When enough media outlets pound us enough with the message that someone is odious or venal or stupid one starts to believe the propaganda. “Oh man sure hope Michele Bachmann does not become the Republican presidential candidate because she’s crazy and dumb too”. Enter Stanley Kurtz at National Review Online who boils it down for us in “Bachmann Smart, Media Dumb”:

Seems like only yesterday when Michele Bachmann was supposed to be dumb… [L]ate last year, when I heard her speak at David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend. I was sitting at a table full of professor types. We kept turning to each other and saying, “This woman is sharp, not at all the dunce she’s been portrayed as.”

Liberalism nowadays may be the last great holdout of old-fashioned prejudice. By telling themselves they’re against group hatreds of all kinds, and dismissing their opponents’ arguments as nothing but bigotry in disguise, liberals grant themselves license to despise. They swear, mock, and hate with a clean conscience, never guessing they’re turning liberalism itself into an outpost of bigotry in reverse. The flip side of liberal guilt is this hidden license to hate.

Same thing applies to Sarah Palin. Came across an article about the recent efforts to go through thousands of her emails. Some people leave comments along the lines of “she is still stupid” with no supporting evidence whatsoever. Just naked prejudicial assertion. I frankly am increasingly tired of being told whom we should like.

Walter Russell Mead has made significant contributions to our national social-political conversation with “The Death of the American Dream I” and “The Death of the American Dream II”.

The one thing I do know is that change is on its way — more fundamental, more challenging, and also perhaps more exhilarating than many of us are ready for. The health of the American economy is going to require us to move away from the credit card economics of the consumer republic.  The health of American society and democracy require that we move beyond the life of the last eighty years.  We should be looking at new ideals in which domestic partners are enterprise partners, the home is more frequently a place of business, and education moves away from big box buildings and toward forms of community schooling somewhere between home schooling and charter academies.

One way to summarize the kind of change we need.  During the farm era the focus of American domestic policy was to create the most favorable possible environment for millions of ordinary Americans to launch flourishing small businesses.  Rather that focusing on home ownership, American social policy should probably be looking at small business formation as the key to mass middle class prosperity in the next fifty years.

The American Dream is not in the last analysis a farm or a home and a good job.  It is the dream that through hard work and good choices the average American can be prosperous and independent, and that ordinary people with these life experiences can govern themselves wisely and well without the ‘guidance’ of their ‘betters’.

Even many so-called/self-proclaimed conservatives might not get this. That they confuse “progressivism Lite” with true classical liberalism and the American Dream before the vision of Thomas Jefferson lost out to that of Alexander Hamilton. Mead’s important articles remind me strongly of an important and interesting podcast by Clark Carlton on “My Two Cents on Capitalism”:

Capitalism is a modernist economic system and progressivism is a modernist palliative—not an alternative.

The only real alternative to capitalism is something along the lines of what Jefferson envisioned. This is similar to the vision of the Catholic distributivists, such as Belloc and Chesterton, and to the third way of the Protestant economist Wilhelm Röpke. The foundation of such a system is widespread property ownership and decentralized government.

I should point out here that the Greek word economia means household management.

Even if we disagree with an idea – even find it repellent – we must try to understand it on its own terms. In other words understand it as the person who holds that idea understands it. Otherwise we are engaging in not much more than a kind of solipsism. Reality is not much more than a projection of our own minds.

There is a lot of solipsism going on right now.

Victory Davis Hanson offers his usual perceptive and insightful brilliance in his recent article “The American Soviet”.

We are living in another Soviet, a 21st-century sort in which we nod to official pieties and mouth politically correct banalities while in our private lives, for our safety, well-being — and sanity — we conduct ourselves according to altogether different premises.

…

In the American Soviet, only two questions remain. Do these double lives of ours make a sort of sense: Is it that the official utopian rhetoric about love among the masses offers psychological compensation for our private self-interested skepticism about the nature of man? Or is the daily lie a modern Western rather than an enduring human phenomenon — our 21st-century leisure and affluence infecting us with intellectual and moral boredom, in which we long ago outsourced our collective morality to our bureaucratic overseers as we busied ourselves with far more enjoyable private indulgences?

Much is being made lately of high gas prices. And we need to keep in mind that while the Obama administration is not (solely) responsible for this it has done nothing to improve the situation. And this administration and its defenders are engaging in rank demagoguery.

*(For the record the price of gas began to drop from a high of about $4.00 in mid-2008 during the Bush administration and continued to drop after Barack Obama was elected president. It began to climb again pretty much right at the beginning of 2009. It remained steady in the $2.40-2.80 range for a while. And then began to spike in early 2011. Take a look.)

Check out “Are Sky-High Gas Prices Good?” again by Victor Davis Hanson.

And “The Media Don’t Get Economics” by Conrad Black:

The Treasury and Federal Reserve are playing with dynamite, running unheard-of deficits like this. All decent people hope it works, but anyone who has proceeded determinedly and with sure step from Grade 2 to Grade 3 arithmetic can see the risk. Even the existing measurements, which assume that these trillions of dollars of new debt will somehow be retired, confirm a 20 percent rise in the money supply — but the media, which are rarely slow to unload on public personalities in tight corners, have given this wild monetary rise a relatively free pass, to the enhanced peril of almost everyone in the world.

And “Why Isn’t Obama Celebrating High Oil Prices?” by David Harsanyi:

The administration, of course, isn’t at fault when oil prices spike; it just seems to make matters worse. Or better, if you happen to be an environmentalist. So why isn’t it celebrating? Though the left may be wary of the political consequences, it has been pining for high fuel costs for decades. So here they are. Let’s see how the economy responds.

And when some would demonize petroleum companies Larry Kudlow brings the noise in “The Left Hates Oil Companies”:

I read somewhere that either Exxon or the whole oil industry pays more in taxes than the bottom 50 percent of the whole income-tax system. So while president Obama is out there ragging on oil companies to remove so-called tax subsidies, it’s odd that he doesn’t mention how much in taxes the energy firms actually pay to Uncle Sam.

And so on. Dear readers will recall my views on energy and the environment. I support wholeheartedly(?) efforts to find alternative renewable sources of energy. But (a) we need to be honest and realistic about some of these alternatives currently being promoted and (b) a ruined economy – which is where we are heading – is unlikely to develop any of these.

Oh and speaking of solipsism and understanding the motivation for something repellent I decided not to go there in this post. Too dangerous.

Aw shucks let’s go there. But others will do the talking for me.

H/T Ace of Spades HQ

I was impressed by the astute observations Andrew Malcolm of the Los Angeles Times makes in his recent article “The increasingly odd political optics of Barack Obama”.

The former state senator may, in fact, be slaving away on 18-hour policy days. But much of that is closed out of sight. So the public is left to focus on Obama’s frequent vacations, golf outings, celebrity gatherings and proclivity to give a speech at the first whiff of trouble.

With no real opposition, Chicago’s Democrat pols care little about how insensitive things look.

Any one of these apparent missteps is inconsequential. However, accumulated over his 118 weeks in office, they create the impression of carelessness at best or, worse, arrogance.

Read the whole thing especially the series of “it’s one thing… it’s another” paragraphs.

Although Malcolm appears to be criticizing President Obama in a small way he is defending him. In that his observations could be interpreted to mean “Look actually President Obama is working hard and doing a great job. But for some bizarre reason whoever is in charge of managing his public image is making him look like a lazy self-centered arrogant twit”.

One would think it is all about him and not the United States of America. To which I respond ding ding ding.

What I struggle to understand is how some people continue to defend this president. Are we looking at the same reality here?

H/T Ace of Spades HQ

And once again Veronica De Rugy of both George Mason University and Reason magazine lays down some reality for those more inclined to believe demagogy in her recent piece “The truth about taxes and redistribution: Do the rich pay their fair share?”

The four myths she tackles with truth are:

Myth 1: The wealthy aren’t paying their fair share.
Fact 1: The wealthy disproportionately fund the United States federal government.

Myth 2:  Top earners in the United States are millionaires.
Fact 2: Only 2% of the top 10% of earners are millionaires.

Myth 3:  All Americans pay income taxes.
Fact 3:  An estimated 45% of Americans will pay no federal income taxes this year.

Myth 4: The key to our deficit problems rests in our ability to increasing the top marginal tax rates leads to increased tax revenues
Fact 4: From 1930 to 2010, tax revenue collection in the United States has never topped 20.9 percent, averaging 16.5 percent of GDP over these 80 years – despite drastic fluctuations in the rate of taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

With all respect to Professor de Rugy I wonder if anyone is attempting to claim “all Americans pay income taxes”. But the point is still well taken.

By the way that last Myth/Fact is important. When protesters in Wisconsin shout “tax the rich!” and when President Obama says the wealthy need to “pay their fair share” (fair?!?!? I do not think that word means what you think it means) they speak from a space-time continuum in which Hauser’s Law does not apply.

The more one thinks about it the more troubling it becomes.

The speech President Obama gave in Tucson Arizone was excellent. But that is not the same as praising the person who gave it.

Conservative reaction to the speech has been mixed. Most of it was positive and complimentary. Some was critical. I thought the critics were being excessively negative. But now?

The problem is context. What happened before and after the speech? And what has President Obama said and done before and after?

Victor Davis Hanson – who has spoken well of the speech – helps me see how this episode has been used in order to strength the president politically:

In logical terms, how are we to use a moment to reexamine political speech when the moment was explicitly declared not to be connected with political speech at all?

How can a president subtly distance himself from the macabre and revolting behavior of his left-wing base while simultaneously editorializing on unhinged invective in general (e.g., without an embarrassing extreme, there is no occasion to call for moderation from others)?

Why did five days of presidential silence follow the shootings (so unlike instant editorializing about the Mutallab and Hasan incidents), when the likes of Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, Andrew Sullivan, Sheriff Dupnik, and the New York Times rushed in to scavenge political capital amid the carnage? All that might have been bridled with a brief word or two from the White House, a brief Sister Souljah moment admonition to the New York Times to cool it for a while. We know that would have worked, because the Times within hours after the successful Obama speech was calling to cool what it had helped arouse, apparently realizing that its demonization and its refutation of demonization hand-in-glove were politically useful.

And why not some therapeutic confessional of past (and in many cases quite recent) presidential culpability?

The president handled the situation in a way much to his political advantage. His poll numbers jumped. Fair enough. But even though she had categorically nothing to do with the shootings those of Sarah Palin – who often criticizes this administration and is potentially a political opponent – fell. Truly amazing.

Once again Barack Obama gave a great speech. But one also must evaluate that speech within the context of everything else this president says and does.

It is understandable that many classic liberals aka conservatives were quick to praise his speech in Tucson. One gets tired of disagreeing with someone most of the time and is glad to seize upon something positive. See? I don’t have this knee-jerk reaction against everything Obama says and does. I’m able and willing to give him credit when due.

But if the president deserves credit for what he said it is only fair that he also bear responsibility for what he failed to say. For five days he said nothing to defend those who were being attacked by the left wing media. How long did it take for President Bush to speak on behalf of Muslims/Islam? Eventually President Obama said:

Let’s remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy – it did not – …
That we can question each other’s ideas without questioning each other’s love of country…

But it was four days too late. The damage had already been done.

Bigot?

The Lucy Fallacy.

In The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis the youngest Pevensie child finds her way into the magical world of Narnia through the back of an old wardrobe. After she returns to this world she excitedly tells her older brothers and sisters about what she found. They do not believe her.

The next day again Lucy enters Narnia through the wardrobe but this time Edmund follows after her and discovers that Lucy has been telling the truth. Lucy finds Edmund and looks forward to when both of them can tell Peter and Lucy about Narnia.

But Edmund betrays her. When Peter and Susan ask Edmund to confirm Lucy’s account he says “Oh yes Lucy and I have been playing – pretending that all her story about a country in the wardrobe is true. Just for fun of course. There’s nothing there really”.

Lucy is devastated but refuses to back down. She knows what she saw and experienced. And no one can stop her from speaking or knowing the truth.

Peter and Susan are concerned and approach the Professor. Is their sister all right?

“That is a point,” said the Professor, “which certainly deserves consideration; very careful consideration. For instance – if you will excuse me for asking the question – does your experience lead you to regard your brother or your sister as the more reliable? I mean, which is the more truthful?”

“That’s just the funny thing about it, sir”, said Peter. “Up till now, I’d have said Lucy every time.”

“And what do you think, my dear?” said the Professor, turning to Susan.

“Well,” said Susan, “in general, I’d say the same as Peter, but this couldn’t be true – all this about the wood and the Faun.”

“That is more than I know,” said the Professor, “and a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing; a very serious thing indeed.” (50-51)

Could it be madness? Oh no. One has only to look at Lucy and talk with her to know she is not mad.

So Lucy is normally truthful. She is obviously not insane. There is only one conclusion. She must be telling the truth.

Here is the point.

Imagine for the moment that the issue is not Narnia. The issue is the real world. Society politics economics and religion. And whether or not an individual person is a racist / bigot / dupe / warmonger / Klingon agent / whatever.

“You think Obama is a terrible president? You must be a racist. You think Islamism is a threat to life and freedom? You must be a bigot. You said or you think x with which I strongly disagree? Then you are stupid and/or evil.”

We see this all the time no? Especially since 2008.

Juan Williams just happens to be a most famous current example. Someone with an impeccable record as a “liberal”. Authored three books dealing with the African-American struggle and the history of the civil rights movement. No one ever had reason to think he was a bigot. And then he says one thing – one single honest confession – not so much about Muslims but about his own fears and anxieties. And how we should not fear or condemn Muslims as a whole because of what some have done in the name of Islam.

Contrast this with the dreadful misrepresentation of his comments by Alicia Shepard ombudswoman for National Public Radio.

Suddenly Williams is a bigot. The entire story of his life is somehow rendered null and void because of a single comment he makes that a small number of people do not like.

Which itself raises another issue which is who decides what is offensive or hurtful?

Which makes more sense? That when someone says something you find offensive and yes possibly racist or bigoted then goodness gracious they must have been one this whole time even though everything they were and said and did would contradict that impression? Or that gee maybe the other 99.99% of this person’s words and actions carry more weight? And either you misunderstand what this person said and need to consider it more carefully or it was a momentary departure from this person’s true nature and character?

If a white person mugs and insults an African-American man how much should we blame that man if out of his hurt and anger he cries out “you d*mn cracker!” Might not be the best example but you get the point. Most people think I am a good husband and father. Make no mistake I have my bad moments. Do those bad moments mean I am not a good husband and father?

If what Juan Williams – just to stay with this example – said was indeed genuinely bigoted then to what extent can we say “that was really stupid and thoughtless Juan but hey we know that most of the time you are a great guy so apologize everybody their lesson and we move on”?

Vivian Schiller “apologized” for suggesting that Williams is nuts or just greedy. Was that enough? Maybe it was. But if so where does that leave Williams?

Now apply this to white people who criticize the current federal government. Not just the African-American president but the rather white Congressional leadership.

You have a white person who has never given you reason to think s/he is a racist. Gets along great with black people. Sometimes worships at African-American churches. In college chooses to live in a dorm that is predominantly African-American because he is interested in “minority and third world issues”. Even participates in a few protests about how the university treats minority students. Participates in the Big Brother program. Has an African-American “little brother”. Visits and does things with that little brother not just during the year he lives in that dorm but for the next three years when it is no longer expected. After seminary accepts a call to a small congregation made up mostly of people from other countries including people from African nations. Ministers with them. Visits them in their homes. Eats with them. Invites them to his home. Lets his children play with their children. Asks one African to preach for him when he is out of town. Serves on a prayer breakfast planning committee on which a few African-American clergy serve and gets along with them just fine. His wife becomes a public school teacher and accepts a position at a school that is about 98% African-American. Performs brilliantly. The kids love her. Parents love her and beg the principal to put their kids in her class. She gets along well with her African-American colleagues. She and her husband pull their children out of a mostly white private school and place them in a school that is 66% African-American. Let their kids hang out with African-American friends and classmates and go to their homes for birthday parties. Let their daughter date an African-American classmate. Oh and he sometimes prays for the president publicly when leading worship for his congregation.

So if this guy says “Obama is the worst president I have seen in my life” there are some who would conclude that oh my gosh this guy must be a racist?!?

Or does it make more sense to conclude this guy opposes the Obama administration for reasons that have zilcho to do with race?

How does one statement or conviction that offends manage to cancel out the entire rest of a person’s life and character?

Dang people. Even Jesus ate with sinners! And he forgave them too!

This is what has astonished me about the left especially since 2008 and their sense of absolute empowerment. That many on the left will turn on and condemn their neighbors and friends quite suddenly when that neighbor or friend says or does something that goes against the leftist agenda.

Of course do note that now there are some at National Public Radio who are telling us that oh yeah actually Juan Williams has been an odious bastard for a long time and we are not surprised. Odd. Do not recall them ever expressing such concerns until now. They are rewriting the story of one man’s life and character perhaps because at some level they realize that they are committing the Lucy Fallacy.

I am not going to drink coffee at 4:38 p.m.

Yeah yeah am supposed to stay away from political topics. But two words.

Juan Williams.

I have listened to National Public Radio for years. Like it most of the time. Especially “Car Talk” and “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me”. No one can credibly deny that it leans hard to the political left. Although I had to work hard to “filter” out the bias it was still thorough in its coverage of the issues.

But boy did they cross a line when they fired Juan Williams. Let me put it this way. I am impressed that the supposedly vile and narrowly partisan Fox News has Williams on some of its programs where he is allowed to expressed his liberal(? slightly left of center?) views. I was even more(?) impressed that National Public Radio would allow Williams to appear on Fox News. “Wow. They must hate Fox News. And yet they allow Williams to do this. Have to give them credit”. Now we know that the opposite was true. They hated it. They tolerated it because they had no other reason to fire Williams. Then they got their reason.

Therein lies the problem. Let us assume for the sake of argument that Juan Williams crossed a line and damaged his credibility such that National Public Radio had to let him go. Then how can they not also do the same with at least half of their correspondents and analysts?!? That they would single out Williams is outrageous hypocrisy of the highest order.

Remember. When National Public Radio fires an African-American man with excellent credentials because he expresses an opinion it is not about race. But when millions of Americans disagree with the president not to mention Congress it must be about race. Sure that makes sense. Heads we win tails you lose.

Several have written that this is just one more reason why the federal government does not need to subsidize National Public Radio with taxpayer funds. Let me state clearly and for the record that it does not receive only 2% of its funding from the government. It receives fifteen percent. The 2% figure is a fiction based on how much it receives directly. The other 13% is indirect through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Unless one believes in money laundering most people would say that other 13% very much counts.

In just one week there have been more posts and articles on this than one can list in one place.

National Review Online offers at least four good pieces.

• “The NPR Test Case” by Andrew McCarthy – do not skip this one
• “Let NPR Pay Its Own Way” by the editors.
• “The Closing of NPR’s Mind” by Rich Lowry
• “Defund State Sponsored Media” by Michelle Malkin

Anything the always brilliant and thoughtful Ann Althouse on this topic is worth reading. Especially “I spoke hastily and apologize”:

Apologize? You can’t just apologize unless Williams could just apologize. NPR CEO Vivian Schiller must resign. And don’t you just love the notion that ordinary human feelings are mental disorders that should be kept hidden? In NPR’s delightful vision of the future, no one will dare to speak about how they feel and every inappropriate twinge that breaks through your self-protective numbness will be medicalized and treated. Imagine a country that adopts a psychiatric treatment model for political dissent.

Weekly Standard is a goldmine of hard hitting pieces on this topic. Especially “National Pathetic Radio” by Stephen Hayes. The wise and insightful Anchoress aka Elizabeth Scalia is your one stop for about two dozen comments and other pieces. Follow the magic links.

Some good links and commentary at Gay Patriot in “Of Juan Williams and the Imminent Defunding of NPR”.

*Do not miss “They Came for Juan Williams. Why This Is a Turning Point” by Barry Rubin at Yid with Lid.

That should keep you busy for a while.

Came across a Los Angeles Times article criticizing a Tea Party coloring book for kids. Fair enough. More interesting are the comments. Most take issue with the criticisms. Only a few take issue with the Tea Party movement and/or the coloring book.

One of the persons who takes issue with the Tea Party movement comments:

The Tea Party “claims” to be for small government, yet many of the candidates that are currently running for office think nothing of promoting ideas in which the government has jurisdiction over our private affairs and sex lives. That isn’t smaller government to me.

This is a point others have made. “You conservatives claim you believe in freedom and smaller government. And yet you have no problem supporting laws against same-sex marriage or elective abortion. These are private matters. In a way you want an even more intrusive government”.

It is not a bad argument. There are a few responses.

Really? Which Tea Party candidates – and how many are there really? – are promoting such laws? It is true that many social conservatives are part of the Tea Party movement. But for the most part it seems that the Tea Party movement and Tea Party candidates are being careful to focus on a broader consensus regarding smaller government and less government spending.

The person quoted above surely exaggerates. Although there is at least one example. Joe Miller running for United States Senator from Alaska.

A stronger response is to point out that smaller government means smaller government. It does not mean less government on every single issue. Let me put it this way. A statist might want the government to control 50% of everything we say do and spend. A classic liberal might want the government to control 10% of everything we say do and spend.

But it is entirely possible for a classic liberal to believe the government should control some things that the statist thinks the government should not control. That does not mean the classic liberal contradicts herself when she advocates more liberty and less government. As long as overall there is a net increase in liberty and a net decrease in the size and scope of government. Ten percent of our lives is still much less than fifty percent of our lives. It is entirely possible for someone to say “the government should intervene in how we define marriage or family relationships or at what stage a human being deserves legal protection – but it should not intervene in how much money we make or where we go to school or what kind of health care we receive or what legal contracts we honor or what political and religious opinions we hold or express and so on and so on”.

Smaller government means exactly that. Small-er government.

This is why when some Christians err when they invoke the Second Law of Thermodynamics against the(?) theory of evolution.

Basically the argument goes like this.

Evolutionary theory states that things are becoming more organized and complex as organisms evolve naturally over time. But the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that the amount of order in a system decreases over time. There is no way that organisms could evolve without divine intervention.

There is a colossal problem with this common argument against evolutionary theory. It misunderstands and misapplies the Second law of Thermodynamics also known as the Law of Entropy.

So long as there is a net overall decrease in energy and order in the universe – it is entirely possible for there to be local instances of increased energy and order. Or as Professor Alan McNeil said to those of us studying biology at Cornell University “the Second Law of Thermodynamics is why we have to eat lunch”. Yes human beings are examples of order and organization. But we have to eat lunch. Something that is ordered and organized – food – must be destroyed in order for us to continue.

Not to mention the fact that we grow old and die. Even lunch cannot stave off the long term effects of the Law of Entropy.

Automobiles are examples of order and organization. But they use up large amounts of fuel. There is a net decrease in order in order to maintain a local instance of organization.

And yes this opens up a whole list of theological questions which will be raised in a future post.

Yeah yeah not another politics post. But this was huge. Many others have made similar arguments. But not in the Washington Post.

Kudos to the Washington Post - not normally a bastion of classical liberalism aka “conservatism”* – for publishing “Conservatism does not equal racism. So why do many liberals assume it does?” by Gerard Alexander who is a professor at the University of Virginia.

The whole piece is trenchant – well reasoned and bolstered with hard facts that counter the prevailing leftist narrative. Two paragraphs in particular stand out.

These policy positions remain central to the conservative domestic agenda, but calling them racist, the third assumption, presumes something very strange: that conservatives do not mean what they say about them. Welfare reform is deliberately anti-black (or anti-minority or anti-poor) only if conservatives secretly believe that welfare actually does help its beneficiaries and are being deceitful when they argue that long-term dependency devastates inner-city communities. Tax cuts are part of a racist agenda only if conservatives do not believe that lower taxes will enhance economic growth and social mobility for all. Conservative opposition to raising the minimum wage is anti-poor only if free-marketeers are feigning concern that increases will price less-skilled people out of the workforce (as when Milton Friedman called the minimum wage “one of the most . . . anti-black laws on the statute books”) and secretly agree with liberals that increases will benefit the working poor over the long term.

Subtle. But how many of us have thought through the implications like this? Basically the above paragraph presents leftists with an awkward dichotomy. Either conservatives do not really believe in welfare reform and/or lower taxes and/or abolishing the minimum wage and so on – or they are racists.

But not both. That is not a menu option. Because the two options are contradictory.

I also commend to dear readers one of the closing paragraphs:

But most conservatives have been less concerned with the “hardware” of people’s race or ethnicity and more concerned with the “software” of their values or culture. This is why the white Protestant core of the modern conservative movement has not merely integrated Catholic “ethnics” but also rallied behind the Irish American William F. Buckley and the Italian American Antonin Scalia. Jews, women and Hispanics have been similarly integrated into both its ranks and leadership; indeed, many white conservatives swoon when members of minority groups proudly share their values. This explains why, in the 2008 campaign, conservatives were at least as roused by Obama’s ties to the white former radical William Ayers as the black Jeremiah Wright, both of whom seemed to make a living out of damning America. [emphasis added]

Thank you Professor Alexander.

While we are at it – I consider this article important enough to promote it on this website. But am afraid to link it on Facebook. There are people who would give me major grief. That is unfortunate – when we have reached the point where a large segment of the American population is just plain afraid to say publicly what they think.

This is huge. If it turns out to be legit.

I sort of followed the whole David Weigel on Journolist brouhaha that led to his being let go by the Washington Post. But leftist bias in the news media is old and tired and overwhelming. I want to enjoy life. Not read Newsbusters and be angry all the time.

Since undergraduate days have been an observer of the press aka the news media. In those days it was print and television and radio. About half the articles I wrote for the Cornell Review “the conservative voice on campus” were about the news media.

Okay so the news media is predominantly leftist aka “liberal”. We already know that. But why? And do they know that? For a long time assumed it was as simple as group think.

1. Most journalists (of whichever media) happen to lean left in their social-political views.
2. This colors their reporting. What they cover. How they cover. Questions they ask. Language they use.
3. These journalists with their left wing bias encourage and reinforce each other. Group think. Not conspiracy.

And that was just the way it was. Pervasive. Irritating. Annoying. But what could we do about it?

Two words: Internet. 2008.

The Internet alone has greatly challenged the monopoly of the “Mainstream Media”. We can get other news. From other sources. That is covered differently.

But in my opinion 2008 was the watershed year. The presidential election.

That is the year when the Mainstream Media took off the mask and chose sides. The left wing bias was no longer subtle. It was no longer “okay so most of us journalists lean to the left but we are still professionals and care about covering the news in a fair balanced manner”. And we could no longer say “well at least we are still getting the news we just have to filter out some of the bias”.  In many ways we were just not getting the news at all. And what news we got was so slanted it could no longer be filtered – it had been fundamentally transformed into something else.

In a way I felt like the news media had chosen sides in a soft civil war – against “middle America”. Against those of us who still believe in a federal republic based on and governed by the Constitution. Against those of us who believe in liberty opportunity responsibility and security.

For about ten years I got most of my news from National Public Radio. Was it biased? Yeah. But it was still thorough coverage of the issues. I could “filter” it.

I seldom listen any more.

(One could also mention cable.)

Enough background. Back to the news.

The Journolist is a listserv in which several hundred journalists (along with some professors and activists) participated. There are many such listservs for just about every group concerning just about every area of interest. I know of listservs for Hebrew language and Jewish studies. There is one for the Chinese Students and Scholars Association at Louisiana State University.

Sometimes these listservs are considered private. Sort of like email. It is considered a breach of confidentiality or at least of propriety to share the content of these conservations with people outside the group. In my opinion such groups are entitled to set their own rules. Public or private.

Journolist was very private. And like Climategate the problem is not a private listserv. The problem is what people were saying and doing under cover of that privacy.

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

Read the whole thing at The Daily Caller.

It appears that journalists actively worked behind the scenes to effect coverage of the presidential campaign. In Barack’s Obama favor.

A few caveats. And they are important.

1. Who is The Daily Caller? Does s/he really have these Journolist archives? Frankly “according to records obtained by The Daily Caller” does not inspire my confidence. Who else has seen these? Is there a way to confirm they are authentic?
2. Just because a bunch of journalists on a private listserv say “we are going to do something about this” (attack journalists who in any way even remotely make Barack Obama look bad) does not mean it happened. People say “we should do something about this” all the time. What did these journalists actually do as a result of these conversations?
3. What about context? Many of the journalists cited are with The Nation which is hardly mainstream. Oh wait. It is.

I think the true significance of the Journolist archives might not lie in what these journalists achieved – would the Republicans still have lost? would Hillary Clinton have been the Democratic nominee? – but in how it exposes the mindset of many journalists.

Ann Althouse (whose blog is read by millions as opposed to my hundreds) has two great posts on this.

In one she ridicules the plight of feminists who had to “wave aside as politically irrelevant” the very anti-feminist personal behavior of one William Jefferson Clinton:

Ah! How Katha suffered for Bill Clinton! She would prefer to have a more pleasurable life, full of the fun of being true to the principles of the feminist movement, but there were more important things to be done at the time. Caring about rape, sexual harassment, male privilege, and female subordination — that was a self-indulgence brave Katha [Pollitt of The Nation] rose above.

Heh. Yet this is not unrelated to another issue which is the astonishing lack of ethical considerations:

But in The Daily Caller quotes, they only ask what will work best. They don’t even throw in as a makeweight argument that it would be more ethical to refrain from calling their opponents racists.

Another distinction is that Alinsky was talking about rules for political activists, not journalists. Even as means are subordinated to ends, journalism is subordinated to political activism. (emphasis added)

That last clause is the money quote. It is why I believe 2008 was the critical turning point for the relationship between the news media and the American people. Before 2008 I think there was always political activism but it was often subordinated (if barely) to journalism. 2008 is the year in which that relationship flipped. Journalism began to serve the ends of political activism.

One of the things I appreciate about the blog Politics, Policy, Pathology and Hope Within The Black Community (how’s that for a blog title?) is how often he asks “why do we focus so much ire and attention on that perceived potential threat to the black community but ignore these constant actual threats?” He puts it well in recent post “Non-racist assaults to the black community – thwarting the racism chasers”:

I have stated previously that as we aggregate all of the threats to the Black community and then stack rank them based upon their threat level, preponderance and proximity – there are more “non-racist” acts that will never be labeled “civil rights violations” against Black people (despite being so) than those which are labeled “RACIST” and thus raise the ire of the NAACP and other leftwing actor-vist groups.

Street pirates killing robbing and terrorizing actual black people versus Glenn Beck and the Tea Party movement.

By the way Politics, Policy, Pathology and Hope has been on a roll lately. From one brilliant post a week to something like 2-3 each day. Getting hard to keep up. My only mild warning/critique is that the writing style is not always easy to follow.

Back to the news. So the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People wants to pass a resolution about the Tea Party movement.

Stop by and give some love to Another Black Conservative who addresses the absurdity of the resolution against the Tea Party movement – and also offers a thoughtful defense (and mild critique) of First Lady Michelle Obama.

Once again the NAACP is still trying to fight pre Civil Rights era struggles in a post Civil Rights era world. They will even go after a media made racial boogeyman to do it.  The NAACP is working with the false story from the media that Tea Partiers hurled racial slurs at black congressmen. To date not a single video of the incident has ever emerged and the media itself has seems to drop the story all together. Yet here is the NAACP getting all fired up about it now.  If the NAACP thought there was truth to this story, they should have made noise when it happened, instead of waiting until now.

Why did they wait you ask?  Because the midterm elections are now four months away and the NAACP is more about shilling the leftist agenda than they are about the “advancement of colored people”. Rallying blacks against the Tea Party is more important to the leftist agenda than tackling the real issues facing the black community like poor schools, unemployment or the devastating effects of drugs and crime.

Timothy Dalrymple serves up a gumbo pot full of truth and reason with his essay “Is the Tea Party racist?”

These arguments are, however, mere justifications for a position already taken. Liberals were inclined to believe Tea Partiers racist even before such “evidence” was available. That is, the belief that Tea Partiers are racist is not an evidence-based belief. It is a belief in search of evidence.

What I propose, then, is the Theory of the Missing Motive. Since the education establishment has failed to convey a thorough and unprejudiced perspective on differing political points of view, even highly educated liberals possess a cartoonish, easily-dismissed image of American conservative thought. Liberals cannot believe that Tea Partiers are actually motivated by the passions and the reasons that Tea Partiers claim motivate them, because liberals in general are alienated from those passions and insufficiently educated in those reasons.

It is essentially a failure of imagination. Liberals cannot imagine themselves into a way of thinking in which conservatives do what they do and believe what they believe for good reasons. And since they cannot believe that conservatives are motivated by rational beliefs and admirable motives, they must appeal to darker, more primitive impulses to explain their behavior. The racist motive presents itself as a natural and convenient explanation.

Liberals, in other words, were always going to believe that a movement dominated by white conservatives is racist.

* * *

If you were not already inclined to consider Tea Partiers racist, you would not find the evidence compelling.

Elizabeth Scalia aka The Anchoress also exposes the lack of intellectual honesty behind such charges of “racism”.

“We’re deeply concerned about elements that are trying to move the country back, trying to reverse progress that we’ve made,” NAACP spokeswoman Leila McDowell told ABC News. “We are asking that the law-abiding members of the Tea Party repudiate those racist elements, that they recognize the historic and present racist elements that are within the Tea Party movement.

Emphasis mine. Does it matter at all to Ms. McDowell et al. that the rare racist behavior exhibited at any conservative/libertarian gathering is explicitly condemned by the vast majority of tea partiers, and so the repudiation she seeks is already a reality?

Here’s another perspective the NAACP could have offered, had they wished:

“…while there is still work to be done in America, it is heartening to see that when racist behavior is exhibited it is quickly condemned by people of good will in all spheres of society; we work toward the day when racism will exist no more, and the fact that it cannot grab a foothold even among those whose concerns we do not share gives real hope too us, that the dream of Martin Luther King and of so many anonymous, tireless workers for social justice can and will be realized for all God’s children.”

That would be a statement everyone can get behind, because all reasonable people want that. If people really do want to see continuing progress made in converting distrustful hearts and minds, a positive statement like that would be much more effective than the one they’re using.

This country needs someone in authority, somewhere, to acknowledge something good about its people, and to mean it. Lacking that–and we are–such a statement from the NAACP would be something good. And it would have the added benefit of being true.

What does it say when we demand someone do something they have already done? Does it not call into question the sincerity of our demand?

Once again for the record I am not a member of the Tea Party movement although I am sympathetic with its concerns. I think the country is heading in a disastrous direction – and Congress is at least as much to blame as is the Obama administration – and am troubled by apparent efforts to use the racism charge to silence political dissent. First they come for the Tea Parties and all that.