Bash the Messenger

Abortion wackos

Jun 032009

I suspect that Peter Wallsten and Robin Abcarian are two journalists who are just making stuff up — or else printing stuff that President Obama makes up. Here is some of what I mean.

In calling last month for “common ground” on abortion, President Obama launched his search for an unlikely political sweet spot — a popular stance on an issue that has long been dominated by extremes.

This is nonsense. Before Obama came along with his extremist anti-choice, pro-abortion policies, the country had reached an uneasy truce in the abortion wars — a compromise, even. Obama may have said at some time that he is looking for a common ground on abortion, but he says a lot of things. Reporters should keep in mind that this is the same guy who said he is not running an auto company.

But the slaying Sunday of Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller has raised the level of mistrust between the very factions that the White House has been trying to bring together.

How do these reporters know the level of mistrust has been raised. And how could the killing of Tiller do that even if it happened, when everybody except a few lone wackos wants his killer to be brought to justice the same as any other killer? The killer didn’t represent the anti-abortion crowd any more than President Obama’s extreme views represent the vast majority of those Americans who want abortion to be legal.

Tiller’s death is a “massive setback” in the search for common ground, said Cristina Page, a New York City author and abortion rights advocate. “It’s sort of like having a family member murdered and then being asked to make nice with the assassin’s family. It’s unnatural.”

Gee, how McCarthyite of her. Nice built-by-association in that “assassin’s family” phrase. OK, so maybe Obama isn’t the only extreme wacko on the pro-abortion side.

Ah, in reading further into the column, I see that the two journalists are at least good enough to quote some people who don’t buy their thesis in paragraph one.

There’s more, but I gotta run.

Backlash grasping at straws

Bash the Messenger, Health care reform, Rule of law No Responses »

May 282009

Fox news headline: “Sotomayor’s Gun Control Positions Could Prompt Conservative Backlash.”

Backlash? Backlash?? I think the word the writer is groping for is “opposition.”

In the same article:

Such a line of attack could prove more effective than efforts to define Sotomayor as pro-abortion, efforts that essentially grasp at straws. Sotomayor’s record on that hot-button issue reveals instances in which she has ruled against an abortion rights group and in favor of anti-abortion protesters, making her hard to pigeonhole.

Grasp at straws?

Fox seems to have hired an idiom-challenged reporter to write these things.

But that last sentence is a fascinating one. It suggests that perhaps Soutomayor wasn’t basing her ruling on the identify of the group before her, but was basing it on the law, let the chips fall where they will.

Will the Obama administration be willing to overlook an indiscretion like that?

How we came to this pass

Bash the Messenger No Responses »

May 132009

Camille Paglia, being a little slow on the uptake, asks, “How have we come to this pass in America where the assassination of top government officials is fodder for jokes on national radio?:

It’s a very bad subject for jokes, but I think Paglia is old enough to know how it started. Back in 1998 when Clinton was being impeached, Alec Baldwin went on the Conan O’Brien show and screamed: “if we were in another country… we would stone Henry Hyde to death and we would go to their homes and kill their wives and their children. We would kill their families, for what they’re doing to this country.”

The left didn’t get majorly upset over that. Then (in 2006) there was the documentary, “Death of a President,” which used a rather unsubtle power of suggestion to make the idea of assassinating President Bush thinkable.

Before that (in 2004) there was a call for the assassination of George Bush from the Guardian.

On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod’s law dictates he’ll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. – where are you now that we need you?

Those people were out-of-control, out-of-their-minds angry. If people now are merely making jokes about assassinating the president, maybe it’s a sign that the political scene is calming down. Maybe Camille Paglia should catch up with the times and do the same.

White House press corps scandal

Abuse of power, Bash the Messenger No Responses »

May 122009

There has hardly been any comment on the recent scandal involving the White House press corps.

We can all assume that what Tom Lauria said is true. The Obama administration threatened Perella Weinberg, saying it would use “the full force of the White House press corps [to] destroy it’s reputation” if it resisted the government’s plan to abrogate their status as preferred creditors.

Robert Gibbs denied that the White House put that kind of pressure on Perella Weinberg, but nobody believes that. Obama’s defenders in the blogosphere are instead defending the right of Obama to bash corporations.

Some professional journalists are peddling the line that Perella Weinberg itself denied it. But there is no evidence of such a denial. Yes, there is a Reuters article with the headline, “Perella denies White House threat over Chrysler.” But if you read the article, you find out that what Perella Weinberg did was contradict the idea that it succumbed to White House pressure. At that point it says it realized its interests were better served by going along with the White House plan. That of course is not a denial that the threat was made exactly as Lauria described it.

Others are doing a good job of describing the many offenses against our legal system in what the Obama administration is doing here. I presume some of them will someday be featured in a bill of impeachment.

But the most chilling aspect of this has not been discussed. That is that the White House threatened to use the press corps as its agent of destruction.

And there hasn’t been a word of outcry from the nation’s press. Shouldn’t it be howling against Lauria, demanding that he retract his slander. Shouldn’t they try to protect their reputation, however tarnished?

About the best the news media have done, in some cases, is to omit the part of the accusation that involves them. For example, Neil King Jr. and Jeffrey McCracken of the Wall Street Journal simply say that Tom Lauria “accused the White House of threatening to destroy the reputation of Perella Weinberg.” They don’t mention the press’s alleged role in this.

Yes, it’s a vindication for those of us who have accused the nation’s press of losing its objectivity and being in the tank for Obama. But our country would be in a healthier state if the press still thought it desirable to deny it.

Ideological shift

Bailouts, Bash the Messenger No Responses »

Apr 272009

Here’s a cute rhetorical trick. The Reuters headline says, “Obama leading U.S. ideological shift.”

That’s like putting out a headline back in the 400s saying, “Atilla the Hun leading European ideological shift.”

Or at the 1821 Treaty of Chicago, by which the United States provided a massive bailout to the Potawatomi Indians in exchange for their ceding most of their Michigan Territory: “Gov. Lewis Cass leading ideological shift in the Northwest.”

A less genteel way for Reuters to put it would be, “Obama leading shift to robber-baron capitalism.” Or, “Obama wages aggressive war of conquest.”

Oops

Bash the Messenger, civil liberties No Responses »

Apr 252009

For some reason, the 1st of these items reminded me of the 2nd.

The British Daily Mirror runs a story about using lie detectors to examine the thoughts of paedophiles, illustrating it with a thinly disguised photo of Leonid Chernovetsky, mayor of Kiev hooked up to a lie detector. (As reported on English Russia and on Ukrainiana.)
Janet Napolitano uses her position as an influential government official to go McCarthyite and smear large classes of political opponents, painting them as potential terrorists. (This, from an administration that is simultaneously asking for power to control the internet and pull the plug on any groups it wants to cut off.)

Get a grip, Murdoch

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Apr 112009

The lead headline in the weekend WSJ says, “Jobs Maintains Grip at Apple.”

There are two problems with that headline:

1. It’s too metaphorical to be the product of hard-nosed, professional journalists.

2. It’s contradicted by the article itself. The only people it’s going to fool are those who read only the headline.

If you look inside the article, you learn that Steve Jobs “…remains closely involved in key aspects…has continued to work on the company’s most important strategies and products from home…is also involved in the development…”

Those are weasel words. Anyone who has ever read a job applicant’s resume is going to ask questions about the type of “involvement.” If, that is, the applicant is ever lucky enough to be granted an interview on the basis of such vague words. Any applicant who actually managed a project or played any key role at all is going to use better words than “involved” if s/he expects to actually get an interview.

How to broaden a reporter’s mind?

Bash the Messenger, Stimulus spending No Responses »

Apr 062009

“GM’s fate, government response will determine if job-letting is over.” That’s the headline on yet another opinion piece in Sunday’s Kalamazoo Gazette, this one by Peter Luke.

Here’s the online version. It’s headlined somewhat differently: “As GM, Chrysler downsizing looms, White House must find ways to keep Michigan employed.”

Like Rick Haglund and indeed like most newspaper people, Luke’s outlook is more government-centric than people-centric. An example is the closing paragraphs of his article:

The president’s overseer for the recovery of auto communities, former MSU economist Ed Montgomery, visited Michigan last week to say Obama is “committed to having a strong, viable auto industry” and to helping us “deal with the situation.”

GM’s downsizing is inevitable. But any reorganization — even a structured bankruptcy — designed to build a stronger, viable company should at least mitigate further job losses. Otherwise, Montgomery’s recovery efforts will be that much more expensive.

The economic stimulus, responding to a national recession that is 15 months old, does not do the whole job. Michigan’s downturn started nine years ago and has shredded the economic fabric of whole regions of the state.

Montgomery said he “gets” Michigan’s situation. Which is: If Detroit, Pontiac, Flint and Saginaw don’t get the federal help they need to rebuild, the state will continue to bleed income, population and, to borrow a word from Obama, hope.

So in other words, according to Luke, the fate of our economy depends on the feds spending money. But if he was a better-informed reporter, he might realize there are other ideas out there as to how economic growth takes place. That may be a little much to ask, but he could start small and think about what happens when the federal government spends money.

His current thinking is much like that of the old industrialists. For example, there was the idea that “the solution to pollution is dilution.” Or that the way to improve sanitary conditions in cities is to dump the sewage into the nearest river. At one time it was acceptable to think that getting rid of the problem locally was good enough. Now we know better than to just solve our local environmental problems at the expense of the global ecosystem. If only reporters like Peter Luke would apply the now-commonly-known principles of ecology to economics, and keep in mind how everything is connected.

For example, take those federal stimulus dollars. They have to come from somewhere. Mitigating job loss in Michigan through stimulus dollars is going to mean people in other parts of the country losing their jobs to pay for them. Or maybe we can borrow the money and do it through inflation, taking jobs away from the next generation to save those of our own. It’s not right to think we can solve our local problem without paying any attention to the problems the solution might cause for those in other times and places, or even in other sectors of the local economy.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for federal action in dealing with our economic crisis. There might even be a place for federal spending. But the beginning of wisdom is to quit taking such a narrow view of the problem, and realize that there are more interconnected parts than the federal government and the Michigan auto industry. It’s ironic that on the facing page to Luke’s column there is an editorial titled, “How much do you really know about the media?” In it there is this paragraph:

Yahoo and Google don’t generate news, newspapers do: Yahoo and Google use Associated Press or local news organizations’ news reports, create a headline and a link and make it look as though they have news on their pages. This is called “aggregation.” The truth is that without newspaper staffs reporting the news in print and online, there would be precious little credible local news available anywhere on the Internet to aggregate or blog about.

Ignore for a moment the unfortunate wording that suggests that newspapers invent or manufacture news. The writers probably meant something like “report” rather than “generate.” At least I hope so.

But if newspapers want to give themselves credit for reporting local news, they ought to start by encouraging people like Peter Luke to broaden their horizons and truly cover the local news. Perhaps pay less attention to government people like Ed Montgomery, and more to all the interconnected people and businesses that constitute the economy. We do get lots of news stories about people who are affected when government program X is cut, but there is a lot more to the economy than government spending on individuals and on industry.

Haglund redefines capitalism

Bailouts, Bash the Messenger, Limits on government power No Responses »

Apr 052009

Rick Haglund writes a column that appears in the Business/Jobs section of the Sunday Kalamazoo Gazette. But it’s almost always a lot more about government than business.

His article in today’s print section is headlined: “Wagoner exit will force automakers to fix problems fast.” The online version is headlined: “Obama lays out capitalistic path for General Motors, Chrysler.”

Both headlines reflect the content of Haglund’s article. (This is not always the case in the Gazette). And both are wrong.

Those who believe President Barack Obama is a socialist are now convinced of it after he sacked General Motors Corp. Chairman Rick Wagoner and told Chrysler LLC to finish its deal with Fiat SpA in 30 days, or else.

Nonsense. What Obama did may have little precedent in U.S. corporate history. But someone needed to force GM and Chrysler to get real about fixing their problems–and fast.

Personally, I think it’s stupid to get hung up on the socialist label. But it’s simply not true that forcing GM and Chrysler to fix their problems fast says one thing or another about whether Obama is socialist.

And if Haglund really wanted the companies to fix their problems fast, he would have opposed Bush’s bailout back when Bush was president. At the time, opponents of the move were pointing out that the bailout would only delay the inevitable. Now the inevitable is making its agonizing approach, and people are justifying the Bush-Obama behavior by saying the companies need to act faster. The markets would already have forced fast behavior changes if only the Rick Haglunds of the world would have been willing to allow markets to work.

Back at the time of the first bailouts, the opponents were saying that there is always bankruptcy to deal with these things. Bush and the Democrats were opposed. So we got the bailouts and we got a new Putin-like precedent for takeover of corporations, and now Obama is threatening GM and Chrysler with bankruptcy to make them change faster. We already had that threat without the new and dangerous precedents, if only Bush-Obama had been willing to let it take the course they are now forcing on GM and Chrysler.

And to add error to injury, Haglund says Obama is acting like a capitalist.

But in pushing a gold, risky restructuring plan, Obama is acting more like a capitalist than the capitalists who would like the government to keep them in business for as long as it takes.

This of course is nonsense. The capitalist approach is what Bush and Obama have hindered. They were the ones trying to keep the businesses alive, and they said so at the time. It is simply not true that capitalists are the ones who insist that the government keep them in business. GM’s capitalists, perhaps, but not capitalists in general.

I presume the Gazette doesn’t have a fact-checking department, or this last paragraph of Haglund’s would never have been allowed to stand.

By the numbers: searing heat

Bash the Messenger No Responses »

Mar 172009

Even by Murdoch standards, this one is exceptional. It’s the lead headline on page one of today’s WSJ:

“Political Heat Sears AIG”

Those must be some special reporters who can come up with objective measurements for these things. Next they can tell us how to prepare our Thanksgiving turkeys safely.

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