Culture/Society

This week, Chris Matthews' anti-Bush bigotry spilled over into a profanity laden rant. The "Hardball" host dropped the F-bomb during a live interview with Don Imus.

Meanwhile, CNN’s Paula Zahn connected opposition of illegal immigration to, you guessed it, the Ku Klux Klan. This is the same network, however, that tried to downplay proven religious bigotry by a blogger for the John Edwards campaign.

Over on ABC, "Good Morning America" anchor Diane Sawyer spent the week in Syria. She let the despotism of President Bashar Assad go mostly unchallenged.

During other segments, Sawyer chose to ask him about video games and whether he uses an iPod.

Last weekend, the Chicago Sun-Times gave nearly an entire page in their "Controversy" Section to a man who feels America is under attack by a radical, religion that is inseparable from Nazi Fascism. He feels it is a hateful religion that is out to destroy America and everything it stands for and it must be stopped at all costs.

No he did not mean Islamism, amazingly enough, but Christianity.

There are times when people find their lives empty and begin to look for a "new" way of life. Sometimes they find that life in a cult and become brainwashed converts like "Azzam The American", the recent American born al Qaeda mouthpiece, or Johnny Lindh Walker, the young enemy combatant from California who was caught fighting for al Qaeda against US forces. If one looks for something, one usually finds it. And too often when what is being looked for is found, it causes more trouble than it really is due or takes on a larger meaning than reality permits. The saying "Be careful what you wish for comes to mind.

On Wednesday, Ralph Nader continued his media adulation tour, this time stopping by "The Daily Show." Just as with his appearance on "Late Edition," the only tough questioning Nader received was on the issue of the 2000 election and whether he placed George Bush in the White House. Stewart once again made clear exactly why conservatives view him as a not a political humorist, but a partisan, liberal comic. At one point, he told the consumer advocate that he was always right. And when Nader attacked President Ronald Reagan, the Comedy Central host joined right in:

Jon Stewart: "Please welcome back to the program, Ralph Nader! Ralph! Come on! Nice to see you again. Thanks for joining us. So they say they’re going to make a film about you, ‘An Unreasonable Man,’ and they come to you, and you say, ‘I'm in.’"

Ralph Nader: "What are you going to do? ( Laughter ) Everything– You know, you want air bags in cars and seat belts in cars so you lose the freedom to go through a windshield. Reagan didn't like that. He liked the freedom to go through a windshield."

Stewart:: "Exactly. So he was considering you an anti-liberty–."

Nader: "Yeah. Right."

Stewart: "Exactly. Ralph Nader. Tear down that belt. That sort of thing?"

What better way for the Boston Globe to get into the loving Valentine spirit than by portraying the Vice-President of the United States as a wanton killer?

Contact Mark at mark@gunhill.net

Dana Milbank is mad at Democrats for somehow letting Former Iraq Chief Paul Bremer off the hook today in the Washington Post’s ”Rusty Democrats Unable to Pin Anything on Bremer”.

I guess to show he is a real meterosexual, Milbank starts his piece off with an observation on Bremer’s choice of footwear and draws the wild conclusion that it must say something about his mental state.

Jerry Bremer wore black dress shoes instead of his trademark combat boots yesterday as he testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. But except for that concession, the former American viceroy of Iraq had lost none of his swagger.

In a flagrant instance of intellectual dishonesty, Media Matters, which might be considered the liberal alter ego of NB, edited Chris Matthews' "fascist" slur of Rudy Giuliani out of its account of yesterday's Hardball.

As I noted here, on yesterday's show, Matthews, discussing Rudy with former congresswoman Susan Molinari, had this exchange:

Matthews: "He got the pee smell out of the phone booths in New York. Even phone booths that aren't booths, they're just a place to make a phone call, had that smell about them before. I think I've been to New York enough times -- he did clean up that atmosphere in New York."

Molinari: "You bet he did. He stopped making excuses for people. . . "

Matthews, interrupting: "Was he a little bit of a fascist?"

There's nothing like the day an Italian-American Republican moves toward announcing his presidential candidacy for musing as to whether he might have a whiff of fascism about him. As reported here, Rudy Giuliani inched closer to running for president today by filing a so-called "statement of candidacy" with the Federal Election Commission, indicating that he would seek the presidency as a Republican should he decide to go forward.

Chris Matthews had Rudy supporter and former congresswoman Susan Molinari as a guest on this afternoon's Hardball. In the course of discussing the way in which Rudy managed to clean up NYC, Matthews and Molinari had the following exchange:

The Laura Ingraham Show this morning had a big discussion about the odd part of Prince's performance of "Purple Rain" during the Super Bowl halftime show last night. Prince is obviously self-impressed with the symbol he used for a name for a few years (the TAFKAP Era, for The Artist Formerly Known As Prince). Not only was there a huge symbol on the stage, it was also the shape of his guitar.

So many people thought putting Prince behind a flapping curtain with a spotlight so you could see him in silhouette playing his odd guitar sent an obvious er, male-genitalia message last night. Was this just a dramatic flourish gone awry? Some sort of Austin Powers hommage? And why would CBS let it slip through their censors after the Janet Jackson Wardrobe Malfunction of 2004? Anyone else think of old Prince lyrics about the "lion in his pocket"?

Ain't technology wunnerful? I mean, it saves all that wear and tear on the VW Mini-Bus, saves the trees that would otherwise be cut down for anti-war signs, the paint, the tye-dying of shirts, the buying of sandals... heck all sorts of things and time can be saved because the World Wide Web has brought technology to leftist activism!

I feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

It's also a great thing that those evil, rotten, Nazi, CONSERVATIVES have not discovered the WWW as a place to gather their forces. It's so heart warming that the left can, at long last, use technology for good instead of evil.

Or so it seems the Washington Post imagines the world has been set to rights because today a charming article has appeared in their paper letting us know that hey have found the "perfect example of how antiwar is waged in the Internet age." Or at least so says Jennifer Earl in "Where Have All the Protests Gone? Online".

For the MSM, there's nothing like the occasion of a natural disaster to challenge the faith of religious believers.

On today's Good Morning America, Kate Snow interviewed the Rev. Larry Lynn, Pastor of the Lady Lake Church of God, whose buildings were totally levelled by the tornadoes that recently struck central Florida.

A minute or so into the interview, Snow asked a question that challenged the core of the pastor's religious belief: "How do you reconcile your faith with the enormity of this tragedy?"

"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo comic strip, 1971

Nicholas Kristof has apparently embraced the Walt Kelly view of America. When it comes to the war in Iraq, the only evildoers the New York Times columnist seems to see are Americans.

At the foot of his pay-to-play of column of January 23rd, Kristof invited readers to submit their literary analogies for President Bush and Iraq. In today's columnn, Kristof mentions having received over 400 reader responses.

And which entry does Kristof choose to feature at the column's beginning and that might fairly be taken as his unofficial winner? One that analogizes the various actors in the play to characters from Harry Potter. I set forth below the reader's analogies, followed by a description of the character as culled from their Wikipedia entries.

On Friday’s "Good Morning America," reporter Elizabeth Vargas openly lobbied for the passage of legislation that would require employers to offer six weeks of paid time off to workers for maternity, illness, or the care of a loved one. In addition, the ABC correspondent bashed America for not having "flexible, family friendly polices." According to Vargas, a new Harvard University study places the United States near the bottom among countries that provide paid maternity leave. She also offered only token opposition to the idea that all employers should be forced to give six weeks, plus the standard sick time and vacation. For the most part, the segment came across as a stinging indictment of the U.S.:

Robin Roberts: "Now to a new study from Harvard about paid maternity leave all around the world. It ranks countries based on how generous or stingy their benefits were. And the bottom five countries may have you scratching your head and saying, 'You must be kidding.' ABC's Elizabeth Vargas is here with the details. And we did see this and we were like, no, no, no. This cannot be right."

Elizabeth Vargas: "Everybody has that reaction, Robin. 26 million mothers in this country work. The vast majority say to make ends meet, they must. With that many moms in the workforce, you'd think the U.S. would lead the way in flexible, family-friendly policies. Think again. For millions of working moms, those first weeks after giving birth are a time to take off, recover, and bond with your new baby. But increasingly, the question is who pays?"

How can Katie Couric claim to keep her politics our of her work when she offers up her own editorial positions on a variety of subjects? She does so in the course of her "Katie Couric's Notebook" segments. It's true that Katie normally avoids the controversial. On January 16th, for example, she took a bold stand against procrastination. And when she did address abortion on January 22nd, she played it largely down the middle -- though pro-lifers might argue that her mention of the way the issue has sparked violence ignores the daily violence of abortion itself.

But at times Couric takes positions on hot issues of the day, such as on January 12th when she expressed the hope that the Gitmo prison "is closed down soon." On January 26th, Couric came out for "breaking our addiction to oil." Or how about this one, in which, incredibly, Couric argued in favor of congressional earmarks!

WFAA TV in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas market has been touting a story that they obviously think is some sort of tragedy. So bad, in fact, that the first words of their story are, "'Inhumanity' and 'atrocity' are just two words being used to describe news..."

One would think that the world was ending, wouldn't one?

The TV station is wracked up in high dudgeon over a family of Palestinians who are in the country illegally and were scooped up by Immigration officials and remanded to a rather posh housing center to await the outcome of the machinations of government officials trying to determine their fate.

This is amusing for it's total ridiculousness. In the AP story about upcoming Senate campaign of Al Franken, the soon to be ex-Air America ranter and supposed comedian, AP seems to have forgotten to mention he is a liberal.

The short AP blurb doesn't mention it at all: Short AP Version.

And the long piece gives no hint of Franken's leanings until the last line of the report: Long AP Version

And even the long piece does not state Franken's leftist positioning as a fact, but couches it as the claim of a political science professor. And they don't even introduce the label until the very last paragraph of a ten paragraph story.

Nearly 3,000 Americans killed in a series of attacks on one single day -- the most American civilians ever killed in a single day with coordinated attacks -- was no big deal as far as David Bell writing for the L.A. Times is concerned.

The attacks were a horrible act of mass murder, but history says we're overreacting.

See, they know this because Russia had a bad time of it during WWII.

...imagine that the attacks had continued, every six hours, for another four years, until nearly 20 million Americans were dead. This is roughly what the Soviet Union suffered during World War II, and contemplating these numbers may help put in perspective what the United States has so far experienced during the war against terrorism.

Such a ridiculous comparison. WWII, a standard, symmetrical war, bears little resemblance to this threat we face today. The Russians were under arms facing Hitler. It wasn't a "nice" war, surely, but it was a standard war none-the-less. Hitler invaded and the Russians resisted.

Standard war stuff, really.

The New York Times thinks you are a criminal if you own a gun. The editorial writers at the Times simply don't believe that you could possibly be a law abiding citizen if you are interested in self defense, their most recent anti-gun piece reveals.

Their January 30th piece, incongruously titled "A Day Without Guns ..." -- incongruous because the piece itself does not address any such subject as a day without guns -- cannot be interpreted too many other ways than contempt for both the citizenry as well as the Constitution.

Twenty years ago, the Florida Legislature cravenly decided to allow "law abiding" citizens to carry concealed weapons merely by declaring their preference for self-defense. Then last July, at the prodding of the gun lobby, the current crop of state lawmakers proved they could be even more corrupt and cowardly than their predecessors by deciding to make the list of gun-toting Floridians a secret.

The quotes around "law abiding" says it all. In such a case, the usage of quotes marks obviously denotes sarcasm as opposed to a mere quote and their position that no gun owner could be a law abiding citizen rings through loud and clear.

So, here is a question: Why is CBS using propaganda film originally posted on an al Qaeda website and claiming it is merely "CBS obtained" with no mention of the actual source for Lara Logan's report on The "Battle of Haifa Street"?

The anti-Iraq website called Iraqslogger posted a story about how CBS reporter Lara Logan is crying that CBS seems to have spiked her "Haifa Street" story. Logan has sent out a mass email to all her friends and colleagues in the world of journalism in hopes that they will pressure CBS to show her report that has not yet made it to TV. It has, though, appeared on the internet.

As NewsBusters has been reporting for the past couple of weeks, a battle is being waged between liberal bloggers and a conservative radio station in San Francisco. Those that are unfamiliar with this issue should read articles covering both sides of the matter here and here.

Two of the most outspoken voices on the Internet regarding this subject have been Mike Stark, who writes for Daily Kos and his own blog Calling All Wingnuts, and Noel Sheppard, a contributing editor of NewsBusters as well as a frequent contributor to the American Thinker.

In order to further an understanding of this complex issue, Sheppard and Stark have decided to debate one another at their various Internet venues. The ground rules are as follows:

On a long drive home from a Indianapolis this weekend, I had the dubious pleasure of listening to a CBS news break at the top of the hour on a talk station and in one of their reports on Saturday's anti-War protests the verbiage used to report the gatherings was so slanted that it was startling and was so obviously intended to make it seem much greater than it really was that it wasn't even funny.

Reporter Jim Taylor started his report saying "A nation says no to war ..." as an introduction to the story of the goings on in Washington.

A "nation" says no? A few protests equates the the whole nation, CBS?

Just when we were getting warm 'n fuzzy with Chatty Hillary of the living room couch, she went Mike Tyson on us.

Can you imagine the MSM's collective gasp of horror if a Republican presidential candidate threatened to punch out opponents? It would be a field day for the psychologists, as one after another would be paraded across TV screens to speculate on the subconscious roots of such hostility, and opine on the fitness for office of anyone harboring such pugilistic predilections. Lefty foreign policy mavens would be invited to fret over the way such knee-jerk aggression might lead us into war, etc.

But NBC raised nary an eyebrow when reporting on Hillary having uttered just such a threat during a campaign stop in Iowa yesterday.

View video here.

Hollywood types speak gauzily of their "art," even if nothing seems to fit the definition of some of this "art" better than "films almost no one wants to watch." Robert Redford became a hero of the "art" film world by founding the Sundance Institute in 1981, based on the call for "creative risk-taking" and "nurturing the diversity of artistic expression." But the search for risk-taking-cum-creative diversity is a hopeless free-fall into the abyss, and all too often, and too predictably, results in creative perversity. What Mapplethorpe brought to the photograph, Redford’s festival is now bringing to the silver screen.

The 2007 Sundance festival has reached a new low with a strange, yet highly publicized film called "Zoo." No, it isn’t about giraffes and hippos. "Zoo" is about "zoophiles" – you know, humans who like sex with animals. The documentary explores the activities of a group of men in the Pacific Northwest who engaged in bestiality. To be precise, they engaged in sex with Arabian stallions – until a man died from a perforated colon in 2005.

We all know the face of real terror. Nick Berg getting his head sawed off by a knife wielding Islamist, suicide bombers laying waste to mass transit in Israel, the World Trade Towers collapsing on the morning of 09/11/01. That is real terror.

But, to Reuters, enforcing U.S. immigration laws is terror.

The title of the Reuters piece sets the tone for the overwrought sentiment infused throughout the whole article: "California Latinos fearful after immigration raids".

Words like "fearful", "shock", "afraid" and "terrified" are sprinkled all through the article leaving the impression that something mean and violent is occurring to these poor people. One would think that we are rounding up Mexican and Central and South Americans who are in this country illegally and herding them off to torture camps or to some Holocaust redux.

On Wednesday, during an interview with Dick Cheney, "Situation Room" anchor Wolf Blitzer continued to badger the Vice President and quizzed Cheney about the month-old story of the pregnancy of his lesbian daughter, Mary. (Hat tip to Drudge) Cheney bluntly responded to the CNN anchor, " I think you're out of line with that question." That comment came after Blitzer, who appeared to be attempting to drive a wedge between conservatives and the Vice President, quoted a Focus on the Family statement, from December 6, 2006:

A transcript of the segment, which aired at 5:35pm on January 24, follows:

Wolf Blitzer: "Your daughter Mary, she's pregnant. All of us are happy. She's going to have a baby. You're going to have another grandchild. Some of the -- some critics, though, are suggesting, for example, a statement from someone representing Focus on the Family: ‘Mary Cheney's pregnancy raises the question of what's best for children. Just because it's possible to conceive a child outside of the relationship of a married mother and father, doesn't mean it's best for the child.’ Do you want to respond to that?"

Dick Cheney: "No, I don't."

Blitzer: "She's obviously a good daughter."

Cheney: "I'm delighted -- I'm delighted I'm about to have a sixth grandchild, Wolf, and obviously think the world of both of my daughters and all of my grandchildren. And I think, frankly, you're out of line with that question."

Video clip (1:07): Real (2 MB) or Windows Media (2.3 MB), plus MP3 audio (400 KB)

Life News has the real story:

Proving the pro-life movement is alive and well despite abortion advocates obtaining control of Congress last November, hundreds of thousands of pro-life advocates participated in the annual March for Life. The mood was optimistic and positive despite 34 years of legalized abortion since the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision.

Independent confirmation of the size of the crowd, plus additional chances for readers to get a perspective on the number of people present (no aerial shots, unfortunately), is at "Barbara's Public March for Life 2007 Gallery," where Barbara says:

As a former radical leftist, I attended many demonstrations in Washington, DC. Now having attended the March for Life two years in a row, I'm amazed at how under-reported the March for Life is - and all too aware of how that under-reporting contributes to the rampant stereotyping of pro-lifers as middle-aged white males. I actually saw very few of those today! What I saw were hundreds of thousands of people willing to brave the cold (DC had its first snow of the winter the night before) to affirm that a baby in the womb is not property to be destroyed, but a person that those committed to human rights must defend. It's a child, not a choice!

As has been the case for decades, those who are supposed to bring us the news couldn't and/or wouldn't accurately report what was occurring right in front of them:

One of my correspondents on my own site, Publius' Forum, has been trying to clear up a wretched email that was sent to one of our boys in Iraq refusing him service and telling him he should "pull out of Iraq".

Fox News has picked up this story that I have been watching for a few days. I've been trying to ascertain if it was real or another example of an internet hoax -- sometimes it isn't easy to tell these days -- but I think I can safely say it is real at this point. It has been rather hot news in Wisconsin over the last 48 hours, too.

The question is, will we see it farther and wider? Will the MSM pick up this story of our solder being ill treated by Discount-Mats.com, a Muslim owned, Wisconsin based floor mat company?

Army Sgt. Jason Hess, stationed in Taji, Iraq wanted to purchase a few floor mats for use in his station in Iraq and emailed the Wisconsin based floor mat company to ask if they would ship to an APO address in Iraq?

Here is the text of his original email:

Documentary filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi, daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has directed a new film that takes a look at the evangelical movement in America. Appearing on Monday’s "Good Morning America," she discussed the now disgraced Reverend Ted Haggard who served as a guide for her film crew’s tour of Red State America. Pelosi told host Diane Sawyer that most people think of evangelical Christians as "holy roller Jesus freaks," and seemed surprised that Haggard didn’t fall into that category. During the discussion, both the ABC anchor and the filmmaker appeared to be trying to treat evangelicals with respect. However, each succumbed to the occasional condescending sounding slip-up. Sawyer asked Pelosi whether the trip to conservative parts of America left her feeling as though "you had to get a visa to a foreign country." And later, Pelosi described the journey "as sort of a sociological field trip." It was the "Jesus freak" comment, however, that appeared too much for even Diane Sawyer:

Alexandra Pelosi: [On the Ted Haggard scandal] "I was heartbroken. Because pastor Ted was my tour guide. And he was so good to me. He took me under his wing and said, ‘Let me explain the red states to you’. And it was hard for me to understand, most people think of evangelicals as being these holy roller Jesus freaks, and Ted wasn't like that. And so, it was interesting for me to understand and say, these are good people. He was reasonable. He was reasonable. He was a normal, every day man. And so, it was hard to stomach, what had happened."

Sawyer: "Yes, and I'm going to have everybody write you who wants to write about ‘holy roller Jesus freaks,’ okay?"

The Washington Post, today, seems to be lamenting that this year's White House Correspondent's dinner will somehow be too nice to President Bush. In a piece titled "With Rich Little, Press Corps Is Assured a Nice Impression", the Post sees a "controversy" brewing over the fact that an act has been hired that doesn't treat president Bush as a despised figure.

Being nice (to a Republican) simply isn't an option to the Washington Post, it appears.

Stung by criticism that comedian Stephen Colbert went too far last year in his remarks at the White House Correspondents' Association annual dinner, the group announced last week that it had lined up a different kind of entertainer for its next dinner on April 21: impersonator Rich Little.

Proving that Al Gore isn't interested in any dispassionate investigation or debate about global Warming, Gore perpetrated a last minute disappearing act and skipped an interview with the biggest Danish paper, Jyllands-Posten, that was set up months in advance.

Flemming Rose, the Jyllands-Posten culture editor, penned an interesting expose of Gore's ducking out on the Wall Street journal's Opinion Journal site today taking the former VP to task. How many other papers do you think will mention Gore's cowardice?

Bet, few... if not no... others do.

Al Gore is traveling around the world telling us how we must fundamentally change our civilization due to the threat of global warming. Last week he was in Denmark to disseminate this message. But if we are to embark on the costliest political project ever, maybe we should make sure it rests on solid ground. It should be based on the best facts, not just the convenient ones. This was the background for the biggest Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, to set up an investigative interview with Mr. Gore. And for this, the paper thought it would be obvious to team up with Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist," who has provided one of the clearest counterpoints to Mr. Gore's tune.