Columnist.
Everyone can imagine the horror of a madman shooting up an elementary school, especially the horror of losing your six-year-old in the melee. But at some point, the news media's wallowing in Newtown reminds one of Don Henley's satirical song "Dirty Laundry," and how the anchors' eyes gleam through plane-crash news because "it's interesting when people die; we love dirty laundry." The "O" word that defines the media at times like these isn't "objective." It's "opportunistic." To be sure, the "news" manufacturers aren't hoping for a school shooting. But that doesn't mean they aren't ready to exploit it. Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen was explicit back in 1999: ""Perhaps it will take one more school shooting to move the majority of Americans into a position more powerful than that of the NRA. Perhaps it will take one more school shooting to move us from people who support gun control to people who vote it."
If I were launching a new conservative venture, the last venue I'd choose for the announcement would be the New York Times. Karl Rove has gone to the Times to announce that he has created a new "conservative" entity "to recruit seasoned candidates and protect Senate incumbents from challenges by far-right conservatives and Tea Party enthusiasts." Rove argues that Republican fortunes have been ruined by "far-right conservatives," but he's shamelessly calling this entity the "Conservative Victory Project." Yes, and I could call myself Ray Lewis, but it doesn't make it so. Whaddaya know? The liberal Democrats at the Times love this idea. They call it "the most robust attempt yet by Republicans to impose a new sense of discipline on the party." They would love a group to "discipline" conservatives right out of the GOP nominating process. What the heck? They could call themselves "conservative," too.
Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival featured a documentary celebrating four "amazing" abortionists who evacuate wombs in the third trimester of pregnancy. The critics in attendance loved it. The Philadelphia Inquirer boasted it drew "two standing ovations -- one for the doctors." Sundance attendees in Utah were greeted by police and armed sheriffs in green jumpsuits that made a show of force outside the theater. They had to have their bags searched and were inspected with handheld metal detectors. After the movie was shown, two police officers stood at the front of the auditorium as the directors and the four abortionists featured in the film answered audience questions. The message was clear: pro-lifers are dangerous.
Did you see that hard-hitting report on "60 Minutes" Sunday, the one that charged that one of our nation's most famous leaders and role models is a shameless liar, a ruthless intimidator and even "incinerator" of enemies, a man who operates like the Mafia? No, that wasn't the interview with Barack Obama alongside Hillary Clinton. It was an interview later in the same show about the drug-enhanced bicyclist Lance Armstrong. That's CBS News for you -- a guy who pedals a bike through France is hammered as if he is the most powerful man in the world, while the most powerful man is treated like a lovable celebrity -- because that is precisely how they feel. The agenda of "60 Minutes" should remind viewers that CBS CEO Les Moonves attended a glitzy Obama/DNC fundraiser in Beverly Hills last June, where he admitted the obvious: "Ultimately, journalism has changed ... partisanship is very much a part of journalism now."
The NBC series "Parenthood"' has drawn raves from TV critics this season for a storyline about a 40-something mother fighting cancer. Then on Jan. 1, NBC asked viewers to tune in the following Tuesday for an "unforgettable" new episode. A teenager would get an abortion at Planned Parenthood. Such is NBC's definition of "parenthood." Drew, one of show's leading teenager characters, has an ex-girlfriend named Amy who comes back to tell him "I'm pregnant." The high school seniors go to the Planned Parenthood clinic, and the scene plays like a political commercial. The counselor says, "If you decide to continue the pregnancy, we'd be happy to refer you for prenatal care. Of course, there are resources for teen moms who decide to raise a child. Adoption is also an option for you to consider. Now, if you decide to end the pregnancy, you have two options." But then NBC swells the sensitive guitar-strumming music up. They don't really want viewers to hear the abortion pitch. Oh, the irony.
Newsweek stopped its print edition at the end of 2012, but they still tried to scandalize the country by producing a fake cover honoring Obama's second inauguration as "The Second Coming." This absurd attempt at myth making is a natural progression. The "cover" story was written by Evan Thomas, who proclaimed on MSNBC a few years ago that Obama was "sort of like God" in being above the gritty political fray. It was just as absurd when Newsweek writer David Frum, the formerly conservative Bush speechwriter, tweeted this piece of media-elite nonsense: "First term Obama: punchee, 2nd term Obama, puncher." No one calling himself a "political observer" can say Obama was some sort of mute victim, consistently under fire, on defense over the last four years. Quote Obama from anywhere, and he's fiercely bashing the GOP. In April 2011, he said the House GOP budget plan would force "poor children," "children with autism" and "kids with disabilities" to "fend for themselves." In another 2011 speech, he described the Republican plan as "let's have dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with health insurance."
President Obama and Vice President Biden gathered their children for a photo-op as Obama showily signed executive orders to prevent future mass shootings. It quickly became obvious that regulating the entertainment media wasn't part of his solution. Politics once more trumped policy. Hollywood not only went unregulated, it went unmentioned. Biden announced that he had met with "229 groups from law enforcement agencies to public health officials to gun officials to gun advocacy groups to sportsmen and hunters and religious leaders."
The Republican Party is desperately in need of some good advice. It needs to return to Ronald Reagan conservatism and give America a two-party system, not a tinny echo of Obama. But our liberal media keep desperately inviting fake Republicans to offer advice to the GOP. They want to create a new Republican Party, one that rejects the principles of the man who championed freedom. Exhibit A: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The Jan. 14 Washington Post insisted on the front page: "Bloomberg wants change in the GOP." Post reporter Jason Horowitz noted, "America's most prominent and deep pocketed advocate for gun control would rather rehabilitate Republicans than oust them." What? Republicans are criminals in need of rehabilitation? The analogies get worse. Supporting the Bill of Rights is like supporting ... segregation and slavery. Democrats don't like Bloomberg trying to reform Republicans instead of defeat them, reported Horowitz. But "Bloomberg counters that just as Democrats were once the party of slavery and segregation, the pro-gun GOP is now ripe for moderation."
Television is getting a little unreal. First, the idea that Al Gore would sell out to Al-Jazeera sounded like an April Fools' joke. Then the Oxygen network -- that supposedly uplifting women's channel founded in 2000 by Oprah Winfrey -- announced it was producing a reality show called "All My Baby's Mamas" starring an Atlanta rapper and former drug dealer named "Shawty Lo," alongside his 11 children and their 10 different mothers. This story didn't originate on a satire site like The Onion. Oxygen promoted this videotaped puddle of stupidity with a YouTube highlight reel featuring the rapper (real name: Carlos Walker) unsuccessfully attempting to name his 11 kids as quiz-show music plays. Rush Limbaugh suggested this sounded like New York Jets football star Antonio Cromartie, who had trouble naming his nine kids by seven women on HBO's "Hard Knocks" documentary series in 2010.
The liberal media have spent 12 years feeling sorry for Al Gore. The Man Who Should Have Won in 2000 has had megatons of positive publicity dumped on him, hailing him as the "Goracle." They cheered as leftists honored him with the Nobel Peace Prize and gave an Oscar to his filmed eco-sermon, "An Inconvenient Truth." So when Gore sold his left-wing cable channel Current TV to Al-Jazeera for $500 million, where were they? Despite the fact that conservatives thought the deal sounded like a ridiculous April Fools' joke, the networks had nearly nothing to say. ABC skipped it entirely. CBS and NBC offered a perfunctory sentence on a couple of newscasts.
In August, Rupert Murdoch's FX picked up a Cold War series set in the 1980s titled "The Americans." Liberals might have braced themselves for the worst. It sounded like some kind of Chuck Norris-style "jingoistic" homage to freedom-loving intelligence agents. But this is Hollywood, so the show instead focuses on KGB spies who speak perfect English, working to destroy Reagan-era America, which is not altogether a bad thing to people in Hollywood. Joe Weisberg, who worked for more than three years at the CIA, first wrote a script about two CIA case officers stationed in Bulgaria. Fox bought that script, too, but that project was deep-sixed. Boring. But exploring the daily joys and sorrows of undercover Soviet agents, that just thrills the Hollywood Left. Some things never change.
The D.C. police investigation of NBC hotshot David Gregory for waving around an empty ammo magazine on "Meet the Press" easily proves two things. First, D.C.'s "ammunition control" laws are ridiculous. But more importantly, once again, we find the arrogance of the national press knows no boundaries. Let us stipulate that this kind of law is just plain stupid. Empty ammo magazines are less threatening than mosquitoes. The point is, however, that liberals like David Gregory (set ital) do (end ital) subscribe to this kind of idiotic law -- for everyone else. Was Gregory so ignorant that he didn't know he was breaking a D.C. law? Nope. We learned NBC contacted the D.C. police and asked for permission to wave the props, and the cops said no. Then Gregory did it anyway. So not only did he believe he was above the law, he broke it so he could produce maximum buzz for his Sunday show.
The year 2012 was a depressing time for people who are already pessimistic about the state of our common culture. Conversely, the re-election of Barack Obama, in large measure made possible by the heavy financial support of Hollywood, projects the optimism of the cultural Left. They anticipate increased blue-state voting patterns in favor of gay "marriage," legalized pot, gun regulations, and what next? Legalized prostitution? Euthanasia subsidized by Obamacare? So let's just line up the cultural winners of Obama's America, where the only impediments to progress are those who believe in religion, manners and "family values." Winner: Seth MacFarlane, the creator of the sick "Family Guy" cartoon and other Fox animated smutcoms on Sunday nights. He'll mock anything to shock the viewer, from portraying Jesus as a lying drunk, to joking Ronald Reagan was gay, even to making fun of domestic violence. Tinseltown loves this man. He guest-hosted "Saturday Night Live" in their season debut, was named host of the 2013 Academy Awards telecast and ABC's Barbara Walters named him one of the year's 10 "Most Fascinating People."
A "serious" proposal is one that has a reasonable expectation of resolving a conflict. Anyone studying Speaker Boehner's Plan B proposal knows it wasn't serious. Why are so many defending it and bemoaning its defeat? It tells you an awful lot about the dishonest nature of politics in America today. Republicans -- fiscally conservative Republicans -- have argued since forever that tax increases diminish economic growth. For the past two years, they have argued that increasing taxes on the "wealthy" would wreak havoc on our fragile (at best) economy. In fact, three studies have confirmed that this "millionaires tax," now endorsed by Plan B Boehner, would cost America 700,000 jobs, an unmitigated disaster.
It's too hard to try and make sense of a senseless event. Adam Lanza's merciless slaughter in Connecticut has forced everyone with a microphone to insist we have a "national conversation" about why this happens. But this urgent need to talk is not an excuse for a reckless discussion. Sadly, that is where we're headed, with pundits hysterical, naive or both. Predictably most in the media went straight to the Left's Alpha and Omega: blaming excessive "access" to guns. It was also an excuse to open fire on the National Rifle Association. For example, author Joyce Carol Oates spewed on Twitter, "If sizable numbers of NRA members become gun-victims themselves, maybe hope for legislation of firearms?" Actress Marg Helgenberger, semi-famous for playing a cop on "CSI," concurred, "One can only hope, but sadly I don't think anything would change."
The year 2012 was defined by the calculated re-emergence of Obama worship, no matter how obvious his failures in office. After his re-election, the actor Jamie Foxx let it all hang out in a tribute at the BET Awards on November 25: "First of all, give an honor to God and our lord and savior, Barack Obama!" For that President Jesus gasbaggery, Foxx was selected as one of the winners of the Media Research Center's Best Notable Quotables of 2012, a collection of liberal foolishness selected by 46 judges of distinction in the conservative media. Foxx won the "Barbra Streisand Political IQ Award for Celebrity Vapidity."
When TNT was preparing its annual special "Christmas in Washington" with the president of the United States, you'd think the last star musician they would consider to join the official caroling would be Psy, the South Korean rapper. What on Earth is Christmasy about this man's invisible-horse-riding dance to his dorky disco-rap hit "Gangnam Style"? It's not exactly the natural flip-side to "O Holy Night." But TNT couldn't resist this year's YouTube sensation. This inane publicity stunt backfired when the website Mediaite reported on Dec. 7 that Psy (real name: Park Jae-sang) had participated in a 2002 protest in which he crushed a model of an American tank with a microphone stand. But that's nothing compared to the footage of a 2004 performance after a Korean missionary was slaughtered by Islamists in Iraq. These lyrics cannot be misunderstood.
How could a liberal actually be upset with the liberal media for their coverage of the 2012 presidential election? Well, Daniel Froomkin of The Huffington Post (formerly of the Washington Post) is furious. His complaint carried the headline "How the Mainstream Press Bungled the Single Biggest Story of the 2012 Campaign". What would that story be? Namely, the radical right-wing, off-the-rails lurch of the Republican Party, both in terms of its agenda and its relationship to the truth. Head Scratch Time. Who in the media (set ital) didn't (end ital) identify the Grand Old Party as burdened, infected and/or poisoned by their conservatives?
The cabal that chooses the 15 nominees for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature has issued its 2013 selections. Why was the top-grossing documentary of 2012 -- and the fourth most-successful documentary of all time - not on that expansive list? Because it was "2016," the film in which conservative author Dinesh D'Souza warns of a dark future for America if Barack Obama is re-elected. The film's producer, Gerald Molen, who already won an Oscar for "Schindler's List," was scandalized. "The action confirms my opinion that the bias against anything from a conservative point of view is dead on arrival in Hollywood."
We know the news flash: On Saturday morning, Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher shot and killed his girlfriend, then drove to Arrowhead Stadium and shot himself in the head in the parking lot in front of his coaches. To liberals like NBC sportscaster Bob Costas, this was not just a crisis. It was also an opportunity. During the halftime of the Dec. 2 Sunday night game between Dallas and Philadelphia, Costas unfurled a wholly unexpected and condescending lecture about how gun owners who harm America with their "gun culture" never learn.
