A poll by PPP reports some results that illustrate that the political/media establishment of the left has totally lost control of the narrative:
Given what we now know about the monolithic and rather militant partisanship of the media, the Katrina narrative seems even worse than it was at the time. People had adequate notice to get out of New Orleans, but did not, and the local political officials were grossly negligent. Mayor Nagin’s behavior was utterly incompetent, and the deplorable Blanco’s first acts were to keep the feds out and hire a Democratic consultant to shape the media messaging. (Remember how Blanco stiffed both the President and Mayor Nagin at a critical juncture?) But turn on the TV or read the paper and it was all Bush’s fault.
Would it surprise anyone to learn that there was active collusion between Democratic politicians and the MSM to make Bush look bad? And yet the media today seem to be totally unable to control the narrative in a way that helps their team, as the polling results above show. No wonder they have gone berserk.
“I don’t think the Tea Party movement has much currency in Alaska,” says Ivan Moore, an independent pollster based in Anchorage. Moore’s poll in July showed Miller down by 32 points, and other polls have come up with similar numbers. “From the very beginning, he has positioned himself so far to the right of the ideological spectrum and attached himself to the Tea Party movement, which even in Alaska is perceived as being a pretty extreme right organization,” Moore says.
And Palin’s endorsement hasn’t helped, Moore adds. According to a Dittman Research poll conducted in April, 52 percent of Alaskans hold a negative opinion of Palin. “When someone with those kinds of numbers endorses someone for public office, believe me, the effect is on the whole negative,” says Moore…
Steve Wackowski, a campaign spokesman for Murkowski, agrees that backing from Palin and the Tea Party Express is more of a liability for Miller than anything else. “It turns Alaskans off when outside groups from the Lower 48 like this California Tea Party Express come out and try to tell Alaskans how to vote and what they should be doing,” says Wackowski.
As of this writing, Miller is ahead by 2000 votes. Win or lose, however, pollster Ivan Moore should be looking for a new job and Slate should be looking for some new editors.
Frank Rich damns the “virulent Islamophobic hysteria of the neocon and Fox News right — abetted by the useful idiocy of the Anti-Defamation League, Harry Reid and other cowed Democrats.” Maureen Dowd says this:
The country is having some weird mass nervous breakdown, with the right spreading fear and disinformation that is amplified by the poisonous echo chamber that is the modern media environment. The dispute over the Islamic center has tripped some deep national lunacy. The unbottled anger and suspicion concerning ground zero show that many Americans haven’t flushed the trauma of 9/11 out of their systems — making them easy prey for fearmongers.
Many people still have a confused view of Muslims, and the president seems unable to help navigate the country through its Islamophobia.
It is a prejudice stoked by Rush Limbaugh, who mocks “Imam Obama” as “America’s first Muslim president,” and by the evangelist Franklin Graham, who bizarrely told CNN’s John King: “I think the president’s problem is that he was born a Muslim. His father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father, like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother.” Graham added: “The teaching of Islam is to hate the Jew, to hate the Christian, to kill them. Their goal is world domination.”
A poll last week by the Pew Research Center tracked a strange spike in the number of Americans who believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Obama is a Muslim. And even the ones who don’t think he’s a Muslim don’t necessarily believe he’s a Christian.
There sure is a crack-up going on, as Maureen Dowd said. However, the crack-up seems to us to be that of the MSM, so shocked to find that the vast majority of their countrymen are sick and tired of being insulted, lectured and talked down to by people who, for no good reason, are convinced of their own importance and moral superiority.
Indeed, it probably goes further than that. We think there is the shocking realization by the MSM that they find themselves with so little power in setting the journalistic agenda and dictating what the public should think. Note Dowd’s and Rich’s ascribing the political opinions of a supermajority of Americans to the influence of a cable news channel and a talk show host. The MSM have lost their power so they think it has flowed into some other centralized source, when in fact they have been undone by the decentralization of news availability. No wonder they sound so over-the-top and lost.
(More: Richard Cohen in the WaPo and a report from NPR make the Times commentators look almost moderate by comparison. HT: BOTW)
Somehow the US has suddenly become Albania or some other moth-ridden, impoverished eastern bloc satellite of the USSR, if the Chevy Volt video below is any indication. This is a devolution so steep and so swift it’s hard to believe. HT: Iowahawk
PS: it’s hard to imagine the America of today (at least as it is currently being governed) having the will and wherewithal to muster the effort that ultimately resulted in VJ-Day.
It’s a weird world out there, and it keeps getting weirder, as this screenshot of a Google autocomplete demonstrates. Here’s Google’s explanation of how autocomplete works:
In some cases, there may be a search term that seems surprising to you, but after doing some searching on the web, you may discover that it’s a popular phrase online for some reason that you didn’t anticipate. Queries in Google Suggest are algorithmically determined based on a number of objective factors (including search term popularity) without manual intervention.
The smearing of Shirley Sherrod ought to be a turning point in American politics…The mainstream media and the Obama administration alike must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its own propaganda to be accepted as news by persuading traditional journalists that “fairness” requires treating extremist rants as “one side of the story.”…
The administration’s response to the doctored video pushed by right-wing hit man Andrew Breitbart was shameful. The obsession with “protecting” the president turned out to be the least protective approach of all. The first reaction of the Obama team was not to question, let alone challenge, the video. Instead, it assumed that whatever narrative Fox News might create mattered more than anything else, including the possible innocence of a human being outside the president’s inner circle. She could be sacrificed without a thought.
Obama complained on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack “jumped the gun, partly because we now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles.” But it’s his own apparatus that turned “this media culture” into a false god. Yet the Obama team was reacting to a reality: the bludgeoning of mainstream journalism into looking timorously over its right shoulder and believing that “balance” demands taking seriously whatever sludge the far right is pumping into the political waters.
Our politics increasingly resembles a cold civil war, and the Sherrod story was like the right’s first successful A-bomb test. Accusations of racism have long been the left’s, and only the left’s, most explosive weapon. No more. I don’t make this observation with admiration or pride. I understand that this could turn out badly. It’s not as if the right had unilaterally disarmed when it comes to political attacks. Far from it. But until now, charges of racism detonated only when dropped on the right.
George Allen’s “macaca” moment cost him re-election to the Senate. Trent Lott’s praise for Strom Thurmond cost him leadership of the Senate. Fabricated quotes, approving of slavery, pinned on Rush Limbaugh cost him a chance at partially owning the NFL’s St. Louis Rams. Joe Biden called Barack Obama “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”; he became vice president. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid theorized that Americans accepted Obama because he was “light-skinned” and spoke “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”; he kept his job.
A real National Conversation about race would acknowledge that humans often say things that later make them wince, or worse, and that liberals like Biden and Reid aren’t the only ones who deserve the benefit of the doubt, of context, of grace. In fact, I suspect most of us already reached that conclusion
What you see sometimes depends on what you want to see. (This story has caused the media to lose its collective mind; Tom Maguire has a good discussion of that.)
Matt Bai, whom we often like, wrote this in the NYT about the Tea Party movement:
There have been scattered reports around the country of racially charged rhetoric within the movement, most notably just before the vote on the new health care law last March, when Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, the legendary civil rights leader, was showered with hateful epithets outside the Capitol.
It’s been a long time since that original report in March. Long enough for the Times to figure out what Powerline and its readers and so many have known for quite a while: the story isn’t true. But it just won’t die.
Recently the Democratic Governors Association created ads in Iowa opposing Obamacare, as the WSJ video above describes. The ads were in the Republican primary contest and the objective was to portray the stronger GOP contender as an Obama supporter in order to tip the race towards the weaker but more conservative Republican candidate. The front group that did the ad campaign did not have to disclose until after the election that its entire funding ($782,500) came from the Democratic Governor’s Association. Here’s some of their clever handiwork:
One of the most interesting elements of the campaign is that the media and direct mail firms involved in the effort (the Chicago-based Strategy Group, as well as Shorr Johnson Magnus, and Harstad Strategic Research) were also significant vendors to the Obama campaign in 2008, according to the Branstad campaign. The Strategy Group, which specializes in Progressive candidate campaigns from its Chicago headquarters, spearheaded the majority of Obama’s direct mail efforts in 2008.
Forewarned should be forearmed for the GOP. Without question, the Obama team are superlative political strategists and tacticians. It’s pretty clever that the Democratic Governors Association secretly funded Iowans for Responsible Government and used it to trash the stronger GOP candidate by linking him to Obama.
But it also tells us that we’re in for a real Wild West Show in this campaign season. We’ve already seen bogus video clips of Tea Parties, and false charges aimed at them by men in high positions. And now this spectacle in Iowa. We expect that it’s going to be nearly impossible to keep up with the intensity and variety of the ever-changing attacks come October — and you won’t be able to tell where many of them are really coming from. It’s going to be quite a show. After all, the phrase politics ain’t beanbag originated in Chicago.
Tunku Varadarajan comments on the NAACP racism charge hurled at the Tea Party (a charge that won’t fully be rolled out until October): “Here we have the Tea Party, one of the nation’s most organic, Athenian, democratic movements, being attacked by a political organization — the NAACP — that is among the most sclerotic, dinosaurian, and cadaverous of America’s political groupings.” It’s not hard to see what’s going on here. Things are looking so gloomy for the Democrats that they’re trying to use this old chestnut of the racism charge to motivate their base and depress their opponents’.
We don’t think that it’s going to work very well this time around. Previous false charge of the same ilk were taken down skillfully by Powerline and its readers, though the MSM did its best to ignore the new media critiques. What’s different now — other than the charges are so old and tiresome — is that the old media really don’t control the narrative anymore (certainly among those who are motivated and paying attention). That is the meaning of the Brad Sherman kerfuffle, when he didn’t have a clue about the NBPP outrage that his constituents knew all about. It isn’t just Fox news or a couple of talk radio programs that are making a difference.
The geezers know that their pockets are being picked and that the country is being governed disastrously by a crowd that believes foremost in their own superiority to the electorate. These older Americans vote like crazy in midterm elections, and — what’s different this time — is that they are getting their news from a multiplicity of sources, perhaps particularly the internet. They are all online now, a huge change from just a few years ago. When 75 year olds are calling Leo Laporte to compare the apps on iPhone 4 to those on Nexos One, you know something significant has changed.
We don’t expect the media dinosaurs to stop their electoral coordination with the Democratic Party and its affiliates, but we do expect it to be significantly less successful this time around. HT: BOTW
Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., in a written statement released late Tuesday…said the “major sources of information which I rely upon most” did not mention the issue….Sherman listed the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Daily News, the Economist, Newsweek, Congressional Quarterly and National Journal and said he only found one mention of the Black Panther case. “While it is possible that our review missed something, it can be said that less than one page per 50,000 from the above sources deals with the issue,” Sherman said.
Sherman is only partly correct — Fox News isn’t the whole story in the world of New Media. Six years ago heavy internet use increased at a compound growth rate of 50% a year, and only 15% of seniors were heavy internet users. It is clear that the news world has now definitively changed and the MSM no longer control the agenda. People like Sherman do themselves no favors if they think that it is a single news station that has created the massive change that has taken place.
Representative Brad Sherman was blindsided at a meeting with constituents. He said he was unaware of the controversy surrounding the Obama administration’s giving a pass to the outrageous NBPP. He said he never heard of the matter, and he may have been telling the truth. Like the strange story of NASA’s new mission, the mainstream media have, with a fewscattered exceptions, mostly ignored the DOJ scandal.
What is interesting is that his constituents knew the whole story, chapter and verse, like the very well informed questioner above. (And these are folks who vote in mid-term elections.) In 2004, we made the fairly obvious point that the internet would change future election cycles, because heavy internet usage was growing at 50% a year, and older Americans represented a massive, as yet untapped market. (The verb “to google” only made it to the dictionary in 2006.)
It would seem that things have definitively changed, as Peggy Noonan noted the other day in her piece on the Tea Parties. The new media have matured to the point where Congressmen who rely only on the MSM for their information are going to find themselves embarrassed in front of their constituents, and scorned for their lack of knowledge of significant issues of the day.
At the three minute mark of this video by Paddy Hirsch, you will understand how reckless securitizations, bad government policies, and a deeply flawed credit rating system, combined with a party atmosphere on Wall Street and a reckless global investor class to create a good portion of the mess we’re in today.
Rasmussen records that 72% of Independent voters disapprove of President Obama’s performance:
Seventy-six percent (76%) of Democrats approve of the president’s performance. Eighty-five percent (85%) of Republicans disapprove along with 72% of unaffiliated voters…the baseline targets for the adult population are 35.8% Democrats, 32.2% Republicans, and 32.1% unaffiliated
By a margin of 52-12%, Independent voters strongly disapprove of the President’s performance. Huge majorities of GOP and Independent voters are opposed to how this country is being governed. This is a sharply divided nation, but not a closely divided nation (though you might not know this by watching TV).
We haven’t had much to say about the Thrilla in Flotilla. After all, we’ve seen it all before — the fauxtography, the knee-jerk reaction of much of the elite media and the “international community,” etc. However, the decisions by new media players YouTube and PayPal in this matter seems a new and unwelcome twist — hostile to both a US ally and to majority opinion in the United States. So it goes. We Con the World can still be seen here, and a friend of this site has suggested another tune as well.
A second Iranian ship is sailing this weekend to challenge the blockade. We seem to be approaching a point of no return, and, as Roger Simon and Scott Johnson observe, the US seems to be taking a position that “objectively” appears to favor our adversaries over our ally.
The occasions when right and left can enjoy the same things seem rare enough in these contentious times. Here’s one of them, however. (HT’s: Dale Peterson, Hot Air)
On the other hand, Matthews also said this about BP and the oil spill: “‘Why doesn’t the President go in there, nationalize an industry and get the job done for the people?’ and pointed out that in China they would have a much harsher response to BP: ‘They execute people for this. Major industrial leaders that commit crimes like this’.” Woody Allen would approve.
NewsBusters surveyed the Sunday-morning-talk-show movement — which is just like the tea-party movement, only with fewer people, and the men all wear makeup — and found signs of an ugly backlash. “This is a damn outrage,” said a furious David Brooks. “It’s almost a non-violent coup,” added an enraged E.J. Dionne. This column yields to no one in our support for freedom of speech. But we hope that Brooks and Dionne will take care to moderate their rhetoric, lest it inspire violence among the more extreme elements of their movement.
The AP says that Senator Bob Bennett was just “thrown out of office” as the lede in its piece on the “angry” Utah GOP convention. Grrrr:
Republican Sen. Bob Bennett was thrown out of office Saturday by delegates at the Utah GOP convention in a stunning defeat for a once-popular three-term incumbent who fell victim to a growing conservative movement nationwide…Bennett’s endorsements by the National Rifle Association and former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, did little to stave off anger toward the Washington establishment from delegates…
As far as we know, despite the “anger” of the delegates, Bennett will still have his job until early next year. In related news, the Salt Lake Tribune illustrates how the narrative is being framed by the other side:
“Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine said Bennett’s defeat proves that the tea party has a firm grip on the GOP. ‘That the tea party would consider Bob Bennett, one of the most conservative members of the U.S. Senate, too liberal, just goes to show how extreme that tea party is,’ Kaine said. ‘If there was any question before, there should now be no doubt that the Republican leadership has handed the reins to the tea party’.”
We suppose this strategy means that we’ll continue to see a continuing stream of stories about tea party extremists from now until November. Most of those will probably be pretty boring. Perhaps there will be an interesting October Surprise, however. What might it be?
It seems too weird to be true. Incredibly, it may not be a hoax, which possibly means it was done on purpose by some prankster, since getting a file from the photo morgue at a newspaper probably involves several steps. A “mush from the wimp” moment perhaps. It still feels like a hoax.
TIME Magazine describes a political ad, and makes an unflattering characterization — the hyperlink says “republican governors pay homage to guy fawkes”:
The Republican Governors Association has embraced the symbolism of Fawkes, launching a rather striking website, RememberNovember.com, with a video that showcases far more Hollywood savvy than one can usually expect from Republicans. Again, the Fawkes tale has been twisted a bit. This time, President Obama plays the roll of King James, the Democratic leadership is Parliament, and the Republican Party represents the aggrieved Catholic mass.
(We’re not big fans of internet political ads; too much Carmina Burana or Samuel Barber for our taste.) But what’s up with TIME’s dragging Guy Fawkes into this? And how many Americans even know who Guy Fawkes is? HT: Powerline
