It would appear the State Department is seeking to maintain the balance of power through a strategy of mutually assured derision.
One problem with using sarcasm as a weapon is that its proliferation is uncontrollable and widespread. Even the Canadians have it. In a column for the Toronto Sun, Ezra Levant mocked "the ironically named Ambassador Power."
Any such claim is baseless. The legal basis of the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga cases is entirely distinct from that of Smith, although the cases are related. In 1993, Congress responded to the Smith ruling by enacting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which, as Kapur writes, "says any law that 'substantially burden[s]' a person's exercise of religion must demonstrate a 'compelling governmental interest' and employ the 'least restrictive means' of furthering that interest." Kapur acknowledges that "that's the basis under which Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood . . . are suing for relief from the birth control rule."
And that," he continues, "might offer Scalia an escape hatch":
Experts say he could conceivably decide that the First Amendment doesn't protect a religious person's entity's [sic] to an exemption from the law but that RFRA suffices to let Hobby Lobby and certain others off the hook from the birth control rule.
Actually, that is a very unlikely outcome. Judges tend to avoid making unnecessary pronouncements about constitutional questions, so the inquiry will begin with the question of whether the mandate violates the plaintiffs' rights under the RFRA statute. If the answer is yes, that is where the inquiry will end--with no determination about what the First Amendment requires.
The "escape hatch" language suggests that the RFRA question is a contrivance Scalia will use to mask his supposed religious favoritism. That is preposterous in light of the 2006 case of Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente União do Vegetal, a case with a fact pattern similar to that in Smith:
A religious sect with origins in the Amazon Rainforest receives communion by drinking a sacramental tea, brewed from plants unique to the region, that contains a hallucinogen regulated under the Controlled Substances Act by the Federal Government. The Government concedes that this practice is a sincere exercise of religion, but nonetheless sought to prohibit the small American branch of the sect from engaging in the practice, on the ground that the Controlled Substances Act bars all use of the hallucinogen. The sect sued to block enforcement against it of the ban on the sacramental tea, and moved for a preliminary injunction.
The plaintiffs prevailed in an 8-0 decision by Chief Justice John Roberts, which Scalia joined without comment (Justice Samuel Alito had not yet been seated when the case was argued). So Scalia has already applied RFRA to vindicate the rights of a hallucinogen-using minority sect. There would be no contradiction in holding that the statute also protects mainstream religious believers to whose moral views the current administration is hostile.//
You can understand the appeal of this approach. Identity politics has enormous cultural influence. If you belong to a group that acquires accredited victim status, influential people will tie themselves into knots to satisfy whatever demands you make. The reductio ad absurdum is the kerfuffle over what pronouns to use in reference to Bradley Manning, who following his sentencing on espionage charges declared that he is now a "woman" named "Chelsea."
Smaller lefty organs like Slate and The New Republic are demanding that everybody immediately commence using feminine pronouns to refer to the former private. As we noted yesterday, the New York Times NYT -0.42% is struggling to come to terms with the news, although its public editor is on board with "Ms. Manning." Most hilarious of all is a blog post by Andrew Rosenthal, the Times's editorial page editor, about a letter Manning wrote to President Obama:
Private Manning told Mr. Obama that he (I'm using the male pronoun to follow our newsroom's style even though he also announced today that he is a woman, and would like to be called Chelsea) entered the Army and went to Iraq believing that since the 9/11 attacks, "we've had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life."
To be sure, that wonderfully entertaining parenthetical is by far the best part of Rosenthal's post. But can anyone imagine Abe Rosenthal twisting himself into knots to be solicitous, especially of a man convicted of espionage against America? A lot changed in one generation, thanks to identity politics.
In an interview with CNN host Piers Morgan last week, Media mogul and CNN founder Ted Turner said the fact that there have been more suicides than combat deaths in the Army this year is not “shocking,” but “good.” Highlighted first by Breitbart.com, the Oct. 19 interview has Turner speculating that “it’s time to put war and conflict behind us and move on,” and the rising rate of self-inflicted troop deaths is good because it brings attention to that view. Here’s the exchange:What Turner is saying is that the human capacity for love and charity - which he feels expresses itself in the self-destruction of soldiers who have been forced to act opposite to their true human nature - is good. I take it that he would prefer that no one engage in acts of war or to commit suicide. Is Turner right about suicide being related to a human aversion to killing other humans? Maybe. Maybe not. Probably there is a human aversion to killing other human beings - and that is a good thing - but this aversion is mediated through the individual's understanding of what the action means. If the individual understands that he is protecting his home, then he may feel better about it than if doesn't have that understanding. There are limits to this, of course. For example, the SS concentration camp guards apparently had high rates of suicide despite the Nazi indoctrination that they were serving the good of Germany. Apparently, there comes a point where the cognitive dissonance becomes so great that self-deception is no longer possible. With the SS, it was blatantly obvious that they were abusing defenseless human beings, not protecting Germany. And that is a good thing. You see a similar wilful inability to understand an obvious point when people assert that Thomas Aquinas taught that those in Heaven would be entertained by the punishment of the damned. That is simply BS. Thomas never said any such thing. What he said was (Supplementum, Q.94.3):TURNER: It’s time to put war and conflict behind us and move on, and start acting like civilized, educated human beings. MORGAN: You made the point to me in the break there, more American servicemen have – TURNER: — are dying now from suicide over there than are dying in combat. MORGAN: That’s shocking, isn’t it? TURNER: Well, what — no, I think it’s — I think it’s good, because it’s so clear that we’re programmed and we’re born to love and help each other, not to kill each other, to destroy each other. That’s an aberration. That’s left over from hundreds of years ago. It’s time for to us start acting enlightened.President Barack Obama has spoken out to condemn Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock’s controversial comments on abortion and rape in recent days. Will he let this remark go unaddressed?
I answer that, A thing may be a matter of rejoicing in two ways. First directly, when one rejoices in a thing as such: and thus the saints will not rejoice in the punishment of the wicked. Secondly, indirectly, by reason namely of something annexed to it: and in this way the saints will rejoice in the punishment of the wicked, by considering therein the order of Divine justice and their own deliverance, which will fill them with joy. And thus the Divine justice and their own deliverance will be the direct cause of the joy of the blessed: while the punishment of the damned will cause it indirectly.In his own maladroit way, Turner is making the same point. He is not rejoicing in the suicide of soldiers; he is rejoicing in what he sees as a natural order that makes people sympathetic to others.
Here's what almost certainly happened: After the interview, Axelrod, or someone else from the campaign, called Crowley's attention to the White House transcript. She read the relevant portion and conceded that Axelrod was right: Obama had called the attack an act of terror. As we wrote yesterday, such an interpretation was reasonable, although it was a matter of opinion because the president's statement was ambiguous. Obama was briefed on all this during his debate preparation. If this surmise is correct, then Crowley knew about the "acts of terror" Easter egg hidden in Obama's Sept. 12 speech, and Obama knew she knew. Romney did not know and was as incredulous as Crowley had been, because the administration had spent weeks peddling the claim that the video dunnit. Obama brought the matter up expecting incredulity from Romney and backup from Crowley. She therefore unwittingly played her role in Obama's little ambush of his opponent. She was just clarifying the facts--or so Axelrod & Co. had led her to believe.Can we really conclude that Obama really follow the Sunday talk shows when we know he doesn't follow his own security briefings? Much more likely, he knew that the speech used the phrase "no act of terror" in an equivocal fashion because (a) it was included to give him cover and (b) he gave the speech. Obama's real problem is that he also knew that while he may have happened to use the phrase "no act of terror", he also knows that he wasn't calling Libya an "act of terror" in that (a) he blamed a "film" in the speech and (b) he and his administration kept referring to the murder as the result of a spontaneous demonstration caused by an "offensive" "movie." It's what he said, not what did not say, that's the problem for Obama.
Perhaps the reason other journalists are so deferential toward the "fact checkers" is that these fact checkers, unlike the traditional ones, don't check the facts of journalists but of politicians. By and large, they aren't actually checking facts but making and asserting judgments about the veracity of politicians' arguments.
The quality of their work is generally quite poor. "The MSM's ['mainstream' media's] fact-checkers often don't know what they're talking about," notes Mickey Kaus, who cites an example on a subject he knows well:
The oft-cited CNN-"fact check" of Romney's welfare ad makes a big deal of HHS secretary [Kathleen] Sebelius' pledge that she will only grant waivers to states that "commit that their proposals will move at least 20% more people from welfare to work." CNN swallows this 20% Rule whole in the course of declaring Romney's objection "wrong":
"The waivers gave 'those states some flexibility in how they manage their welfare rolls as long as it produced 20% increases in the number of people getting work.' "
Why, it looks as if Obama wants to make the work provisions tougher! Fact-check.org cites the same 20% rule.
I was initially skeptical of Sebelius' 20% pledge, since a) it measures the 20% against "the state's past performance," not what the state's performance would be if it actually tried to comply with the welfare law's requirements as written, and b) Sebelius pulled it out of thin air only after it became clear that the new waiver rule could be a political problem for the president. She could just as easily drop it in the future; and c) Sebelius made it clear the states don't have to actually achieve the 20% goal--only "demonstrate clear progress toward" it.
But Robert Rector, a welfare reform zealot who nevertheless does know what he's talking about, has now published a longer analysis of the 20% rule. Turns out it's not as big a scam as I'd thought it was. It's a much bigger scam.
The merits of the argument are beyond the scope of today's column. It is quite possible that there are people whose knowledge of the subject is as deep as Kaus's and Rector's but whose honest interpretation is more favorable to the Sebelius position. An appeal to their authority could carry as much weight as our appeal to Kaus's and Rector's.
But an appeal to the authority of "independent fact checkers" carries no weight at all. In case you're skeptical of this assertion, let's look at some other examples of their output from the past week.
Here's an excerpt from an Associated Press "fact check" of Paul Ryan's convention speech:
RYAN: "And the biggest, coldest power play of all in Obamacare came at the expense of the elderly. . . . So they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama."
THE FACTS: Ryan's claim ignores the fact that Ryan himself incorporated the same cuts into budgets he steered through the House in the past two years as chairman of its Budget Committee. . . .
RYAN: "The stimulus was a case of political patronage, corporate welfare and cronyism at their worst. You, the working men and women of this country, were cut out of the deal."
THE FACTS: Ryan himself asked for stimulus funds shortly after Congress approved the $800 billion plan.
In both of these cases, the AP neither disputes nor verifies the factual accuracy of Ryan's statements. Each of these is simply a tu quoque--an argument against Ryan. Under the guise of fact checking, the AP is simply taking sides in a partisan political dispute.
Sometimes the "fact checkers" are ignorant even of facts that, in contrast with the welfare material above, require no special expertise to know. This is from a CNN.com "fact check":
In a new policy paper, his Republican rival for the White House, Mitt Romney, says, "President Obama has intentionally sought to shut down oil, gas, and coal production in pursuit of his own alternative energy agenda." . . .
Obama has, for sure, angered some oil and coal producers by steering federal money to alternative energy sources. But there is no evidence that he is trying to "shut down" traditional energy industries.
No evidence? How about Obama's own words? "So, if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It's just that it will bankrupt them, because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted."
Sometimes the "fact checkers" simply pronounce trivial truths. From the AP on Mitt Romney's convention speech:
ROMNEY: "I have a plan to create 12 million new jobs. It has five steps."
THE FACTS: No one says he can't, but economic forecasters are divided on his ability to deliver. He'd have to nearly double the anemic pace of job growth lately.
This is like "fact checking" somebody's wedding vows by asserting that while marriage can be wonderful, it's hard work and ends in divorce half the time.
The Times's headline finding was that an overwhelming majority of respondents, 67%, think the president backed same-sex marriage last week "mostly for political reasons," while only 24% think he did it "mostly because he thinks it is right." This column agrees with the 24% more than the 67%, but in any case Obama has managed a neat trick: He has managed to look like a cynical opportunist while taking an unpopular position.
One reason to think this Times poll may be more unbiased than usual is its findings on the substantive question of same-sex marriage:
About 4 in 10, or 38 percent, of Americans support same-sex marriage, while 24 percent favor civil unions short of formal marriage. Thirty-three percent oppose any form of legal recognition. When civil unions are eliminated as an option, opposition to same-sex marriage rises to 51 percent, compared with 42 percent support.
That makes the Times/CBS poll an outlier among polls, but puts it in line with the results of actual voting. Every state where same-sex marriage has been on the ballot, it has lost--usually by considerably larger margins, but mostly in socially conservative states. Forty percent support and majority opposition seems in the right ball park.
But the most revealing Kristof assertion was this one: "The basic principle of American life is that we try to respect religious beliefs, and accommodate them where we can."
That prompted an incandescently furious response from Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary:
Nicholas Kristof's statement is light years beyond the President in disrespect for religious liberty.…The language of accommodation is almost as old as the Constitution itself, but it was never framed as Kristof frames it—certainly not by the founders who spoke of "inalienable rights" granted to human beings by the Creator's endowment.…
With this one simplistic and condescending sentence he throws religious liberty under the bus and reveals what makes sense to so many in the secular elite.
They will try their best, they promise, to respect our religious beliefs, and to "accommodate them where we can."
That's it. Don't dare ask for anything more.
Religious liberty—no scare quotes here—is one of America's basic principles, the first freedom in the Bill of Rights. The separation of church and state protects religious minorities, and nonreligious ones, from the coercive imposition of religious law. It is also a bulwark against a secular government's impositions on private conscience. To the Times editorialists, it is at best an inconvenience.
And the paper's reporters aren't much better. Here's what passed for balance in a story by Laurie Goodstein:
The uproar threatens to embroil the Catholic church in a bitter election-year political battle while deepening internal rifts within the church. On the one side are traditionalists who believe in upholding Catholic doctrine to the letter, and on the other, modernists who believe the church must respond to changing times and a pluralistic society.
Albert Mohler is a Baptist. This columnist is an agnostic. But I'm with Mike Huckabee, another Baptist, who said: "We're all Catholics now."
This columnist has posited that the polarization of the electorate around the issue of abortion, combined with the direct effect of abortion itself on fertility, over the long term has a conservatizing effect on the electorate. We call it the Roe Effect. Although environmentalism is not sharply polarizing in the way that abortion is, it seems to us quite probable that a similar and overlapping effect is at work here.
After all, you can't make a baby by hugging a tree. Attitudes about "the environment" are very much tied up with attitudes about human fertility. The prevailing view on the environmentalist left is, and has been since at least the early 1970s, that to bring a child into the world is an act of violence against Mother Earth. Along with feminism, which devalued motherhood and women's domestic work, environmentalism motivated left-liberal baby boomers to have smaller families, or none at all.
If ideology drives one segment of the population to reproduce less, the effect compounds over time. Whereas big families get bigger with each generation, a childless couple (or single woman) is unlikely to have grandchildren either. The future belongs to the fruitful.
But in any case, why does it so bother Miller that the Romneys, Santorums and Pauls (and also the Palins, whom she mentions in another paragraph) made the choice to have large families? If she cared about choice, she would recognize it's none of her business. But contemporary feminism does not actually value choice, except as a means to an ideological end, which is the obliteration of differences between the sexes. The biggest such difference consists in the distinct and disparate demands that reproduction makes on women. Thus in order to equalize the sexes, it is necessary to discourage fertility. Implicit in contemporary feminism is a normative judgment that having children is bad.
If this were made explicit, of course, the whole project would fall apart. Feminism is politically unviable without the support of at least a substantial minority of women, and women (or at least most women) do have a maternal instinct. So feminism has to wage its war against fertility covertly, rationalizing it in terms of other goals. A revealing example comes from a CNSNews.com report on testimony that Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, gave to a House subcommittee the other day:
Sebelius told a House panel Thursday that a reduction in the number of human beings born in the United States will compensate employers and insurers for the cost of complying with the new HHS mandate that will require all health-care plans to cover sterilizations and all FDA-approved contraceptives, including those that cause abortions.
"The reduction in the number of pregnancies compensates for the cost of contraception," Sebelius said. She went on to say the estimated cost is "down not up."
We're skeptical that this prediction will pan out, because it assumes that the ObamaCare mandate will lead to a substantial increase in contraceptive use and thus a reduction in pregnancies and childbirths. But Sebelius's logic, as far as it goes, is unassailable: The pill is a hell of a lot cheaper than the medical costs (never mind the nonmedical ones) of prenatal care, childbirth, pediatric care and adult care until 26, the ObamaCare age of majority.
Perhaps you have spotted the flaw in the Sebelius logic. Yes, in the short term, contraception is cheaper than fertility. In the long term, however, a war on fertility is an act of cultural and economic suicide. Today's low fertility is tomorrow's shortage of productive citizens--of the taxpayers who would have to pay for the ever-expanding entitlement state.
The continuing collapse of European welfare statism is as much a crisis of demographics as of sclerotic government. Even communist China, which somewhat ironically lacks a Western-style welfare state, is having to reckon with the unintended long-term consequences of its one-child policy.
America has some hope for the future, though. Its fertility rate has not declined as sharply as in other Western nations, in part thanks to families like the Romneys, Santorums, Pauls and Palins. The polarization of American politics gives reason for hope about America's political future, too. As we posited years ago in "The Roe Effect," the left's war on fertility is likely to have its greatest success in reducing the fertility of left-leaning women, thereby ensuring that future generations are more conservative.
You may remember that last month the New York Times's Charles Blow blocked this columnist on Twitter. After we published yesterday's column, we discovered that Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post had done the same, and for the same reason: because we had pointed out the logical shortcoming of her appeal to her own authority based on her identity (in her case as a woman, in his as a black person).
If it's impolite to subject a commentator's public words to logical scrutiny, we suppose we're one rude SOB. Twitter is a social medium, and no one is under any obligation to socialize with us. But the point here is that the practitioners of identity politics frequently are unable to deal with challenges to their views by either modifying them or defending them reasonably. What exactly is liberating about that?
Rubin proclaims herself puzzled as to how Santorum can "square" his attitudes toward birth control, on which he would not impose his religious views through legislation, and abortion, on which he would. But Santorum explains that right off the bat: The latter but not the former, in his view, is "the taking of a human life." That's Romney's position too, and the position of every Republican presidential nominee since Reagan.
In the video Rubin scorns, Santorum actually makes an entirely reasonable and fairly sophisticated argument, and he says nothing cringe-worthy. He doesn't appeal to the authority of the church or "family values." He doesn't say that people who fornicate are going to hell or ought to be ashamed of themselves. Nor does he deny that it is prudent for them to use birth control.
What he says is that birth control has greatly expanded sexual freedom, and that sexual freedom has had consequences that are harmful to society and to women in particular. Again, one may disagree whether, on balance, these harms outweighed the benefits. But what is so upsetting about the idea that they might have? What in the world explains Friedersdorf's and Rubin's overwrought emotionalism?
Here's our attempt at an explanation: In liberal metropolises like Los Angeles, Washington and New York (homes of Friedersdorf, Rubin and this columnist, respectively), a high proportion of conservatives have internalized the assumptions of feminism. One of those assumptions is that female sexual freedom, an essential component of sexual equality, is an unadulterated good. Santorum's statements to the contrary challenge this deeply held view.
Furthermore, contemporary feminism is, as we recently argued, a totalitarian ideology, by which we mean one that tolerates no divergence between the personal and the political. If you are not a feminist, you can enjoy a lifestyle of sexual freedom and also take seriously the idea that sexual freedom is bad for society. If you are a feminist, that is a thoughtcrime. Thoughtcrimes are enforced through cognitive dissonance, which produces the departures from rationality that we have seen here from Friedersdorf and, to a lesser extent, from Rubin.
We say "to a lesser extent" because Rubin's bottom line, that Santorum's personal opinions about birth control make him unelectable, is not outlandish and could be true. But to the extent that Friedersdorf and Rubin support that hypothesis, it is by example rather than by logic. That is, if their emotions are typical of those of independent voters in swing states, then Rubin's conclusion is probably correct. But like this columnist, they are members of a rarefied class--media professionals living in highly Democratic areas--so the premise is counterintuitive to say the least.
Totalitarian ideologies sustain themselves in large part through fear, and feminism has been particularly fearsome of late, as the Susan G. Komen ladies and the Catholic bishops can attest. But our intuition is that this is a sign of weakness, not strength. The fearful reactions to Santorum's heresies against sexual freedom reinforce that sense.
This column has its differences with Rick Santorum, but we admire him for his fearlessness in challenging feminist pieties. "One man with courage makes a majority," Andrew Jackson is supposed to have observed. Is Rick Santorum such a man? If not, let's hear a reasoned argument to the contrary.
Conservatives who portray Obama as "kowtowing to women's groups" in mandating that Catholic institutions provide abortifacient drugs and sterilization procedures are making a very fine distinction (and perhaps also trying to imply that the president is unmanly). Actual women hold diverse views on this and other topics; the so-called women's groups reflect an ideological extreme.
Obama's anti-Catholic decree is plainly ideological rather than political. Like his decision to push ahead with ObamaCare despite overwhelming public resistance, it is an effort to impose a worldview rather than to win support. "The Catholic Church should deal with its own sexuality problem," Unitarian minister Debra Haffner told Fox News's Bill O'Reilly yesterday. By his actions, Obama has proved that he shares her contempt for the liberty of religions that believe in God.
Remember Froma Harrop, the civility scold and Baroness Catherine Ashton look-alike who called Tea Party congressmen "terrorists" and couldn't understand why anyone found this hypocritical? She provided us with lots of material last summer and now Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" has recycled it into comedy gold, somehow persuading her to sit for an interview in which she looks utterly ridiculous. You have to watch it to believe it.
Two Papers in One!
■"It is disturbing that President Bush has exhibited a grandiose vision of executive power that leaves little room for public debate, the concerns of the minority party or the supervisory powers of the courts. But it is just plain baffling to watch him take the same regal attitude toward a Congress in which his party holds solid majorities in both houses. Seizing the opportunity presented by the Congressional holiday break, Mr. Bush announced 17 recess appointments--a constitutional gimmick. . . . Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton made scores of recess appointments. But both of them faced a Congress controlled by the opposition party, while the Senate has been under Republican control for Mr. Bush's entire five years in office."--editorial, New York Times, Jan. 9, 2006
■"Nearly six months after it opened its doors, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finally has a director, after President Obama's recess appointment of Richard Cordray. . . . Mr. Obama also appointed three new and qualified members to the National Labor Relations Board. . . . Announcing the appointments, Mr. Obama also asserted a welcome new credo: 'When Congress refuses to act, and as a result, hurts our economy and puts our people at risk, then I have an obligation as president to do what I can without them.' Hear. Hear."--editorial, New York Times, Jan. 5, 2012
#OCCUPYFAIL: Occupy Portland domestic terrorists arrested with hand grenades. All the media myths about the Tea Party seem to have come true with regard to the Occupy movement, but the press doesn’t seem to care all that much.Here is the story:
The deputy also found two gas masks, protective eye goggles and a safety helmet. All three men told the deputy that they had spent the night at the Occupy Portland demonstration, and they brought the mortars and safety equipment to the demonstration in preparation of the expected confrontation between police and protesters Sunday morning.So, the "grenades" are home-made, but let's give full credit to the Occupiers desire to maim.
The three had been at the demonstration during the confrontation Sunday morning and had left about an hour before the vehicle was stopped. During that confrontation, a police officer was injured by a firework, but the three men denied being involved in the incident.
When asked about the explosives, the three men told authorities that they knew the canning jar would explode, causing glass shrapnel to fly and possibly cause injury.
In covering the Tea Party, of course, the Times emphasized its supposed extremism and violence. Brisbane doesn't even mention these themes in his column on Obamaville, even though there has been a good bit of violence there, whereas Tea Party violence was a figment of left-wing imaginations. That tells you something about the agenda of the Times and other like-minded news outlets.
The media helped create and now helps sustain the Obamaville monster, but that doesn't mean they can control it. In recent days videos have surfaced from Oakland, Calif., and Portland, Ore., showing Obamavillians attacking local news crews attempting to report on the goings-on.
The Portland video is especially creepy. It shows an angry white man--his face obscured part of the time by a pink scarf--shouting obscenities at a newsman, and declaring: "We are the 99%, you're the 1%. . . . We don't want you in our society." The distinction between demonization and dehumanization is a very fine one, and media figures who have encouraged this foul and dangerous movement will have a lot to answer for if it continues to escalate.
In the Obama years, bad news has always surprised the media.If this bad news really is "unexpected", then we are truly screwed since we are in the hands of total incompentents.
It is the most common adverb of the Obama years: “unexpectedly.”
● “Sales of U.S. previously owned homes unexpectedly dropped in July,” reported Bloomberg.
● “Manufacturing in the Philadelphia region unexpectedly contracted in August by the most in more than two years as orders plunged and factories shed workers,”reported Bloomberg Businessweek.
● “Consumer spending unexpectedly fell in June,” reported Reuters.
● “Dismal economic data on Thursday pointed to an unexpectedly abrupt slowdown in manufacturing and a pickup in inflation,” reported the New York Times’ business page.
This is just in the past week; hundreds of articles each month note that some new bit of economic data is contrary to the expectations of experts. But the term is starting to become an object of ridicule within the conservative blogosphere as the country endures its third year of hard economic times under President Obama.
Three years after a financial crisis, unemployment has hit painful highs, GDP growth has been sluggish at best, and some predict a “double dip” recession. During this period, the Obama administration and its allies have repeatedly made bold promises about imminent prosperity — from an infamous chart that projected that the stimulus would keep unemployment rate below 8 percent, to the administration’s “Recovery Summer” tour of 2010, to Nancy Pelosi’s prediction that passing Obamacare would create 400,000 jobs “almost immediately,” to the president’s prediction that we would enjoy 3.1 percent growth this year and 4.1 percent growth in 2012 and beyond.
For about three years now, conservative bloggers have chuckled at how frequently the unveiling of bad economic news comes with the adverb “unexpectedly” in media reports. As Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds, Michael Barone, and others have often asked, unexpected to whom?
“I think it’s a combination of cognitive dissonance, the terra nova nature of the post-bubble economy, and a healthy dose of partisanship,” suggests Ed Morrissey, who has blogged about the ubiquitous adverb regularly at HotAir.com.
Perhaps the perpetual surprise reflects a media desire to focus on pockets of growth or prosperity — at least with a Democrat in the White House. In a widely diversified $14 trillion economy, one can almost always find some areas of economic improvement.
Certainly, a media that wanted to paint a more dire portrait of the economy would have no shortage of material to work with. There’s considerable evidence that America’s problems in job creation are much worse than the most widely cited numbers would indicate.
Had Snyder gone the other way, it would have been satisfying to see the loathsome Phelps get his comeuppance. But a Puffington Host post the other day by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a nephew of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, reminds us why we ultimately come down on Roberts's side rather than Alito's:
Fans of enlightenment, democracy and justice can take comfort from a significant victory north of Wisconsin border. Fox News will not be moving into Canada after all! The reason: Canada regulators announced last week they would reject efforts by Canada's right wing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, to repeal a law that forbids lying on broadcast news.Fred Phelps is in rotten company. A free-speech hall of fame would include a lot of despicable protagonists, including Klansmen ( Brandenberg v. Ohio, 1969), neo-Nazis ( National Socialist Party v. Skokie, 1977) and pornographers ( Hustler v. Falwell, 1988). Yet the evil of allowing such ghastly speech is more than offset by the security that people like RFK Jr. lack the power to take away everyone's freedom in the name of enlightenment, democracy, justice, civility, modesty, honest, collegiality and idealism.
Canada's Radio Act requires that "a licenser may not broadcast . . . any false or misleading news." The provision has kept Fox News and right wing talk radio out of Canada and helped make Canada a model for liberal democracy and freedom. As a result of that law, Canadians enjoy high quality news coverage including the kind of foreign affairs and investigative journalism that flourished in this country before Ronald Reagan abolished the "Fairness Doctrine" in 1987. Political dialogue in Canada is marked by civility, modesty, honesty, collegiality, and idealism that have pretty much disappeared on the U.S. airwaves.
Posts
All Comments
