Tea Partiers talk back to the pale voices at MSNBC and the NYT

From Reason:

PREVIOUSLY on the subject of Democrats and their racism:
•Democrats move to their comfort zone
•Black students, harassed for "acting white," get $150,000
•“You can’t vote against healthcare and call yourself a black man.”
•"The city wasn't ready to hire a white police chief."
•A prominent black politician says the white incumbent cannot properly represent black voters.
•San Franciscans discriminate against blacks.
•"He's not black and he can't represent me, that's just the bottom line."
•NAACP defends racism.
•Stanford finds Democrats are racist.
•Obama nominates a racist.
•Leaders acknowledge Democrat base is racist.
•"That's just how white folks will do you." ---Barack Obama.
•Dem says Dem primary voters are racist.
•Dems accuse Bill and Hillary of racism.

The NY Times as a fever swamp

To see what passes for wisdom at the New York Times, once known as the paper of record, check out this Frank Rich column:So, why does he thinks that the GOP is full of extreme Marxists ("Stalinists")? Well, that never becomes clear. He does claim that the contest between Republican Dede Scazzafava and Conservative Party nominee Hoffman in the special election for New York's 23rd district was "riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war." That might be true except that there were no riots and there was no blood. He continues:

The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama. ....

And Scozzafava is a mainstream conservative by New York standards; one statistical measure found her voting record slightly to the right of her fellow Republicans in the Assembly. .... [Emph. added]

So, Frank Rich wants to claim that Scozzafava is a "mainstream conservative" but that "the right," which is a "wacky paranoid cult," is attacking her because they want "to eat their own." However, today, former candidate Dede Scozzafava has endorsed the Democrat in the race. That makes Rich's claim that she is a "mainstream conservative" absurd. Further, it shows that "the right" had correctly figured out that she was a liberal. The only person in the story who appears "wacky" and "paranoid" would be Frank Rich.

Hat tip: B. Daniel Blatt

Sexism update

The Democrats may not have found a way to attack Gov. Palin's politics, but they can point out repeatedly, that she is a woman. For example, today Democratic Congressman Russ Carnahan introduced Sen. Biden at a campaign event with:

“There’s no way you can dress up that record, even with a lot of lipstick,”

The New York Times reports on on a similar jab from Sen. Obama's latest appearance in Lebanon, VA:

“John McCain says he’s about change, too — except for economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics,” Mr. Obama told his supporters here. “That’s just calling the same thing something different.”

With a laugh, he added: “You can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change; it’s still going to stink after eight years.”

It would be reasonable to think that Obama's "lipstick on a pig" comment referred to the Sen. McCain's policies instead of Gov. Palin gender except for two things (1) the crowd reaction to that line is so out-of-proportion strong (horribly clipped youtube video here) that they appear to have recognized it as a reference to Gov. Palin, the 'pit bull with lipstick', and (2) it is followed by the line about "old fish" which, in context, becomes a clear allusion to Sen. McCain's age.

Always trying to avoid the appearance of bias, the headline on the NY Times story did not mention Obama's making a gaffe or even a controversial statement. Instead the story was entitled "Feeling a Challenge, Obama Sharpens His Silver Tongue." By contrast, even the AP understood that the lipstick remark was about Palin, not policies.

PREVIOUSLY, during the primaries, Democrats were well aware that their party was filled with sexism and racism.

RELATED: More debunking of anti-Palin myths and lies here on libraries and here on the bride-to-nowhere.

RELATED: Biden questions Obama's judgement.

The New York Times as propaganda

In an article provocatively entitled "Book Cites Secret Red Cross Report of C.I.A. Torture of Qaeda Captives," the NY Times writes:

Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book [written by Jane Mayer] on counterterrorism efforts since 2001. ....

Citing unnamed “sources familiar with the report,” Ms. Mayer wrote that the Red Cross document “warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.” Red Cross representatives were not permitted access to the secret prisons where the C.I.A. conducted interrogations, but were permitted to interview Abu Zubaydah and other high-level detainees in late 2006, after they were moved to the military detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

So, the basis for these allegations is merely claims by terrorists. He claims as an example of torture, that some prisoners were “slammed against the walls,” something that is not unusual for guards at the best prisons to do to misbehaving prisoners and Al Qaeda prisoners do have a reputation for attacking guards. The NY Times, however, reports no context at all. By printing terrorist's claims uncritically, the NY Times is just serving as a vehicle for enemy propaganda.

Hat tip: BotW.

Defeat, whatever the cost!

The liberal approach to foreign policy is remarkably consistent over the decades. Consider Speaker Pelosi's approach to Al Qaeda in Iraq and the approach advocated by the New York Times toward to the Khmer Rouge in 1970s:

Indochina Rerun

February 17, 1973, Saturday

Page 30, 548 words

The news from Laos and Cambodia is beginning to show distressing similarities to the diplomatic deadlock of December that delayed the Vietnam cease-fire and provoked temporary intensification of the war....

There is one point which the Vietnam evolution these past three weeks has confirmed: no legalistic niceties are worth delaying an agreement on a cease-fire, for no diplomatic language on a signed paper can enforce provisions that one side or the other wishes to evade. [emphasis added]

It is interesting how concern for the lives of the 7 million inhabits in Cambodia as the Khmer Rouge approach power is neatly reduced to mere euphemisms like "legalistic niceties" and "diplomatic language." Also, while the NY Times acknowledges that "signed papers" are unenforceable, they are at the same time advocating no "delay" on reaching a "cease-fire agreement" which is itself just an unenforceable "signed paper." This seems consistent with the usual liberal position that reaching "agreement" is far more important than actually solving any problem.

UPDATE: William Shawcross, former NY Times reporter of Cambodia's "Killing Fields" fame, has learned the lesson about the human cost of US defeat.

Nations: children who won't grow up?

Is foreign policy just like kindergarten? The liberal/left seems to think so. This was discussed here as an explanation of Sen. Clinton's foreign policy pronouncements. Interestingly, a 1923 Sunday New York Times Magazine article explicitly uses the same unruly-child-in-need-of-a-parent analogy to explain foreign policy, at least as seen by the article's author:

WHO'LL BE HEAD OF THE FAMILY?

February 25, 1923, Sunday

By ANNE O'HARE McCORMICK

Section: The New York Times Magazine, Page SM1, 2866 words

THE task of saving the world lies heavy on the heads of statesmen of all nations. They realize that the greatest political opportunity in the outline of history is within the grasp of some bold hand. But whose? And how? In what Parliament hides the harmonizing genius, the Pied Piper who will entrance all the spoiled and snarling children of the world out of their own discordant houses into some peaceful family of nations?

...

Great Britain has never blinked the fact [sic.] that some marriage of convenience, or necessity, would eventually force us all, unwilling and frightened stepchildren, into some kind of family of nations. She has never doubted who would be the head of that family. Experienced in heading a good-sized family of her own, and, with all her mistakes, the most successful stepmother of nations in human history, she had reason to believe that no one in the world seriously question her claims or her qualifications. [emphasis added]

This world-as-family analogy would be merely an amusing rhetorical device except that, 80+ years later, as we have seen, and despite some disastrous consequences, it is still the way that liberals think of foreign policy. Indeed, for 15 years after Ms. McCormick wrote this article, liberal world leaders treated Mussolini and Hitler as children to be placated rather than as serious enemies.

The liberal belief in the concept of an international "head of family" is also unchanged. Now, despite its decades of failures, the United Nations is assigned that role. As Ms. McCormick noted, Great Britain had previously had that role.

Liberals also apply the the child-in-need-of-parent concept to domestic politics, as discussed within this post.

A possible relationship between liberalism and childhood pain was noted here. The connection between the family analogy and foreign policy may have been taken too far by Democratic presidents who, however seriously, make a show of asking their children for foreign policy advice.

Those foreign "moderates"

One of the repeating left/liberal ideas in foreign policy is that a leader of an enemy is actually a "moderate" and we should not push him too hard because his country would then fall to the more extreme contingent. We heard this about the USSR under Brezhnev, Andropov, and Gorbachev. We have heard this occasionally about the leadership of Iran, although not about Iran's current president who does not even pretend to pose as a moderate. A terrorist like Arafat and his successor, Abbas, have both succeeded in convincing liberals that they are "moderates." This left/liberal idea is not new. In 1933, the New York Times was playing Hitler as a moderate who might lose control to the extremists: A July 23, 1933 article by Anne O'Hare McCormick was entitled "HITLER THREATENED BY EXTREME NAZIS; OUTBREAKS FEARED" [caps in original]. The NY Times to the contrary notwithstanding, history shows that Hitler was not threatened by extreme Nazis. Rather, Hitler was an extreme Nazi.

"FRANKFURT'S BANKS STILL RUN BY JEWS" says New York Times headline, 1933

Another installment in our should-you-trust-the-MSM series: Hitler was not so bad says the 1933 New York Times. Thus, in a story printed on June 20, 1933, the Times wrote of German Jews: "Many Under Ban Look on Hitler as Less of an Evil Than Threatened Bolshevism." The NY Times reporter calls the physical attacks on Jews "only a dark detail." The Times says that Hitler's proposal to remove Jews from all bank directorates has been "already scrapped."

This story was written by the same reporter who earlier claimed that "Mussolini [was] eager to maintain peace."

History of climate change scares

Sen. Inhofe, chairman of the senate environment and public works committee, has produced a summary of global warming/climate change issues that is, coming from a politician, surprisingly good. For example, he outlines a history of media scares about climate change going back over a century:

Here is a quote form the New York Times reporting on fears of an approaching ice age.

“Geologists Think the World May be Frozen Up Again.”

That sentence appeared over 100 years ago in the February 24, 1895 edition of the New York Times.

Let me repeat. 1895, not 1995.

A front page article in the October 7, 1912 New York Times, just a few months after the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, declared that a prominent professor “Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age.”

The very same day in 1912, the Los Angeles Times ran an article warning that the “Human race will have to fight for its existence against cold.” An August 10, 1923 Washington Post article declared: “Ice Age Coming Here.”

By the 1930’s, the media took a break from reporting on the coming ice age and instead switched gears to promoting global warming:

“America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-year Rise” stated an article in the New York Times on March 27, 1933. The media of yesteryear was also not above injecting large amounts of fear and alarmism into their climate articles.

An August 9, 1923 front page article in the Chicago Tribune declared:

“Scientist Says Arctic Ice Will Wipe Out Canada.” The article quoted a Yale University professor who predicted that large parts of Europe and Asia would be “wiped out” and Switzerland would be “entirely obliterated.”

A December 29, 1974 New York Times article on global cooling reported that climatologists believed “the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure in a decade.”

The article also warned that unless government officials reacted to the coming catastrophe, “mass deaths by starvation and probably in anarchy and violence” would result. In 1975, the New York Times reported that “A major cooling [was] widely considered to be inevitable.” These past predictions of doom have a familiar ring, don’t they? They sound strikingly similar to our modern media promotion of former Vice president’s brand of climate alarmism.

The whole thing is worth reading.

UPDATE: The senator responds to his critics at CNN here.