The Press

Quote of the Day

by

The astounding (even to me, after all these years!) smugness and mean-spiritedness of so many in the media engendered not just interest in but sympathy for Palin. It allowed Palin to speak not just to conservatives but to the many Americans who are repulsed by the media’s prurient interest in and adolescent snickering about her family. It allowed the McCain-Palin ticket to become the populist standard-bearer against an Obama-Media ticket that has disdain for Middle America.

Bill Kristol. RTWT — a sneering but still accurate assessment.

I love that line: McCain/Palin v. Obama/Media. We know who Obama’s real “running mate” is! It’s his horde of little pals who are working away like Santa’s elves to bring to an America that is hungry for change the gift of hope we can believe in.

Feh. (Spits on ground.)

Your Move, Mr. Donkey

by

For the first time ever in this election cycle the GOP actually has momentum.

We were watching this election slowly trickle down our pantlegs, until last night.

But now McCain and Palin have gone off-script.

The planned ritual execution of the Old White Guys before the coronation of His Holiness Barack I is now officially not-going-as-scheduled.

McCain threw a barracuda into the swimming pool. Maybe it will work. Maybe it won’t.

But it has made life interesting, for now.

(And it has made Obama’s defensive eat-up-the-clock approach look ill-advised. It has also made his, or his wife’s, rejection of Hillary look like the weak decision it was. Real leaders have the stones to surround themselves with the strongest people in their own party. JKF took LBJ, Reagan took Bush I, Clinton took Gore. That is how the pols with balls do it.)

The MSM and the Donks are stunned.

But they won’t stay stunned.

Their initial volley of vicious slime attacks and jeering, arrogant condescension have failed. The Donks and their MSM allies, the ones who are assigned to do the dirty work, will now come back like cornered rats, like animals. It is going to get way, way worse.

Expect a massive and vicious counter-attack, possibly based on some purported “new revelations” of corruption, against Palin to begin today or tomorrow. No doubt Mr. Axelrod and his team, Obama’s brain, are working hard right now on the counter-attack.

They have to destroy her now.

Gov. Palin and her family are going to have an ugly two months.

UPDATE 1: “I’m really looking forward to the VP debates. And – for the first time – the election itself, although there’s a lot of water between here and there, and something tells me that the long knives are being sharpened.” Neptunus Lex (The Other Lex!) gets it.

UPDATE 2: I laughed out loud at the spirit of this, and its apparent accuracy:

There’s also more to the pit bull thing: Why do they bite so hard? Because that is what they love to do most in life. And it’s not funny, unless the person get chewed up richly deserves it. She even found a funny, extemporaneous (apparently) way to say explicitly that she was, in fact, a pit bull, though one with lipstick. Translation: I wear lipstick and I am your worst nightmare.
 
This lady was not fighting for her life. She was having the time of her life. She’s a stone fighter, not the kind of victim the bullies want. I begin to get the barracuda moniker. A natural born killer. I think I’m in love.

The Right Coast

UPDATE 3: Here’s the photo of Gov. Palin with the moose she bagged. I’d heard about it, but I had not seen it before. Looks like good eatin’.

The Democrats’ Denial-of-Service Attack

by

The TV news is all Palin, all the time. And daughter of Palin. Politically this isn’t necessarily bad for Republicans, to the extent it focuses scrutiny on Governor Palin, who I think stands up well to it. However, it is bad (or good, depending on your partisan inclination) in that it removes scrutiny from Obama, who does not. The risk of a media pile-on on Palin was one of the risks McCain took in selecting Palin. Only time will tell if it was a justified risk.

The distributed Obama campaign — including the Obama organization, leftist bloggers and MSM — quickly figured out the dynamics of the situation and are responding effectively. The campaign or bloggers introduce daily talking-points that are repeated and amplified by a media cascade and can generate enough network (online and TV) discussion to crowd out most other topics. That’s what happened today and yesterday. Today’s main talking point was, McCain didn’t adequately vet Palin. This is clearly not true, given that McCain’s people were checking out Palin months ago. Yet given the story about the daughter, the talking point is just plausible enough to give media people cover in keeping it alive for a day as a major story. Conservative and Republican bloggers and MSM people unwittingly help their opponents by focusing even more attention on Palin in order to defend her and correct the record. While all of this is going on, Obama is almost invisible, and he appears to have picked up a few points in the polls. (Notice that the bounce didn’t begin until waves of Palin stories rescued him from the media spotlight.) The concurrent weather story, which isn’t really a story but is being hyped for all it’s worth by the pro-Obama media, further distracts scrutiny from Obama.

Conservative MSM people haven’t quite caught on to the full extent of what is happening. Their supposedly non-partisan colleagues are gleefully helping Obama by repeating endlessly “questions” about Palin that displace both McCain’s message and serious scrutiny of Obama. Who wants to talk about Obama’s relationship with Ayers, or about offshore drilling or tax cuts, when there’s juicy gossip (or merely reckless speculation) to be spread about Palin’s family. On Brit Hume’s show tonight, the conservative commentators were almost sputtering with rage at the Democrats’ dishonest attacks on Palin. Yet these same conservative commentators spent most of their time attempting to rebut the attacks, which means they didn’t talk much about anything else. Larry Kudlow devoted much of his show to defending Palin. Conservative media people watch impotently as their leftist colleagues do Obama’s work. The big-media conservatives aren’t temperamentally or tactically equipped to respond effectively. Perhaps the pro-McCain bloggers will do better.

Obviously Obama would like to keep Palin at the center of media focus. Obviously McCain would like to keep his own policies, and Obama’s failings, at the center of focus. McCain’s electoral prospects depend on how quickly he and Palin can maneuver to shift the focus back to Obama. McCain may yet come out OK if public disgust with scummy media partisanship generates a backlash, or if voters lose interest in the MSM’s dishonest Palin-as-soap-opera meme. Whatever happens, it’s clear that Governor Palin and her family are in for a nasty ride. The leftist political-media complex will go all-out to destroy her as long as attacking her deflects attention from the radical leftist at the head of the Democratic ticket.

UPDATE: Other views, from Rich Karlgaard, Jay Cost and Tom Smith (Smith’s post links to several additional good posts).

“Let the media do the dirty work.”

by

Mark Brown, a liberal columnist in the Sun Times, had this to say about Gov. Palin.

Leave her alone. Let it go. Don’t even think about going there. It’s a setup. It’s a trap.
 
I wanted to shout that advice to the Barack Obama campaign Friday, but somebody on the television was telling me it was already too late: Obama’s people had reacted initially to the news of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s candidacy for vice president by belittling her credentials.
 
For Pete’s sake, there’s no reason to do that. Let it happen on its own. Let the media do the dirty work.

Once in a while the mask slips and people blurt out the truth. Here we see Mr. Brown admitting what every rational person knows already. The news media is Obama’s ally, it is partisan, it is in effect an arm of the Democratic Party, engaged in this election on behalf of Sen. Obama. This goes far beyond “liberal bias”, which is also obvious to anyone paying attention. The mainstream media are Obama’s protectors and cheering section. The press area at the Denver convention was full of people with press passes, cheering and chanting along. They are on the team.

The news media is not interested in reporting news about Gov. Palin, or being fair or objective. It is interested in “…belittling her credentials”, it is interested in doing “the dirty work” on behalf of Sen. Obama, to help him win. Brown, who ought to know, since he works at the Sun Times, is telling us that his industry will run interference all the way for Sen. Obama, until he is in the White House, allowing him and his campaign to take the high road.

Thank God these people no longer have a monopoly on news.

Thank God they are part of a dying industry which will not be missed.

BTW, lets all start referring to Sarah Palin as governor. She is the only executive out of the four people at the top of the two tickets. Gov. Palin deserves to be referred to by her office.

UPDATE: Jim Bennett sent this great photo of Gov. Palin with a caribou which is headed for the stew pot. Here’s hoping Sen. Biden is in similar shape, metaphorically of course, after their debate.

UPDATE 2: Lisa Schiffren has an excellent piece about Gov. Palin, and why she has excited the GOP base. It had a nice, big impact on McCain fundraising, which is an objective demonstration of new support. The news media has been mostly wrong about the rationale for this pick. It is much more about mobilizing the party base, and getting the many, many unhappy, reluctant GOP voters excited and willing to work, contribute and vote. The idea that lots of Hillary voters would come over is not plausible. Democrats are good soldiers and will vote for their party on election day. It is much more about taking away the “look-at-the-two-boring-white-guys” theme than about, “I-am-woman-hear-me-roar.” Gov. Palin’s femaleness, in other words, checks one of Sen. Obama’s offensive plays, while her substantive positions mobilize the base.

Propaganda from Georgia and Russia

by

According to Der Spiegel, both Russia and Georgia have made extensive use of misinformation since the conflict began:

How truth lost the war (‘Wie die Wahrheit den Krieg verlor’)

The two most important points:

Russia claimed that the Georgians had killed 1,500 people in the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali and turned 98 percent of the city into ruins during their initial assault. Yet, the field hospital near Alagir [in North Ossetie, Russia], where almost all wounded Russians and South Ossetians were brought to, accepted only about a dozen of them that night.

…

Georgia had claimed that Russian tanks were advancing towards the Georgian capital Tbilisi. But on Tuesday evening, there were still no tanks to be seen around the city, when the Russian President announced an end to the fighting

(I had to correct my initial translation in one point due to a misunderstanding, please see the update below).

Der Spiegel also refers to an article in the Moscow Times:

Russian television is flush with footage of misery left by the Georgian assault in the separatist district of South Ossetia, but few, if any, reports mention Russia’s bombing of Georgia.

William Dunbar, a correspondent in Georgia for English-language state channel Russia Today, mentioned the bombing in a report Saturday, and he has not gone on air for the station since.

“I had a series of live, video satellite links scheduled for later that day, and they were canceled by Russia Today,” he said by telephone from Tbilisi on Sunday. “The real news, the real facts of the matter, didn’t conform to what they were trying to report, and therefore, they wouldn’t let me report it.

“I felt that I had no choice but to resign,” he added.

Update: In my original translation, I had written about a field hospital near Tskhinvali, for the wording in the article had led me to believe that Alagir is located near the city. But in fact, Alagir is located in North Ossetia, Russia. This article from Reuters also would suggest that casualties are far lower than reported.