A Sept. 14 Newsmax article by Jim Meyers and Ashley Martella is devoted to peddling "Narcissist Nation: Reflections of a Blue-State Conservative," a new book by George Marlin, whom Meyers and Martella baselessly describe as "one of the country’s most influential conservatives." The authors quote Marlin saying that "Obama uses the ‘I’ word more than all the presidents have used it collectively in the 200 and some-odd years of our nation."
That's not even close to being true. Author James Pennebaker, unlike Marlin, has done some actual pronoun-counting:
Toward the end of his penetrating new book, “The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us,” Pennebaker crunches the numbers on presidential press conferences since Truman and finds that “Obama has distinguished himself as the lowest I-word user of any of the modern presidents.” If anything, Obama has shown a disdain for the first-person singular during his administration.
“Why,” Pennebaker wonders, “do very smart people think just the opposite?” He chalks it up the selective way we process information: “If we think that someone is arrogant, our brains will be searching for evidence to confirm our beliefs.” If we’re predisposed to look for clues that Obama is all about “me me me,” then every “me” he utters takes on outsize importance in our impressionistic view of his speechifying.
Thus, it seems that the central premise of Marlin's book has been discredited. We someone don't think Newsmax will be terribly interested in reporting that.
Why Is WND Hiding That Central Birther Premise Has Been Demolished? Topic: WorldNetDaily
A Sept. 11 WorldNetDaily article by Jerome Corsi makes a big deal out of "an authentic Hawaii Department of Health long-form birth certificate issued in 1961" as a way to attack Barack Obama's long-form birth certificate. But it appears that Corsi is hiding a crucial fact about that certificate.
The Obama Conspiracy blog is reporting that the "authentic" certificate Corsi is citing as a lower certificate number than Obama's despite being dated 19 days later. One of Corsi's major arguments to support the idea that Obama's certificate is a fake, as he detailed in an April 27 article, is that it was out of order from a pair of birth certificates known as the Nordyke twins.
Corsi asked: "how was it possible that the Nordyke twins had their birth certificates accepted by the registrar general in Hawaii three days later than the registrar general accepted Obama's birth certificate, when the twins' numbers are lower than Obama's number?" The answer, of course, is that more than one person was processing birth certificates in the Hawaii Department of Health office -- but that is too simple a answer for Corsi, who instead felt the need to blow it up into a conspiracy.
Speaking of conspiracies, it seems WND has engaged in a conspiracy of silence over this revelation. Obama Consipracy reports that WND originally posted the "authentic" birth certificate with its number faintly displayed, but later substituted it with a version with the number completely blanked out.
John Woodman, who has recently released a book debunking the claims of Corsi and other birthers (which, of course, Corsi and WND have studiously ignored so far), has the incriminating screenshots on his blog.
Any chance Corsi and WND will come clean about their deception? Don't count on it -- peddling birther conspiracies is how WND makes its money these days, and debunking one of its own conspiracies is not in its business model.
NewsBusters' Sheppard Is Upset Chuck Todd Made A Promo Ad For His Employer Topic: NewsBusters
In the tradition of his regularly being shocked by the non-shocking, Noel Sheppard uses a Sept. 10 NewsBusters post to have himself a big ol' freakout about something that is decidedly un-freaky.
What's Sheppard so worked up about? That Chuck Todd did an promo ad for MSNBC.
No, really, that's it. At no point does Sheppard address the content of Todd's promo ad -- which is benign -- so he's reduced to whining about how liberal MSNBC is and sneering things like:
Makes you wonder when they'll give one to President Obama.
Oh. That's right. They don't have to.
Their broadcasting is a non-stop advertisement for him.
NEW ARTICLE: WorldNetDaily's Favorite Traitor Topic: WorldNetDaily
Aaron Klein leads his "news" organization in agitating for the release of convicted spy Jonathan Pollard. Read more >>
MRC's Transgender Freakout, Part 2 Topic: Media Research Center
Last week's freakout at the existence of transgendered person Chaz Bono -- and worse, his appearance on "Dancing With the Stars" -- by the Media Research Center's Erin R. Brown was duplicated by her boss, Brent Bozell, in his Sept. 9 column.
Bozell declared that ABC chosen Bono to join the "DWTS" cast "because she’s well-known as an “LGBT” activist, with an emphasis on the 'T,'" and that he's joined on the show by "Carson Kressley, the most lecherous member of the old show 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.'" We didn't know Bozell kept track of that show's lechery level with such an eye for detail.
Like his dutiful employee, Bozell is appalled by Bono's mere existence:
This is Bono’s year of media activism, complete with a book last spring called “Transition” (promoted all over the “news” channels) and a promotional one-hour Oprah Winfrey Network special called “Becoming Chaz,” hailed as the story of a “valiant struggle of a sensitive individual to become who he really is.”
Nowhere in any of this celebration is the hard reality. Despite her low voice, and her sideburns, and her awful decision to amputate her own breasts, “Chaz” remains a woman. It’s ridiculous for ABC to argue children won’t be confused by this political-correctness crusade. The entire “transgender” propaganda movement is confused. Indeed, there is a new sexual category to go alongside G, L, B, and T – “Q” for questioning.
ABC and the rest of the media universe can do all the pretending they want, but that’s not going to make Chaz a real male.
Apparently, like Brown, Bozell thinks transgenders should be hidden away, with nobody allowed to speak of their existence.
You won't hear me complain that Obama is taking his 17th vacation in the last two-and-half years.
You won't hear me suggest it sends a bad signal to the millions of Americans hurting economically – many of whom haven't been able to afford a single, modest vacation since Obama took office.
And you certainly won't hear me suggest that Obama is somehow needed in Washington to deal with a multitude of crises, especially the economy he has ravaged.
There's an old adage in Washington that the only time the country is safe is when Congress is out of session. With a president who thinks he's a legislator and a lawmaker, one who signs executive orders like Derek Jeter signs autographs, the nation is indeed safer when Obama is on an extended holiday.
[...]
We should be grateful the man has no work ethic. Just imagine the damage he would have done to the country if he did. For heaven's sake, he has turned the country into an economic basket case working part time!
The fact is, I wouldn't care if Obama was a Muslim if he weren't such an arrogant, lazy, snotty, lying socialist. So far as I can tell, he doesn't prostrate himself and pray to Mecca five times a day, and I can't quite picture him turning up his nose at a bacon cheeseburger. It's all the things he does do that make him such a pain in the butt.
Israel, thanks to the so-called "Arab Spring" so welcomed by our pro-Muslim President Barack Hussein Obama, is now surrounded by Arab states, like Egypt, that are even more hostile to the Jewish and Christian people.
To those who still think they're liberals, but who have nonetheless concluded that President Obama couldn't pour beer out of a boot with the instructions printed on its heel, I would ask: Are you really going to continue to yowl about Bush and Cheney and Halliburton as we tumble over the falls? Can you not put aside blind party loyalty and parroted catty quips aimed at Michele Bachmann and Glenn Beck long enough to realize that it is an ideology, not a party, that threatens that which we all hold dear?
Because if you really believe that hard-line socialism isn't about to overtake us, or that it is in fact an appropriate alternative for America, then you're either deluded, stupid, or evil.
It is, however, a reality that must be recognized and dealt with as we approach a United Nation's General Assembly meeting this month, which – to futher Arab interests – is bent on creating a Palestinian state on the West Bank. While our "mullah in chief," Barack Hussein Obama, has said that the United States will veto any such resolution, this "commitment" is not convincing in the long term. For Obama's support of Israel at the U.N. is simply by political necessity at this time, since his poll numbers are dismal and he needs to hold support in the American Jewish community to have any chance of being re-elected in 2012. Over the longer term, Obama and his band of self-hating Jewish leftist/socialist advisers in the White House, are bent not only on the destruction of the Jewish state, but the advancement of Muslim interests domestically and around the world. Having been born to a Muslim Kenyan father, the president is a Muslim according to Islamic law, and he certainly has shown these sympathies over the last few years – including a widely viewed YouTube clip showing a Freudian slip to ABC's George Stephanopoulos, where Obama seemingly admitted that he is of the "Muslim faith."
You would think the man who is president would be the leader in reminding Americans of what happened and would make certain we know all the details of that terrible day and their ramifications.
But then, we're not dealing with a traditional president. Barack Obama does not operate in a manner of patriotism that most Americans expect of a president and, quite frankly, are accustomed to seeing.
We expect the man who is president to put this nation first.
We expect him to honor and revere our history, our present and our future.
We expect him to be aware of our enemies and to make it a priority, for our future and safety, to locate them and wipe them out when they have attacked us and to use all means possible to prevent further incursions on our territory and freedoms.
But expectations are not reality, and the reality of today is quite different.
The man who is president, Barack Obama, has made it an ongoing practice during his term in office to diminish this country, what it stands for, what it has accomplished and its standing among other nations.
Barack Obama is so immersed in his political ideology that he cannot even speak the word "terrorists." He will not name the enemy, their identity or their goal.
Barack Obama apparently wants us to believe that everyone is a target of some amorphous group that he can't even call an "enemy."
For years, we've seen the machinations of such plans advanced by socialists. Inner plans: Convince us that they advocate for equity and brotherhood, when in fact they're the most bigoted among us. Assemble all of the stupid, the ugly, the perverted, the lazy, and enroll them into institutionalized resentment and ignorance, then mobilize them politically. Regulate and legislate medicine to the point where health care is so expensive that citizens welcome government intervention. Tax businesses to the point where they cannot afford to pay workers a living wage, nor take sufficient profit to continue operation. Sabotage major markets to stultify the economy in the aggregate, thereby proliferating widespread destitution, fear and anger. The list goes on.
The external plan: A socialist America.
Is there a cabal of black activists meeting with President Obama and high-level administration operatives to orchestrate these occurrences? I can't say for sure, but as with Cloward-Piven, it certainly would make sense, and we've seen that nothing is beneath these people. In the end, it doesn't much matter, because political operatives know how to interpret signals; many radical factions construed Obama's election as license to broaden and augment their influence. That process has only progressed, since his administration showed no inclination to condemn nor curtail their actions.
President Obama is strongly implicated. Apparently his aim is to put maximum pressure on Israel to retreat to the indefensible cease-fire lines of 1949, as he has openly demanded. While Americans are distracted by the election campaign, the administration is running an international pressure play. Stage magicians do it by misdirection. Obama does it the same way. Stage a big Jimmy Hoffa headline in Michigan, and push the Turks to provoke Israel on the same day.
MRC Report on 'The Media' Post-9/11 Curiously Omits Fox News Topic: Media Research Center
Apparently, Fox News is not part of "the media" as far as the Media Research Center is concerned.
In a new MRC "special report," Tim Graham attacked "the media spin in the Bush years" and claims that "the media" was "not objective, and it was certainly not independent of liberal partisans, leftist experts and terrorist defense lawyers." Graham makes many sweeping claims (i.e., "Under Bush, anchors and reporters painted the War on Terror as a dark era in American history where our civil liberties were vanishing"), which he illustrates only with anecdotal examples and not any sort of comprehensive analysis. It's reminiscent of Graham's so-called analysis of Huffington Post, in which he cited a mere 19 examples to draw sweeping conclusions about the content of thousands of HuffPo entries.
Graham clearly can't stop shilling for the Bush adminstration, as he attacks reporters for being insufficiently patriotic (translation: they reported bad news about the Bush administration) and played down the Abu Ghraib scandal by huffing that "he networks displayed much greater outrage for U.S. prisoner abuse than for the enemy’s murders."
As with most MRC reports, the scope is deliberately narrow -- it focuses mostly on the broadcast networks, with the occasional appearance of CNN and MSNBC, and Fox News is almost entirely absent. Graham's only mention of Fox News comes on the third-to-last paragraph of his report, which he touts how Fox reported that Iraq war protester Cindy Sheehan proclaimed herself to be a 9/11 truther.
To sum up: Graham ignores how the highest-rated cable news network covered the last 10 years of war, serves up only anecdotal clips of the rest, but portrays his report as some kind of comprehensive examination instead of the repackaging of right-wing talking points it actually is.
Newsmax Baselessly Raises Specter of Voter Fraud In NY-9 Topic: Newsmax
This Sept. 13 Newsmax article is a regurgitation of a Washington Times blog post repeating unsubstantiated claims by the campaign of Bob Turner, a Republican who's running to fill the congressional seat in New York's 9th District vacated by Anthony Weiner, that there is the possibility of "vote fraud" in the election. Neither Newsmax nor the Times provide any evidence to back up Turner's claim.
Raising the specter of voter fraud by Democrats despite the fact that it is extremely rare is a common tactic of Republicans. Ergo, Newsmax regularly does it.
A Sept. 12 WorldNetDaily article complains that "White House press secretary Jay Carney today at the administration's daily news briefing declined to allow a question about the massive funds paid to the family of Martin Luther King Jr. for the use of his image and his words on a memorial in Washington," a question that was "prepared for the news briefing by Les Kinsolving, WND's correspondent at the White House."
But as before when WND has issued such complaints, WND offers no evidence that Carney knew what Kinsolving was going to ask. Therefore, it can't logically complain that Carney "declined to allow" the question when he apparently had no idea what it would be.
Running yet another story about a question Kinsolving would have asked is simply petulant and unprofessional behavior on WND's part.
MRC's Graham Bashes CNN's Blitzer For Accurately Noting Tea Party Racism Topic: NewsBusters
Tim Graham trots out the tired liberal-bias playbook against CNN's Wolf Blitzer in a Sept. 12 NewsBusters post, complaining that he was going to serve as the host for last night's Republican presidential debate with the group Tea Party Express despite having once said that "Within the larger tea party movement that’s gained steam across the country, a small but passionate minority is also voicing what some see as racist rhetoric."
Graham certainly wasn't going to acknowledge that Blitzer was absolutely correct -- and even more so in the case of the debate co-sponsor.
Mark Williams was the spokesman for the Tea Party Express until his long history of racially charged rhetoric finally went too far when he penned a blog post mocking NAACP Benjamiin Jealous in the form of a letter to Abraham Lincoln asking him to reinstate slavery because all blacks really want are "Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house." Williams' racist blog post got him and his Tea Party Express kicked out of the National Tea Party Federation.
Interestingly, of the threeNewsBustersposts that reference Williams' rant, none explicitly condemn it. In one of them, Noel Sheppard rants about "disgustingly offensive anti-Tea Party rhetoric" but offers no opinion about Williams' disgustingly offensive rhetoric.
WND Flies Airplane With Birther Banner Over GOP Debate Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily goes for the lamest stunt in the book to fuel its birther obsession: hiring an airplane to fly a banner stating "Where's the Real Birth Certificate?" over the Republican debate in Florida.
Yeah, lame stunts are pretty much all they have at this point.
NewsBusters: Criticizing Bush Makes You A Sociopath Topic: NewsBusters
Sure, the conservative outrage about Paul Krugman's New York Times blog post stating how "Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in" on the 9/11 attacks to "justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons" was completely predictable. But Matthew Sheffield takes it to the next level in a Sept. 11 NewsBusters post, issuing a highly personal attack on Krugman:
On this solemn commemorative day, we at NewsBusters have made a point of holding our rhetorical fire against liberals as a gesture of respect to those who lost their lives that day and subsequently. There is much we could say and, starting tomorrow, will say.
An exception has to be made for one Paul Krugman, who seems, earlier life, to have been a decent and civilized person. Since he began writing a column for the New York Times, however, Krugman has experienced a veritable descent into madness, principally due to Bush Derangement Syndrome.
[...]
Having no respect for the dead—all 2,977 of them—is hardly the only sin evinced by Krugman today, though. His posting makes no attempt to make an argument and he didn't seem to even bother spell-checking it.
Cowardice is another. It takes a special kind of sociopath to make a hateful remark and then run away when sane people choose to make a response. Why else would he have disabled comments on his post?
It’s possible that Krugman’s rant was prompted purely by a venal desire to gin up hits for the pitiful collection of ravings otherwise known as his blog, “The Conscience of a Liberal.” Such types of shameless sociopaths do exist after all.
Of course, if Krugman is a sociopath for making supposedly inappropriate 9/11-related remarks, then so is conservative columnist Hugh Hewitt, who just a week after 9/11 doubted that he could have offered any support to the president had that president been Al Gore.
Sheffield provides no evidence that Krugman's assessment is wrong -- meaning that his real complaint is that Krugman said it at all, and that anyone who criticizes Bush and other Republicans is a sociopath. Really, Matthew?
Ellis Washington Is Still Fighting Evolution Topic: WorldNetDaily
Ellis Washington devotes his Sept. 9 WorldNetDaily column to ranting about evolution with all the unseriousness we've come to expect from him. To wit:
What of derivative theories of evolution like the Big Bang theory – that all matter and living things in the universe, including mankind, came about 13.7 billion years ago from an explosion? I'm not a scientist, but I was taught in elementary school that explosions destroy things, not create them.
Uh, yeah. Washington continues:
These are exceedingly important questions not only because for over 150 years evolution has indoctrinated and perverted science virtually beyond redemption, but because Darwinian philosophy and its speculative suppositions have totally dominated the entire academy including: law, religion, philosophy, politics, economics, education, culture and society under the ancillary philosophy of Social Darwinism created by Herbert Spencer who also coined the phrase, "Survival of the fittest" – the totalitarian motto 20th-century dictators, including Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot and many other tyrants, used as a pretext for control, domination, suppression of liberty and the genocide of hundreds of millions of people.
As we've repeatedly pointed out every time Washington does this, social Darwinism is not an "ancillary philosophy" to Darwinism -- the idea of survival of the fittest existed long before Darwin. And if Wikipedia is to be believed, Herbert Spencer didn't believe in the kind of social Darwinism Washington is accusing him of.
Washington went on to complain of a law review article he wrote: "after being accepted then rejected by an American law journal for no rational reason, I was forced to publish this work in a Romanian journal – the former communist country of the murderous dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. How's that for irony?" Of course, the unnamed law journal that supposedly accepted his article, on the subject of juvenile justice, likely had a good reason for rejecting it: it's a political screed.
We'll spare you the substance, if you can call it that, of the 26-page article and quote from its conclusion, which reads suspciously like one of his WND columns:
The existence of a separate juvenile justice system that functions outside of legitimate constitutional jurisprudence should be viewed by anyone with a rudimentary understanding of Constitutional law, as a monumental fraud. The philosophy underlying juvenile law in America is based primarily in relativism and a radical egalitarian worldview. The juvenile justice system is a direct outgrowth of the Progressive movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
[...]
Beneath the jurisprudence of the juvenile justice system facade lies a spurious intellectual foundation whereby the requirements of the state are conjoined by Austinian jurisprudence—He who is sovereign rules, Kantian empiricism, Darwinian evolution, progressivism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Marxist socialism. Thus, the philosophical assumptions of juvenile law are well received in the academy of modern times while the implementation of more child autonomy and less parental control over the child so trumpeted by the academic class since the 1960s, has only driven a wedge between the parent and child thus eroding substantive familial bonds, despite the fact that previous generations treated the family as a sacred relationship ordained by God. Now, due in large part to culturally denigrating philosophies intellectual suppositions by Darwin, Marx, Freud, Dewey, Wilson, FDR, LBJ, Obama and others, these ideas have been codified into juvenile law statues and given the imprimatur stamp of “law” by judicial mandates, the fallout is that the family is becoming less and less a spiritual, cohesive unit and the primary building block of society, and more and more an impersonal tool of a secular humanist, leviathan state to be manipulated, controlled and used for its own diabolical ends. Let us never forget that the entire juvenile justice system in America was created in the name of the children. May Congress have the political will to dismantle the juvenile justice system in the name of the children.
Washington thinks this is a law review-caliber article? No wonder he couldn't get it published in this country.
CNS Praises Media For Rallying Around Bush After 9/11 Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com director of communications Craig Bannister touts the media's initial response to 9/11 in a Sept. 9 CNS item:
The television media’s coverage of the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks showed us what the news media could, and should, be.
From ABC to MSNBC, from Fox News and CNN to the History Channel, the media’s solemn, respectful, patriotic coverage consoled, inspired, and united an embattled nation in shock.
Accounts of selfless acts of heroism punctuated the coverage of the chaos, devastation, and destruction. Hosts proclaimed their patriotism and rallied the nation around President Bush as he promised a swift and appropriate response to the attacks.
One gets the feeling that the important part to Bannister is the "rallied the nation around President Bush" stuff. We suspect he would not be so solicitous of the media had they behaved the same way toward a President Gore.
