Ben Shapiro Attacks Non-Existent Kennedy School Grads Running Obama Foreign Policy Topic: CNSNews.com
Ben Shapiro snarkily writes in his March 6 CNSNews.com column:
In the ivory tower inhabited by the great intellects of the Obama administration, however, no problem is too big to be thought or talked or surrendered away. If Russia won't change its perspective, we will simply cut our military more to convince them we mean well; if the Palestinians or Iranians don't change their perspectives, we will force Israel to negotiate with them in order to prove our goodwill.
Meanwhile, our enemies laugh. And they should. The global battlefield is no place for the Kennedy School political science grad students who inhabit our White House and believe that a well-aimed, snooty barb is a substitute for a muscular foreign policy presence.
But Shapiro names no Kennedy School graduates involved in foreign policy in the White House. Perhaps that's because there aren't any.
Of the named people in his column, national security adviser Susan Rice graduated from Stanford and Oxford, and John Kerry went to Yale and Boston College. Of the Kennedy School grads listed at Wikipedia as members of the Obama administration, none are working in foreign policy.
The Kennedy School is operated by Harvard University -- the the same school from which Shapiro received his law degree. Somehow we don't recall him dissing his law degree the way he disses his fellow Harvard grads.
WND Rehashes Serial-Killer Smear of Valerie Jarrett Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's promotion for the new issue of its Whistleblower magazine reads exactly you would expect something from the home of Obama Derangment Syndrome to be:
Suppose you were a committed leftist revolutionary who somehow got elected president of center-right America.
Suppose you were great at making speeches, but little else. You masked your socialist agenda in the appealing rhetoric of fairness and justice, but secretly loathed the American system of constitutional government and free-market capitalism.
Suppose you were also an extreme narcissist with an absurdly grandiose view of yourself and almost no tolerance for criticism and disagreement. Your ego so fragile, your worldview so distorted, your mind so angry beneath your charismatic exterior, and your self-image of being a divinely gifted leader in danger of disintegrating in the light and heat of mounting geopolitical turmoil and your own stunning failures as president.
In short, suppose you were Barack Obama.
To “stay the course” you were on – of trampling the Constitution and forcing socialism on an unwilling America, despite plummeting disapproval and deafening calls for you to stop – you would need help. A very special and secret kind of help.
You would need Valerie Jarrett.
Yep, the issue is about Valerie Jarrett. It apparently includes a version of the article in which WND's Michael Maloof libels Jarrett by likening her to the serial killer Richard Ramirez, baselessly calling her the "Night Stalker."
As we've noted, WND's Joseph Farah claims credit for inventing the "Night Stalker" nickname for Ramirez, so Maloof is presumably well aware of the connotation for applying it to Jarrett.
The magazine also includes an article by Edward Klein, "in which the former New York Times Magazine editor in chief says Jarrett 'is in many ways the de facto president.'”
WND is falsely trying to imply that Klein is a liberal. In fact, he's written a hatchet job on Hillary Clinton and wrote an embarrassing self-published novel treating every crazy Obama conspiracy as fact, co-authored with crazy person John LeBoutillier.
WND has no problem with telling lies and spreading smears -- just another reason nobody believes WND.
Zombie Blogger At NewsBusters Issues Zombie Complaint Topic: NewsBusters
We thought that Clay Waters' departure from the Media Research Center, we were done reading about complaints that the media labeled conservatives as conservative.
But no. In his first work since leaving the MRC last may when his TimesWatch column was canceled, Waters has resurfaced at NewsBusters to, yes, make another silly labeling complaint:
The New York Times covered the latest annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) with its usual mix of suspicion, overloaded labeling bias, and anti-GOP doomsaying. The paper's skeptical coverage of the three-day conservative confab, held this year at National Harbor on the Potomac, opened with two stories in Friday's edition, one on the organizers's attempts to put "a less strident face on the convention and the party."
Reporter Jonathan Martin's rundown of the speech by Republican star Sen. Marco Rubio, still in the mix for the 2016 presidential race, contained nine "conservative" labels, which actually makes it a model of restraint for the Times compared to last year's label-heavy reporting. Yet the question remains: Just how many "conservative" labels do you need, when the conference has the actual word "conservative" in the title?
Waters doesn't answer his question by telling us which "conservative" labels in the article, if any, he considered extraneous.
Speaking of extraneous: Waters' end-of-blog bio still lists him as an MRC employee, portrays TimesWatch as an existing thing, and links to the TimesWatch Twitter feed though it apparently no longer exists.
Speaking of Indifference to Murder Victims ... Topic: WorldNetDaily
Jack Cashill begins his March 5 WorldNetDaily column this way:
On Tuesday of this week, cop killer and former Black Panther leader Marshall “Eddie” Conway was sprung from a Maryland prison, and the NAACP greeted his release as though he were Nelson Mandela.
As the son of a cop, the nephew of a cop, the cousin of four other cops, I wish I were overstating how indifferent liberal activists were to the murder of then 35-year-old Donald Sager.
Yes, the same man who has amply demonstrated his indifference to the killings of people like Trayvon Martin and George Tiller is suddently concerned that someone might be expressing indifference about someone else's death. How ironic.
Though Cashill's column is ostensibly about the release of Eddie Conway, he leaves out crucial information -- like how long Conway was in prison before he was released. The killing for which Conway was convicted took place in 1970, which means Conway has spent more than 40 years behind bars. Conway has also consistently claimed his innocence, and there's no physical evidence linking Conway to the death; his conviction rested on a confession by one of the other defendants and testimony by a jailhouse informant.
But then, Cashill is saving his sympathy for killers like Scott Roeder, George Zimmerman and Steven Nary.
Flashback: Newsmax's First Foray Into TV Topic: Newsmax
So Newsmax has been getting attention for the upcoming launch of its new TV news channel as a rivel to Fox News for the conservative audience. But we remember Newsmax's first attempt to get into the TV business.
In 2001, Newsmax produced a show called "NewsMax.com Reports." As we detailed at the time, it starred Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy and then-columnist Barry Farber (now with WorldNetDaily) and promised to be "the start of a new effort to reach millions of Americans with news and information the major media won't report."
It was also essentially an infomercial, airing as paid programming on CNBC on a Saturday. Newsmax also created something called the "Off-The Record Club," designed to "help NewsMax to buy national TV air time to expand our reach." For $25 a month, members were promised a monthly "special audio tape briefing from a top expert, insider or VIP – giving you an insider's perspective you won't get from the major media."
We don't know if more shows were produced beyond the one that aired, or if anyone actually signed up for the club. We assume not, because we never heard from either again.
Meanwhile, in its article on the new TV venture, Bloomberg Businessweek offers some interesting tidbits about Newsmax:
It had revenue of $104 million in 2013 -- $46 million of it in subscription revenue from its 17 newsletters and $6 million more from the sale of vitamin supplements.
The average age of Newsmax’s audience is 54.7, which makes it a prime target for things like newsletters and vitamin supplements.
It was Amway founder Richard DeVos who suggested to Ruddy that Newsmax could sell supplements to his middle-aged audience.
Newsmax has 260 employees, with plans for 300 by summer. It's moving into a new 50,000-square-foot corporate headquarters in Boca Raton.
Ruddy's friendship with the Clintons could pose issues down the road: “I’m already torn by a Hillary Clinton candidacy,” he says. “I actually think she would make a good president. Generally, I would align myself with the Republican candidate, so there could be some bumps coming down the road.”
She said, disparagingly, that he “believes his mission is to restore Russian greatness. When he looks at Ukraine, he sees a place that he believes is by its very nature part of Mother Russia.”
Is he wrong about that?
They were once united as one country. They do share much of their history. In fact, Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, is often referred to as the mother of Russian cities and the cradle of Rus civilization.
And is it wrong for a leader of a modern state to seek to restore greatness to his own country?
This might seem like an obtuse idea to Hillary, but what’s wrong with that objective?
Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing if Hillary’s party took such an attitude toward their own country?
So according to Farah, Putin is just a patriotic Russian whose patriotism should be an inspiration to Americans. No wonder nobody believes WND.
It's a new month, and new unemployment numbers are out, so you know what that means -- it's time for CNSNews.com to distort those numbers.
Ali Meyer ably distorts in a March 7 article headlined "February: 223,000 More Unemployed Individuals." Meyer didn't mention that 175,000 jobs were created in February, and the increase in unemployed individuals is because more people joined the labor force.
Meyer's two other articles also failed to mention that 175,000 jobs were created last month, or that the increase in the unemployment rate was driven by people entering the work force. Instead, they focused on cherry-picked statistics like "Black Teen Unemployment 32.4%" and "February: Women Unemployed Up 36,000."
Logrolling In Our Time, Jim Fletcher Edition Topic: WorldNetDaily
As we've previously noted, warning flags should go up whenever WorldNetDaily columnist Jim Fletcher reviews a WND-published book -- not only is it the very definition of a conflict of interest, WND editor Joseph Farah has turned in a positive blurb for one of Fletcher's books and is selling said book at the WND store.
Fletcher's Feb. 27 WND column is a review of the WND-published book "The Rabbi Who Found Messiah," by birther Carl Gallups. To the surprise of exactly no one, Fletcher loves it, calling it a "blockbuster book" and adding: "Gallups has an uncanny ability to mention a breathtaking array of topics, and his new book doesn’t disappoint. From discussions of Kaduri and Messianic fervor, to Ariel Sharon and Christian eschatology, Gallups provides the reader with plenty to think about."
At no point does Fletcher mention that Gallups' book was published by the same company that prints his column.
Meanwhile ... Topic: Media Research Center
Right Wing Watch wonders why conservatives had a fit over an atheist group at CPAC but appear to be perfectly fine with the white nationalist-linked group ProEnglish having a presence there.
WND's Erik Rush Goes Anti-Obama, Pro-Putin Topic: WorldNetDaily
It's a given that Erik Rush is going to say ridiculously anti-Obama things. And he does just that in his March 5 WorldNetDaily column, complete with italics:
Obviously, Obama does not care if his detractors declare that he is weak or inept at foreign policy, any more than he cares if they believe he is a poor economic manager or leader on domestic issues. His policies, which have been detrimental to America on every front – economic stability, national security, domestic tranquility, foreign policy – are the sabotage of an enemy operative, not the careless acts of a ham-handed politician.
But Rush is also jumping on the pro-Putin bandwagon being steered by his fellow WND columnists:
The Western press as well as Republican leaders are beating the drum of Putin wishing to “restore the Soviet Union,” being an international bully, a retrograde dictator and so on. We know that Ukraine has been a contested area for centuries. We also know that Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union and that Putin is an authoritarian leader. However, he is also dealing with factions (in the neighboring Ukraine, Dagestan, Chechnya and Armenia, to name but a few) that are replete with those who hold anti-Russian sentiments, including militant Islamists, some of whom have very recently carried out suicide bombings within Russia. This was precisely the reason for widespread safety concerns at the Winter Olympics at Sochi.
[...]
As I’ve recently reported in this space, the close ties between Islamists and Hitler’s Third Reich are a matter of the historical record, as are the ties between the Svoboda Party’s progenitors and the Nazis of World War II. So not only does Putin see himself fighting anti-Russian sympathies and factions in the region, he may even see himself potentially fighting neo-Nazis.
More significantly, Putin is fighting the efforts of the Obama administration, which has dedicatedly supported not only Russia’s enemies in Ukraine, but the Muslim Brotherhood and jihadists globally.
While the nationalist and borderline neo-Nazi Svoboda Party is a faction in the coalition that overthrew the Russian-backed government in Ukraine, as Slate notes, it's inaccurate to paint all Putin opponents in Ukraine as neo-Nazis, as Rush is trying to do.
As with his fellow WNDers, Rush is relying on pro-Putin propaganda. Timothy Snyder in the New York Review of Books points out that before the overthrow, then-President Viktor Yanukovych's regime was denouncing the opposition as not only Nazis but Jews as well.
There seems to be some cognitive dissonance there. But Rush will ignore that since he got in his minimum daily requirement of Obama derangement.
The March 5 column by the two is posted at NewsBusters with both Bozell and Graham credited. But the same column posted at the MRC's "news" operation CNSNews.com once again lists only Bozell as author.
Bozell and Graham's March 7 column similarly carries only Bozell's byline at CNS.
It's coming up on a month ago now that Graham was revealed to have served as Bozell's ghostwriter for years. Not only have Bozell, Graham and the MRC refused to speak about it publicly (despite Bozell making several appearances on Fox News in the following days), the MRC still can't properly credit Graham on all its platforms.
How hard can that possibly be? Very hard, apparently.
Michelle Obama was not elected to office, and while, by definition, her husband did not usurp the position he dishonors, his bigoted, racialist wife is usurping authority and inflicting additional financial injury upon an already suffering people.
[...]
It would be barely tolerable if Michelle Obama would stick to doing jumping-jacks and writhing around on the floor of Ellen DeGeneres’ set, much to the delight of DeGeneres. After all, who wouldn’t want the first lady of the United States wallowing around on the floor of their nationally televised talk show? It proves that you can make a black woman the first lady, but that doesn’t mean she will have any class.
American families do not need the additional financial burden her labeling edict brings. The American people need for the Obamas to be gone.
MRC Writer Wonders Why An Author Didn't Get Honored At Oscars Topic: Media Research Center
Kristine Marsh devotes a March 3 Media Research Center Culture & Media Institute item to pondering why the late Tom Clancy didn't get honored at the Oscars. This being the MRC, she can only come up with one possible reason:
It’s not surprising that Hollywood ignored Clancy at the Academy Awards though. His pro-military politics certainly didn’t make him a contender for the Hollywood elite. According to CNN’s obituary, Clancy’s books were very popular with the military, so he had access to confidential information that he used as inspiration for plotlines to his stories. However, he was no whistleblower, and was very careful to not put anything in his novels that he thought would endanger the troops or national security.
It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that Clancy was an author and not directly involved in the movie business. According to IMDb, Clancy had no direct involvement in the movies made from his books beyond providing the original source material, except for serving as an executive producer on "The Sum of All Fears."
Marsh offers no evidence of an author with similar contributions was honored by the Academy. Perhaps that's because she started with an answer and worked back toward the question.
Shorter Colin Flaherty: I Wanted To Hornswoggle O'Reilly! Topic: WorldNetDaily
Colin Flaherty begins his March 3 WorldNetDaily column by declaring, "Never in the history of hornswoggling has anyone been hornswoggled quite as badly as Bill O’Reilly last week."
As the rest of his column demonstrates, that's only because Flaherty didn't get a chance to hornswoggle O'Reilly first.
Flaherty's rant focuses on O'Reilly's participation in an Obama administration initiative aimed at boosting young black men:
The president also sprinkled words like “personal responsibility” into his remarks.
When this crowd talks personal responsibility, what they really want is for people like Bill O’Reilly to take personal responsibility for everything he has done to create and perpetuate the white privilege that causes so much relentless white racism … that causes all the disparities.
The key to this crowd is watching what they do, not how they justify it.
This is the same president who said because he believed in free enterprise, he had to seize control of General Motors. The same president who said you could choose your doctor, as long as it was the doctor he chose for you. The same president who says unemployment is just another recreational opportunity.
Because Flaherty can't do anything without race-baiting, his column quickly degenerates into a tirade against "Critical Race Theory" (and Obama, of course):
The most visible symbols of Critical Race Theory and white racism were also in attendance at this meeting, starting with the parents of Trayvon Martin. They have made a career out of appearing before national groups like the NAACP and the National Association of Black Journalists to talk about how racism polluted their son’s upbringing; how racism caused Zimmerman to stalk and shoot him; how racism caused the jury to acquit him. And how racism causes people to write columns like this, reminding others that Trayvon was a thug with a history of violence, lawlessness and drug abuse – and tolerance because school officials do not like “criminalizing” young black men.
That is pure Critical Race Theory.
Even a cursory reading of the larger black websites – Grio, The Root, Huffington Post Black Voices, Ebony, Jet and hundreds more – shows how deep and wide these beliefs are. Or on TV every day, where Toure of MSNBC is their perfect spokesman: “The accumulated impact of historic discrimination and the advantages of white privilege and the systems perpetuating” it are responsible for widespread black dysfunction, said Toure. “Not personal responsibility.”
Flaherty also said of Department of Justice Civil Rights Division nominee Dego Adegbile: "Adegbile’s major claim to fame is pleading for the innocence due to racism of convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. The president chose him not in spite of his work, but because of it." Actually, Abu-Jamal's guilt or innocence was not an issue in the appeal Adegbile worked on; it involved Abu-Jamal's sentence, and the appeal successfully turned a death sentence into life imprisonment.
Flaherty concluded: "Bill O’Reilly is usually pretty good at keeping this out of his No Spin Zone. But not this time." Well, O'Reilly has kept the all-spin Flaherty away from him, so that must count for something.
CNS Not Big On Correctly Spelling Names of Non-Christian Deities Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com is so Christian-centric, it seems, it has trouble correctly spelling the names of other deities.
A March 6 CNS article by Susan Jones on the Dalai Lama delivering the opening prayer to the U.S. Senate manages to misspell Buddha's name in both the headline and the opening paragraph:
As of this writing, CNS has yet to fix the spelling.