The rest is here:
Bring us Your Poor, Your Tired, Your Huddled, Illegal Masses…

“I decline utterly to be impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire.”

–Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 1927

For the past 6 years, Chris Matthews has hosted a show in which guests gleefully reported the purported success of both indigenous insurgents and foreign al Qaeda fighters in Iraq.  On his network, MSNBC, that became the default setting.  They were the publicity arm of al Qaeda.  Car bombs led the news, successful American battles, infrastructure completion, or the like were not even news.  Bagdad Bob had nothing on them.

Chris would evoke the worst kind of moral equivalence by constantly posing some form of this the question, “Wouldn’t you be mad if someone invaded America and imposed a different form of government they thought was better?  Wouldn’t you fight back?”

Anyone who thought this was unpatriotic was the worst kind of scoundrel, an unquestioning lackey of the Bush Administration who was trying to quash dissent, the highest form of patriotism.

Losing a war was chump change compared to defeating evil Republicans.

Now, finally, Chris Matthews has spotted REAL anti-Americanism—people who were happy that President Obama was humiliated in his vanity-laden attempt to bring the Olympics to Chicago.

Oh, the horror.

Matthews’s Monday show intro was unintentionally revealing, though not part of the video on the MSNBC website:

CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: Anti-American?  Let’s play HARDBALL.  Good evening. I’m Chris Matthews in Washington. Leading off tonight:

The right roots against America. Remember how Republicans questioned Democrats’ patriotism during the Bush years, how you were either with Bush or with the terrorists? So what do we make the of the glee some prominent Republicans felt when Chicago and President Obama lost its Olympics bid? It’s one thing to argue politics and policy, what’s good and what’s bad for America. That’s what we do right here on HARDBALL. It’s another thing to root for America to fail.

Yeah, whether America wins a war or keeps thousands of innocent Americans are massacred on a normal work day—or Chicago gets the Olympics.  Same thing.  We won’t mention that more than HALF OF CHICAGO didn’t want the Olympics.

But the comparison tells us more about Chris Matthews than he meant to reveal, or wants to admit about his side of the political divide. Is he finally admitting that liberals rooted against America winning the war in Iraq so they could use it against George Bush?

Guest Terry Jeffrey did a great job of trying to bring a perspective of reality to Chris’s newfound feverish patriotism—which is really Obamism:

JEFFREY: I don’t think the city of Chicago getting the Olympics is synonymous with a vital national interest of the United States. I mean, you could be from Chicago and not want the Olympics to come to Chicago.

Exactly right.  Later, Jeffery got to the main point of who roots for America, which caused Matthews to lose it and throw out a mangled version of Churchill’s great quote.

MATTHEWS: You don’t think-just to get back to our point here, you don’t sense that on the right-well, maybe I’m asking the wrong person to agree with this-that there is a goal here that anything where there’s a contest, a chance to prove its success, whether it’s ideological, whether it’s pro-American or political or partisan, any chance for Barack Obama to fail, your side is going to root for him to fail, whatever it is. He must fail at any moment. Whether it’s health care, whether it’s the Olympics, whatever it is, you will cheer if he fails. Are you denying that now?

JEFFREY: Not any place, most places. There’s one place, clearly, where conservatives ought not want him to fail, and that…

MATTHEWS: No, but don’t be selective. Isn’t it true…

JEFFREY: No, it’s not true.

MATTHEWS: … that the evidence of this past week is, wherever he attempts to do something, you guys want him to stumble.

JEFFREY: No, actually, that’s true because…

MATTHEWS: Give me an example where you’re rooting for him.

JEFFREY: Well, let me give you an example. I’m very much rooting that what President Obama chooses to do, which he hasn’t yet chosen to do, in Afghanistan works because all Americans share an interest in our country succeeding in Afghanistan. It’s important for our national security that it happens. I hope his policy in Iraq succeeds. I hope what he does with the Gitmo prisoners, Chris, succeeds. I think conservatives are very much worried that he will not succeed because they think his policies in those areas may be wrong-headed.

On the domestic front, I think conservatives are opposed to just about everything President Obama is trying to do because he’s trying to augment the power of government over our lives and diminish our individual freedom. So to the degree that his ability to leverage the Democrats in Congress to attain his agenda is diminished, that’s a good thing for the United States of America….

MATTHEWS: … most of this began last fall under George Bush. The bringing in of Hank Paulson from Goldman Sachs, the whole works, the whole downfall of Wall Street, the attempt to bail out Wall Street, the banking industry, the failure of General Motors and those industries began long before Barack Obama came into office. He came in to clean up the mess, and I refuse not to take sides between the fire brigade and the fire. He’s the fire brigade. Your side was the fire.

During his softball interview with Alan “Republicans want you to die in the health care holocaust” Grayson, Matthews ludicrously exclaimed “I don’t always take sides, but you are right!”  Now we get it, Republicans are the fire, Barack Obama is the fire brigade.

However, when it comes to the American military versus America’s real enemies, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran—or in the case of civilization versus barbarians in, say Gaza, Chris Matthews has a lot harder time discerning who is the fire brigade.

To use Chris’s mangled analogy, he and his colleagues spent 5 years reporting on deaths and injuries to the fire brigade, but never mentioned any of the fires they put out.  But don’t you DARE call that anti-American.

ACORN boss and embezzlement coverup co-conspirator Bertha Lewis spins a yarn about ACORN at Washington, D.C.'s National Press Club yesterday.

The current chief organizer of ACORN, who was up to her eyeballs in the $1 million embezzlement scandal at the embattled radical leftist group, lied and lied and lied some more in an appearance at the National Press Club yesterday.

The contemptible Bertha Lewis, who now prefers to call herself “CEO” of ACORN, gave a “grand performance” at the press club, Glenn Beck said on his TV show Tuesday. Beck’s right. Maybe she should get nominated for an Oscar.

A small sample of the untruths that issued from her mouth:

CLAIM: After news of the embezzlement broke, ACORN “immediately hired outside professionals, no organizers. We may be brilliant organizers, but we needed real financial professionals, real legal professionals, to come in.”

FACT: If ACORN actually hired such people, it has kept evidence of those hirings under wraps. I don’t believe her.

CLAIM: Lewis says ACORN “began the decoupling of over a hundred corporations and organizations under my watch. We took apart that network with transparency and stability.”

FACT: I am not aware of any evidence supporting Lewis’s claim. Prove it, ACORN. Talk is cheap.

CLAIM: “And for nearly 40 years, ACORN has had the privilege to stand with our 500,000 member families fighting for those who typically don’t have a voice.”

FACT: ACORN’s own website says it has “over 400,000 member families,” whatever that means. Yes, 500,000 is more than 400,000, but you can’t just round up from an indefinite figure like “over 400,000.”

Those are just a few of Lewis’ lies from yesterday.

Nor did Lewis say much about her own role in covering up the embezzlement perpetrated by founder Wade Rathke’s brother. After news of the theft broke, Lewis drove out honest ACORN national board members who dared to ask questions.

Lewis, who has high-level contacts within the Marxist governments of Venezuela and Bolivia, also brought out the good ole stand-by smear yesterday, i.e. that everyone who criticizes ACORN is racist. Fortunately, now that the undercover sting videos last month showed Americans the true face of ACORN, the smear, which used to send Republicans and other ACORN critics running, isn’t working too well.

Of course the New York Times highlighted the only part of Lewis’s talk that appealed to it, namely her assertion that ACORN is somehow a victim of a new kind of McCarthyism.  Said Lewis (according to a press club transcript):

The RNC, every single day, because we’ve been inflated as the bogeyman, raises almost $2 million dollars a day every day. And this form of modern day ACORN McCarthyism has got to stop. Last week, members of Congress were asked, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of ACORN?” Everybody should take pause at that. Everybody should say, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. This is not how we have discourse. This is not how we have disagreement in this country, by demonizing someone without due process.” This whole voting to de-fund ACORN, it’s all sensational, but it’s unconstitutional. So all we’re saying is, you know, hold us to a standard of the law. Then hold the folks that made those films to the same standard of the law.

On Monday’s Morning Joe, “conservative” (for MSNBC) host Joe Scarborough moderated a panel discussion that would be the main talking point for the day on the liberal network— conservative celebration at Obama’s humiliation in Copenhagen.

Looking as glum as if his dog just died, and to top it all off, he couldn’t get his cup of morning joe, Scarborough began the discussion by mentioning his weekend column in which he asked, “What would have happened if liberals had cheered the United States not getting the Olympics?”

Joe played the ill-considered video from the previously very effective Americans for Prosperity as people in their workshop heard the news and cheered.  We’ll save that topic for a future post.

Next up was a clip of Rush Limbaugh, who buoyantly called it the “worst day in the Obama presidency,” and then Rush repeated the refrain taught to New Jersey school kids, “Mmm, mmm, MMM! Barack Hussein Obama, mmm, mmm MMM!”

Joe then handed the discussion off to the BBC’s U.S. correspondent Katty Kay, who is about a year behind the popular culture when it comes to the outrage of the moment.

KATTY KAY, BBC:  “…Listening to that Rush Limbaugh clip again, and I don’t think I really want to hear it again for a fourth or fifth time, is that it’s not Barack Obama it’s Barack HUSSEIN Obama, Barack HUSSEIN Obama– there’s something insidious going on there too with the repetition of his middle name…

The BBC, the network that brought us the classic humor of Monty Python and the original version of The Office, has assigned a particularly humorless drone to cover United States politics for the BBC news.

If you’re going to discuss current events, Katty, try to keep up.  Apparently, this constant talking head commentator is the only person on the continent who cares about politics and hasn’t seen this:

Weirdly, not one of the other panelists, Americans all, seemed to see how Katty had stepped in it, including Joe.  Maybe his usually sharp sidekick Willie Geist wasn’t paying attention.

Now, we already know Kay has a strange sense of humor— and propriety.  She didn’t seem to have any problem when Ted Kennedy biographer Edward Klein revealed to her on NPR, that Mary Jo Kopechne’s chauffer liked to tell Chappaquiddick jokes.

KLEIN TO WAMU RADIO HOST KATTY KAY: I don’t know if you know this or not, but one of his favorite topics of humor was indeed Chappaquiddick itself. And he would ask people, “Have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?” That is just the most amazing thing. It’s not that he didn’t feel remorse about the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, but that he still always saw the other side of everything and the ridiculous side of things, too.

But it’s one thing for the Limey not to get the subtext of Rush Limbaugh’s daily media tweak, Media Matters shows once again, they are out of touch, too.  They posted the Morning Joe video at the top of this article, because they thought it bolstered their point, not realizing how stupid the people agreeing with them look.

Ironically, last week on Fox News, Charles Krauthammer, showed a sense of British humor history, when he described the public option during a recent Special Report panel, as being a “dead parrot” which had been “nailed to its perch.”

Maybe someone should send this to Joe Scarborough, who looked like he could use a good laugh when he glumly declared that all of the anger at Obama was “disgusting.”

Or maybe he just needs a break.  Joe seems to be getting Stockholm Syndrome from hanging out at MSNBC too long.  I must have missed Joe calling it “disgusting” that every commentator gleefully exaggerated al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgent successes with the regularity of Bagdad Bob, while ignoring any American success until the surge was basically over.

Of course, calling that “unpatriotic” was oppressive and McCarthyite, right?  It’s not nearly as serious as the Olympics…

The Media Matters irony detector must’ve been in the shop on September 16, when they roused themselves to mock Glenn Beck… for making a joke.

Here’s what they wrote:

Beck: [politically outspoken UK band] Muse is “brilliant,” buy their new album;
Muse: Please retract your endorsement

Then Media Matters helpfully posts five minutes of audio from Beck’s radio show. After praising the British musical group Muse at length, Beck returns after the commercial break and says:

I just got an email from representatives of Muse. They would like me to retract my endorsement. My apologies to Muse for saying that I like them. I didn’t mean to destroy all their credibility and coolness. Let me just set the record straight. Muse – I hate them. It’s an awful album and you should never go out and buy it.

Frankly, I’m a bit shocked by Beck’s fondness for Muse. I can’t believe he doesn’t know that one of the musicians in Muse is a “9/11 Truther,” who also asserts the contradictory view that “America asked for it.” After all, Van Jones, a favorite target of Beck’s before his resignation as White House “green jobs czar,” was connected to those who believe “9/11 was an inside job.”

Amusingly, Media Matters is either too lazy or too dumb to even raise those contradictions in this particular “critique” of Glenn Beck — if you can really call a web post consisting entirely of a snarky headline and a five-minute audio clip a “critique.” It’s like I’m doing their job for them. Maybe George Soros, the far-left billionaire who funds Media Matters, should cut me a check…

Now, my first clue that Beck was joshing about getting that email and his subsequent “retraction” was that you could hear his crew laughing in the background. My second clue was Beck’s sarcastic tone. (Oh, and Media Matters: if you’re reading this — now I’m being sarcastic, see? You’re welcome…)

No one paid much attention to this “news story” until yesterday, when the “controversy” hit the British press.

Earlier this week, the UK supermarket chain Waitrose pulled its ads off the British feed for FOX News, citing “customer concerns” about Beck’s statement earlier this year that President Barack Obama is “a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”

So with Beck’s name making news, British reporters did weird things (sarcasm) like Googling Beck’s name, and they found the Media Matters post about Muse. Then they did something really crazy (sarcasm) and called the president of Beck’s production company — long distance, even! (sarcasm) — to ask if Muse had really sent that email to Beck

And he told the reporters the bit about getting the email was a joke.

There were around 300 stories on Google today about Media Matters’ outrage over an obvious (and forgettable) “morning zoo” gag on Beck’s radio show.

Which means Media Matters is being mocked around the world for being a bunch of humorless, hyper-vigilant, tone-deaf leftists who evidently don’t know how to dial a phone, or just can’t be bothered to do so.

A pretty nice punchline. But I doubt Media Matters gets it, even now.

Harry Hay: "Safe Schools Czar" Kevin Jennings' hero

You can almost smell the flop sweat at Media Matters. They’re dancing as fast as they can, to keep new victim-hero, “safe schools czar” Kevin Jennings, from getting the hook.

Here’s Media Matters’ latest desperate attempt to steer attention away from Jennings, by playing “shoot the messenger”: “Wash. Times continues to smear Jennings with false claim that he failed to report ’sexual abuse’ of student.”

Having redeemed itself somewhat by denouncing Roman Polanski and his supporters in no uncertain terms, Media Matters is now minimizing the well-documented fact that after one of his high-school students told him he’d had sex with a stranger whom he’d met at the bus station, Jennings didn’t report the incident to authorities, choosing instead to save it as a favorite anecdote in his many books and speeches.

Media Matters’ new spin on the story is that the boy in question was sixteen years old — the legal age of consent in Massachusetts!

Fine. (I guess.) But the boy’s confession to Jennings could easily be interpreted as cry for help. Even Jennings (admittedly under considerable public pressure) now says, “I can see how I should have handled this situation differently.”

If the boy had told Jennings he was a drunk driver, would Media Matters’ have exclaimed: “So? The kid had a driver’s licence”? (Speaking of which: Media Matters even posts a copy of the student’s actual driver’s licence to prove his age at the time. And yet they make fun of “birthers”…)

For folks who regularly denigrate organized religion, it’s astonishing how often the Left reverts to Jesuitical, legalistic phariseeism when cornered.

Normal people, on the other had, read about the Jennings incident and find it troubling on many levels. Of course, in the Left’s eyes, “normal people” are just future leftists who haven’t had their consciousness sufficiently raised, and who are still hopelessly mired in backward bourgeois morality.

So what, specifically, is Media Matters’ “gotcha” today? It’s that the Washington Times:

also advanced the manufactured link between Jennings and the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) because of Jennings’ past praise of gay rights activist Harry Hay. In fact [... in] the 1997 speech in which Jennings mentioned Hay, Jennings’ praise was of Hay’s work as an early gay rights activist and had nothing to do with NAMBLA.

Media Matters stresses again and again today that the word “NAMBLA” never appears once in Jennings’ speech. And they’re absolutely right.

Yet, to borrow from Trotsky: while Jennings may not be very interested in NAMBLA, NAMBLA was of considerable interest to Harry Hay, according to his heavily footnoted Wikipedia entry :

In the early 1980s, Hay joined other early gay rights activists protesting the exclusion of the North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) from participation in LGBT social movements, most noticeably pride parades–arguably the most visible signs of LGBT culture–on the grounds that such exclusions constituted a betrayal by the gay community. In 1983, at a New York University forum, sponsored by an on-campus gay organization, he remarked “[I]f the parents and friends of gays are truly friends of gays, they would know from their gay kids that the relationship with an older man is precisely what thirteen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-year-old kids need more than anything else in the world.” In 1986 Hay was confronted by police when he attempted to march in the Los Angeles pride parade, from which NAMBLA had been banned, with a sign reading “NAMBLA walks with me.” Hay refused to participate in the official 1994 parade in New York City commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots because of its exclusionary policies.

The same leftists who were delighted to indulge in faux outrage and moral posturing over a 2002 speech that Trent Lott delivered on ex-Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday, are now unwilling to “connect the dots” when those involved are on “their” side.

Glenn Beck has become a hot topic of discussion lately on the cable news programs. Branding him as the new leader of the conservative movement and the Republican Party, many competitors are looking to destroy the man. On her new CNN program, for instance, Joy Behar made another in a long line of direct attacks on Beck during a September 30th interview with Ann Coulter; Coulter’s response was brilliant:

Behar: People hate [Beck] more than they used to hate you.

Coulter: There is a liberal obsession with “tell us who your leader is.”  And you realize why liberals want to know is because this is how they argue: they find who the leader is and they destroy him…. We’ve decided we’re not going with a leader this time, so you’re going to have to argue with us on the facts.”

Indeed, members of the media, and leftists generally, have begun to attack Beck with a vengeance.  NewsReal has repeatedly shown that Beck is a prime target, now that he has helped take down the self-avowed communist Van Jones and the criminal enterprise known as ACORN.  While NewsReal has had some differences with Beck, our bloggers have found themselves on his side in most battles and have defended him.

But now, a number of prominent conservatives and Republicans – among them MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, radio host Michael Savage, and Senator Lindsey Graham — have begun taking swipes at Beck as well. Scarborough, for his part, has advised that Republicans running for President in 2012 ought to publicly repudiate the broadcaster. Savage repeatedly refers to Beck on his show by such smears as ”the hemorrhoid,” ”a fraudster,” and a “rip-off artist.” And on the latest Fox News Sunday, Senator Graham made it very clear that Beck has nothing to do with the Republican Party, and that he (Graham) doesn’t watch Beck’s show.

Conservatives don’t do themselves any favors by turning their backs on a person who is helping to shed a bright light on so many of the left’s hidden agendas and corrupt activities. Certainly anyone is perfectly entitled to disagree with Beck — but let’s not dump him. Coulter is correct in saying that while Beck is not the leader of the political right, neither is he its enemy.

Kevin Jennings, "Safe Schools Czar"

On the left, using so-called scare quotes has become a favored polemical trick. You know what I mean: they put quotation marks around words or phrases, either to denote sarcasm and cynicism, or to engender doubt about a concept’s value and accuracy.

Scare quotes are a kind of hipster secret handshake — a shorthand way of saying, “Of course, superior people like you and I ‘get’ how self-evidently silly XYZ is…” To normal folks, it’s a tiresome tactic that wore out whatever welcome it had, around the time Douglas Coupland published his third novel.

Now Media Matters is at it again, with a new post on their site: “Conservative media unleash anti-gay rhetoric in attacks on Jennings”

“Jennings” being Kevin Jennings, the Obama administration’s “safe schools czar.” Recently, FOX News reported that:

President Obama’s “safe schools czar” is a former schoolteacher who has advocated promoting homosexuality in schools, written about his past drug abuse, expressed his contempt for religion and detailed an incident in which he did not report an underage student who told him he was having sex with older men.

(…)

Jennings was appointed to the position largely because of his longtime record of working to end bullying and discrimination in schools. In 1990, as a teacher in Massachusetts, he founded the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), which now has over 40 chapters at schools nationwide.

During the incident regarding the underage student (who confessed that he’d had sex with a strange man he’d met at the bus station) Jenning’s only concern seemed to be whether or not a condom had been used during the encounter. We know this because, although the incident occurred twenty-one years ago, Jennings has related the story as a major turning point in his life, in two books, and in many speeches, including the one recorded below:

“In their attacks on Jennings,” says Media Matters today, “numerous conservative media figures have resorted to thinly veiled homophobic appeals to paint Jennings, who is gay, as a ‘radical’ ‘gay activist’ with an ‘agenda’ of ‘promoting homosexuality in schools,’ and have misrepresented or distorted Jennings’ previous comments about religion and tolerance.”

See what I mean about scare quotes?

Now let’s see: if Kevin Jennings cannot accurately be described as a “gay activist,” I don’t know who can. My first clue was that he founded an activist organization twenty years ago with the word “gay” in its name.

But is Jennings a “radical”? Well, some people would say, based upon their sincerely held religious, moral and political convictions that, by definition, any “gay activist” is a “radical” one.

However, let’s stick to the more serious accusation about Jennings and his group “promoting homosexuality in schools.” Let’s look at one program sponsored by GLSEN. Readers can decide for themselves if the word “promoting” is or is not accurate.

At this point, credit is due to Pamela Geller and a handful of other bloggers, who’ve been posting information about Kevin Jennings and GLSEN for a long time. (WARNING: in its entirety, the post below contains sexually explicit language which may be disturbing):

The Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN) is a national homosexual activist group targeting children in the public schools. Its founder, Kevin Jennings, was recently appointed to a high position in U. S. Department of Education by Barack Obama. GLSEN is part of the tax-supported Massachusetts Commission on Gay Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender Youth. (In fact, GLSEN’s membership in that commission is mandated by law!)

On March 25, 2000, GLSEN put on a conference called “TeachOut” for kids across and public school teachers across Massachusetts. This conference was co-sponsored by the Massachusetts Department of Education.

At this conference children as young as 12 years old were taught by state employees how to engage in various extremely dangerous (and disgusting) homosexual sex acts.

Again: the rest of that blog post contains sexually graphic language.

I’ll let Ann Coulter have the last word. In the segment below, she calls Jennings “another Bill Ayers” (who, besides being a terrorist, is also an educator), and then suggests that “Obama make Roman Polanski the safe schools czar [instead], which would satisfy the Hollywood Left“:

Morning Joe is one of only a few shows on MSNBC that conservatives can watch without being insulted every couple of minutes. Of course, that doesn’t mean much considering that the network employs talk-show hosts like Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, but to give credit where credit is due — Morning Joe is normally OK.

Except when the show’s producers force co-host Willie Geist to talk about Sarah Palin.

On Thursday, the presenter talked about Palin’s upcoming book Going Rogue: An American Life. Even though the cover of the governor’s memoir hasn’t been printed yet and the book is due to appear in bookshops November 17th, it already tops the bestseller lists of both Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

That’s a shock for liberals like Geist, who never get enough of telling their audiences that Palin shouldn’t be taken seriously. They say she is a goofball. An intellectual lightweight. She doesn’t have a chance at winning national elections. She’s even more stupid than George W. Bush.

You’re familiar with the usual talking points, I’m sure.

So what’s an angry leftist going to do when Palin makes headlines by authoring a book that’s a bestseller two months before it’s published? That’s right, simply parrot the same hackneyed talking points which they used to discredit her so successfully last year.

Instead of taking her seriously and noting the obvious — that the “unprecedented” sales figures are definite proof that Palin is a force to be reckoned with — Geist showed the infamous file footage of the governor chatting with a reporter while turkeys were being slaughtered behind her. “Is she also going to explain this,” Geist wondered?

It’s a typical leftist tactic: after all, “ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”

What does Palin have to do for MSNBC to take her seriously? If writing a bestselling book doesn’t do the trick, what will? Or isn’t this about Palin as much as it is about the network itself and its political agenda?

The answer to that question is self-evident.

On Tuesday’s “O’Reilly Factor,” Glenn Beck explained why he doesn’t trust public schools to educate his children:

Because I saw a change in my older kids when they went to school. And I also — I just don’t like revisionist history. I don’t like the fact — when my daughter, my second to oldest daughter decided she was going to go to college and she was going to study ancient history, I said, “How about some current history? You know, America is kind of good. How about, you know, studying some…”

The enthusiastic home-schooling father said his daughter told him, ”Dad, American history, every time I look into it, we’re always on the wrong side. We always are doing the wrong thing.”

This depressed Beck. He said he thought to himself that if his daughter, growing up in his household which is filled with flag-waving and patriotism “she still can’t beat it…there’s no chance.”

Works for me.

Beck examined another piece of leftist propaganda on a recent show. That anti-capitalist, anti-individualist video made by former Greenpeace employee Annie Leonard and the extreme-left Tides Center, is being shown to schoolchildren across America.

Meanwhile, the doltish Joy Behar of the TV show “The View” trashed Beck. “He was an alcoholic and a drug addict at one time … and it sort of follows, yeah, that he would be crazy now,” she said. Keep it classy, Joy.

Remember this?

JIMMY CARTER, FMR. U.S. PRESIDENT:  I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he‘s African-American.  I live in the South, and I have seen the South come a long way and I have seen the rest of the country that shared the South‘s attitude towards minority groups at that time, particularly African-Americans.  And that racism inclination still exists.  And I think it‘s bubbled up to the surface because of the belief among many white people—not just in the South but around the country—that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country.  It‘s an abominable circumstance and grieves me and concerns me very deeply.

Apparently, you only think you do.

CNN’s Candy Crowley thought so too.  Check out this exchange she had with Jimmy Carter this morning, while she was at the Carter Library to do a puff piece on the occasion of the regrettable 39^th President’s 85^th birthday.

Crowley, who was very deferential, nonetheless asked the reasonable question about Carter’s controversial remarks, which had been disavowed pretty thoroughly by the President and his spokesman:

CROWLEY: Mr. President, let me ask you first, domestically, you made some remarks recently about how you felt about the protesters that were protesting against President Obama. You said, overall, you thought the protesters, were upset that there was a black president, that there was racism involved. You said that many people…

J. CARTER: By the way, that’s not what I said.

CROWLEY: OK…

J. CARTER: I said, those on the fringe element that had the vituperative personal attacks on president Obama, those were the ones that I included…

CROWLEY: Your first remarks were that overall…

J. CARTER: No, it wasn’t. If you read the remarks carefully, you’ll see that’s not what I said. I said those that had a personal vituperative attack on president Obama as a person, that was tinged with racism, but I recognize that people who disagree with him on health care or the environment, that the vast majority of those are not tinged by racism.

CROWLEY: So you think they were taken out of context. You didn’t mean that most of those protesters out there were racist…

J. CARTER: I meant exactly what I said. What I actually said, if you look at the transcript, is just what I just repeated to you.

Well, look at the transcript.  I don’t see the words, “fringe,” or “minority” anywhere.  There are no limitations in his remarks.  In fact,” many white people—not just in the South but around the country” and “overwhelming portion” DO make an appearance.

In fact, the next day, Carter repeated his main point (along with some embellishments and additional slanders, which Ben Johnson covered here.)

CARTER: There is an inherent feeling among many people in this country that an African-American ought not be President

Again, “many people,” not a “vituperative fringe.”

Mr. Carter, I believe you.  You DID mean what you said.  It was the culmination of a week of Democrat spokespeople and surrogates for the President floating this trial balloon and hoping that the “You lie” outburst by Congressman Joe Wilson would give you the opening to make this slander.  It backfired, and the White House was nimble enough to see it wasn’t working, and they threw you under the bus.  (For a list of the FOOs — Friends Of Obama — under the bus, check out Paul Cooper’s excellent post.)

And what you said clearly and plainly was that the majority of anger directed at the President came from racism.  Don’t give us this read the transcript “carefully” garbage.  You are a public speaker with decades of experience.  You knew what you were saying, and the general public is not expected to read between the lines to see if you left any wiggle room.  Had the public saluted when you ran this garbage up the flagpole, you would today be taking credit for having been the first person with your stature to sound the alarm.

So, Jimmah, is that bus heavy?  Good luck trying to crawl out from under… Of course your outrageous and predictable remarks near the end of this interview, saying that Iran is only reacting to Israeli and American aggression to “defend” itself, won’t help you in that effort.

Marc Lamont Hill's New Twitter Background

So here’s the question of the day: why did Fox News contributor Marc Lamont Hill change the background of his Twitter page from that of cop killer Assata Shakur to boxing legend Muhammad Ali?

Could it have anything to do with being challenged on this by David Horowitz and AIM’s Cliff Kincaid?

There can only be two possible explanations for Hill’s change of image:

1. He’s come to realize that it’s wrong to support a revolutionary fugitive who’s currently being sheltered in Fidel Castro’s Police State.

2. Similar to former Green Jobs Czar and 9/11 Truther Van Jones, Hill is attempting to cover up the radical ideology he actually embraces in order to appear “moderate,” reach the masses, and continue collecting checks from Fox News.

Don’t bet the house on #1.

That’s right: Media Matters is now going after… Ted Nugent.

Today the Media Matters website proclaims: “Nugent jumps on Beck bandwagon: Obama and Carter the “real racists” who “have been destroying black America for decades”

Then, using their patent-pending “clever leftist rhetorical trick” technology, “senior fellows” at Media Matters today cut and paste excerpts from something the “Motor City Madman” just wrote for Human Events.

And then they don’t offer any counter-arguments.

Devastating, huh?

To Media Matters, it would be self-evident to any right-thinking person of goodwill that the following statements by the legendary guitar hero are patently absurd:

The Democrats know that without the support of black Americans, their political party is doomed — at least until they can addict the immigrants who have arrived over our southern border. Get them dependent on Fedzilla handouts, and the Democrats believe they can own their votes.

Meanwhile, the condition of black America continues to erode because our government keeps it so. How sad. How totally unnecessary.

You don’t need to be an historian to see who the real racists are in America.  Jimmy Boy [Jimmy Carter], Barry O [Barack Obama] and others have been destroying black America for decades for their votes.  That’s the ugliest side of racism.

Indeed, the Democrats’ so-called “War On Poverty” was such an obvious failure, and did so much damage to generations of African-Americans, that Democratic President Bill Clinton set about dismantling the welfare system.

As John Perazzo has thoroughly documented, using footnotes and everything (as opposed to, say, just quoting people he doesn’t like):

But if we use President Johnson’s own stated goals as a measure of the War on Poverty’s effectiveness, we can only conclude that the undertaking was a monstrous failure. Dependency on the government did not decline, but skyrocketed. Between the mid-Sixties and the mid-Seventies, the dollar value of public housing rose nearly fivefold and the amount spent on food stamps rose more than tenfold. From 1965 to 1969, government-provided benefits increased by a factor of 8; by 1974 such benefits were an astounding 20 times higher than they had been in 1965. Also as of 1974, federal spending on social welfare programs amounted to 16 percent of America’s GNP, a far cry from the 8 percent figure of 1960. By 1977 the number of people receiving public assistance had more than doubled since 1960.159 By 1994 the number stood at about 5 million, five times the 1965 figure.

(…)

Writes Walter E. Williams [who happens to be black]: “Racial discrimination has nothing to do with what’s no less than an education meltdown within the black community. Where black education is the very worst, often the city mayor is black, city council dominated by blacks, and often the school superintendent is black, as well as most of the principals and teachers, and Democrats have run the cities for decades. I’m not saying there’s a causal connection, just that one would be hard put to chalk up the rotten education to racial discrimination.”

Even more troubling is the spectacle of African-American Democrats using racist language to insult blacks who don’t toe the party line. Some examples from the Discover the Networks archive:

* In 2002, NAACP chairman Julian Bond referred to Ward Connerly, a black California Board of Regents member who had led the fight to end affirmative action in California’s public sector, as a “fraud” and a “con man.”249 Bond likened black conservatives in general to “ventriloquists’ dummies” who “speak in their puppet-master’s voice.”

*  Jesse Jackson has called Connerly a “house slave” and a “puppet of the white man.”251 He also has condemned Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s vote to place limits on affirmative action programs, characterizing Thomas as an “enem[y] of civil rights” and likening his black judicial robes to the white sheets of Klansmen.

* The late columnist Carl Rowan sarcastically suggested, “If you give Thomas a little flour on his face, you’d think you had [former Klansman] David Duke.”

* San Francisco mayor Willie Brown called Thomas not only “a shill and cover for the most insidious form of racism,”254 but also a man whose views are “legitimizing of the Ku Klux Klan.”255 Brown added that Thomas “should be reduced to talking only to white conservatives,” and “must be shut out” by the black community.

By the way: that part in the Media Matters headline about Nugent “jumping on the Glenn Beck bandwagon”? Nugent doesn’t mention Beck once in the column in question. Someone’s fixated on Beck, but I don’t think it’s the Motor City Madman.

Congressman Alan Grayson, Democrat from Florida, has garnered a lot of media attention as a result of his outlandish statements about Republicans who are opposed to a leftist government takeover of healthcare. From the floor of the House — on CSPAN for all to see — he claimed that the Republican plan for healthcare consists of nothing more than advising the uninsured to not get sick, and telling those who do fall ill that “[we] want you to die quickly.”

Grayson is so proud of his speech and the criticism it generated, that he posted it on his own Youtube site!

His horrible speech was condemned by Republicans and even by some on the left. Many called for Grayson to apologize.  So he went back to the House floor but then refused to apologize.  However he didn’t just refuse. He decided also to offend Jews all over the world by comparing some Americans’ inability to afford health insurance to a “holocaust.”  I guess he didn’t get the memo that you don’t use the extermination of the Jews by Nazi Germany as an illustration for pretty much anything that doesn’t involve millions of people being murdered.  Again, though his words were shameful, he has proudly placed the video on Youtube:

Even left-wing MSNBC host Rachel Maddow called out Grayson for using “inflammatory rhetoric.” In an interview with the congressman, she gave him three chances to apologize for his use of the word “holocaust,” and he never did!  Congrats to Maddow for drawing attention to this despicable display (even though Maddow tried to deflate the criticism by providing Republican examples of “inflammatory rhetoric”).

Here is Grayson trying to make  his case on The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer:

Grayson claims on this video that his real goal is “to work together [with Republicans] to solve problems.”  Yet he yells repeatedly that Republicans have no viable healthcare plans.  Then, when Republican spokesman Alex Castellanos starts to actually explain the Republican proposals, Grayson simply shouts him down.  He even calls Republicans “Neanderthals,” and then explains he isn’t really name-calling because his charges are true.

My only guess is that Grayson saw the money that Congressman Joe Wilson made for his campaign with his controversial shout of “you lie” during President Obama’s recent speech. It appears Grayson decided the best way to jumpstart his own fundraising efforts for his next campaign was to make a fool of himself in as many public venues as possible. How else do you explain him proudly posting all these videos on his own Youtube site which provides links for donors who would like to contribute to his campaign?

Jon Favreau, Jim Messina and Patrick Gaspard on Marine One

Here’s the “gotcha” Media Matters is highlighting on its web site today: “Latest fact-check fail: Fox News runs with claim that White House official worked for ACORN”:

After Matthew Vadum wrote in The American Spectator that “[e]vidence shows that years before he joined the Obama administration,” White House political affairs director Patrick Gaspard [who now holds Karl Rove's old job at the White House] “was ACORN boss Bertha Lewis’s political director in New York,” Fox News seized on the blog post, asserting that — in Sean Hannity’s words — “ACORN has somebody on the inside of the White House.” However, Politico’s Ben Smith has since reported that the allegation “just isn’t true” and that the White House has denied the American Spectator report; in its reporting, Fox News gave no indication that they attempted to fact-check the Spectator report or contact the White House for a response.

Once again, the George Soros Steno Pool employs its uncanny ESP powers to inform us on what gets said and done during and after FOX News production meetings.

And hey, if you can’t trust the White House to give you the facts…

Finally, Media Matters posts this explanation from the source of the “misinformation” himself, ACORN co-founder Wade Rathke, who also would never ever lie to you, cross his heart:

In almost 1400 blogs I’ve done, sometimes I don’t get it right, call it a senior moment or whatever it might be, but reading the blogsphere with me as a source took me back searching for whether or not I could be causing a problem here inadvertently. Patrick was never on the staff of ACORN.

I wonder how the tough minded investigative journalists over at Media Matters would react if Rathke’s counterpart in the conservative movement pleaded “not guilty by reason of senility” after making an embarrassing gaffe.

The Spectator’s Vadum responds today with a “gotcha” of his own: “I didn’t publish all the evidence I have of Gaspard’s ties to ACORN.”

Vadum adds:

ACORN has a confusing structure and its network of who-knows-how-many taxpayer-funded tax-exempt nonprofit affiliates. As I’ve written ad nauseam, this is deliberate. (…) The Politico’s Ben Smith is a living case study showing what happens when sincere, well-meaning journalists write about something they do not understand.

Vadum goes on to explain that Patrick Gaspard once worked as SEIU State Council for the Working Families Party (WFP).  And according to ACORN’s own website (at least, for now) in 1998, “ACORN members spearhead[ed] formation of the Working Families Party, the first community-labor party with official ballot status in New York state in more than 50 years.”

Here’s more from Discover the Networks:

Currently composed of some 30,000 members, the Working Families Party (WFP) is a front group for ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). WFP functions as a political party in New York State and Connecticut, promoting ACORN-friendly candidates. Unlike conventional political parties, WFP charges its members dues — about $60 per year — a policy characteristic of ACORN and its affiliates.

According to the party’s website, WFP is a coalition founded jointly by ACORN, the Communications Workers of America, and the United Automobile Workers. However, ACORN clearly dominates the coalition. New York ACORN leader Steven Kest was the moving force in forming the party, and WFP headquarters are located at the same address as ACORN’s national office, at 88 Third Avenue in Brooklyn, New York.

Oh, and one of the co-founders of WFP was Bertha Lewis. Here she is in an extremely irritating but blessedly brief October 2008 video, sitting in front of a WFP banner, telling viewers to vote for Barack Obama:

PS: There’s an interesting article over at PolitickerNY.com, dated June 23, 2009:

Al Sharpton had just stepped out of a meeting with Barack Obama.

It was January 2007, and he was down in the Obama Senate office during a trip to Washington to meet with a number of Democratic presidential contenders. Mr. Obama had been almost uncannily pitch-perfect, Mr. Sharpton thought, hitting every talking point and preempting every question.

As he was leaving, he caught sight of a familiar face in the reception area of the office.

“I said, ‘That looks like Patrick.’ And Patrick starts laughing,” Mr. Sharpton said.

At the airport on the way back to New York, he said, he had a further revelation.

“It hit me when I got to the shuttle that a lot of what Obama was saying meant that he must have been talking to Patrick Gaspard,” Mr. Sharpton said. “Obama made me feel like he knew every move I made. I said, ‘Patrick did it again.’”

A screen grab of Glenn Beck from the Media Matters website.

For amusement sometimes I read the Media Matters for America website.

If Media Matters, the left-wing character assassination factory with strong ties to liberal uber-funder George Soros, is denouncing something, chances are it’s something that ought not be denounced.

Take for example Media Matters’s apoplexy over the richly deserved pounding the radical activist group and crime syndicate ACORN has been taking in the media lately.

Look at the shrieking headlines from the Media Matters website:

• Latest fact-check fail: Fox News runs with claim that White House official worked for ACORN
• Conservative media raise ACORN bogeyman to baselessly cast doubt on Franken’s campaign victory
• Maddow takes down right-wing media’s attempted smear of Gaspard
• Like a dog that’s been beat too much

And it goes on and on and on.

Particularly hilarious is a new writeup on the site about ACORN news coverage.

This gem runs more than 2,200 words!

Media Matters quotes Glenn Beck saying that President Obama “is surrounded by these people.”

On “Fox & Friends,” Beck said, “What’s really weird is [Obama senior advisor Patrick Gaspard] was also one of the top guys at SEIU. Oh, my goodness. SEIU, ACORN, the same organization in — right — he holds the Karl Rove position at the White House. The president has zero credibility when he says, ‘I haven’t been following this ACORN thing.’ This is his army — SEIU and ACORN.” Beck also said that Obama “is surrounded by these people. He’s surrounded by SEIU, and he’s surrounded by ACORN. While ACORN may have — be back one step, SEIU and ACORN are the same.”

What’s the big deal? Beck happens to be right on all counts.

Click to watch Ed's latest nationally televised lie.

“Now they’re resorting to sneaky tactics.” — Ed Schultz.

On last night’s edition of MSNBC’s “The Ed Show,” Ed Schultz and his guest “exposed” a shocking scandal: the National Republican Congressional Committee is harrassing doctors and placing their names on ads opposing Democratic health care reform against their will. An NRCC group called the Physicians Council for Responsible Reform, they claimed, is listing random physicians on their propaganda without their knowledge or consent, “because they want to deceive the public.” In typical MSNBC/Ed Schultz “reporting” style, it is a false smear designed to discredit the physicians who oppose ObamaCare, which can be arrived at only by ignoring the facts and inverting the evidence its own segment presents.

Schultz interviewed Dr. Barry Kaufman, an Indiana ophthamologist who said he received a FAX asking him to help finance the PCRR’s ad campaign against socialized medicine. It also asked for permission to add his name to an advertisement opposing socialized medicine. Schultz said callers to his radio show were surprised to learn this was run by the Republican Party, although the FAX in question (which he showed in a full-screen shot) and the bottom of the PCRR webpage (in all caps) states clearly: “PAID FOR BY THE NATIONAL REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE.”

Dr. Kaufman insisted after receiving the FAX, “I had to call a number, an 800 number, to approve or disapprove of having my name in this advertisement.” This is false for numerous reasons. The most obvious is seen by zooming in on the screen print of Kaufman’s FAX itself, where we see:

It says, “Please call with approval to include your name ASAP.” Doctors do not have to call to offer a disapproval, and if they taken no action, their names do not appear in any ad.

The FAX is nothing more than a Republican fundraiser. It implores the physician’s “help” to place this ad in local media, and for a donation, his name will be included, as in the mock-up. The PCRR could neither be more clear about its beliefs nor its intended goal: no one gets mentioned in any ad unless (s)he makes at least a $50 donation, preferably more. Receiving this FAX is rather like reciving a letter from that other rotund Ed — McMahon — stating, “You May Have Already Won Ten Million Dollars!” In fact, you have not won anything and will not even be entered into the contest unless you return the entry form. Don’t want to participate? Throw it away. Evidently this was too complex for the Indiana-based M.D. and Big Ed.

Incredibly, Ed Schultz twists these facts to the opposite of their logical conclusion, and when the doctor corrects him, both agree to stick with the smear:

Ed: So…had you not caught it, your name would’ve ended up there [in the print ad] without your consent, correct?

Kaufman: …I talked to the NRCC, a supervisor there, and they assured me my name appeared only on my own FAX, and every other name on this was health care professionals that support the Physicians Council for Responsible Reform.

Ed: So, we should alert our audience tonight that just because you get one of these things from the Republicans and you’ve got a bunch of doctors’s names on there doesn’t mean that these doctors are supporting what the Republicans are doing. Can we cut to the chase on that? Is that where we are?

Kaufman: Absolutely! They’re just putting names, they’re taking them out a hat…because they want to deceive the public, because on the website for this PCRR, they say that 73 percent of patients polled trust their doctors as the major source for health care reform. So, they’re extrapolating that by using doctors’ names to deceive their patients.

Ed: Oh gosh, you’ve gotta watch them at every corner, don’t ya, folks?

There’s no telling if Ed and his guest were guilty of willful deception, journalistic malpractice, or invincible ignorance, but this entire “news segment” was a lie all the same — albeit apparently a successful one. Ed stated, “I have, on my radio show, received numerous phone calls and e-mails from doctors all over the country who are furious about this tactic.” If physicians are really having their names used to promote a political party against their will, why hasn’t the federal government prosecuted the NRCC under the  “truth in advertising” clause? The Obama administration would be only too happy to bust that “deception” in a heartbeat. They haven’t, because it doesn’t exist. Ed and his guest lied to their audience, and something more than a weak “clarification” is in order this time.

Ed Schultz is becoming an unmitigated disaster for MSNBC: its lowest rated show, Schultz has been caught lying about 9/12 protest signs (which he also produced in full-screen shot but lied about), invited a U.S. Congresswoman to slit her wrist on his show, ranted Republicans “want to see you dead…They kinda like it when” women get cancer, and suggested Sen. Olympia Snowe allow cancer to spread through her body two weeks before seeing a doctor — all since the first of the month.

This time, Ed Schultz succeeded in poisoning the well against the PCRR and the thousands of physicians across the country who oppose socialized medicine, who donated money to have their names appear in a political advertisement that reflects their strongly held beliefs. Schultz smeared an advertising campaign — and he and Dr. Kaufman silenced the voices of his colleagues who dared to speak out against Obama’s trillion dollar rationing scheme.

All because Ed Schultz has an axe to grind, and the good doctor doesn’t know how to deal with junk mail.

MSNBC and “The Ed Show” must correct the lie Schultz reported to their viewers; apologize to the PCRR, NRCC, and its member physicians for trying to sabotage their right to free expression; and underscore that all physicians whose names appear in these ads appeared voluntarily. MSNBC might also wish to consider if it wants to continue employing a seething, serial embarrassment posing as a “news” host who cannot understand basic logic.

That was snarky, I know. But given how hard it is to keep up with the latest “progressive” “goodthink” without my Left Wing Decoder Ring (I had to pawn it when my Z.O.G. check bounced…), I trust you’ll forgive me.

Media Matters‘ Jamison Foser manages to out-snark me anyway. With unconcealed contempt, Foser blasts two Washington Post columnists for downplaying the crimes of filmmaker Roman Polanski, who fled the country in 1978 after being convicted of sexually assaulting an underage girl, and is now being extradited to the United States.

As well, Foser generously credits conservative blogger Patterico (who works for the L.A. County District Attorney’s office) with pointing out columnist Anne Applebaum’s unstated conflict of interest in the matter: her husband, “Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, is lobbying the U.S. to drop proceedings against Polanski.”

Finally, the one thing conservatives and progressives can agree upon: child molesters should be punished, no matter how many Oscars they’ve won.

Sadly, we can’t even go that far.

To site just one example from this week: on The View, liberal Whoopi Goldberg opined that what happened to Polanski’s victim wasn’t “rape-rape,” adding that, in Europe, the incident wouldn’t have been such a big deal. And please don’t comment that “nobody watches The View;” millions of women do, every day.

Now, American liberals bemoaning the philistinism and puritanism of their unwashed fellow citizens is nothing new. What is relatively new is what Catholic blogger and author Mark Shea has called “the mainstreaming of pedophilia,” a phenomenon driven by Hollywood and other cultural taste-makers.

People were shocked back in the 1990s, when little girls dressed up as “Pretty Woman” (i.e., a prostitute) for Halloween. These days, pre-pubescent girls dress like that to go to school every day. Movies from obscure festival prize-winners to Oscar winners like American Beauty are incrementally normalizing pedophilia. Glamor is a potent agent of erosion. (Which is why, incidentally, Catholics renewing their baptismal vows promise to “reject the glamor of evil.”)

As Mark Shea has observed ruefully: today’s progressives (rightly) condemn pedophile priests (although mostly as a stick to beat the Catholic Church with); tomorrow’s even “more enlightened” ones will be obliged by their own twisted, doctrinaire logic to hail them as poor, misunderstood victims of society’s “dark age” intolerance.

Gee, if only all those Catholic priests had thought to go to film school instead.

The last few weeks have not been kind to the aura of President Barack Obama.

Internationally, he has begun to be perceived as a weak leader. None of his campaign promises have led to any results on the international stage. The detention center at Guantanamo Bay is still open. The Middle East remains a mess. Oil prices are still too high. All is pretty much the same as the day he took the Oath of Office.

The Iranians, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the North Koreans, the Venezuelans, the Chinese and the Russians are all quite pleased that Barack Obama has replaced George W. Bush—a man they all feared—as president. They have understood, this early in the game, that the President lacks the one quality that makes for a strong leader: decisiveness. And they are taking advantage of it.

Domestically, things are not much better for the President.

As Bill O’Reilly reported last night, Obama’s approval ratings are in freefall, with only 49% of Americans now approving of the direction the country is moving under his leadership. Cash-for-clunkers, massive bailouts, cap-and-trade, increasing unemployment, health care reform, and now a plan to reform the educational system have left Americans shell-shocked and wondering when it will all end.

Naturally, the left needed a theory to explain away this precipitous drop in Obama’s popularity so soon into his Presidency. As luck would have it, they had an old one in the archives, which they have newly re-packaged and re-introduced. Only this time, it has now been put forth by the husband of its originator: former President Bill Clinton has resurrected the “vast right wing conspiracy” theory first put forth eleven years ago by his wife, Hillary Clinton.

This past weekend, Mr. Clinton was asked by David Gregory on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program about the possibility that such a conspiracy still exists (assuming it ever did), and his soon-to-be-famous answer may have shocked even Mr. Gregory:

DAVID GREGORY: Your wife famously talked about the vast right wing conspiracy targeting you. As you look at this opposition on the right to President Obama, is it still there?

BILL CLINTON: Oh, you bet. Sure it is. It’s not as strong as it was, because America’s changed demographically, but it’s as virulent as it was. I mean, they’re saying things about him – you know, it’s like when they accused me of murder and all that stuff they did. But it’s not really good for the Republicans and the country, what’s going on now….

Mr. Clinton went on to imply that the President’s popularity is falling because of lies and accusations levied against him by the extreme right:

BILL CLINTON: Their agenda seems to be wanting him to fail, and that’s not a prescription for a good America. They can take his numbers down; they can run his opposition up. But fundamentally, he and his team have a positive agenda for America.

Clinton and the Democrats can make all the noise they want about a “conspiracy,” but the reality is much different. Obama’s sinking popularity is not the result of external forces acting upon him; it is of his own doing.

The intellectually bankrupt left, however, will continue to appear on their media outlets, crying foul and blaming others for the President’s failings. As their ideology unravels, they will make even more noise. They have to, for as Shakespeare observed, the “empty vessel makes the greatest sound.”

In life, McCarthy was part of the Right.  In death, he has been possessed by body snatchers on the Left.  The apprehensions aroused by charges of “McCarthyism” are based on the Left’s assertion that there is a powerful and destructive impulse lurking just under the surface of our political life: a native fascism easily ignited and ready to rage dangerously out of control. It is an assumption not often questioned, although the evidence suggests that the opposite is true.  Arthur Miller’s efforts in The Crucible to portray it as a peculiarly American atavism notwithstanding, the history of McCarthyism actually shows how alien the witch-hunt mentality is to the American spirit and how superficial its hold on the American psyche.  Appearing in the extraordinary circumstances of the postwar period, McCarthyism was brief in its moment and limited in its consequences.  And it was complete in the way it was purged from the body politic. The Wisconsin senator’s strut on the stage ended in a crushing repudiation by his colleagues in the Senate and an enduring obloquy in the rogues’ gallery of American history, a position close to that of Benedict Arnold and a handful of other villains.  His enemies survived to be rehabilitated as martyrs and heroes of an American political “ nightmare”, while he himself is the only figure from that haunted era to suffer irreparable damnation.

– Destructive Generation by Peter Collier and David Horowitz

This quote was submitted by Dan W. who noted:

I have long regarded DH’s Chapter Six of “Destructive Generation” as one of the most illuminating discussions of McCarthyism I have seen, including how the history has been distorted by the modern Left…. I think this passage  (plus one additional paragraph) gets to the core of the issue. Like “racist” these days, the casual use of the term is used by the Left today as a way to, as David said, “invoke cloture on debates that it doesn’t want to have”

–

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