-Islamophobia lobby poses as the implacable opponent of bigotry, yet it spreads a bigoted view of ordinary white folk as so volatile, so brimming with fury, that they are one terrorist bombing away from transforming into an anti-Muslim pogrom.

Howard Kurtz used this week's installment of Reliable Sources to bash hot talk in the wake of the Boston bombings.

Jane Hall, a frequent Kurtz guest, strikes a willfully obtuse pose so she can bash Fox News for Islamaphobia.

But I think there is a difference between endlessly linking this and saying, you know, they're hopefully having visuals that say radical Islam with these young men's pictures and talking about how they should have been shot in the boat and how the wife of one of the suspects should be imprisoned simply because she is wearing a head dress in the Muslim religion.
{AND}
My point. Wait, my point is that we don't know what happened here and, yet, there is a rush to tar all Muslims with radicalism. That's my point. I think it is, in many places, on FOX. I really think if you look at it, it's across a lot of different shows on FOX.

Hall is either a very stupid woman, always a possibility with journalism professors,, or she is deeply dishonest. There may be some who are suspicious of Tamerlan Tsarnaev's widow "because she is wearing a head dress in the Muslim religion". But Hall is flat wrong when she implies that Islamaphobia is the sole driver of such suspicions. Only a fool like Jane Hall or Howard Kurtz would give a pass to the woman who lived in a small apartment where her husband built bombs and plotted terror.

Similarly Hall takes Fox News's attempt to distinguish the killers from the majority of Muslims ("radical" versus "mainstream") and pretends that Fox is trying to paint all Muslim's as radical.

So is she very stupid or dishonest? Kurtz does not care. He is on another mission. He is out to re-establish the post-9/11 media consensus: be sad, not angry.

KURTZ: The coverage of the Boston bombing took a sharp turn this week as the narrative turned to the motivation of the Tsarnaev brothers and whether federal authorities had mangled the case. There was some angry talk about Muslims, as much of the media world picked side, pointed fingers and engaged in ideological sniping....

KURTZ: So, what explains the ugliness that erupted after the marathon was marred by violence?

A couple of posts by William Jacobson shed light on the political agenda of the SPLC and others who are intent on promoting the media meme that the average American is "hateful and stupid".

SPLC doesn’t have the guts to put Bill Maher on its “Anti-Muslim” Hate Watch list

SPLC does not have Maher on its anti-Muslim Hate Watch list even though his statements in the video, which he has made numerous times before, seem to fit squarely within SPLC’s definition. (For the record, I don’t think Maher should be on the list, even though he would be by the SPLC definition.)

It’s not hard to guess the reason. Maher’s base is SPLC’s base. Maher is a liberal with a very large megaphone, a bigger megaphone than SPLC. Maher could do more damage to SPLC’s fundraising than SPLC could do to Maher’s career.

Developer of Eliminationist Narrative still claiming Jared Loughner was “right-wing”

How we live now

2013-04-30T16:49:00.002-04:00

The Difference Between Newtown and Boston

We can debate the rights and wrongs of restrictions on gun ownership or calls for more background checks. But the desire to use public grief about Newtown to push for passage of these measures was not rooted in any direct connection between the crime and legislation. Yet almost immediately Newtown was treated as an event with obvious political consequences. Indeed, the desire by gun rights advocates to speak of the issue outside of the context of Newtown was treated as both inherently illegitimate and morally obtuse.

But the reaction to Boston has been very different. Once it became apparent that the perpetrators were “white Americans”—in the memorable phrase employed by Salon.com—but could not be connected to the Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh or any other conservative faction or cause, most liberals have taken it as their duty to squelch any effort to draw the sort of conclusions to which they had almost universally rushed when blood was shed in Newtown. Many in our chattering classes who thought it was patently obvious that the actions of a lunatic should be blamed on the weapons he employed in Connecticut seem deathly afraid of what will happen if we discuss the actual motives of the Boston terrorists.

Confusing fact and fiction

2013-04-27T09:23:00.003-04:00

Good piece by Megan McArdle:

Memo: The Aaron Sorkin Model of Political Discourse Doesn't Actually Work

Jed Bartlett doesn't win policy debates because of his amazing tactical skills, his overpowering arguments, or the sheer persuasiveness of his granite-faced brand of urbane folksomeness. He wins them because Aaron Sorkin is a liberal and he wants Republicans to lose on the major issues. Unfortunately for liberals, Tom Coburn and John Boehner don't have their lines faxed over from Hollywood every morning.

In a similar vein, Mother Jones finds the Tsarnaev brothers "confounding."

The 11 Most Mystifying Things the Tsarnaev Brothers Did

MoDo thinks that Washington is like an episode of West Wing. Apparently, MoJo thinks the average terrorist is a villain out of "24" or a "Die Hard" movie. This leaves them "mystified" at the brothers poor tradecraft.

If they had watched a couple of episodes of "The First 48" they would have no cause for surprise. The typical criminal is no brain surgeon. The bombers probably made fewer mistakes than your run of the mill street criminal.

That's what most terrorist are-- at least in part. Strip away the ideological motivation/justification/rationalization, and you find a street thug.

This is not to minimize the danger such terror-gangsters represent. The Mumbai attackers were no geniuses yet they killed 164 people and held a huge city hostage for three days. Terry Nichols hardly fit Hollywood's idea of a terrorist, yet he helped build a bomb that killed 168 people.

She was from the government and was there to help

2013-04-26T13:50:00.001-04:00

From Instapundit:

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Female High School Teacher Resigns After Being Charged With Raping Female Student. Oh, who am I kidding? These kinds of incidents only suggest a systemic problem if they happen in the Boy Scouts, or the Catholic Church. Otherwise they’re just isolated incidents, a few bad apples, waddyagonnado?

Common sense gun laws

2013-04-26T13:48:00.003-04:00

From Munchkin Wrangler:

MA has extremely restrictive gun laws that can land people in hot water very quickly. If I go to MA and forget a box of range ammo in my van–or even just fired brass for reloading–I am looking at three years in a MA state prison if said state trooper pulls me over, goes through the van with a very fine comb (because HEY, GUN NUT), and finds so much as a single piece of expended brass.

I'm trying to figure out how a group of legislators decides that empty brass is a dangerous object that needs to be banned or restricted.