Media

Time to Play “Guess The Party”!!!

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The mayor of a small town in California, a guy named Dean Grose, decided to share an Email with some of his coworkers. The Email was certainly in poor taste, was racist, and the ensuing ruckus has prompted the mayor to announce that he is resigning.

What I can’t figure out is which party the mayor belongs to. There is no mention of his political affiliations anywhere.

Recent history has taught us that this is usually a sign that the troubled politician is a Democrat. It seems that the news media will try to avoid mentioning that a politician in trouble belongs to that particular party, while repeatedly pounding home the affiliation of any Republican that is going through a rough patch. It appears to be an attempt to deliberately associate all Republicans with bad behavior, while at the same time distancing the journalist’s favorite party from any link with corruption or poor judgment.

Don’t believe me? Ace of Spades has been documenting this particular form of bias for some time now. It is amazing how often it crops up.

But I’m not sure that such shenanigans is the case in this case, mainly because I can’t find any mention of Mayor Grose’s political party anywhere. It could be that no one really knows, so the media decided to keep quiet until they found out.

Dear Bill O’Reilly:

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If the stock market tanks in response to widespread concerns about incompetent national business and political leadership, this actually means that “the gangsters on Wall Street” are accountable.

Thanks for your attention.

Has It Ever Been This Bad?

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Another Obama  nominee  has tax problems. Instapundit asks,”Don’t  any  of these people pay their taxes?”

Did we go through anything like this back when Bush first came into office. I don’t think that we did. What has changed?

I’m dubious that it’s a “Democrats corrupt”/”Republicans Angels” dynamic but could we be looking at the results of a media culture that does not scrutinize Democrats as closely as Republicans? Just about everyone in politics is an arrogant, egocentric,  narcissist  who believes on some level that the rules do not apply to him. Only the threat of exposure keeps them even moderately honest. Does knowing they face a hostile press make Republicans mind their Ps & Qs while knowing they face a  sycophantic press make the Democrats arrogant and careless?    

If so, it is just another example of how the failure of the media as an institution hurts all of America in the long run.  

That was Then, This is Now

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Michael Hirsh on the Stimulus/Debt/Pork package    [h/t Instapundit]:

When you are dealing with a stimulus of this size, there are going to be wasteful expenditures and boondoggles. There’s no way anyone can spend $800 to $900 billion quickly without waste and boondoggles. It comes with the Keynesian territory. This is an emergency; the normal rules do not apply.

From the Newsweek cover story, “Bush’s $87 Billion Mess“,  November 3, 2003:

For Bush, the political challenges are growing just as rapidly. Having made one of the most fateful decisions in the modern presidency — to try to remake the Middle East, starting with Iraq — he has no choice but to press ahead with his request for the $87 billion, even if it is unpopular, reports Chief Political Correspondent Howard Fineman.  
 
Six months ago, the Bush administration decided to cut corners on normal bidding procedures and hand over large postwar reconstruction contracts to traditional defense contractors on a limited-bid or no-bid basis.   It bypassed the Iraqis and didn’t worry terribly much about accountability to Congress. The plan was for a “blitzkrieg” reconstruction. But by sacrificing accountability for speed, America is not achieving either very well right now report Correspondent-at-Large Rod Nordland and Senior Editor Michael Hirsh.

So we need strict oversight and a plodding pace in a war zone where people are dying every hour, but we need to throw accountability and  thoughtfulness  overboard when dealing with a program that represents just an acceleration of run-of-the-mill government spending?  

Wars are just one wasteful, stupid, clusterf*ck after another and not even the strongest  proponent  of any particular war will tell you any different. Do we want to make this the standard for our day-to-day government spending?

Youth Wingers?

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From a Telegraph story [h/t Instapundit]:

The biggest display of public disaffection with Mr Putin prompted a violent response in Moscow. Pro Kremlin youth wingers brutally beat some protestors, while others were detained, including Eduard Limonov, a prominent Kremlin critic and leader of the outlawed National Bolshevik Party.[emp added]

What the hell are “youth wingers”? How does that even make sense? You have right and left wingers because they represents opposite sides of a spectrum. Does “youth wingers” imply a division between young and old?

More likely they just couldn’t figure out whether to call the bullies “left” or “right”.