Favorites: Thomas Sowell, Mark Steyn, Victor Davis Hanson, Tony Blankley, Charles Krauthammer, Michael Barone, Jonah Goldberg, Dan Henninger, Kim Strassel, John Hawkins, Shelby Steele, Brian Lamb, Milton Friedman, Adam Smith, FA Hayak
This column contains language some may find offensive.
Recently there have been quite a few articles and MSM stories about how people on the Right are “haters.” I don’t ever remember one news story about angry people on the Left from 2001 – 2008.
Larry Elder has a great column today giving some more examples:
Which “hater” said the following, and where was the condemnation?
“The (George W.) Bush administration and the Nazi and Communist regimes all engaged in the politics of fear. … Indeed, the Bush administration has been able to improve on the techniques used by the Nazi and Communist propaganda machines.” Was it a) Miss Piggy, b) Lady Gaga, c) the Dog Whisperer, or d) George Soros, billionaire Democratic supporter?
“(George W. Bush’s) executive branch has made it a practice to try and control and intimidate news organizations, from PBS to CBS to Newsweek. … And every day, they unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President.” a) Dan Rather, b) Katie Couric, c) Helen Thomas, d) Al Gore, Nobel laureate.
“(Republicans are) coming for our children. They’re coming for the poor. They’re coming for the sick, the elderly and the disabled.” a) Mother Teresa, b) the Grim Reaper, c) Jack Bauer, d) Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga.
The contest between Democrats and Republicans is “a struggle of good and evil. And we’re the good.” a) Wolverine, b) Spider-Man, c) RoboCop, d) Howard Dean, then-Democratic national chairman.
When asked whether the number and prominence of blacks in the Bush administration suggested a lack of racism, he said, “Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich.” a) Adolf Eichmann, b) Joseph Goebbels, c) Heinrich Himmler, d) Harry Belafonte, entertainer and liberal activist.
He called President Bush’s perceived lack of help for Katrina victims “ethnic cleansing by inaction” and called it a “calculated … policy.” He added, “So by simply not doing anything to alleviate this … crisis that was so greatly exaggerated by Katrina, they let the hurricane do the ethnic cleansing, and their hands are clean.” a) David Duke, b) Jack the Ripper, c) Jeffrey Dahmer, d) Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.
“When you look at the way the (then-Republican-controlled) House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation. And you know what I’m talking about.” a) Kunta Kinte, b) Harriet Tubman, c) Booker T. Washington, d) then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, former first lady and current secretary of State.
“George Bush let people die on rooftops in New Orleans because they were poor and because they were black.” a) Ming the Merciless, b) Ivan the Terrible, c) Vlad the Impaler, d) Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.
“It’s not ‘spic’ or ‘nigger’ anymore. (Instead, Republicans) say, ‘Let’s cut taxes.’” a) Bernie Madoff, b) Bonnie and Clyde, c) Bennie and the Jets, d) Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y.
“You’re damn right; Dick Cheney’s heart’s a political football. We ought to rip it out and kick it around and stuff it back in him.” a) Dr. Seuss, b) Dr. Oz, c) Dr. J, d) Ed Schultz, MSNBC and radio host.
“We are in danger. The extreme right wing has seized the government. Tonight (John) Ashcroft and the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security and the IRS can work together. So look out, because without a definition of who is a terrorist, anyone can be. … Martin Luther King could have been. … The right-wing media, the FBI — they are targeting our leadership.” a) Mr. T, b) Flavor Flav, c) Gary Coleman, d) the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
“And what we are dealing with right now in this country is whether we are having a kind of bloodless, silent coup or not. … (George W. Bush) is trying to bring to himself all the power to become an emperor — to create Empire America,” a) Darth Vader, b) Satan, c) the Rev. Pat Robertson, d) Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash.
Lanny Davis, former special counsel to President Bill Clinton, campaigned for Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. Lieberman, despite his reliably left-wing voting record, infuriated the left for supporting the Iraq War. Davis found himself on the receiving end of “hate and vitriol of bloggers on the liberal side of the aisle” and “their extremism, bigotry and intolerance.” A friend and fellow Lieberman supporter, said Davis, became “fearful for his physical safety.”
“I held on to the view,” Davis admitted, “that the left was inherently more tolerant and less hateful than the right. … I have reluctantly concluded that I was wrong. The far right does not have a monopoly on bigotry and hatred and sanctimony.”
The majority of Americans oppose ObamaCare. Their opposition is not racist, fascist or intolerant. Let us work to prevail.
This is my first post that will appear on the Saratogian newspaper’s blog.
I only began blogging a little more than 9 months ago and have gotten pretty hooked on it.
Reading postings on the blogosphere has opened up a whole new venue of political insights and information. It also gives me hope that there are millions of Americans, just like me, who have found a better way to get their information, bypassing the MSM. .
An example: folks who get their news via CNN were told “Hundreds of people, at least dozens of people”attended yesterday’s Tea Party Rally in Nevada. Now tell me, does this look like “hundreds, or at least dozens?”
This photo was taken at 1:35 p.m. More than an hour and a half after the rally started people were lining the highway trying to get in. Hundreds????
Most of my postings revolve around: the free market vs govt control; the rights of individuals vs. the “rights” of groups; freedom vs equality; foreign policy, and the economy.
I’ve accepted that progressives who are just as passionate about politics, are generally concerned people who just see the world, and human nature, differently than conservatives do (see Thomas Sowell’s recent Intellectuals & Society). Disagreements in political philosophy have been going on for hundreds of years (best book, so far: Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind – from Burke to Eliot).
I was one of those nutty long haired hippies throughout the 60′s and early 70′s and quite liberal in my thinking. Socialism seemed so much “fairer” than capitalism, until I saw how difficult is was running my own business from 1976 to 1990. So I’ve seen both sides.
Since I’m not a very articulate person, I will frequently rely on charts to show what I consider to be the obvious (if only to conservatives). Like this one:
or this one:
Besides postings about the Main Stream Media and what I, and many conservatives, view as media bias, I write about our president, the Congress; legislation; the differences between why the Left thinks the way it does, and why the right thinks the way they do (read Thomas Sowell’s Conflict of Visions); foreign policy; Mann made global warming; political campaigns, and I try to throw in some humor every now and then.
Most of my information come from these columnists, that I try to read every day: Thomas Sowell, Mark Steyn, Charles Krauthhammer, Michael Barone, Ann Coulter, Jonah Goldberg, the Wall Street Journal Editorial page (Dan Henninger, Kim Strassel, Peggy Noonan, etc) Tony Blankley, George Will, and Shelby Steele.
These are the ten blogs that I try to read each day:
All serious conservatives know that NPR, NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, the NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, etc. etc, but this animation of a “teabag” conservative, who has the temerity to question Obama and his Health Care program, is just so far over the top. Enjoy this if you’re a masochist.
With the announced intention to take a more accommodating approach to Sudan, the Obama administration is proving to be a disappointment to those who imagined that “hope and change” extended to the world’s oppressed peoples. The New York Times notes that the new soft-pedaling approach may not be well received by the human rights community, which is still trying to come to grips with Obama’s snub of the Dalai Lama:
The new administration policy is likely to inflame an already vociferous chorus of criticism. In advertisements and letters to the White House, legislators, activist groups and Sudanese rebel leaders have accused Mr. Obama of abandoning his promises to make Sudan a priority from his first day in office and to stand tough against President Bashir, whom the International Criminal Court indicted this year for crimes against humanity.
Some critics have expressed outrage over earlier statements by [special envoy General J.Scott] Gration in which he raised questions about the effectiveness of imposing sanctions and suggested that a series of rewards might work better at getting Mr. Bashir’s government in Khartoum to cooperate.
Beyond letter writing and ads, however, what are Richard Gere, Mia Farrow, and the rest of the chic set prepared to do about the administration’s pusillanimous human-rights policy? One would think the people with the “best moral compass” on the planet could bestir themselves to rise up in unified opposition to a policy that amounts to playing footsie with perpetrators of genocide.
The Obama administration’s crouch on human rights on Sudan, Iran, and everywhere else – giving a pass to thugs and spouting cringe-inducing moral equivalency — is of course not simply morally noxious, but also counter-productive. We have assisted the mullahs in establishing international legitimacy. We have taken the heat off of Hugo Chavez. And we now propose to allow Sudan to ooze back in the “international community” with not so much as a traffic ticket for the deaths of hundreds of thousands. In doing so, we have systematically undermined those struggling for democracy and regime change, given breathing room to thugs, and muddied our own position as the world’s leading democracy. The world is less democratic, less free, and less safe as a result.
All of that, one would think, should be cause for alarm and protest. But alas, the plight of Roman Polanski and the vexing issue of Rush Limbaugh’s NFL bid seems to be taking up all the time of the liberal preeners. And besides, it’s not as though it’s George W. Bush’s policies we are talking about. What would be odious coming from a Republican administration elicits only yawns from this one. Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize, so cut him some slack, right? That, tragically, seems to be the prevailing sentiment among those who used to rail that we weren’t doing enough to defend human rights around the world.
Liberal Bias: Even if the stimulus plan has not in fact stimulated the economy, the national media have been very stimulated by it. Their sudden rosy economic coverage reminds us of 1993.
Read More: Media & CultureThen as now, a Democrat swept into power, and after months of bad-mouthing the economy, the press turned suddenly upbeat and linked any good news to the nation’s new CEO. The 180-degree shift in coverage after Bill Clinton’s election reeked of political bias, especially since 89% of Washington reporters voted for him (more than double the public share).
A survey by the independent Center for Media and Public Affairs found that stories painting the economic outlook darkly plummeted to 14% in November 1992 from 90% of the total surveyed in October 1992. Overall negative reporting on the economy shrank to 34% in December after hitting a two-year peak of 96% before the election.
During the election, the national media harped on the Bush recession even though it had ended a year earlier. And they parroted the Clinton-Gore line that Republicans had driven the economy “into a ditch” and given the nation “the worst economic performance since the Great Depression” (sound familiar?), though it was in fact one of the mildest downturns on record.
After the election, the media credited optimism surrounding Clinton’s victory for a November spike in consumer confidence, while ignoring a GDP report released just before the election that showed a nearly 3% surge in economic activity. As stocks rallied, the press cited Clinton’s economic plan, which included — yes, you remember — a stimulus program.
History seems to be repeating itself now, with media bias just as blatant in recent coverage of the economy.
A survey of coverage by 15 major newspapers, including the Washington Post and New York Times, shows that the media had an extremely gloomy outlook before the election — registering a record-low reading of 22 by the Dow Jones Economic Sentiment Indicator (ESI), which gauges media attitudes regarding the economy. (See chart.)
But since the election, media sentiment about the economy has improved in every month but one, proving their coverage has gotten steadily more positive throughout the Obama presidency. In July, the ESI shot up to 33.6, even as consumer confidence sank — indicating that “the media are reporting things are better than they seem to the public,” notes the Media Research Center in Washington. It marked the longest improvement trend in more than four years, and was the fifth straight monthly increase.
The media are even more sanguine this month, following news of a 10th-of-a-point down-tick in the unemployment rate. “Job Losses Slow, Signaling Momentum for a Recovery,” the New York Times gushed on its front page. The lead story said the report “suggested that a recovery was under way — and perhaps gathering steam,” thereby ending what the president has repeatedly described as “the worst recession since the Great Depression.”
