The primary season is off and running and though it is far too early to
make any calls on the Democratic or Republican side, some common
recurring themes are coming to the forefront. First of all, this has
been branded as a "change" election. One thing we need to keep in mind
before voting for change, any change, is that the U.S. has
experienced over six years of terror-free soil since the tragic events
of September 11th, 2001. In the media's rush to condemn anything and
everything connected to the Bush administration, people have not been
adequately reminded that America was once undeniably under siege by
Islamic radical terrorists and the administration has admirably held
our enemies at bay. In addition, General Petraeus has done a yeoman's
job in making some progress against America's and the Iraqi people's
enemies in Iraq. And not at all whispered about in the media is our war
in Afghanistan, which requires recognition, if not just for the benefit
of those men and women who have done a great job in difficult
conditions. Second of all, there is a lack of real debate in each

Let's play a Wednesday night game of WIARHSI: What If a Republican Had Said It? What if a top GOP consultant compared Barack Obama to a "dog"?

James Carville, who acknowledged he was serving as an unpaid consultant to the Clinton campaign, used the metaphor on tonight's Larry King.

View video here.

File this under the Misleading Headlines category. On Drudge today, there was a link to a story headlined Greenwich School Bans Desserts. Drudge's link was entitled 'School Bans Desserts; Parents Given Strict Policy For Bag Lunches'. The only problem with this was that that was NOT the actual content of the story. According to the actual story, as reported by WCBS TV Channel 2 in Connecticut,

Glenville School in Greenwich is trying to turn things around, starting this year ice cream and cookies are no longer sold in the cafeteria. Instead they have fruit and yogurt as an option. Parents were doing their best, sending their kids to school with healthy lunches or hoping they'd make decent choices if they were buying lunch at school. But when cookies and ice cream were offered two days a week, things changed in a hurry.

In other words, the school simply ceased selling certain desserts in the school cafeteria- they did not ban students from eating said desserts, nor are students forbidden from bringing these desserts from home.

Remember in 2006 when many leftwingers shouted with horror regarding a study that had found over 600,000 Iraqi civilians dead since the war began? I heard this number ad nauseum from my leftwing friends.

The WashingtonPost included the number in this piece. Fox News quoted it with some skepticism. But CNN headlined it.

Only one Supreme Court Justice seemed keen on overturning Indiana's voter identification law, Los Angeles Times reporter David Savage noted in a January 9 article at latimes.com. That would be liberal Clinton appointee Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But while Savage noted that "conservatives [were] leading the way," in questioning the validity of the Indiana Democrats' complaint about the law, he failed to note Ginsburg's ideological leanings. Nor did he suggest she's out on a far-left limb since none of other liberal colleagues shared her concerns:

It took a couple of tries, but CNN "American Morning" co-anchor John Roberts got Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama to admit what people probably already knew - Obama wants to raise taxes.

Obama appeared in an interview with Roberts on the January 9 "American Morning" fresh off his second place finish in the New Hampshire Democratic primary. He told Roberts high taxes were in the best interest of the American economy.

"Well, I think that there's no doubt that letting the Bush tax cuts on the top 1 percent lapse would not have, I think, a significant impact on the economy, but would bolster our fiscal situation," Obama said. "We continue to run big deficits - our national debt has increased drastically. That is not good for our long-term economic security."

Reuters, in its headline for a story reporting the death of Philip Agee, a former CIA agent turned traitor, labeled Agee a "CIA whistle-blower" ("CIA whistle-blower Philip Agee dies in Cuba"). As the blog Little Green Footballs put it, Agee was "the traitor who exposed fellow CIA agents to violence and murder by revealing their names" in his 1975 book "Inside the Company: A CIA Diary."

Agee, who had worked for the CIA for 12 years both in the United States and in Latin America, resigned from the Agency in 1968 after expressing "disagreement with U.S. support for military dictatorships in Latin America." Reuters then went on to say that Agee "became one of the first to blow the whistle on the CIA's activities around the world." He died on Monday in Havana, Cuba, where he had settled in the 1980s.

[Update, 4:03 pm Eastern: See Ken Shepherd's item on AP's treatment of Agee's death.]

Yes, it was Chris Matthews:

"I think the Hillary appeal has always been about the mix of toughness and sympathy. Let's not forget, and I'll be brutal, the reason she's a US Senator, the reason she's a candidate for President, the reason she may be a front runner, is that her husband messed around...That's how she got to be a Senator from New York. We keep forgetting it. She didn't win it on her merit, she won because everybody felt, 'My God, this woman stood up under humiliation,' right? That's what happened. That's how it happened. In 1998, she went to NY and campaigned for Chuck Schumer as almost like the grieving widow of absurdity, and she did it so well and courageously. But it was about the humilation of Bill Clinton."

I don't think I have ever seen such a harsh analysis of Hillary Clinton. Not from Sean Hannity. Not from Bill O'Reilly.

Could the media be turning on Hillary?

According to "View" co-host Joy Behar, those sainted by the Catholic Church are no more than mentally ill individuals who heard voices. On the January 9 edition of "The View" Behar, who considers prayer a "distraction," suggested that there are no longer any saints due to modern medicine.

"I have a theory that you can’t find any saints any more because of psycho-tropic medication. I think that the old days the saints were hearing voices and they didn’t have any thorazine to calm them down. [laughter] Now that we have all of this medication available to us, you can’t find a saint any more."

It's almost like he's trying hard to win an MRC DisHonors Award.

Chicago Tribune's Jim Tankersley, writing last night in The Swamp blog re: Sen. Hillary Clinton's New Hampshire victory:

On Wednesday’s CBS "Early Show," co-host Harry Smith interviewed Barack Obama and asked: "President Clinton was on the stump for his wife playing hardball. He said, and I quote, your campaign for president is 'the biggest fairy tale' he's ever seen." Smith interviewed Hillary Clinton not minutes before Obama, yet did not make any mention of her husband’s harsh rhetoric.

While Smith praised Clinton’s "stunning victory" over Obama in the New Hampshire primary and asked her "Have you taken a second to savor this win last night?," he bizarrely asked Obama about a possible third party run:

I listened to every word of your speech last night, and I started to think am I starting to hear the beginning of a third party candidacy? Because you were not just speaking to the base. You were not just talking to Democrats. You were trying to reach beyond that. And in the primaries to come, a lot of independents can't vote. Were you planting some seeds last night?

Last week during the January 4 broadcast Smith saw Obama’s Iowa win as "stunning" and on Monday, January 7 said Clinton was "fighting for her political life."

Update (17:35): Paul Colford with AP e-mailed me with an updated obit posted at 14:40 EST that had more information. See more at bottom of the post.

Philip Agee, a leftist who exposed fellow CIA operatives by name in a book he published in the 1970s has died in Cuba. Agee's perfidy was one reason Congress in 1982 passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. If that doesn't ring a bell, that's precisely the law that Bush administration critics charged Karl Rove and/or Scooter Libby violated in the "outing" of CIA agent Valerie Plame.

Yet while the Plame case was a media obsession for roughtly four years, the AP's Will Weissert buried that detail deep in its January 9 obituary. What's more, the wire service practically painted Agee's defection to Cuba as retirement from CIA work to the private sector:

During an interview on Wednesday morning with the Democratic victor in the New Hampshire primary, CNN’s Kiran Chetry asked Hillary Clinton if there was a hint of sexism in the response to the senator’s apparent show of emotion in the lead-up to the vote. "Do you think it's a double standard or a little harder because you're a woman to show you're a strong leader, but also be able to show some of your human side?"

In addition to this emotion/gender issue, Chetry, like her co-host John Roberts had done two days earlier, questioned Hillary about the Iraq war, specifically about the success of the troop surge. "You opposed the troop increase when the president proposed it, even introduced legislation to try to reverse it. Since then though, the attacks have fallen by 60% and a lot of the observers say that the surge is working. Do you acknowledge that the surge is working now?"

Clinton acknowledged the recent downturn in violence, but then went on to claim that "that was not the purpose of the surge. The purpose of the surge was to try to convince the Iraqi government to make the tough decisions that, so far, it has not made. So, I don't believe that that is a real justification, and we've had such a terrible year in the loss of American lives."

Former "The View" co-host, 9/11 conspiracy theorist and left-wing warrior-poet Rosie O'Donnell set to verse her thoughts on Hillary's now-infamous tearing-up incident:

Former Bill Clinton aide, and current ABC anchor, George Stephanopoulos appeared on Wednesday's "Good Morning America" to gush over Hillary Clinton's mastery of the relatively simple task of stage management. Discussing the New York senator's win in New Hampshire with GMA co-host Diane Sawyer, he fawned over the placement of individuals at the victory speech: "Hillary Clinton alone at the podium. Young people, faces of hope, behind her. Where is Bill Clinton? Where is Chelsea Clinton? They are not there yet."

The segment seemed to be a cross between a football game and a campaign spot. Stephanopoulos, using a telestrator, circled the various individuals as they appeared onscreen. At the same time, he narrated what sounded like an ad for the '08 White House contender: "Hillary Clinton actually has to motion them up to the stage. Yes, they're reluctant. They don't want to come up. There's Chelsea. There's Bill Clinton, coming up, a little hang dog." The ABC anchor rhapsodized about how Bill Clinton mouthed the words "I'm so proud of you" to his wife. He ended the video replay by describing the New York Senator as "all alone at the podium, the sole victor." Sawyer solemnly added, "Taking charge."

Turkey, Israel, the US, and the Persian Predicament

(From: http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=48359)

As there are growing signs that just a few months before terminating his tenure President Bush will commit the most disastrous mistake in the History of the United States, pulled mostly by the ominous figure of his anti-American Vice-President, more people realize that any Western attack against Iran would unleash a disastrous wind of conflicts that will all be at the West's grave detriment.

The Clinton and McCain victories in New Hampshire were topic A on the network morning shows today, so I thought we'd compile a montage video of the teases that the "Early Show," "Good Morning America," and "Today" ran.

Video (1:40): Windows Media (3.29 MB) and MP3 audio (475 kB).

Some samples:

Writing on Newsweek's Web site, Jonathan Alter offers up three "pop psych theories" as to why Hillary Clinton won in New Hampshire when the media establishment (Alter included) unanimously predicted an Obama victory. To Alter, the mystery is why women voters flocked to Hillary in such large numbers, and his theories range from the patronizing (discounting her First Lady "experience" as irrelevent supposedly "reminded many women of how their own contributions at home have been under-appreciated") to the absurd ("as in any high-school election, the studious girls who show up to vote might harbor a few resentments about the boys").

And Alter makes no effort to square his theories about superficial women voters being moved by esoteric personality issues with the never-ending media mantra about New Hampshire voters being the most sophisticated and probing in the nation (which is why we must take their judgements so seriously). Yet their choice for President supposedly came down to thousands of beleaguered Democratic women who projected their problems in life onto a crying Hillary?

The horserace coverage and media spin about Clinton's comeback notwithstanding, she actually trails Barack Obama right now where it really counts, in the number of delegates (her 24 to his 25) to the Democratic Convention.

John Hinderaker at Powerline notes the delegate count, numbers that the media rarely discuss when the dust settles on hyped primaries:

New Hampshire was a big win for John McCain and a serious setback for Mitt Romney. But do last night's results mean that Romney is finished? Not at all. In fact, he is the current leader on the Republican side in delegates, as tabulated by CNN.

Turns out on the Republican side, McCain has a meager 10 delegates compared to Huckabee's 18 and Romney's 24.

Given that and the fact that McCain was helped by crossover votes from liberal independents that he cannot count on in closed primary states, the media would do well to note McCain's challenge to run to the right in order to sew up the nomination, rather than take his victory in New Hampshire as a sign that's he's the new front-runner.