Bloodthirsty Liberal

Excellent!

- Aggie

Did the MSM maliciously report a break-in and attempt to wiretap Senator Landrieu’s office?

Do you recall the guy who dressed like a pimp and, with a young woman who was dressed like a whore, waltzed into the offices of ACORN across our fair land? They asked and they received. Wanna know how to bring in underage prostitutes from South America? Ask ACORN! How about tax evasion? We’re here to help.

It was with a little sadness that I read that the young man who pulled off the brilliant piece of investigative journalism had apparently crossed the line into illegal activity. I wanted him to keep on entertaining us by unmasking the evil deeds of the nutty left. It was not to be, I thought.

Once again, we seem to have underestimated the ability of the media to misrepresent the facts.

The government has now confirmed what has always been clear: No one tried to wiretap or bug Senator Landrieu’s office. Nor did we try to cut or shut down her phone lines. Reports to this effect over the past 48 hours are inaccurate and false.

As an investigative journalist, my goal is to expose corruption and lack of concern for citizens by government and other institutions, as I did last year when our investigations revealed the massive corruption and fraud perpetrated by ACORN. For decades, investigative journalists have used a variety of tactics to try to dig out and reveal the truth.

I learned from a number of sources that many of Senator Landrieu’s constituents were having trouble getting through to her office to tell her that they didn’t want her taking millions of federal dollars in exchange for her vote on the healthcare bill. When asked about this, Senator Landrieu’s explanation was that, “Our lines have been jammed for weeks.” I decided to investigate why a representative of the people would be out of touch with her constituents for “weeks” because her phones were broken. In investigating this matter, we decided to visit Senator Landrieu’s district office – the people’s office – to ask the staff if their phones were working.

On reflection, I could have used a different approach to this investigation, particularly given the sensitivities that people understandably have about security in a federal building. The sole intent of our investigation was to determine whether or not Senator Landrieu was purposely trying to avoid constituents who were calling to register their views to her as their Senator. We video taped the entire visit, the government has those tapes, and I’m eager for them to be released because they refute the false claims being repeated by much of the mainstream media.

It has been amazing to witness the journalistic malpractice committed by many of the organizations covering this story. MSNBC falsely claimed that I violated a non-existent “gag order.” The Associated Press incorrectly reported that I “broke in” to an office which is open to the public. The Washington Post has now had to print corrections in two stories on me. And these are just a few examples of inaccurate and false reporting. The public will judge whether reporters who can’t get their facts straight have the credibility to question my integrity as a journalist.

Jeez. This is truly unexpected. Not.

- Aggie

Look quickly, before it disappears

I don’t know anything about this stuff, but the page on my computer shows the usual text, but it is all crossed out, like this.

- Aggie

This is how they do it in Minnesota!

Garrison Keillor, self-appointed cultural representative of regular old Americans, ruffled some feathers yesterday with a mildly xenophobic rant about Christmas. After lambasting a Unitarian church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for “spiritual piracy and cultural elitism”—tweaking the lyrics of “Silent Night” for a singalong, in layman’s terms—he turned his ire in a different direction:

And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write ‘Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah’? No, we didn’t. Christmas is a Christian holiday—if you’re not in the club, then buzz off.

The Baltimore Sun got some angry letters about this, and understandably so. Hating on Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” is, in a way, the same thing as the American Family Association’s boycott of the Gap for its “failure” to use the word Christmas in ads: both actions reject a dilution of Christmas by outsiders, just in slightly different ways. It certainly does not accord with the generous holiday spirit. And anyway: “Dreck?” Really? Who’s co-opting whom?

News flash: Garrison Keillor is no longer a self-appointed cultural representative of “regular old Americans” - if he ever was. He is a hard Leftist. He is a hard Leftist who employs an arrogant type of “irony” to poke fun at regular Americans. He lives in a state with a largely Lutheran population (see Martin Luther: The Jews and Their Lies). The kind of casual anti-Semitism that he displays is no problem among his buddies up there close to where Santa makes Christmas presents for good little girls and boys.

I’m dreaming of a Christmas season where no English speaking person expresses hostility toward the Jews. One where Garrison Keillor, Michael Moore and that whole crowd stuff so much lutefisk and herring down their gullets that they cannot talk.

- Aggie

The media is alarmed!

London, England (CNN) — A secret document that appears to show that Iran was working on building nuclear weapons as recently as 2007 is “alarming” and “part of a body of evidence backing up deep concerns over Iran’s nuclear program,” a Western diplomatic source with knowledge of the papers told CNN on Monday.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear watchdog, has a copy of the secret papers, which were also obtained by the Times of London, the source said.

IAEA officials confirm they are investigating the document, but said they have not formally asked Iran for more information about it.

Never ask a question if you can’t stand the answer.

President Nuance and Ambiguity is all over this one, so relax. And don’t forget our Intelligence Community:

United States intelligence concluded in 2007 that Iran had suspended work on its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

In the National Intelligence Estimate released in December 2007, the U.S. intelligence community dramatically reversed course from its 2005 evaluation. It expressed “high confidence” in 2005 that the Islamic Republic was working toward nuclear weapons, then two years later said — also with “high confidence” — that Iran had stopped its weapons program in 2003.

That’s encouraging.

The revelation “means, essentially … that the Iranians have been lying to everybody” when they said they were not seeking to build nuclear weapons, said Mehrdad Khonsari, a former Iranian diplomat.

Let’s hope that Mr. Khonsari has found a new place to live.

- Aggie

simpering, whining, clueless

The NY Times is so distanced from reality that is appears to believe that 1. The NY Times offers objective news and 2. The Wall Street Journal just isn’t objective enough anymore. They don’t like Obama! What’s up with that?!?

…But there are growing indications that Mr. Murdoch, a lifelong conservative, doesn’t just want to cover politics, he wants to play them as well.

A little over a year ago, Robert Thomson, The Journal’s top editor, picked Gerard Baker, a columnist for The Times of London, as his deputy managing editor. Mr. Baker is a former Washington bureau chief of The Financial Times with a great deal of expertise in the Beltway. The two men came of age in the more partisan milieu of British journalism.

According to several former members of the Washington bureau and two current ones, the two men have had a big impact on the paper’s Washington coverage, adopting a more conservative tone, and editing and headlining articles to reflect a chronic skepticism of the current administration. And given that the paper’s circulation continues to grow, albeit helped along by some discounts, there’s nothing to suggest that The Journal’s readers don’t approve.

Mr. Baker, a neoconservative columnist of acute political views, has been especially active in managing coverage in Washington, creating significant grumbling, if not resistance, from the staff there. Reporters say the coverage of the Obama administration is reflexively critical, the health care debate is generally framed in terms of costs rather than benefits — “health care reform” is a generally forbidden phrase — and global warming skeptics have gotten a steady ride. (Of course, objectivity is in the eyes of the reader.)

I put that last sentence in bold because it is the only sentence in the article that approaches some sort of reality, albeit a skewed reality. The rest, if I may borrow a word from someone who shall remain unnamed, is CODSWALLOP.

I don’t want to overtax the fevered brains at the NY Times, but they might just take a itsy bitsy teeny weeny peek into their own coverage of oh… say… George W Bush. Or Obama. Have they turned in their cheerleader suits yet? The high school wants them back. Or Israel. Perhaps they could explain why terrorism happens in the United States or western Europe, but activism happens in Israel?

Do they remember their very own ombudsman, Daniel Okrent, who wrote that the NY Times is a liberal publication? this is not a problem at all

I’ll get to the politics-and-policy issues this fall (I want to watch the campaign coverage before I conclude anything), but for now my concern is the flammable stuff that ignites the right. These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you’ve been reading the paper with your eyes closed.

Others would include Israel, folks.

What’s wrong with being a liberal newspaper? Only conservatives spread cooties, liberals are cool. But how can we ever trust a paper, such as the NY Times, that missed the fact that Jews perished in the concentration camps, didn’t get around to mentioning this little tidbit to their loyal readers until 1950? How ’bout that Pulitzer to Walter Duranty? Where exactly do they get off?

- Aggie

He’s Even Smarter Than The Old Obama!

He is suddenly concerned about small business, winning wars, history…. I wonder if George W. Bush has graciously agreed to write his speeches?

…
The economic speech took place Tuesday at the Brookings Institute, the generally left-leaning think tank in Washington. The president put unusual emphasis on—and showed unusual sympathy for—Americans in business, specifically small businesses. “Over the past 15 years, small businesses have created roughly 65% of all new jobs in America,” he said. “These are companies formed around kitchen tables in family meetings, formed when an entrepreneur takes a chance on a dream, formed when a worker decides it’s time she became her own boss.” This is how Republicans, moderates and centrists think, and talk.

The president claimed success in reducing taxes—”This fall, I signed into law more than $30 billion in tax cuts for struggling businesses”—and announced a new cut: “We’re proposing a complete elimination of capital gains taxes on small business investment along with an extension of write-offs to encourage small businesses to expand in the coming year.” He called it “worthwhile” to create a new “tax incentive to encourage small businesses to add and keep employees.”

All this was striking, and seemed an implicit concession that tax levels affect economic activity. It was as if he were waving his arms and saying, “Hey taxpayer, I’m not your enemy!” The only reason a president would find it necessary to deliver such a message is if he just found out taxpayers do think he’s the enemy. The emphasis on what it takes to start and build a business, seemed if nothing else, a bowing to reality. And if you’re going to bow to something, it might as well be reality.

Phew! Who mentioned to Obama that small businesses employ people? How’d he get the news? He doesn’t have business representatives in his inner circle. As of last spring, he was threatening business leaders (big business) with pitchforks. Now he’s humming a different tune. mm. mm. mm.

On to the war:

Thursday, at his Nobel laureate speech in Oslo, the president used an audience of European leftists to place himself smack-dab in the American center. He said, essentially: War is bad but sometimes justified, America is good, and I am an American. He spoke of Afghanistan as “a conflict that America did not seek; one in which we are joined by 43 other countries—including Norway—in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.” Adroit, that “including Norway.” He said he had “an acute sense of the cost of armed conflict” and suggested America’s efforts in Afghanistan fit the criterion of the concept of a “just war.” It continues to be of great value that a modern, left-leaning American president speaks in this way to the world. “The world” didn’t seem to enjoy it, and burst into applause a resounding once.

Hey, I thought we hired him to make friends with “the world”? How’d all the bowing and scraping work out? Do they love us in Ghent?

Our First Dude also discovered Evil sometime between last spring and today. He mentioned it in Oslo, naming Hitler as an example. I can imagine the folks at moveon rolling their eyes, muttering bitterly about “playing the Hitler card again”. But the MSM applauded it. Am I the only one left in America who can recall the nauseating reaction to President Bush when he insisted that there is evil in the world? That was the birth of the future Kerry campaign strategy: NUANCE. There is no evil, only Americans who lack nuance and cannot find the good in everyone.

My guess is that Ft. Hood and the rash of arrests of young Americans allegedly planning terror attacks is unnerving this White House. That and the polling, which once again proves that sh.. runs down hill. Or, as Lincoln said: You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

- Aggie

Just another MSM scam.

- Aggie

Before we get to Tina Brown’s analysis of why Obama just blathers and no one understands him, can I offer mine? I don’t think he’s the Great Orator that we’ve been told to worship. I think he’s a guy with a good speechwriter and a teleprompter. Given those two items, most of us could become Great Orators. It is the adult version of a Secret Decoder Ring.

Ms. Brown has a slightly different take:

It’s a strange paradox for a great wordsmith, but whenever Obama makes an important policy speech these days he leaves everyone totally confused. His first health-care press conference back in July triggered a season of raucous political Rorschach and left his hopeful followers utterly baffled about what they were being asked to support.

Now White House envoys are being dispatched all over the globe to explain what the president really meant about the date when troops will or won’t be pulled out of Afghanistan. . . .

Does Obama create confusion on purpose? Is this his “process” based on his confession that he’s a screen onto which people project things? Is it a strategy so that whatever bill trickles out of Congress or however many soldiers linger in Afghanistan, he can claim that the outcome is what he meant it all along? . . .

Or is it that there is so much subtext to every part of this message that the simple heads of the electorate are just not pointy enough to comprehend it?

I have come to the conclusion that the real reason this gifted communicator has become so bad at communicating is that he doesn’t really believe a word that he is saying. He couldn’t convey that health-care reform would be somehow cost-free because he knows it won’t be. And he can’t adequately convey either the imperatives or the military strategy of the war in Afghanistan because he doesn’t really believe in it either.

I suppose it is encouraging that the elite is beginning to notice that The Great Wordsmith is full of baloney. I wish they’d gotten there about 13 months ago.

- Aggie

Egypt is building an iron wall

And every Friday we can expect protesters, right? Rock throwing, hip American and European college students, that kind of thing.

No?

Egypt has begun the construction of a massive iron wall along its border with the Gaza Strip, in a bid to shut down smuggling tunnels into the territory. The wall will be nine to 10 kilometers long, and will go 20 to 30 meters into the ground, Egyptian sources said. It will be impossible to cut or melt.

The new plan is the latest move by Egypt to step up its counter-smuggling efforts. Although some progress had been made, the smuggling market in Gaza still flourishes.

Egyptian forces demolish tunnels or fill them with gas almost every week, often with people still inside them, and Palestinian casualties in the tunnels have been steadily rising.

Recently, Egypt examined several possibilities of blocking the tunnels, and joint American-Egyptian patrols have been seen in Rafah attempting to detect tunnels using underground sensors.

Egypt is gassing the Palestinians? Where in the heck is Amnesty International? Human Rights Watch? The EU? The UN? Are BTL and I the only ones discussing this? Where is the NY Times? Oh Profession of Journalism, wake up!! I have a story for you…

My heavens, it is beginning to look like no one cares.

- Aggie