Bent Notes

Gwen Ifill, the moderator of Thursday’s VP debate, is hardly an objective journalist.

An Investors Business Daily editorial on the faux-Iwo Jima Time cover.

The non-story in the New York Times about the lobbyist from a decade ago who was hanging around John McCain comes mere days after that paper had “endorsed” him as its favorite Republican candidate.  It’s quite obvious now that that “endorsement” was all about softening him up for the kill.  Pinch, Keller and the rest of the NYT’s gang of Freedom-Haters no more want to see McCain elected President than they do Duncan Hunter.

This whole episode points up a central truth we hammer home here at BN every chance we get: “reaching out” and “crossing the aisle” is an open invitation to have your entrails clawed out.

There is only one way to relate to Freedom-Haters: defeat them.  They have no interest in us other than silencing us.

It’s not encouraging to see this nation’s only hope for not becoming a socialist dictatorship respond by saying he was “disappointed.”  Senator, if that’s the best you can do, you’re in for a lot more “disappointment” on the way to your defeat and this nation’s ruin.

Good Morning America’s queen of girly-girl chit-chat, gush and fluff gets all wet in the britches looking back on the career of the Western Hemisphere’s version of Stalin.

 UPDATE: Allison Flexnor - whose exact function at CNN is unknown, but who is in a position to issue guidelines to anchors and reporters - is likewise a tyranny-lover. 

Ralph Peters has an excellent column today about the MSM’s ignoring of the recent good news coming out of Iraq.

Think about this.  One of the major theaters in the current global war is coming to a successful resolution, and no major news outlet will say so.

I feel good about the direction things are going in Iraq, but this willful blind eye on the part of our culture here at home has me concerned for the road ahead.  Without an informed populace, mistaken perceptions of reality will wind up guiding our thinking - and voting.  There’s still an arduous road ahead.  Benazir Bhutto’s homecoming to Pakistan was met with an al-Qaeda attack that killed over 130 and injured hundreds more.   Iran is headed full-steam towards a nuclear weapon.  I could go on.  The point is that if no one tells the American public that Iraq is getting its act together and is no longer the mess it was even earlier this year, a we-don’t-need-any-more-quagmires mindset will prevail when other fronts in this struggle still require our vigilance and keen wits.

Two thought-provoking posts - one from Dean Barnett and one from Hugh - at Hugh Hewitt’s blog this evening. Respectively, they deal with the lastest blow to The New Republic’s stature as one of America’s premier opinion journals, and the battle between Apple’s itunes and Rhapsody for the older demographic.

These subjects are disparate and shouldn’t be treated in the same post.  Plus, I’m beat after a long day.  It’s 12:30 now.  Prep for the semester’s first blues-history lecture.  A Jazz from Bloomingtom board meeting.  Shopping for and installing new multimedia software for the new laptop.  Some administrative stuff for Mrs. Q’s salon.

Let me say this to get my - and your - thought processes started. With regard to TNR and in particular this Scott Beauchamp debacle and editor Franklin Foer’s handling of it, it’s of a piece with the whole east-coast, journalism-is-a-sacred-calling / the-establishment-must-always-be-regarded-sceptically-except-when-it-is-us mentality that we see in examples such as Newsweek’s recent cover story on the supposed minority of the scientific community that’s sceptical of global-warming claims.  Hugely agenda driven.  Big-time issues with”powerful corporations.”  And so on.  As I say, I will properly deal with this in a post dedicated to this matter.

With regard to the HH post about Apple and Viacom vying for the over-40 demographic, let me start with this, and, of course, I’ll get into it in proper depth soon:  Maybe I look like some kind of way-off-the-radar-screen blip to industry trend-watchers and even cultural-observation pundits, but I take my music seriously.  I don’t mean just as some kind of it’s-all-about-me consumer with little earplugs glued to the sides of my head and tastes that grow more persnickety by the day.  No.  I take music’s role in the development and heritage of our culture - any culture - so seriously that I think abandoning the field of what downloadable music is going to be made available in cyberspace to a bunch of twits who think American music started with Depeche Mode or Jewel or what the f— ever is dangerous for national security reasons.

As I say, it’s late.  I hope it doesn’t take too long to get back to each of these subjects in the detail they deserve.

He’s a stinkin’ liar.

Michelle Malkin has a comprehensive roundup of scoops on this Scott Thomas Beauchamp character, and what it portends for a once-respected magazine.

It was most interesting to come upon this Myron Magnet piece in City Journal after my four days at Indiana Black Expo.  Magnet is one of the most rigourous and clear-eyed observers of the upheavals in American society in the last fifty years, and here he applies that scrutiny to the question of why we have the simultaneous phenomena of an expanding black middle class and a huge black prison population.  It’s long, but I invite anyone who starts into it to read the whole thing before drawing any conclusions.  And if anyone feels the need to get the same message from someone of another pigmentation, may I suggest the works of John McWhorter or Shelby Steele.

Chistopher Hitchens sheds light on the shameful behavior of those who tried to make a scandal out of Paul Wolfowitz’s situation at the World Bank.

Why did they hire William Arkin in the first place?  As their national-security guy, no less.  They had to know about his background with The Insititute for Policy Studies, Greenpeace and other such outfits.  But after this column, they’ll surely can him, won’t they?