Posted on 09/11/2008 8:16:39 PM PDT by RobFromGa
Mad How disease [Mark Steyn]
The Washington Post's media man, Howard Kurtz, is mad as hell and he's not gonna take it for more than another couple decades or until the management buy-out offer improves:
The media are getting mad.
Whether it's the latest back-and-forth over attack ads, the silly lipstick flap or the continuing debate over Sarah and sexism, you can just feel the tension level rising several notches.
Maybe it's a sense that this is crunch time, that the election is on the line, that the press is being manipulated...
Yes, indeed. Howie feels the press is being "manipulated" by the McCain campaign.
Maybe it is. A conventional launch strategy for a little-known vice-presidential nominee might have involved "manipulating" the media into running umpteen front-pagers on Sarah Palin's amazing primary challenge of a sitting governor and getting the sob-sisters to slough off a ton of heartwarming stories about her son shipping out to Iraq.
But, if you were really savvy, you'd "manipulate" the media into a stampede of lurid drivel deriding her as a Stepford wife and a dominatrix, comparing her to Islamic fundamentalists, Pontius Pilate and porn stars, and dismissing her as a dysfunctional brood mare who can't possibly be the biological mother of the kid she was too dumb to abort. Who knows? It's a long shot, but if you could pull it off, a really cunning media manipulator might succeed in manipulating Howie's buddies into spending the month after Labor Day outbidding each other in some insane Who Wants To Be An Effete Condescending Media Snob? death-match. You'd not only make the press look like bozos, but that in turn might tarnish just a little the fellow these geniuses have chosen to anoint.
John Hinderaker has more on Kurtz' descent into madness, while Roger Kimball calls the last two weeks an "act of auto-immolation" by the media. Alas, while setting their own pants on fire, Howie & co also managed to spill the lighter fluid all over Barack's coronation robes. The other day Boston's "alternative" paper ran a piece lamenting that MSNBC being so obviously in the tank for Obama is, in fact, damaging the Obama campaign. As Orrin Judd says:
Even if it isn't particularly true, the notion that Keith Olbermann defeated Barack Obama needs to become conventional wisdom, just to drive the Left bonkers.
Indeed. When Howie claims he's getting really really mad, I wonder if he realizes he sounds like Elmer Fudd warning Bugs Bunny "You're making me vewy vewy angwy" right after he's shot his own butt off.
(Incidentally, Howard's second paragraph,quoted above, should be taught in Journalism School as a model of how to give the air of "impartiality" and even-handedness - "Whether it's... or... or..." -when, in fact, you're entirely "unidirectional", in John Hinderaker's word, in your obsessions.)
“Alas, while setting their own pants on fire, Howie & co also managed to spill the lighter fluid all over Barack’s coronation robes”
Steyn’s on a roll.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
This is wonderful!
ROFL! Very funny. Love seeing the media with their panties in a wad.
So many moonbats, so little time.
Steyn's always on a roll. I sure do miss him and his amazing ability with ideas and words...
Steyn is our modern Mark Twain...
Excellent. Also, I’m not sure if the Hindraker piece he links has been posted here, but that is maybe even better. Which is quite an accomplishment, because this is very good indeed.
Excerpt:
Having to raise money puts Obama in a set of "Golden Handcuffs" that will make it almost impossible to move to the center and win the general election.
Who are the most rabid donors to campaigns?
Answer: The base! The rabid, anti-War, America-bashing, redistribution and reparation-loving, hard left fringe-- that's who funds the liberal Obama.
What do liberal Democrats running for Prez do in general campaigns?
Answer: They put on the fakery, and move to the center and try to console the voters with platitudes designed to hide the fact that they are far left America-bashers.
By chosing to let the far left fund his campaign, Obama has made it mighty difficult to move to the center.
Obama's "golden handcuffs" mean that he has to say things in his fund-raising to fire up the hard left. We need to be keeping a careful eye on his fund-raising activities because this is where the true Obama will be revealed.
Steyn has earned the gracious title that the National Review has bestowed upon him: The Happy Warrior!
Ever see a cat play with a mouse?
The Leftist “demented and depraved” psychos are illustrating to the American people just who and what they are and that includes their cohorts in the US Congress. The drive-by media and the Muslim Messiah disciples need to double up on their Prozac or even triple it.
Mark Steyn is more bad-ass on sabbatical than some commentators are on the job. Outstanding. I fear for his opponents if he ever goes into electoral politics.
If I could just touch the hem of Steyn’s robe . . .
There were already so many reasons to despise the MSM, but in the past two weeks (not to mention this entire Obamanation of a campaign) many in the MSM have proved they are only fit to be scrubbing out toilet stalls in James McGreevey’s NY highway rest stops......
I’m glad Mark is posting at the Corner again.
“When Howie claims he’s getting really really mad, I wonder if he realizes he sounds like Elmer Fudd warning Bugs Bunny “You’re making me vewy vewy angwy” right after he’s shot his own butt off.”
OR . . . Obama shooting his own butt off.
There oughta be a rule. A Steyn post daily. Yeah, that’d do it for me.
By John Hinderaker
Howard Kurtz's column in the Washington Post is surprisingly blunt and surprisingly revealing. The mainstream media, Kurtz says, are mad. Their anger, though, is oddly unidirectional:
The media are getting mad.Whether it's the latest back-and-forth over attack ads, the silly lipstick flap or the continuing debate over Sarah and sexism, you can just feel the tension level rising several notches.
Maybe it's a sense that this is crunch time, that the election is on the line, that the press is being manipulated (not that there's anything new about that).
There certainly isn't. Barack Obama has been manipulating the press for years. His manipulation didn't make the media mad, though, because reporters were willing accomplices who have been trying to get Obama elected. It's the thought that John McCain could be manipulating them that has the media seeing red:
News outlets are increasingly challenging false or questionable claims by the McCain campaign, whether it's the ad accusing Obama of supporting sex-ed for kindergartners (the Illinois legislation clearly describes "age-appropriate" programs) or Palin's repeated boast that she stopped the Bridge to Nowhere (after she had supported it, and after Congress had effectively killed the specific earmark).
But the two examples Kurtz cites are ads that are indisputably true. Obama did support sex education down to kindergarten. Kurtz thinks that's OK, because the sex education for five-year-olds would be "age appropriate." He's entitled to that opinion, but my opinion, and that of most voters, is that any sex education for kindergartners is a terrible idea. In any event, whether you think teaching five-year-olds about sex is a good idea or a bad idea, the ad is true.
Likewise with the ad that says Governor Palin killed the Bridge to Nowhere: it's a simple fact that no one, including the Democratic Party in Alaska, thought to deny until Palin was selected to run for Vice-President. We wrote about it here. As the Anchorage Daily News reported on March 12, 2008:
Palin ruffled feathers when she announced - without giving the delegation advance notice - that the state was killing the Ketchikan bridge to Gravina Island, site of the airport and a few dozen residents.
If Kurtz or other members of the media want to criticize some other aspect of Palin's record they are welcome to do so, but the suggestion that she didn't kill the famous bridge is ridiculous.
That's not to say that there is no false advertising in the air this campaign season. We wrote here that Barack Obama's oft-repeated claim, in a television ad and elsewhere, that he "reach[ed] out to Senator Lugar...to help lock down loose nuclear weapons" is flatly untrue. It was Sam Nunn who "reached out to Senator Lugar" in 1991. Obama's minor amendment to the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Act in 2006 had nothing to do with "locking down loose nuclear weapons;" on the contrary, it specifically excluded them. Obama's amendment has turned out to be a bad idea, too. But these and other falsehoods by Obama aren't what the press is "getting mad" about, and reporters have no intention of reporting on them.
While noting that the media in general are "getting mad," Kurtz himself is mad about the "lipstick on a pig" flap:
The lipstick imbroglio is evidence that the Drudge/Fox/New York Post axis can drive just about any story into mainstream land. Does anyone seriously believe that Barack Obama was calling Sarah Palin a pig?
I'm not sure what Obama had in mind, but I find it odd that in pages of outrage devoted to the supposed excesses of the McCain campaign, Kurtz finds no room to mention the fact that prominent Democrats (not anonymous emailers, who are much worse) have said that Governor Palin is Pontius Pilate and that her primary qualification seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion.
The truth is that Sarah Palin has been the object of the most vicious and concerted smear campaign in modern American history. But that fact doesn't cause the media (or Howard Kurtz) to get mad.
It's not too hard to diagnose why, as Kurtz correctly says, "the media are getting mad." They're getting mad because their candidate is losing. They've spent years building him up and covering for his mistakes and shortcomings, and he is such a stiff that he can't coast across the finish line. I'd be mad too, I guess, but I think I'd have the decency not to take it out on Sarah Palin.
PAUL adds: I'm not getting mad, but I find the nature of this campaign increasingly dismaying. Obama has been lying about McCain all along, from the nonsense about fighting in Iraq for 100 years to the claim (based on a joke) that McCain thinks the middle class extends to people making up to $500,000 a year.
Meanwhile, I think Kurtz is correct about the "lipstick" remark. The answer to his question, "does anyone seriously believe that Barack Obama was calling Sarah Palin a pig" may be "yes," but in my opinion it should be "no." And it's off-putting to hear Republican women like former Gov. Swift trying to parlay Obama's phrase (which, unhappily, has become common political jargon recently) into an identity politics "gotcha." This is the kind of thing I expect from Democrats, not Republicans.
To be sure, Obama lacks credibility when he complains about the "gotcha," having been the beneficiary of, and perhaps a party to, a similarly invalid identity politics play against Bill Clinton. Many in the media also lack credibility since, as John points out, their sense of outrage runs in only one direction.
ROFL!
Nailed it!
Bttt!
Steyn ping please. A real gem!
The Republicans may simply be demonstrating how ludicrous these identity-politics "gotchas" are by turning one back on its most avid users.
I doubt that 0bama was calling Sarah Palin a pig with his remark. It was his hearers that made the Palin-porker connection. I suspect that 0bama was just sounding off -- but that is still a problem. When you're POTUS, you must consider the effect of everything you say. We have certainly heard enough about "Bushisms" for 8 years; can you imagine another 8 of of verbal "0bamanations"?
Eeeeh. Spare us.
I read Kurtz’s article. This is a perfect rejoinder.
Yes Howard, I do. And I'll tell you a little story.
Sitting at a conference table at work yesterday with five women and five men. Subject of the election comes up and one woman says, "Well I guess some people will vote for the Beavis and Butthead ticket." Every woman in the room knew instantly what that meant and rolled her eyes. I saw one man's jaw drop, literally, with the recognition that the women in the room were genuinely disgusted.
Keep it up, Obama.
Even if it isn't particularly true, the notion that Keith Olbermann defeated Barack Obama needs to become conventional wisdom, just to drive the Left bonkers.
Have to love his ‘turn of phrase!
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