Media

Obama Fails the “Quayle Test”, Pretty Much Daily

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Now, Obama is supposedly some kind of genius, as well as being a messiah-figure who transcends politics, and maybe can even fly and turn sand into rice, like Kim Il-sung used to do. He inspires heart-felt music videos, unlike John McCain. Also, he May Not Be Mocked, much like Louis XIV, Hirohito (in his prime) or Ramses II.

Yet, this super-being just said he will be dealing with foreign leaders, presumably as president, for the next eight to ten years.

Knowing that Presidents are limited to two, four-year terms, is mandatory, basic knowledge that should be, and usually is, second nature to every single reasonably educated American. Everybody knows this. Children know this.

This guy was some kind of Constitutional Law professor at the University of Chicago. He went to Harvard. Now say “ooooh!”

Yet, this kind of thing happens a lot with him, oddly enough.

This is my proposed Quayle Test. Ask yourself: How each time Obama says something stoopid, would the press would have crucified Dan Quayle for it?

Each day, each new gaffe from Obama, imagine Dear Old (supposedly) Dumbsh*t Dan saying it. Then compare what would have happened to him compared to the response Sen. Obama gets from his cheering gallery in the Press.

Obama, and the MSM, are failing this test almost daily.

If I had time to monitor it, I would put a Quayle-O-Meter on the blog.

But I trust we will all be keeping track informally of errors of “J. Danforth Obama”.

Not Getting It… On Expropriation

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In my life one lesson I learned is that there are three kinds of people:

1) those you trust

2) those you don’t trust

3) and those you can trust to f*ck you over

The WSJ, which is generally a fine publication, often is tripped up by the fact that their journalists are often myopic and even when they get the story right, they often miss the overall context. From the June 6 issue, here are two articles back to back, both good articles, but quite ironically placed.

The lower article is titled “Kremlin Seeks TNK-BP Detente”. British Petroleum (BP) is part of “a 50-50 venture with a group of Russian billionaires that is Russia’s No. 3 oil producer.” Per the article:

“People close to BP charge the Russians with trying to take effective control over the venture through pressure tactics, possibly ahead of a sale to a state-controlled company such as OAO Gazprom.”

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Number Gut Part II

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Way back in 2004 I wrote about how the lack of an intuitive sense of scale prevented many people from viewing the Lancet Iraqi Mortality survey with skepticism. The same lack of sense of scale shows up in other areas such as in this article (via Megan McArdle) about ending subsidies to the oil industry instead of levying a windfall-profits tax.

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O’Reilly, the Democrats and Wright

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Watching Bill O’Reilly interview partisans about Jeremiah Wright, it occurs to me that O’Reilly’s interests now overlap those of the Democrats, and that something slick has just happened. When the Democratic spin was that Wright had been misquoted (“God damn America”), and that anyway Obama had spent little time with him, O’Reilly was eager to expose Obama’s relationship with Wright. That relationship was a source of controversy and O’Reilly’s business runs on controversy.

But now the Democratic spin is that Obama has repudiated Wright, and that Wright is a self-aggrandizing buffoon (“God damn America”) whose antics are irrelevant in a fair assessment of the reasonable, even tempered Obama. And O’Reilly, either taking the bait or having a good sense of where the ratings are, is no longer on the trail of the dissembling Obama so much as he is focusing on the bloviating Wright.

Thus Wright takes on the role of a decoy flare that is launched by an aircraft to distract heat-seeking missiles — at least that is how Democrats wish to see the situation. Republicans prefer to think that Wright is stuck to Obama and will weigh him down come November. I think the Republicans are more likely to be correct but who knows. What I find fascinating is how unerringly O’Reilly is attracted to the flashiest part of any issue, and how by focusing on the flash and noise he tends to miss more-important points. He hounds the judge who furloughed the sex offender, while ignoring reasonable questions about statutory-rape and mandatory-sentencing laws. Similarly, O’Reilly pursues Wright at the expense of giving additional scrutiny to candidate Obama’s slippery non-repudiations of his detestable mentor.

O’Reilly isn’t bad as big-media types go, which is saying something, but there’s still a lot of spin in his “no-spin zone.” Unlike typical MSM spin, which is heavily political, O’Reilly’s bias leans more toward the sensational and moralistic. (Other journalists make things easier for him by underreporting some types of sensational stories for political reasons.) His journalistic style makes good business sense. However, viewers, particularly those who share his political views, should be cautious about accepting his conclusions, and should consider not only the heavy-handed points he scores but also the thoughtful questions he doesn’t ask.

“How many record execs does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

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Very funny:

First of all, before we change anything, is the light bulb really burned out? Maybe we just need to breathe some life into it; repackage it, maybe the light bulb could do a duet with somebody (Sheryl Crow? Tim McGraw?) in hopes of getting some crossover appeal, maybe it could be in a beer commercial, maybe we could get it out on the road with a brighter light bulb. The other thing to think about is that this summer, Honda is rolling out a 100 Million dollar campaign for a new car aimed at thirty-somethings who consider themselves adventurous/spontaneous but can’t really afford something like a luxury S.U.V. and it might be a perfect campaign to tie this light bulb into, at least it would be the perfect demographic, in terms of age.
 
Also, and this is just an idea: what if we found out what video games are being released in the third quarter and maybe pitched the idea of having our light bulb make an appearance in the video game at some certain level of completion; like, you get to a dark cave, let’s say, if it’s an adventure game, and if you have enough points you can get the light bulb – and it would be our light bulb, obviously – and then it’s easier to see in the cave…

Not only is this passage funny and, from what little I know, accurate about how record-industry people actually talk (which is why it’s funny), it’s also a great piece of viral marketing because it got me and a lot of other bloggers to link. But it’s entertaining, so I don’t mind linking.