WHAT WOULD BREITBART DO?
Archive for 2012
March 4, 2012
TOM COBURN ENDORSES ROMNEY: “This Year, Nothing Trumps the Economy.”
UPDATE: Reader Matt Carolan writes: “For fun, people should wear the Breitbart masks in photos – our version of the Guy Fawkes mask Anonymous and Occupy like to wear.” Heh.
SO LAST NIGHT I WAS PRETTY HARD ON ROBERT WRIGHT, calling him a “schmuck” for this post on Andrew Breitbart. Well, it was a schmucky post — where liberals are always “passionate about injustice,” people on the right are characterized as “hostile,” “rage-filled” or “angry,” and Wright’s post follows in this tradition in the course of making a not-very-interesting and not-very-well-supported point.
But on reflection, one schmucky post doesn’t a schmuck make. Sooner or later, every blogger will make a schmucky post, so taking a contrary view would make us all schmucks or schmucks-to-be. But I’ve known Wright for years and in truth have not found him to be a schmuck. So I’ll retract my characterization of Wright, which on sober reflection seems unfair, though not my views on the post, which really was a stinker.
A READER EMAILS:
When will there be a Facebook or Social Media petition to demand that Obama gives back Maher’s $1 million unless and until he apologizes to Sarah Palin?
Make Obama OWN it.
I don’t know, but I did see this image on Facebook:
THE REAL REASON WHY law school tuition keeps rising.
ROGER KIMBALL: James Q. Wilson 1931-2012. A must-read.
WASHINGTON POST Attacks Free Speech. Funny, I don’t recall them getting so upset over the attacks on Joe The Plumber. “What about President Obama? He has never repudiated Bill Maher for myriad of similar offenses including calling Sarah Palin the C-word and the T-word. Instead of demanding that Bill Maher apologize, Barack Obama accepted a million bucks from him.”
This is all battlespace preparation for the general election. Neutralizing Limbaugh is a priority — though I think there’s a risk of significant blowback in terms of energizing the Republican base. Though the base seems to be energizing itself.
TIME TO PAY UP, SUCKER: “Sha la la la la la la live for today… sang the Baby Boomers, who continue to live, and you’re being warned to get ready to come up with the programs they’re going to need to maintain themselves as the consequences of failing to make provisions for the future accumulate. Women and their needs… you’re supposed to understand that is what government is for.”
BUYING HABITS: Reader Art Weller writes:
I was in the process of buying my son a new Laptop today, on Amazon. I stopped in the middle of the process, backed out, and came back through the link on Instapundit. In a modern age, I can combine my consumer actions with supporting a part of my community. That’s interesting, and worth paying attention to.
That’s what was on my mind as I was grocery shopping this afternoon, and it led me to begin comparing prices at the big grocery store with what I pay on Amazon for some items (such as coffee). In every case, the local store was higher priced.
Even figuring in the cost of Amazon prime, I save money shopping online more often than not, making the convenience free.
Thoughtful day, especially in today’s economic climate.
Support the folks you’d like to see flourish. Let the ones you don’t like shrivel and die.
KENNETH ANDERSON: CIA, Drones and Proxy Forces, and the Exit from Afghanistan.
Let it be shouted from the rooftops that Rush Limbaugh should not have called Ms. Fluke a slut or, as he added later, a “prostitute” who should post her sex tapes. It’s unlikely that his apology will assuage the people on a warpath for his scalp, and after all, why should it? He spent days attacking a woman as a slut and prostitute and refused to relent. Now because he doesn’t want to lose advertisers, he apologizes. What’s in order is something more like groveling—and of course a phone call to Ms. Fluke—if you ask me.
But if Limbaugh’s actions demand a boycott—and they do—then what about the army of swine on the left?
During the 2008 election Ed Schultz said on his radio show that Sarah Palin set off a “bimbo alert.” He called Laura Ingraham a “right-wing slut.” (He later apologized.) He once even took to his blog to call yours truly a “bimbo” for the offense of quoting him accurately in a New York Post column.
Keith Olbermann has said that conservative commentator S.E. Cupp should have been aborted by her parents, apparently because he finds her having opinions offensive. He called Michelle Malkin a “mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick.” He found it newsworthy to discuss Carrie Prejean’s breasts on his MSNBC show. His solution for dealing with Hillary Clinton, who he thought should drop out of the presidential race, was to find “somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out.” Olbermann now works for über-leftist and former Democratic vice president Al Gore at Current TV.
Left-wing darling Matt Taibbi wrote on his blog in 2009, “When I read [Malkin’s] stuff, I imagine her narrating her text, book-on-tape style, with a big, hairy set of balls in her mouth.” In a Rolling Stone article about Secretary of State Clinton, he referred to her “flabby arms.” When feminist writer Erica Jong criticized him for it, he responded by referring to Jong as an “800-year old sex novelist.” (Jong is almost 70, which apparently makes her an irrelevant human being.) In Taibbi’s profile of Congresswoman and presidential candidate Michele Bachmann he labeled her “batshit crazy.” (Oh, those “crazy” women with their hormones and all.)
Chris Matthews’s sickening misogyny was made famous in 2008, when he obsessively tore down Hillary Clinton for standing between Barack Obama and the presidency, something that Matthews could not abide. . . .
But the grand pooh-bah of media misogyny is without a doubt Bill Maher—who also happens to be a favorite of liberals—who has given $1 million to President Obama’s super PAC. Maher has called Palin a “dumb twat” and dropped the C-word in describing the former Alaska governor. He called Palin and Congresswoman Bachmann “boobs” and “two bimbos.” He said of the former vice-presidential candidate, “She is not a mean girl. She is a crazy girl with mean ideas.” He recently made a joke about Rick Santorum’s wife using a vibrator. Imagine now the same joke during the 2008 primary with Michelle Obama’s name in it, and tell me that he would still have a job.
It’s different when you say bad things about Republican women. Duh.
Related: Dana Loesch and Amy Farah Fowler on the subject.
And does it make sense to expect people to be “gentlemen” in a society that does not reward or appreciate gentlemanly behavior? Is it fair to invoke archaic standards of behavior as a means of preventing criticism of modern standards of behavior?
A LEGAL SHOW WORTH WATCHING. “Federal lawsuits against Aereo, a startup that plans to show broadcast TV online, could influence the awkward relationship between television and the Internet. . . . Aereo is reminiscent of another technology the broadcasting industry once fought: cable TV. That began as a way for people who lived far from TV transmission towers to get better reception. Early cable pioneers basically just put up big antennas and ran cable out to customers The broadcasters squawked and got federal regulators to inhibit what the cable industry could do, but only for so long. It’s funny how things turn out: Now a company that was born slinging cable controls NBC. You can’t blame the TV broadcasters for trying to stop Aereo. Every company in the TV business is trying to make sure innovation happens on its own terms.”
Actually, I do blame people for trying to stop innovation.