Today’s score is: Sex scandal – 8660, National security scandal – 126
Those are the Google News counts for searches on Larry Craig vs Sandy Berger
I guess lying about sex is the more important issue, after all.
Oct 192007
Bash the Messenger
Oct 182007
Two headlines on two NYT articles, by the same authors, that at least start out identically. (I haven’t compared them all the way to the end.)
1. House Sustains President’s Veto on Child Health
2. House Fails to Override Child Health Bill Veto
Somebody there must have admitted that there is a difference between child health and a child health bill.
Oct 182007
From the Guardian:
The DNA pioneer James Watson today apologised “unreservedly” for his apparent claim that black people are less intelligent than whites.
And this isn’t the first time.
Prof Watson has regularly courted controversy, reportedly saying that a woman should have the right to abort her child if tests were able to determine that it would be homosexual.
He has also suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, proposing that black people have higher libidos, and claimed beauty could be genetically manufactured.
Sure, he’s probably a bigot, but shouldn’t we make allowances? After all, he’s a Nobel laureate, and we know how those Nobel laureates are.
And shouldn’t there also be headlines about how his Nobel prize puts pressure on him to run for President?
Oct 162007
From Reuters:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – There’s no sign of a family reunion planned, but U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama are distant cousins.
So says the vice president’s wife, Lynne Cheney, who said she discovered that her husband of 43 years is eighth cousins with the senator from Illinois.
The two men could hardly be more different. Cheney is an advocate for pursuing the war in Iraq to try to stabilize the country, while Obama wants to get U.S. troops out of Iraq.
So they have two different opinions about the Iraq war. How is that such a huge difference? Sure, it’s a different opinion, but there’s a lot more to being a person than that. Now if you said, “Cheney is an advocate for the war, hates cauliflower, and has a type A personality while Obama wants to quit the war, loves cauliflower, and takes Reagan-style naps” you’d be a little further along in showing that they have differences. But you’d still be a long ways from saying, “the two men could hardly be more different.” There are a lot more things than that which could distinguish one human being from another.
Oct 152007
Tale of two headlines at thehill.com
1. GOP targeting Clinton on phone-call snooping
2. Scandal usurps Idaho’s legacy
Note that the second headline is NOT “Democrats target Republicans on Larry Craig sex scandal.”
Note also the first headline is NOT “Clinton phone-call snooping scandal usurps Democratic message.”
Oct 152007
Is there anything more vacuous than a bunch of Republican candidates arguing about who is the real conservative?
Why, yes, there is. The news coverage of that argument is much more brainless! It makes these candidates look like a bunch of Einsteins in comparison.
Consider this ABC news article, “Thompson whacks Guiliani on Home Turf.”
Whacks? Whacks??? This isn’t slapstick. It’s criticism. it’s debate. Why does ABC demean it by calling it “whacking”? (No, don’t answer that. We know why.)
Here are the airheads at ABC News:
Thompson’s salvo, which he planned on repeating Monday evening at a meeting of New York’s Conservative Party, fit in perfectly with the latest back and forth among the GOP presidential candidates about who is authentically Republican, and who is faking it.
It’s more than traditional campaign rhetoric — they are challenging one another’s very legitimacy as Republicans. It’s a dynamic that seems natural in this race, with no clear Republican front-runner who can claim overwhelming support among the GOP’s conservative base.
Some analysis, huh? They tell us there is a fight, but avoid any mention that there is some substance to it. But when ABC news lets the candidates speak for themselves, we get to some important issues:
Giuliani campaign press secretary Maria Comella responded, “Mayor Giuliani is the only candidate who does more than just talk about the importance of Republican principles — he actually has the track record to back it up.
“It’s easy to throw around meaningless rhetoric, but quite another thing to stand up to a Democratic majority and successfully cut taxes, control spending and reform welfare.”
Good question, that. It’s one thing to talk Republican principles. But so many Republicans fold when faced with real opposition from the leftwing hate machine. I’ll bet I would if I was in their shoes, on account of I’m too easy-going. This is one reason you don’t want me to be President, even though I have a disconcerting habit of being right about things. You need somebody who has been tested under fire.
And there is more. It isn’t the Lincoln-Douglas debates by any means, but it’s a whole lot more meaningful than the ABC reporting on the topic. Maybe ABC would do well to just shut up and let the candidates speak if it can’t do any better than words like “whack” and “salvo.”
Oh, btw, I don’t think there’s any more chance I’ll vote for Giuliani than that I’d ever vote for George W. Bush. I’m just saying he made a good point.
At least that ABC article gives us some nice photos of the four top GOP candidates. It made me realize that I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of those four on TV. I have no problem with it staying that way. And since I’m not watching the baseball postseason this year, it means I probably won’t go near a television until March Madness. So I’m going to fall behind in cultural literacy again.
Oct 142007
In my previous post about the AP coverage of the Larry Craig/Sandy Berger scandals, I linked to a Fox News story that I thought was an AP story. I got this by going to google news and entering the search terms “Sandy Berger.”
The only story that came up on the first page that seemed to be an AP one was the third one in the list, the one that is datelined “AP Washington”. I figured FOX news had printed an AP story. But in looking at the Fox News link, there is narry a word about that article coming from the AP.
So is the AP even silenter than we had thought on the Sandy Berger scandal? If you google for “Larry Craig,” you have no trouble at all finding Associated Press articles.
Oct 142007
When comparing the lies of Bush and Clinton, leftwingers would ask how could we possibly compare lies about a mere sex scandal with lies that caused people to die.
So now we have a Republican sex scandal and Democrats are saying, “He lied, he lied! Larry Craig said he would resign, and he isn’t doing it.”
And at the same time we learn that a man who lied about national security, who was convicted for stealing and destroying documents, is serving as an unofficial advisor to one of the leading presidential candidates. If national security really is national security, it’s a matter in which millions of lives are at stake.
So now which issue are Democrats, e.g. the Associated Press, saying is the more important?
Here is the AP on the sex scandal:
Now that scandal-tinged Idaho Sen. Larry Craig has reneged on a pledge to resign this fall, his fellow Republican senators act as though they hardly know him. They want voters to forget him, too.
But they privately acknowledge that an earlier strategy to drive Craig from office has backfired, sticking them with an open-ended ethics investigation likely to keep the issue before the public for months.
And here is the AP about the national security scandal. Note that there is not a word saying this issue is likely to be kept before the public for months.
I assume we can take this to mean that the AP is telling us it is going to campaign hard for the Democrats on the Larry Craig issue, and is going to report no more than absolutely necessary on the Sandy Berger/Hillary Clinton scandal.
Oct 122007
The news media and google have been flogging this news item in the past 24 hours:
Will Nobel mean Gore will run for president?
By Steve Holland
WASHINGTON, Oct 12 (Reuters) – The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Democrat Al Gore on Friday increases pressure on him to launch a late bid for the U.S. presidency, but advisers say he is showing no signs of interest in the 2008 race.
This isn’t journalism. It’s campaigning.
If Al Gore wants to enter the race now, fine. I don’t like the idea of candidates in either party wrapping up their nominations early, like George W. Bush did. If he has supporters who want to take advantage of the Nobel prize to push the issue, fine.
But disguising this campaign as Reuters has done? This is not reporting. This is beating the drums for a bandwagon.
There is no reason a Nobel prize puts pressure on anyone to run for president. Lots of people have won Nobel prizes without it putting pressure on them to run for anything. It might give people some publicity they can use to their advantage, but it doesn’t pressure them.
Here’s an honest lead sentence Reuters might have used: “Gore supporters are using the recent award of a Nobel prize to promote the idea of a run for the presidency.”
Or if it wanted to be a news agency instead of a partisan campaign agency, maybe it could instead do a little investigative reporting, and find out the role of these Gore groups in getting him the Nobel prize. We’ll probably find out anyway, several years from now. But Reuters could get a scoop and tell us about it now. That would be newsworthy.
Oct 062007
Headline on Google and Voice of America: “Congress vows to override Bush veto on child health care.”
1. Congress vows that? Maybe some Congressional Democrats do, but isn’t it customary to have a vote before saying Congress does something?
2. I’ll bet it’s not child health care that Bush vetoed. I’ll bet he vetoed the latest version of the SCHIP legislation.