Category Archives: Media

The fringe is not the mainstream

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I have to echo Robert Stacy McCain in expressing great gratitude and respect to The New Republic‘s James Kirchick.  Kirchick, an assistant editor at TNR who is also a contributing writer for The Advocate, is a liberal Democrat and practicing homosexual who had the integrity to write an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal declaring, “The Religious Right Didn’t Kill George Tiller,” and calling out his fellow liberals for their mendacious and invidious comparison of pro-life evangelicals to Islamic jihadists:

But if the reactions to the death of Tiller mean anything, the “Christian Taliban,” as conservative religious figures are often called, isn’t living up to its namesake. If “Christianists” were anything like actual religious fascists they would applaud Tiller’s murder as a “heroic martyrdom operation” and suborn further mayhem.

Radical Islamists revel in death. Just witness the videos that suicide bombers record before they carry out their murderous task or listen to the homicidal exhortations of extremist imams. Murder—particularly of the unarmed and innocent—is a righteous deed for these people. The manifestos of Islamic militant groups are replete with paeans to killing infidels. When a suicide bomb goes off in Israel, Palestinian terrorist factions compete to claim responsibility for the carnage.

There is no appreciable number of people in this country, religious Christians or otherwise, who support the murder of abortion doctors. The same cannot be said of Muslims who support suicide bombings in the name of their religion.

I greatly appreciate his willingness to come out and make this point.  For all that Kirchick doesn’t much care for us conservative evangelicals (understandably, I will admit), he clearly has a sense of perspective on the matter that most of his colleagues in the media willfully do not have:

I hold no brief for the religious right, and its views on homosexuality in particular offend (and affect) me personally. But it’s precisely because of my identity that I consider comparisons between so-called Christianists (who seek to limit my rights via the ballot box) and Islamic fundamentalists (who seek to limit my rights via decapitation) to be fatuous.

Read the whole thing—it’s an excellent piece.  Yes, there are those who attach themselves to the pro-life cause as a way of justifying their destructive, nihilistic desires and providing a channel for their anger and hatred; but then, there are those who join the animal-rights movement or write for Playboy for the same reason.  You can’t judge a movement by the most extreme folks who claim to be acting on its behalf, or else I’d be justified in arguing (on the basis of the now-pulled Playboy piece referenced in that link) that all liberal men want to rape conservative women, something which is clearly false.

The truth is, there is no room in the pro-life movement for people who believe in killing abortionists, and there never has been; but those of us who are pro-life cannot thereby stop would-be murderers from claiming hatred of abortion justifies their actions and choice of victims.  All we can say is that anyone who does so hasn’t been listening to what we’re actually saying.

Nor is this an empty statement on my part; pro-life leaders have long recognized that there are those who would use the cause to justify violence, and have long been working to prevent that and explain the evil of it.  (That might explain why, overall, there have been so few cases of violence against the abortion industry, relatively speaking.)  For instance, almost fifteen years ago, Paul J. Hill, who had been defrocked and excommunicated by two different (conservative) Presbyterian denominations for his extremism, shot and killed a Florida abortionist and his security guard, wounding the guard’s wife; he was sentenced to death, a sentence which was carried out nine years later.  In justifying himself, he argued that “Whatever force is legitimate in defending a born child is legitimate in defending an unborn child.”

First Things took his actions and his argument seriously enough to publish a symposium that December in which sixteen pro-life leaders and theologians laid out in detail the reasons why killing abortionists only compounds the evil of abortion.  (Robert George, who made his position on this matter crystal clear this week, took that opportunity to write a satirical paragraph on the issue instead.)  Anyone in any doubt as to whether Scott Roeder is in any way representative of the pro-life movement should take the time to read it and be disabused of their false perception.

(My thanks to Presbyterians Pro-Life for their statement on the Tiller murder which reminded me of the First Things piece.)

 

Sarah Palin on the murder of Pvt. William Long

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Here’s Gov. Palin’s statement (HT:  Mel):

The stories of two very different lives with similar fates crossed through the media’s hands yesterday—both equally important but one lacked the proper attention. The death of 67-year old George Tiller was unacceptable, but equally disgusting was another death that police believe was politically and religiously motivated as well.

William Long died yesterday. The 23-year old Army Recruiter was gunned down by a fanatic; another fellow soldier was wounded in the ambush. The soldiers had just completed their basic training and were talking to potential recruits, just as my son, Track, once did.

Whatever titles we give these murderers, both deserve our attention. Violence like that is no way to solve a political dispute nor a religious one. And the fanatics on all sides do great disservice when they confuse dissention with rage and death.

She’s right on all counts.  Contrary to my initial expectation, the killer here wasn’t a fringe anti-war activist, but rather an American Muslim convert and Yemen-trained Islamic terrorist.  My point still holds, though:  will the media and leftist pundits (but I repeat myself) treat Long’s murder as a terrorist act and go after those whose hateful rhetoric encourages such acts?  So far, nope.  (Go on, tell me you’re surprised.)

Update:  The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg has noticed, as has Toby Harnden of the Telegraph.

Obama administration ticks off Brits . . . again

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. . . Wait, wasn’t this supposed to be the administration that was so in tune with the international community that they’d make us popular around the world again?  So far, it doesn’t seem to be working, at least where the UK is concerned; Barack Obama has been doing a good job of ticking off our (historically) closest and most reliable ally since his second month in office, and now his (overmatched) press secretary, Robert Gibbs, has just made matters worse.  Apparently Gibbs didn’t know that deliberately antagonizing Fleet Street is a bad idea, or he wouldn’t have said this:

“I want to speak generally about some of reports I’ve witnessed over the past few years in the British media and in some ways I’m surprised it filtered down,” Gibbs said.

“Let’s just say that if I wanted to look up, if I wanted to read a writeup today of how Manchester United fared last night in the Champions League Cup, I might open up a British newspaper,” he continued.

“If I was looking for something that bordered on truthful news, I’m not sure that would be the first stack of clips I picked up.”

Mind you, that arrogant, petulant little tantrum was in response to a single article in theTelegraph.  One article, and he can’t take the heat.  I hate to see what Gibbs would do if his boss ever had to take the volume of abuse, calumny, and slander that Sarah Palin gets.

Not only does this not speak well about Gibbs’ emotional maturity and ability to deal with criticism (and perhaps that of his boss, for that matter), it says very bad things about his judgment.  Actually, what it suggests is that he’s gotten so accustomed to the craven, supine submission of the OSM that he takes that as his due, and thinks everyone should cower before him likewise.  He reminds me rather of Prince Rabadash, actually:

Then Rabadash rolled his eyes and spread out his mouth into a horrible, long mirthless grin like a shark, and wagged his ears up and down (anyone can learn how to do this if they take the trouble). He had always found this very effective in Calormen. The bravest had trembled when he made these faces, and ordinary people had fallen to the floor, and sensitive people had often fainted. But what Rabadash hadn’t realized is that it is very easy to frighten people who know you can have them boiled alive the moment you give the word. The grimaces didn’t look at all alarming in Archenland; indeed Lucy only thought Rabadash was going to be sick.

Unfortunately for Rabadash Gibbs, the British press are the Archenlanders in this scenario, and they aren’t about to be cowed, as the Telegraph‘s James Delingpole made abundantly clear with this response to Gibbs’ comments:

Your treatment not just of the British media but of Britain generally smacks of a risible ineptitude. First, you let President Obama send back the Winston Churchill bust. Then, you insult our visiting prime minister with a dismally low-key reception (worthy of a minor African head of state, not your closest and most loyal ally) and shoddy gifts (those DVDs). Then you compound the insult by having one of your monkeys declare, Chicago-politics-style, “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.” OK so we know Obama’s not much interested in foreign affairs and has a special loathing for Britain because it roughed up his Kenyan granddad during the Mau Mau insurrection. But don’t you realise, that one of your jobs as his press secretary is to make out like he loves us so much even his underpants have a union flag on them? . . .

We know we’re not angels. We know we can go over the top sometimes. But unfortunately that’s a much bigger problem for you than it is for us. You see, while a lot of your mainstream media will hold fire on stories which they think may reflect poorly on your wondrous Obamamessiah—what his half-brother has been up to, say—we have fewer qualms about telling it like it is. So far, you’ve had a pretty easy ride. . . . But just you wait till we start showing our teeth. . . .

A lot of Americans know this. They appreciate our irreverence. They enjoy our frank criticisms of all the myriad areas where Obama is getting it so badly wrong—everything from his disastrous cap and trade measures, to his brutal treatment of Chrysler dealerships which didn’t support him, to his pork barrelling, to his failure to do anything that looks remotely like rescuing the US economy. That’s why they come to read us online: because they can and there’s nothing you can do to stop them.

If Delingpole opted to hit the press secretary and his administration low, Nile Gardiner decided to swing high:

Can you imagine Gibbs making these remarks about The New York Times or The Washington Post, or NBC, ABC or CBS? This would never happen. The British press, especially the Telegraph, has been singled out because they frequently publish articles critical of the Obama administration and are not afraid to take on the status quo in Washington. Increasingly, millions of Americans are turning to online UK news websites for cutting edge reports on American politics and U.S. foreign policy that the mainstream media refuses to cover in the States, especially if it is unflattering to the Obama White House.

Robert Gibbs’ completely unwarranted rant against the British press is an absolute disgrace, and the President should disown his views. An unreserved apology by Gibbs is also in order.

For all its talk of “raising America’s standing” in the world after the Bush years, the Obama administration is doing a spectacularly bad job of reaching out to its allies. Unfortunately this is the new face of America’s public diplomacy, which will only serve to alienate public opinion across the Atlantic. Congratulations Gibbs—you’ve just made an enemy out of the entire British media, quite an achievement for the man in charge of selling the President’s message.

Even given Gibbs’ previously established (low) standard of competence, this is a most remarkable fiasco; but the most remarkable thing is that no one at the White House seems to recognize it as such.  Barring a groveling apology from the administration to the British media (and Britain more generally), I think we’ll have to conclude that the solipsism and self-absorption of this administration is so great that they really honestly don’t see the harm in antagonizing the Brits.  If that’s in fact the case, it’s going to come back and bite them in the end.  Badly.

Wow . . . liberal writer takes hatchet to Barack Obama

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I can’t say I’ve ever been very aware of Ted Rall, but apparently he’s a syndicated columnist and editorial cartoonist of some significance; apparently he’s also an atheist and very liberal, but apparently willing to call out Democrats if he thinks they have it coming, rather than take the party line as a straightjacket.  I think he does a remarkable job of proving that with this column (HT:  Mark Hemingway):

We expected broken promises. But the gap between the soaring expectations that accompanied Barack Obama’s inauguration and his wretched performance is the broadest such chasm in recent historical memory. This guy makes Bill Clinton look like a paragon of integrity and follow-through.

From health care to torture to the economy to war, Obama has reneged on pledges real and implied. So timid and so owned is he that he trembles in fear of offending, of all things, the government of Turkey. Obama has officially reneged on his campaign promise to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. When a president doesn’t have the nerve to annoy the Turks, why does he bother to show up for work in the morning?

Obama is useless. Worse than that, he’s dangerous. Which is why, if he has any patriotism left after the thousands of meetings he has sat through with corporate contributors, blood-sucking lobbyists and corrupt politicians, he ought to step down now—before he drags us further into the abyss.

My oh my.  I’m not sure any conservatives have dared to cut loose with a broadside like that (and if they had, they would have been torn to shreds for it by the OSM); to read this coming from a liberal is nothing short of amazing.  But then, I think the issue that provoked him to this point is one on which liberals and conservatives should agree, and unite in opposing the White House:

I refer here to Obama’s plan for “preventive detentions.” If a cop or other government official thinks you might want to commit a crime someday, you could be held in “prolonged detention.” Reports in U.S. state-controlled media imply that Obama’s shocking new policy would only apply to Islamic terrorists (or, in this case, wannabe Islamic terrorists, and also kinda-sorta-maybe-thinking-about-terrorism dudes). As if that made it OK. . . .

Preventive detention is the classic defining characteristic of a military dictatorship. Because dictatorial regimes rely on fear rather than consensus, their priority is self-preservation rather than improving their people’s lives. They worry obsessively over the one thing they can’t control, what George Orwell called “thoughtcrime”—contempt for rulers that might someday translate to direct action.

He’s right about that; this proposal would be exactly the sort of banana-republic behavior I’ve been worrying about (as in this post) ever since the campaign, given some of the tactics we saw from Barack Obama and his flunkies then.  In truth, the whole idea here is profoundlyilliberal, and really rather hard to explain.  Either President Obama is one of those folks who has a sneaking hidden admiration for totalitarian techniques (something more common on the Left than one would think, as we saw with Code Pink and other leftist organizations when they snuggled up to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad), or else this is his solution to the dilemma he faces.  After all, if he’s committed to giving captured terrorists the same rights as any American, and giving them the rights Americans have now would be a threat to national security, what else is he going to do?

The question is, will people go along with it?  Not if Rall has anything to say about it, we won’t—and again, it’s hard to argue with his point:

Locking up people who haven’t done anything wrong is worse than un-American and a violent attack on the most basic principles of Western jurisprudence. It is contrary to the most essential notion of human decency. That anyone has ever been subjected to “preventive detention” is an outrage. That the president of the United States, a man who won an election because he promised to elevate our moral and political discourse, would even entertain such a revolting idea offends the idea of civilization itself.

Rall is here addressing the issue of terrorism, but this is in fact a much broader concern and temptation in jurisprudence, perhaps especially with regard to sexual predators—if preventive detention ever becomes a reality in the American criminal-justice system, it won’t be long before the clamor arises to have it applied to violent rapists; there are more than a few people even now who think it would be perfectly appropriate to pre-emptively imprison folks like that until they’re too frail to feed themselves.  (Science fiction plays with this theme at various points; the apotheosis of this would of course be Philip K. Dick’s 1956 short story “The Minority Report,” and the 2002 film based on it, with his concept of the “Precrime” unit that identifies and arrests criminals before they commit their crimes.)

All of this leads Rall to a remarkably strong statement:

Obama is cute. He is charming. But there is something rotten inside him. Unlike the Republicans who backed George W. Bush, I won’t follow a terrible leader just because I voted for him. Obama has revealed himself. He is a monster, and he should remove himself from power.

Now, the conclusion that President Bush was a terrible leader is Rall’s, not mine; I don’t happen to think he was.  I do, however, think that all too many Republicans fell into line behind him when we shouldn’t have out of political calculation (calculation which, ultimately, proved incorrect, as that behavior turned out to be unwise politically as well as philosophically).  I also don’t think it correct or fair to call President Obama “a monster”—that’s hysterical hyperbole of the worst sort.

The man’s a politician, nothing more and nothing less—though to be specific, he’s a Chicago politician, which is about the most cynical and manipulative sort our country has—and if there’s “something rotten inside him,” well, there’s something rotten inside each and every one of us.  Traditionally, it’s called sin, though I would imagine that as an atheist, Rall doesn’t think he’s supposed to believe in it.  And yet, it’s there all the same, in Barack Obama no less than in anyone else.

And that, I suspect, is the reason for Rall’s harshness in going after the president:  Barack Obama was supposed to be better, and so far (and here I agree with Rall completely) he’s been worse.  What you hear in this scream of rage is, I think, the anguished fury of severe disillusionment, as it has become apparent that Candidate Obama played the Left the same way he played everyone else.  Such political principles and impulses as he has are hard-left, that much is clear, but (as with Bill Clinton) they are secondary to the main goal of gaining, maintaining, and extending power.  If it suits his particular sort of Realpolitik to keep his promises, then he’ll keep them; if it doesn’t, he won’t; and if he can duck responsibility for not keeping them, or keeping them, or (if most advantageous) for addressing an issue at all, he’ll do that, too.

The political lesson of Ted Rall’s column (apart from its message) is this:  the true believers aren’t going to stand for that very long.  E. J. Dionne, in recognizing (and celebrating!) the fact that President Obama and his administration have been quite deliberately selling different stories to different ideological groups as a tactic for advancing his agenda and isolating conservatives, worried a little that the president might overreach, and that it might not ultimately work:

But establishments have a habit of becoming too confident in their ability to manipulate people and events, and too certain of their own moral righteousness. Obama’s political and substantive gifts are undeniable. What he needs to realize are the limits of his own mastery.

Dionne is correct in his concerns; and given the case of Ted Rall, I suspect that this approach ultimately won’t work, that the president will find that his mastery is ultimately too limited to pull off what he’s attempting.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

—Abraham Lincoln (attributed)

Brand perception of the New York Times

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I ran across, courtesy of Chris Forbes, an interesting site called brand tags, which describes itself as “A collective experiment in brand perception. . . . The basic idea of this site is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, a brand is whatever they say it is.”  The mechanism is simple:  the site displays a logo, and you enter the first word or phrase that comes to mind.  It then adds that tag to the tag cloud on that logo.  Once you’ve tagged enough brands, you can look at the tag clouds and see what people associate with various logos and brands.

One that I found particularly interesting was the tag cloud on the New York Times.  Among the largest ones, representing those most often entered, were some obvious ones like “newspaper,” and some positive ones like “authoritative,” “intelligent,” “reliable,” and “serious”; one of the largest was “crossword,” which probably shouldn’t have surprised me.  Along with “paper” and “newspaper,” though, the largest single one was “liberal,” and there were a number of other prominent ones associating liberal bias with the Grey Lady.  This isn’t surprising, but I did think it was interesting, and I don’t imagine it’s anything the folks at the NYT are happy about.  Click the link and see for yourself.

Barack Obama’s Achilles heel

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I commented earlier today on the latest attempt by the OSM (Obama-stream media), in the person of New York Times gossip columnist Maureen Dowd, to pre-emptively defend their adored idol, Barack Obama, by asserting that any terrorist attack during his time in office won’t be his fault, it will be Dick Cheney’s fault. This is, as I noted, not an isolated thing, but part of a broader campaign to ensure that any bad event or outcome is blamed on the Republicans, and primarily on the Bush administration; though a superficially appealing approach, I argued that it infantilizes President Obama and renders him unworthy of respect, because it essentially says that he can’t be held to the same standard as other presidents.  It makes him less effectual, powerful, influential, and important than his predecessor (and even his predecessor’s VP!), and thereby makes him a lesser figure.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I also don’t think people will buy it; we’re too accustomed to the Harry S Truman (“The buck stops here”) approach for many people to swallow “It’s not my fault” coming from our president.  We’ll take a lot of things, but I don’t believe avoidance of responsibility will be one of them.  However, let’s suppose for a moment that I’m wrong.  Let’s suppose that when the first batch of folks the Obama administration releases from Gitmo turn around and help nuke the World Series, or turn a superbug loose on the Washington Mall on the Fourth of July, or whatever they do, that the American public in fact exonerates the president and buys the line that it’s all Dick Cheney’s fault.  Let’s suppose that a year from now, the voters still pin the problems in our banking system on the Bush administration and hold Barack Obama blameless for the failure of his programs.  Let’s suppose that the polls reveal the attitude that if things are getting worse, it’s just because George W. Bush did such a lousy job.

There’s still one thing that the president won’t be able to duck, and it’s something no one seems to be thinking about:  gas prices.  For whatever reason, all the prognostications I’ve seen are ignoring them, effectively assuming that they’ll remain where they were at the beginning of the year—and they won’t.  Indeed, they already haven’t.  Three or four weeks ago, gas prices here were below $1.90 a gallon; right now, they’re sitting at $2.459, and they’re only going to keep going up.  It won’t be long before they’re back over $3 a gallon, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them back over $4 a gallon by Labor Day.

Why?  Because gas prices were driven up in large part by speculation in oil futures, and the biggest thing that drove the price of futures down was Congress’ action in letting the offshore-drilling ban expire.  The prospect of a dramatic expansion in American domestic oil production exerted considerable downward pressure on oil futures, which brought down the price of oil, and thus the price of gas.  That prospect is no longer in place, thanks to the policies of the new administration, which is resolutely opposed to any sort of energy development except for those forms which are supposedly “green.”  That means that the conditions are back in place for oil and gas prices to rise, which they’re already doing; that in turn means that speculating in futures, betting on them to continue to rise, will once again be a profitable activity.  With so many people who are now a lot poorer than they used to be and so few means available for them to correct that situation, it seems likely to me that we’ll once again see speculation start to drive up the price of oil futures, and that the price of gas will once again follow suit.

And if I’m right, there will be no earthly way for Barack Obama or any of his media stooges to blame George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or anyone on the Republican side of the aisle for that—but there will be a great many Republicans, led by Sarah Palin, to say “I told you so.”  It will be all on him, and Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, and the rest of the Democratic cabal now running this country, and no way for them to avoid the blame.

The OSM (Obama-stream media) theme song

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Consequence Free

Wouldn’t it be great if no one ever got offended?
Wouldn’t it be great to say what’s really on your mind?
I have always said all the rules are made for bending;
And if I let my hair down, would that be such a crime?

Chorus:
I wanna be consequence-free;
I wanna be where nothing needs to matter.
I wanna be consequence-free,
Just sing Na Na Na Na Na Na Ya Na Na.

I could really use to lose my Catholic conscience,
‘Cause I’m getting sick of feeling guilty all the time.
I won’t abuse it, yeah, I’ve got the best intentions
For a little bit of anarchy, but not the hurting kind.

Chorus

I couldn’t sleep at all last night
‘Cause I had so much on my mind.
I’d like to leave it all behind,
But you know it’s not that easy

Chorus

Wouldn’t it be great if the band just never ended?
We could stay out late and we would never hear last call.
We wouldn’t need to worry about approval or permission;
We could slip off the edge and never worry about the fall.

Chorus out

It’s a catchy song, and the video (which is below, if you’re interested) is the sort of fun, goofy piece that Great Big Sea likes to do.  It’s also, as I’ve said somewhere, one of the stupidest song lyrics I’ve ever run across.  What does it mean when our actions are consequence-free?  When our actions have no consequences, we say they’re inconsequential; that means they don’t matter, which is why inconsequential is a synonym for unimportant or insignificant.  If nothing we ever did had consequences, if none of it ever mattered, then we wouldn’t matter; if all our actions were insignificant, it would mean that we would be insignificant, our lives would be meaningless.  As I wrote last fall,

The key is that our actions matter because we matter. Indeed, we matter enough to God that he was willing to pay an infinite price for our salvation; and so our actions matter greatly to him, both for their effect on others (who matter to him as much as we do) and for their effect on us. Our actions have eternal consequence because we are beings of eternal consequence; it could not be otherwise.

Only a fool could wish for insignificance; it’s profoundly foolish even to feign a wish for such a thing.

Now, it’s hardly a new or shocking idea to suggest that our media establishment is composed largely of fools, but they’re so far in the tank for Barack Obama that it’s taking them to new and surprising depths of folly.  We see this particularly in the ongoing effort by the MSM—who would be better called the OSM, the Obama-stream media; they’re so deep in his pocket, they’re nothing more than pocket lint at this point—to render the president consequence-free, at least when it comes to negative consequences:  if anything bad happens, it’s all that evil Bush’s fault, or that evil Cheney’s fault, or the fault of some other evil Republican.  The deepest depths of this drivel (so far) have been plumbed by Maureen Dowd, who wrote in the New York Times,

No matter if or when terrorists attack here, and they’re on their own timetable, not a partisan, red/blue state timetable, Cheney will be deemed the primary one who made America more vulnerable.

In other words, it doesn’t matter when it happens, or what happens, or how it happens, or what could have happened, or what the president and his administration have done, or what they haven’t done, or what they could have done, or what they should have done—according to Maureen Dowd, if terrorists ever do anything here again, no matter what, it’s Dick Cheney’s fault.

Now, to a superficial mind, I can see the appeal of this:  it preserves the “blame everything on the GOP” strategy that got the Democratic Party to power, wherein it is asserted that only the GOP can do or cause bad things, while all good things are solely to the credit of the donkeys.  What Dowd apparently fails to see, however, is the way in which her assertion completely emasculates President Obama and his administration.  What she’s essentially saying is that Barack Obama is fundamentally inconsequential and ineffectual, at least by comparison to the previous administration.  George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are the ones with the real power, the ones who really matter; Barack Obama just can’t be expected to compare, or to have the same kind of effect on the world.  He can’t be held responsible if al’Qaeda or somebody else attacks us, because, um, it can’t possibly be his fault, because, uh, well, he just can’t be; there has to be someone else to blame.  The buck doesn’t stop at his desk; that’s above his pay grade, or something.

I’m sorry, but when people start saying things like that about the President of the United States, that’s just pathetic.  But hey, at least he can dance around and look cool, like these guys:

 

Political fairy tales never end right

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Once upon a time, there was a politician who said,

Let me be as clear as possible: I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people’s families are off limits, and people’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Governor Palin’s performance as governor, or her potential performance as a VP. And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. . . .

You know my mother had me when she was 18, and how a family deals with issues and you know teenage children, that shouldn’t be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that’s off limits. . . .

Our people were not involved in any way in this, and they will not be. And if I ever thought that it was somebody in my campaign that was involved in something like that—they’d be fired.

That politician was very good at saying things that made people think highly of him, and so in the fullness of time, he grew up and became President of the United States. But along the way, he picked up a traveling companion, a Scarecrow named Joe who said whatever came into his mind, including using Gov. Palin’s youngest child to score political points; and the politician didn’t fire him, or stop him, or tell him to back off. And this was a sign that maybe he didn’t mean what he said after all. And the press continued to do what he’d told them not to do, and he said nothing further; and this was another sign.

And then after the politician became president, there came the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, at which it is traditional to have a comedian make fun of the president, to show that the president can laugh at himself and take a joke. But since this politician didn’t like laughing at himself and taking jokes, they had a comedian to make fun of his opponents instead, including a crude “joke” about Gov. Palin and her family. The comedian told this joke right in front of the politician who had once said,

Let me be as clear as possible: I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people’s families are off limits, and people’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics.

In any proper fairy tale, this should be the cue for the politician to step up and say, “I said this was inappropriate, and I meant it. I said we need to respect those with whom we disagree, and I meant it. I said we need to base our politics on political issues, not on character assassination, and I meant it. Stop this nonsense right now.” This should be the cue for the politician to defend the one unjustly abused.

Did he? No . . . he laughed. All his words about the good, the true and the beautiful were just words.

Political fairy tales never end right.

(Crossposted at Conservatives4Palin.)

The hunt for Gollum

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My thanks to Bill Roberts for posting this—it’s the trailer for a fan-made movie about Aragorn’s search for Gollum, a chapter in the story of The Lord of the Rings which isn’t told, only recounted briefly by Aragorn.  It is, obviously, a low-budget production, but from the trailer, it seems to be an impressive piece of work nevertheless.

Coming down to earth

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I’m a big fan of Pixar’s Andrew Stanton, the writer/director behind Finding Nemo and WALL-E; I have tremendous respect for his creative gifts and approach (which he discussed in a fascinating interview last June), and I think he tells great stories well.  My lovely wife disagrees with me, but I think WALL-E‘s the better of the two; that’s no putdown to Nemo by any means, it’s just that WALL-E works on so many levels and really connects the intimate story of the two main characters to the epic background story of the human race and the fate of the planet Earth.

Down to Earth

Did you think that your feet had been bound
By what gravity brings to the ground?
Did you feel you were tricked
By the future you picked?
Well, come on down.

All those rules don’t apply
When you’re high in the sky,
So, come on down . . . come on down.

Chorus:
We’re coming down to the ground—
There’s no better place to go;
We’ve got snow up on the mountains,
We’ve got rivers down below.
We’re coming down to the ground;
We hear the birds sing in the trees,
And the land will be looked after,
We’ll send the seeds out in the breeze.

Did you think you’d escaped from routine
By changing the script and the scene?
Despite all you made of it,
You’re always afraid of the change.

You’ve got a lot on your chest;
Well, you can come as my guest,
So come on down . . . come on down.

Chorus

Like the fish in the ocean,
We felt at home in the sea;
We learned to live off the good land,
Learned to climb up a tree.
Then we got up on two legs,
But we wanted to fly;
When we messed up our homeland,
We set sail for the sky.

Chorus

We’re coming down (down)
Coming down to Earth (down)
Like babies at birth (down)
Coming down to Earth (down to Earth)
We’re gonna find new priorities (down)
These are extraordinary qualities (down)
(Down, down to Earth)

Chorus

Words:  Peter Gabriel; music:  Peter Gabriel and Thomas Newman
©2008 Pixar Music/Wonderland Music Company Inc.
From the movie WALL-E