Ruminations on music, culture, America and the world stage
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar says that there will be no offshore drilling while TCM is in office.
This is another one of those matters on which the overlords are on the opposite side from the overwhelming majority of us.
Two important pieces today on the cozy working relationship between various George Soros front groups and the EPA and Department of Energy:
Chris Horner in the Washington Times and Charlie Martin at Pajamas Media.
I’d been think this since I heard TCM talk about loan guarantees for nuke-plant construction: That is sounds like an interesting move in and of itself, but that it’s really a ploy to incrementally lure Pubs into signing on to “green” technology.
And with three characters like Graham, Lieberman and Kerry working together to craft an “acceptably biparitsan” energy bill, it becomes crucial for grown-ups to keep their wits about them.
Telling indeed is San Fran Nan’s response to a reporter’s solicitation for a response to Ford being the only US car company to turn a profit this year. She sniffed about how commendable it was that Ford lived up to its “responsibility,” whatever that means in her warped totalitarian mind.
Consider the new grant money the broke state of Michigan is going to dole out for more electric-car research.
Then read Payne’s last couple of paragraphs, which have to do with the actual consuming public eschewing the utopian hooey and flocking to the section of the show where the petroleum-powered normal-people cars were.
Compare and contrast its coverage of an actual downturn in the unemployment rate in 2004 with its reportage on an increase in the unemployment rate this month.
State organ MSNBC edits video of the gun-toting attendee of the Arizona TCM rally so as to make it impossible to detect his race (African-American) and then uses the footage to launch into a strong implications that armed Caucasian racists are showing up at these events. Mind you, this was during the daytime “hard news” portion of the network’s broadcast hours.
TCM has now achieved the omnipresence that the Castros enjoy in Cuba, or Big Brother in 1984. One of the regime’s media outlets, a formerly independent network called ABC, will very overtly and forcefully shill for TCM’s Marxist health care plan on June 24.
An editorial today is about the downside of rapid repayment of TARP funds.
The argument: that now the banks in question won’t be directly beholden to the government and won’t have to comply with some kind of executive-pay-level mandate. A bad thing in the Grey Lady’s estimation.
Now TCM is assuming the role of editor.
He began his, um, strong encouragement to the White House press corps to stress how great his budget cuts are, even though they are infinitesimal compared to the overall size of that budget and the deficit it incurs, with the phrase, “As you decide how to write these stories . . . “
For anyone who ever thought BN gratuitiously indulged in hyperbole or went over the top with dire asessments of what the modern-day Democratic Party in the United States was all about, we have come to the juncture about which this blog and many another voice of freedom tried to warn.
UPDATE: This transformation is gaining momentum by the hour. Now Freedom-Hater Senator Cardin of Maryland wants to give the nation’s newspapers non-profit status. Spews the kind of candy-coated poison about how they “serve the public interest” and how their “industry is dying” (cry me a river) sure to appeal to the sprout-munching fluff brains who go in for that common-good hooey.
Where to start with what’s idiotic and dangerous aout this? Shall we start with the government playing favorites with yet another industry? How about what happens to our national discourse and our culture when all our media has the tone and agenda of NPR and PBS? How about what happens to those who currently own the nation’s newspapers? How about the “too-big-to-fail” meme becoming further entrenched? How about how papers such as The Washington Times would fare?
There is a swath of America that still understands what it means to be free and still chrishes that freedom. It’s not going to sit idly by forever.
Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters reports on next week’s Newsweek cover story. It’s David Frum’s assessment that Rush is bad for conservatism and the GOP. Read Sheppard. He makes several excellent points, and I won’t duplicate them here.
A few thoughts of my own on the matter:
1.) The cover graphic, let alone the fact that Newsweek has made an opinion piece its cover story, makes it clear that Newsweek is no longer an objective journalistic organ. In fact, it might be well-advised to merge with The New Republic since it occupies pretty much the same ideological terrain. The two magazines could thus each increase their market share and shore up their sagging circulation and finances.
2.) We’re seeing this pattern a lot lately. The MSM appointing itself the arbiter of who is a “legitimate,” “reasonable,” “seasoned” conservative and who is a fire-breathing yay-hoo.
3.) Frum gets a little overheated in his inventory of Rush’s personal flaws. Physical bulk, tangled marital life, cigars, private plane. It’s like he’s relishing the opportunity to tear into him in a high-profile venue.
4.) Rush’s shortcomings don’t diminish the fact that he’s unfailingly correct on matters of economics, foreign policy and culture.
5.) I will go on record conceding that little aspects of Rush’s style unnerve me. The “wherever I am is where it’s happening” schtick wears thin. And I know what he’s doing when he talks about his private jet and his Palm Beach mansion and the whole “It’s-been-years-since-I-went-to-a-movie-theater-I-screen-movies-privately-at-home” line. He’s trying to convey the incredible opportunity this country offers every one of its citizens. Still, it sometimes comes across as solipcistic. I’m told he’s actually a very humble, gracious guy in his personal ineractions, but there’s obviously some reason why three women have decided to end their marriages to him.
6.) David Frum is not really very conservative anymore.
My recent post “Sam has no idea how to diagnose us” dealt with Sam Tanenhaus’s New Republic piece on his delusion that conservatism was dead. (More accurately, it was a heads-up to read Roger Kimball’s reaction to it at Pajamas Media.)
Along comes further evidence that these effete East Coast smarty-pants sycophants to the Freedom Haters truly have no idea how things operate beyond the Boston-NYC-Washington corridor. Michael Hirsch at Newsweek now offers his prescription for how TCM can reagain control of the “stimulus” debate. He says that said debate has become, as he views it, mired in a “decidedly stale, Republican-style debate over pork, waste and overspending.” As if these were incidental matters, barely consequential, tiny roadblocks on the way to the realization of The Anointed One’s grand vision for rescuing America from this recession.
My God, what kind of wild drug is Hirsch ingesting these days? Has he not seen the lists, available everywhere, of all the unaffordable, unadvisable and just plain silly measures in the bill? How about six billion for university buidlings? Or $380 million for the Women, Children and Infants program? $4.2 billion for “neighborhood stabilization activities”? $145 billion for “Making Work Pay” tax credits? $83 billion for the Earned Income Tax Credit? $600 million to convert the federal auto fleet to hybrids? $850 million to Amtrak? $2 billion for renewable energy research? And that’s only eight examples from the list of fifty posted on NRO’s home page today.
Hirsch perhaps hasn’t seen the Congressional Budget Office’s report that this monstrosity would be harmful to the US economy in the long term. Or the latest poll numbers showing that public support for it has sunk to 37 percent.
If conservatives will just muster all the clarity of vision and ferocity of resolve they can, it will be easy to give this whole FHer house of cards – the majority in government, the lapdog MSM, the arts-and-entertainment world, the education fiefdom – a gentle poke and see it collapse. These people are like the Wicked Witch of the West, who, because she was made of nothing but brown sugar, melted at the slightest moistening. To use a more historical example, the whole FHer infrastucture is more like the Ceaucescu regime in Romania, or the Mussolini regime in Italy. Or, to use a domestic analogy, it is like a violently addictive family member whose bluff can be called. In each case – most definitely including the TCM / Pelosi / Hirsch / Tanenhaus stronghold, a little standing up to them by normal people armed with a grip on reality could be their instant undoing. We’ve seen eveidence that this is possible over the last week. This is no time to let up.
Time calls Pubs “truculent” and tries to put the word in Michael Steele’s mouth. Also, in their coverage of Lt. Gov. Steele’s assuming of the RNC chairmanship, not a word from an actual conservative about the excitement this generates. Also – and this is no surprise – does not tell the lefty origins of the “magic Negro” phrase but rather tries to trace it back to Rush.
Henry and Claire are rolling in their graves.
I’d like to say a litle more about “well-duh” punditry. What amazes me is that this drivel is coming from our supposedly sharpest minds. Even a perusal of the venues that have been my lifeline for years in post-modern America – NRO, Townhall, Real Clear Politics – yields these offerings of a tepid brew of cautious congratulation, nerdy examination of demographic and voting trends going back to 1912, vapid portrayals of America’s essence, and the invevitable mentions of the need for a new generation of conservative leaders. Talk about blah blah blah.
The fact is that what all you chin-rubbing, number-crunching broadly American beacons of eruditon were fearing mortally in your hearts three days ago has come to pass.
“Maybe Obama will govern more from the center, in keeping with his rhetoric after the primaries were over. After all, he will be hemmed in by economic challenges.” My ass.
Get a clue. Not only has he been chomping at the bit for this moment for decades, so have Reid, Pelosi, Barney Frank, Barbara Boxer, Chuck Schumer, Jim Moran, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, John Murtha, and a fired-up FHer base whose organizations will now be more financially and psychologically empowered than ever.
That’s what makes me cringe when I read these columns and blog posts by the main spokespeople for my side that spend the first paragraph spewing that “historic moment” dog vomit. Let Katie Couric handle that obligatory observation. Yeah, yeah, the guy’s black. Well, dig this: I don’t give a flip about his color, except insofar as he does, and on that score I’m not too encouraged. But more importantly I’m concerned about his power to turn a recession into an economic train wreck, the mortal danger he will put this country in with his patty-cake approach to foreign policy, and the effect his own narcissism will have on a postmodern American culture already way too driven by that adolescent character trait.
So count me out of the group hug. I’m still interested in what I’ve always been interested in: our freedom.
. . . no longer stands for “mainstream,” but rather “Marxist Suck-up.”
Exhibit A is Douglass Daniel’s AP “analysis” of Sarah Palin’s remarks referenced in the last post. In the first paragraph, he used the term “racially tinged,” and I thought, Huh? So I read down a few more graphs, to where he says that, Palin and the McCain campaign run the risk of her “not the way we see America” comment being perceived as racist, “whether it was meant that way or not.”
Well, s—! No one was going to see it that way UNTIL YOU ENGAGED IN THIS VULGAR RACE-BAITING, YOU STINKING TOTALITARIAN CHUNK OF DOG VOMIT!
When I first heard Sean Hannity declare that 2008 marked the death of the profession of journalism, I thought it was a bit overheated, a purple moment of talk-show hyperbole.
No, he is spot-on.
