Columnist.
They don't hand out master's degrees in revisionist history, but if they did, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman might deserve one. Obama is mired in a geopolitical mess of his own making, from the Ukraine to the ISIS menace, yet Friedman's decided to argue that Obama shouldn't be harshly judged. His era is much more complicated than Reagan's, you see. "I'll leave it to historians to figure out years from now who was the better president," he claimed. Reagan's era was defined by a capitalist-communist competition between "two organized superpowers," while Obama's era centers on a puzzling conflict "between a superpower and many superempowered angry men."
By now, everyone knows that there's a revolving door between Democratic politics and the "objective" news media. But does it have to spin so fast? On Sept. 10, CNN announced it hired former White House press secretary Jay Carney as a commentator, citing his "invaluable voice for the network" after his five years inside the Obama administration. By that afternoon, and in heavy rotation in the evening around an Obama speech, Carney was battling for the White House position. Having a direct conflict of interest isn't disqualifying if you're labeled a "commentator." The issue: Can Carney truly offer "invaluable" commentary when the media themselves know that he used his White House podium to spout falsehoods to the press?
The liberal legend of Jon Stewart began with his Oct. 15, 2004 appearance on CNN's "Crossfire," where he rhetorically sentenced the show to death. He proclaimed, "It's hurting America. Here is what I wanted to tell you guys: Stop. ... You have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably." CNN announced it was canceling the show two months later, as network president Jon Klein told the New York Times "I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart's overall premise." As is so typical of liberals who preach one thing while doing its opposite (Leonardo DiCaprio, call your office), Comedy Central has never felt any responsibility to "the public discourse." If we applied Jon Klein's standard, it would be time for "The Daily Show" to be canceled.
Indian-American actress Mindy Kaling not only stars in her own sitcom on Fox called "The Mindy Project," she's in charge of it. You might think that feminists would celebrate that achievement, but that would show that you don't know about feminists. Apparently, nothing satisfies them. Instead, they are demanding she use her program to sell feminism, and its crowning joy, abortion. Kaling committed a gaffe among the Hollywood left by telling a Flare magazine interviewer she had no plans to address what the magazine called "the American right's current war on abortion." Kaling said "It would be demeaning to the topic to talk about it in a half-hour sitcom."
The late Lloyd Bentsen is sorely needed when President Barack Obama tries to compare himself to Ronald Reagan. Mr. President, you're no Ronald Reagan. The New York Times recently captured Obama speaking inside the White House in an off-the-record meeting with liberal journalists. He lamented with an "edge of resentment" that he's seen as weaker than Reagan after an Islamic suicide bomber drove a truck into a Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, killing 241 Americans. "Mr. Obama noted acidly that President Ronald Reagan sent Marines to Lebanon only to have hundreds of them killed in a terrorist attack because of terrible planning, and then withdrew the remaining ones, leaving behind a civil war that lasted years. But Reagan, he noted, is hailed as a titan striding the earth."
David Limbaugh has written a book that departs dramatically from his recent tomes on the worst excesses of the Obama presidency. "Jesus On Trial: A Lawyer Affirms the Truth of the Gospel" explores his journey of faith, from believer to non-believer and back. "Rush and I were raised in a great Midwest Christian family. We went to church every Sunday. Our parents raised us right so I'm not blaming them. I'm blaming myself for the message not sticking," he says. As it has for so many, his faith faded away in college. Faith was replaced by skepticism. Limbaugh wants it understood that his intention is not to ridicule skeptics. "I used to be one. But at some point I realized it was foolish and arrogant of me to pretend to form final conclusions about the Bible and Jesus Christ when I hadn't begun to seriously study Scripture or Christian doctrine. ... So I resolved to examine the evidence."
It is amazing the degree to which the media can politicize -- always from a leftist perspective -- just about anything in the news. No matter what the issue, there's the spin, always the spin, especially in the "analysis" reports where "journalists" go in screech advocacy mode while projecting a sober, dispassionate evaluation. Burger King announced that it could no longer abide by our corporate tax rate, the highest in the industrial world, and was moving to Canada, so ABC's Diane Sawyer decided this was a betrayal of the company's civic responsibility, stating that Burger King now stands "accused of doing something a lot of Americans question: defecting, heading north of the border to Canada, and saving a lot of tax money." Chris Matthews channeled his inner Abbie Hoffman to savage Burger King backer Warren Buffett for daring to wish a profit for his investors. "We used to call these guys 'pigs' back in the Sixties. They only liked America because it was a good place to make money."
Five years ago, Pope Benedict arrived in London to erupting controversy. Around 10,000 people took to the capital's streets for a rally against the Holy Father's "intolerance," and as the Guardian reported, against "the child abuse scandal for which so many hold the pontiff personally responsible, for both accelerating it and then covering it up." The abuse in question centered for the most part on incidents that were 40 years old or more. Nevertheless, CBS reporter Mark Phillips described the trip as "A test of whether Pope Benedict can get his message across over the background noise of the Church's child abuse scandal. And that test gets harder as time goes on."
I've been accused of anti-Semitism twice, and I still bristle. The first was after the Buchanan presidential run of '92, which I supported, and which triggered an ugly whisper campaign in Hollywood suggesting an anti-Semitic streak lurking under the hood. The second time, 10 years ago, was a frontal attack. I had conducted a teleconference, involving a dozen or more journalists, to unveil the results of a study conducted by the Parents Television Council involving Hollywood and religion. I learned about an hour later that Lynn Smith of the L.A. Times was working up a story suggesting I'd made anti-Semitic remarks.
We recently came across a rather new TV network, Me-TV. It's great stuff for old fogies (like one of us) -- reruns of the best of television from the '60s and '70s. "Twelve O'Clock High" never looked better. You probably missed this network in all the TV clutter. Few Americans have ever heard of the cable channel WE tv. Apparently, one way to remedy that is to put on a new show in 2015 called "Sex Box." It's another attempt to "help" Americans with their alleged puritanical reluctance to talk about sex. The Hollywood Reporter described it as a show that follows couples whose relationships are on the rocks. The couples have sex in a soundproof box on the set, and immediately afterward, emerge to address their issues in the afterglow "with a panel of experts for a series of emotionally honest conversations about intimacy."
In some prominent corners of the liberal media, the grousing has begun about President Obama's habit of hitting the golf course during crises without any concern for looking cavalier. Everyone knows he joyfully hit the links at Martha's Vineyard five minutes after a nationally televised address expressing his disgust at the horrific execution of American journalist James Foley by ISIS extremists in Syria. He played nine rounds during this most recent vacation in a year filled with vacations. On the front page of The New York Times, they reported "a firestorm of criticism erupted over what many saw as a callous indifference to the slaughter he had just condemned." Their columnist Maureen Dowd mocked him with a faux-Gettysburg Address of golf. When Dowd hits a liberal like this, something serious is amiss.
The amount of mockery presidents endure usually corresponds with their polling. It applies to Republicans (Nixon, Bush, Bush), but sometimes also to Democrats (Carter). In 2012, the Center for Media and Public Affairs found network late-night shows told twice as many jokes about Mitt Romney as they told about President Obama. Was it because Obama was more popular than Romney? Or did it make Obama more popular than his opponent? Obama isn't running for office again, so there's no need for satirists to go easy on him at the risk of endangering his electability. The last NBC poll put Obama's approval rating at 40 percent approval, 54 percent disapproval. His numbers are Carter-esque. Increasingly, he is seen as a national embarrassment, and yet the utter lack of zinging satire for Barack Obama remains.
The late media critic Edwin Diamond once notably quipped that to the American news media, "10,000 deaths in Nepal equals 100 deaths in Wales equals 10 deaths in West Virginia equals one death next door." When it comes to race relations, a similar rule applies. 400,000 civilians have been murdered in Darfur, but one death of a black man in Missouri, allegedly due to white police brutality, is infinitely more newsworthy. The national media are currently obsessed with Michael Brown's killing by a policeman in Ferguson, Missouri, just as they obsessed over Trayvon Martin's killing in Sanford, Florida.
There was something thoroughly distasteful about that Robin Williams press conference the other day. It sounded wrong. It looked bad. It smelled. Was it newsworthy, so much so that news networks would break into their regular afternoon programming to broadcast live the first official law enforcement press conference surrounding Williams' death? We think so. Williams was not just an iconic American comedian since he burst onto the scene with "Mork and Mindy" in the 1970s, he was perhaps the single funniest man in America. That he would die so suddenly understandably generated interest. When the word "suicide" appeared we became a nation of rubberneckers. We had to know what happened.
This year's Senate races are the Democrats' to lose in the sense that the GOP is doing nothing to earn them, hoping President Obama's political collapse will have reverse coattail effects. The "news" networks of ABC, CBS and NBC have largely avoided paying attention to the bad political outlook for Democrats in the 2014. It is amazing. What bigger political story is there this year? They even skip over their own polls revealing Obama's approval ratings have sunk to the point that they almost mirror George W. Bush's marks in 2006, when Democrats took over both houses of Congress.
At night, the children's channel called Cartoon Network transforms into the badly named Adult Swim channel, a parade of juvenile "satirical" sludge such as repeats of Seth MacFarlane's "Family Guy" and "American Dad" cartoons. How many parents know this? Or know these shows rarely miss an opportunity to sock it to "organized religion" -- especially if that religion is Christianity? Sadly, in the second quarter of 2014, the juvenilia on Adult Swim made it the No. 1 television network on basic cable for adults 18-24, 18-34 and 18-49, and also for males in those age brackets. Its mockery has made fans.
Earlier this year, former New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote a trash-talking article in New York Magazine begging conservatives to dig back into the Clinton scandals of the 1990s. Hillary Clinton is preparing to run for president again, and he thinks it will help. Rich delighted in "how inexorably the Clintons will seduce the GOP into another orgy of self-destruction" by focusing on Whitewater or Bill Clinton's sexual harassments, making Hillary look again like "a victim of drive-by character assassination."
Back in the 1950s, C.S. Lewis saw chastity as under attack with "all the contemporary propaganda for lust that makes people "feel that the desires we are resisting are so 'natural,' so 'healthy,' and so reasonable, that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them." You can now safely delete the word "almost." Today virginity isn't a virtue but a burden. Chastity is a freak show and anyone who chooses to keep it is a carnival barker. In today's entertainment world, weirdos -- especially sexual weirdos -- drive a juicy plot, so virgins are in vogue, as a target or merely as an anthropological curiosity.
During the George W. Bush years, network news airtime was loaded with criticism of Bush for every foreign policy development. His policies either caused the crisis or worsened an existing crisis, or, in the case of Iraq, both. Everything Team Bush did was either bumbling, dishonest, blatantly unconstitutional or horrendously costly in lives and treasure. "Bush lied; thousands died." That was the vile mantra of the ultra-left but never denounced as vile by the news media, perhaps because so many agreed with that sentiment. Bush had ruined America's image in the eyes of the world.
Anyone who thinks the cultural left is going to stop its political correctness with the Washington Redskins isn't reading USA Today. On the top of their Sports front page on July 22, the paper reported on activists taking a stand against "redface," championing a group called Eradicating Offensive Indian Mascotry. The thought police have turned on the sirens.
