Category: Politics

I kept thinking about this video as I watched decent young police officers cope with the protesters at the Tampa Republican National Convention.  Watch the whole thing, and you’ll realize why Churchill (the better part of his nature) isn’t dead in Britain.  Soundtrack, too.

Piffle has been circulating in the media all week about how the RNC and the DNC were calm because police didn’t arrest protesters like those terrible cops did in 2008 in St. Paul.  Bunk.  The RNC and the DNC didn’t see as many arrests because the protesters didn’t show up to break windows and hurl bottles at police.  If that’s the result of better intelligence work, more power to it.  Don’t pretend it was the police who needed to adjust their attitudes. ... 

A couple of years ago, I tried to correct a false statement in the New York Times.  Sisyphean task, I know.  But this wasn’t one of those big, ideological falsehoods: it was a technical misrepresentation of a sentencing law.  Which led to a big, ideological falsehood, but at least the task at hand was manageable: replace the misrepresentation of the law with an accurate description.

An embarrassed editor contacted me: the mistake was a fairly big miss on their part, and it completely undermined the point of the op-ed.  But, he told me, they did not permit corrections of authors and content in the letters page.  Would I write a different letter that offered the correct version of the law as additional information for interested readers, rather than calling it a correction? ... 

It should be noted that Barack Obama began talking about Islam yesterday hours before the attacks on Americans in Libya and Egypt.  Delivering his speech commemorating September 11, before violence broke out, Obama could not resist inserting a boilerplate reassurance that Americans are not a danger to Muslim people.  In doing so, he turned a speech that was supposed to be about the murder of Americans by a foreign enemy into another apology for the imaginary straw-man of American Islamophobia:

I’ve always said that our fight is with al Qadea and its affiliates, not with Islam or any other religion. ... 

The Watcher’s Council

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. . . surprisingly doesn’t go to Salon Magazine, despite Will Doig’s extraordinarily inaccurate and unhinged hate-fest aimed at Tampa Bay’s OS (Sin, Original) of failing to buy the kiddies that multi-billion dollar choo-choo train to Disneyworld that nobody needs but would somehow magically transform Central Florida into Seattle.  Will continued his no-choo-no-peace rant on Russia Today — of course between jetting in from whatever fabulous city he was previously gracing and jetting off to the next one.

Will, sweetie, we already have food trucks.  And, better Cuban sandwiches.  And a plethora of tattoos.  And rain.  Wash your face and calm down.  Then go contemplate your own carbon footprint. ... 

Brandon Darby interviewed by “journalist-activist” Renée Feltz at the RNC . . . it’s an educated deconstruction and crack primer on Leftist media tactics, Leftist cop-hating, and how very, very quickly their house of cards can fall.

Brutal and refreshing. ... 

Last night, as Mitt Romney gave his nomination speech at the RNC, Code Pink protesters trailed by Democracy Now! cameramen tried to shout Romney down.  Video here.  Breitbart story here.  This is the ultimate offense in a week of similar stunts to disrupt the proceedings of the RNC.

The important part of this story, locally, is that WEDU, the flagship public television station in Tampa Bay, has been hosting Democracy Now! during the convention. ... 

Today was the last day of the Republican National Convention.  I’ve spent the last week watching the media watch the protesters slowly ripen in the Florida sun, then hurry back to television studios to transform images of the sad, stinking, minuscule, drum-banging, shouting debacle into images of noble massings of freedom fighters — using no tool other than the magic of media bias.

Much of this bias depends upon behaving as if the protesters are victims, rather than instigators of violence and authors of every last one of their own problems.  The New Yorker’s Nathaniel Stein wins the prize for the most fictional imagining of non-existent police cruelty.  I have not and will not be reading Fifty Shades of Grey, but Stein’s whiney attempt at protester pathos certainly sounds like it — sounds like channeling cheap S & M porn.  That is the really offensive thing: how the protesters are exhibitionists; how they force the rest of us to deal with them acting out on the streets. ... 

A few days ago, in so-called Romneyville, where anti-RNC protesters are squatting, I watched a television cameraman genuflect before a protester.  The gesture wasn’t technically religious: it is a strategy used to create the impression of a large crowd out of the presence of a handful of people.  Zoom in on a close shot of one or two people; aim the camera close to the ground to capture walking feet: these are shopworn media strategies for inflating protest numbers.

It’s bad enough when “private” media invents story lines this way.  They’re selling the drama of big crowds.  But when we’re the ones paying for the reporting, bias is much more troubling.  And when you mix in the radical reporters blending protesting directly with “reporting,” it’s a toxic soup. ... 

RNC Protesters: Behind the Media Spin

The protests are a bust.  The same 200-odd activists showed up at a pro-immigration rally that was supposed to draw many thousands.  A large percentage of the attendees were Scientologists proselytizing the protesters, or staff members of various Soros-funded groups, or self-important ACLU and National Lawyer’s Guild “observers.”  Or, addled teens pretending to be anarchists. ... 

From the Anti-RNC Protests yesterday 

1. Caption contest for the first one . . . ... 

The first big march on the RNC was held today in Gaslight Park in Tampa.

Dozens and Dozens of Protesters (photo credit Tina Trent) ... 

Two weeks ago, it was Mayor Bob Buckhorn making dirty jokes about Sarah Palin in the New York Times.  Read the story of the Mayor’s behavior at the link.

Today, it’s the “elite” left-wing paper, the Tampa Bay Times (formerly St. Petersburg Times), running this act of sexual vandalism against Palin.  This is virtual rape.  And the Times, despite all its hysterics over the Republican “war on women,” (and their much touted “institute for journalistic ethics”) seem quite happy promoting it: ... 

The Tampa Bay Times (until recently, the St. Petersburg Times), fancies itself the New York Times . . . only with sandy beaches and really nice water views.

Despite living in paradise, they work very hard to emulate their northern peers’ biases.  In preparation for the coming RNC convention, TBT‘s crack political staff called up 117 of their best friends and asked them what they thought of Paul Ryan, then pretended it was a legitimate political poll: ... 

Many people were confused by the New York Times’  jaw-grindingly idiotic column yesterday trying to link candidate Paul Ryan to serial rapist and racist revolutionary Elridge Cleaver:

Paul Ryan, Black Panther?

By ADAM GOODHEART, PETER MANSEAU and TED WIDMER

Did Paul Ryan quote a famous 1960s Black Panther Party slogan in his speech on Saturday announcing his candidacy for vice president on the Republican ticket? ... 

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Romney nominated a grown-up.  The best and the brightest of the pack.  Who couldn’t like a candidate who cares enough (for their own good) to send 90 cranky Georgetown professors to bed without supper to teach them not to throw temper tantrums about Catholic principles and big words they do not bother to try to understand before bloviating about them in the public square?

I’m also deeply relieved Romney rejected Rubio.  It’s probably the best chance Rubio has to prove himself in a substantive way, rather than being artificially elevated through the system on the basis of his identity.  Far too many right-of-center pundits carried on about Rubio’s imagined “articulateness” and the “great speeches he was making” while studiously pretending not the see the enormous stumbles that defined his Florida political career. ...