Archive Listing
February 8, 2007 - February 1, 2007

Thursday, March 09, 2006

A MATTER OF TRUST. This isn't about giving up. It's about being realistic. Republicans in Congress and the electorate are turning their backs on the President in droves for what seem to them very good reasons. They're mad about the Dubai Ports deal, either because they're frightened of the Arabs or disgusted by the administration's incompetent PR performance. They're sick of all the excessive spending and the President's very belated and lame request for a bandaid called the line-item veto. They're mad about illegal immigration, which continues in an unabated flood because of the administration's refusal to stop pandering to the Hispanic vote.  They're weary of the war and what appears to be the declining resolve of the Bush administration to answer opportunistic critics or to take the bold new steps needed to defuse the powder keg of Iran. They're embarrassed by all the corruption in Congress, and, yes, the Dems are corrupt too, but so are the Republicans.

All this negative emotion is building to the usual self-destructive behaviors by conservatives. Of all times, now is not the time to pull abortion to center stage and polarize the electorate with a premature assault on Roe v. Wade. So, of course, that's exactly what the social conservatives are in the process of doing. Now is not the time for mainstream conservatives to suddenly start paying attention to the tired old isolationist rhetoric of paleo-conservatives like Buchanan and Buckley. They have nothing new to say, so, of course, bewildered Republicans of all stripes will be finding their antique restatements of the Monroe doctrine incredibly compelling. Now is not the time for Republicans across the country to sit on their hands while the Democrats whale away at the President in order to regain control of the House in the 2006 elections, so, of course, that's what they will do.

Fine. All these are time-honored behaviors and Democrats are much more practiced at putting up with ideological compromises within their own ranks for the sake of being in power. Many Republicans, on the other hand, prefer the convenient ideal of simply being right, win or lose, and especially lose. That's their call.

The only point I'm going to make is that if Republicans do sit on their hands in the upcoming election campaign, the Democrats will win a majority in the House of Representatives. And if they win the House, there is no question whatsoever that they will impeach the President of the United States and paralyze American foreign policy for at least two years. The Iraq war effort and the War on Terror will fall apart. Iran will bluster its way past Europe and the U.N. to realize its nuclear ambitions. And no nation in the middle east or in the broader muslim world will believe the United States has the will to back up its diplomacy with anything but more words.

Is that okay with you? We will survive it all -- the humiliations, the foreign and domestic defeats, the Islamist advances and takeovers, the hideous vindictiveness of a controlling party consumed by hatred rather than ennui. We may eventually undo the decades of damage such a two years will wreak upon us. We'll muddle through it, the way we always do. All I'm asking is whether you're ready yet, or not. It's a lot of fun being mad at George W., and by all means continue, but make sure you're comfortable with the image of him being thrown out of office and possibly into prison as well. When the hate juggernaut gets truly up and running, it has considerable momentum and isn't easy to stop. And most of them won't want to stop until the devastation is complete.

If you're not quite ready yet, here's a little instructional program that will help you. Focus on each little step, and pretty soon you'll quit worrying about everything else. It's really simple and easy when you get the hang of it.

Have fun.

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

PSAYINGS.5Q.78. Three times now in recent weeks, Hugh Hewitt has had one of the guests on his radio show hang up on him. We wouldn't be tracking this statistic for Sean Hannity, who gets hung up on fairly frequently for his loud, blustering style. Hugh Hewitt is a very gentlemanly fellow, though, and when someone bangs down the phone in his ear it's because he has found a line of questioning the guest doesn't want to respond to or can't respond to without giving something vital away. Here at InstaPunk we call that a "kill," and though we're sure Hugh would never approve, we think it would be fun to keep count.

First to dive into the weeds was CNN's Washington correspondent Ed Henry, who thought his Messerschmidt would be more than a match for Hugh's P-51. It didn't turn out that way: Mr. Henry grew more and more distraught at Hugh's questioning of policies and practices at CNN throughout the interview, then finally took a mortal hit in his engine about here:


Second to go down in flames was the admittedly disturbed Helen Thomas, who maintains the delusion that she is regarded as an objective journalist. Trying to defend this absurd pretense on the radio got her into trouble right away, and she began fleeing at top speed. The climax was reached when Hugh swung the P-51 around on her tail and politely gunned her down:


The third victim was pollster James Zogby, who was trying to perpetrate a methodologically and ideologically skewed poll result regarding U.S. troops in Iraq. After they both cleared their guns, there was some preliminary ducking and dodging about all the poll particulars Zogby refused to discuss, and then Zogby thought he could stop the whole dogfight in mid-air:

Many thanks to the Radioblogger website for posting the complete transcripts. We'll be back at you with more air-to-air combat as it happens.

UPDATE 3/21/06. Helen Thomas has struck again, this time at thw President, and she went down in flames just like she did with Hugh. For those who are marvelling at the moonbattery surrounding the third anniversary of the War in Iraq, you won't want to miss this completely different perspective on "unacceptable" U.S. casualties.

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

THE AWFUL TRUTH. We can't help feeling bad for Aaron Brown, the brilliant former anchor of CNN's News Night with Aaron Brown. He was perfect for the job, which really couldn't have been adequately hosted by any small sharp-faced mammal whose name wasn't Aaron Brown. He did what was expected of him and yet he still got fired. No wonder he's still agonizing about what went wrong and why he lost his place in the sun. The good news is, he's figured out who's to blame: Fox News, Natalee Holloway, and all of us:


It was because CNN spent so much money covering the tsunami that they could no longer afford to pay the greatest newsman in the country his salary, which would have been a lot higher in the first place in the ideal world in which news is not a business, but a kind of priesthood led by a handful of geniuses who have the brains to tell the rest of us what we should think about everything.

When he lays it on the line like that, it makes us feel guilty. We know we should have been soaking up Aaron Brown's wisdom instead of watching Greta slogging through the landfills of the Caribbean looking for headlines and missing blondes. But we were bad. We ignored Aaron, sometimes for years at a time. We'd like to make it up to him. Here's our best shot.

Somebody as drily acerbic and intellectual as Aaron Brown probably doesn't know how to blow his own horn enough. We suspect his resume needs a touch-up, a kind of "greatest hits" roundup of his deftest observations about the news. So we did some googling and came up with an array of material  he might like to incorporate into his curriculum vitae. First up is this brief summary from Wikipedia:


That's all you really need in the way of hard facts. The rest of the content should be devoted to illuminating the incredible insight, integrity, and objectivity of his reporting. That's why we (and he) are so lucky that the Media Research Council has been collecting direct quotes by the great man for several years now -- available via their search function. Here are our nominations for topics and punchlines Aaron should set before potential employers in his job search.



Yes, of course. Politicians in this country can't wait to not do anything for poor black people. It gets them such great press when Jesse shows up on the doorstep screaming "Racism!" Aaron's Murrow-like sagacity about such low political motives is probably one of the strongest levees we have against a terrible flood of right-wing racism.


This one shows that Aaron has mastered journalistic math, which features equations like (2,000 casualties = 60,000 casualties) and (100 million murdered = 535 criticized). Also (100 million < 535) if the Democrat on the lefthand side of the equation mumbles a half-assed apology while the righthand side stands mute.


Here, Aaron produces a pretty little cornucopia of journalistic talents: convenient misremembering of the recent past, restatement of an oft-repeated but debatable supposition as a proven fact, and the presentation of a partisan charge as if there were no reason of any kind to dispute it. All wrapped in the most perfectly superior tone. God, what a talent.


It's always cool when journalists presume to possess moral sense. It's kind of like snipers and hitmen waxing eloquent about the surpassing virtue of good marksmanship. You're so impressed at the misdirection that you almost forget the underlying question. What would constitute a hero to a Washington journalist? Go, Aaron!


Maureen Dowd is the queen of shoehorning large-scale (and frequently tragic) stories  into cocktail party metaphors for the purpose of scoring catty points against her political foes. No one can hope to best her at this signature device, but every  mainstream journalist has to demonstrate basic competence in this skill. Aaron has.


The artful summation is what broadcast journalists really get paid for. You've got to know what to include (one side), what to leave out (the other side), and how to take credit for the elegant simplicity of your misrepresentations. Nobody can say Aaron doesn't excel at artful summations.


The news is what mainstream journalists say it is. Many simply ignore events they don't wish to anoint as news. A brilliant few actually go out of their way to ridicule events that look like news to their less talented competitors. Aaron is one of those brilliant few. All together now: Whoopi!


Playing it straight down the middle is the Holy Grail of journalism. Wait. That's not right. Convincing your audience that you're playing it straight down the middle is the Holy Grail of journalism. Any way you can. In this quest, Aaron Brown is Sir Galahad.


The broadcast journalist lives in the arena of the spoken word, which opens up opportunities not quite as available to print journalists and pundits. One of these is the smooth non-sequitur, that combination of statements in a sequence that seems to make sense but does nothing of the kind. In the example above, Aaron pulls off the astounding feat of using the exact same illogic for his own purposes that he is falsely accusing the President of using for campaign purposes. Don't see it yet? Read it all the way through again. When Aaron declares it "strange" that "33-year-old questions are being asked," he is implying that Bush's stated doubts about Kerry's national security credentials are based on Kerry's Vietnam War record rather than his presidential campaign rhetoric and his votes in the Senate. The Bush campaign never said any such thing. So what is it that's really "strange" here? That it's Aaron who is defending Kerry's national security credentials, not with reference to his contemporary political record, but with an historical artifact he himself has just deemed an irrelevancy, that the senator "volunteered to go to Vietnam and served with distinction." It's beautifully done and proof positive that Aaron belongs in the front rank of broadcast journalists.


We've shown you that Aaron is schooled in numerous sophisticated journalistic techniques. But technique must go hand-in-hand with good old-fashioned political acumen. How might our recent history have turned out differently if Aaron hadn't been so perceptive about the essential moderateness of Howard Dean? It sends a chill down your spine, doesn't it?


The casual observer might not think so, but journalists have to know a lot of stuff, even about science and things like that. It's where they get all those brilliant comparisons they make to explain the truth to dummies like you and me. Yeah, Aaron's not going to get an A+ for the Galileo part of his comparison, which didn't come out completely 100 percent right, but he has to know more about Global Warming than he does about Galileo, doesn't he? It's been on TV and in all the papers, and you know he reads the papers. Or the headlines anyway.


Goodness and fairness are important too. It wasn't nice for Rush Limbaugh to do things like repeat some of the quotes we've been reviewing here, which means -- if you poseess the exquisite moral sense of an Aaron Brown -- that it's perfectly right and proper to smirk at the very public personal troubles of Rush Limbaugh. In fact, if your'e good enough and fair enough, it's practically mandatory to smirk, and make cruel jokes, and express every kind of delight in your erstwhile adversary's misfortune. After all, everyone's only human. Except Rush Limbaugh, of course.


There are certain inviolable commandments about life. Even for journalists. One of these is that all the money generated by a capitalist system really belongs to the government, which means that personal income is the amount of money the government generously allows you to keep, and any cut in taxes is to be counted an intolerable cost to the government. What can we say? Aaron Brown is a devout journalist.


We said certain commandments. These are not to be confused with the Ten Commandments, which are the last refuge of evil segregationists, as everyone knows. Well, journalists know it anyway. At least, Aaron Brown does. Thank God.


Well, one of the Ten Commandments is probably okay. The one about not killing, especially if the ones we're talking about killing are sworn enemies of the United States of America who have raped and tortured and murdered thousands of people under cover of our network's deal to give them favorable press as long as we get to hang out at the palace with them. What ordinary American idiots don't know, of course, is that Uday and Qusay weren't such bad guys when you got to know them, and much more entertaining to dine with than that cowboy criminal in the White House. Uh, where were we? Right. Killing. It's very very bad. And probably just another political cover-up.


Speaking of cover-ups, a journalist always has to be on the alert (a la Dan Rather) for the story that is being suppressed just because it's false when everybody who is anybody knows it's really true, or sort of true, or should be true, because it would make such a damn good story. And that's journalism in a nutshell, which is where you can always find the mind of an Aaron Brown.


Yes, we remember the Wellstone funeral too. No matter how long we live, we will NEVER get over the ugliness of the fact that Republicans objected to it and had the unmitigated gall to communicate their objections to the mass media via boilerplate language. It was unspeakable then, it's unspeakable now, and it represents a permanent dishonoring of the memory of Paul Wellstone. And the Democrats shouldn't have done what they did either, like Aaron pointed out.


Great men. It takes one to know one. And Aaron Brown is one for the ages.

This brings us full circle. We began by imagining journalism as a sort of priesthood instead of a grubby business under the thumb of the entertainment industry, and we've arived at the kind of larger-than-life role model that a man like Aaron Brown has always done his best to live up to. In the process, we've learned much. As the materials we've assembled demonstrate, Aaron Brown is simply too good for the news business as it is practiced by for-profit corporations. That's why we think he should mail his updated resume to the NPR/PBS combine, where they must be seeking a replacement for spiritual leaders like Bill Moyers (retired, awaiting canonization) and Daniel Schorr (awaiting retirement but possibly immortal). He'd be a good fit there. In our opinion. But what do we know? We're only human.

WE HAD THE ANSWER IN JUNE 2005. Even the Washington Post has finally noticed that the Democrats don't have any idea what they're for:


We hate to say we told you so. But we did. We even wrote up a Democrat Contract with America here. It's still the best summary of what they stand for and where they'll take the country if they regain power. And we're still offering it for free. So here it is. Again.


Best wishes from all of us here at InstaPunk.

Monday, March 06, 2006

MORE LINKS IN THE CHAIN. The continuing collapse of the Ivy League into self-hating dementia is chronicled in two good articles today.

John Fund describes the circumstances surrounding the matriculation of Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi at Yale. We'll only quote the beginning, but it's all worth reading.


And Camille Paglia smacks Harvard around for the Summers debacle and related events.


Again, the whole piece is worth reviewing as a reminder that Alan Dershowitz isn't the only American liberal who regards the state of the nation's most prestigious universities with alarm.

What's most interesting about the current hot topics is the absurd contradiction they highlight. Predatory feminists at Harvard drive their university's president into the weeds, while at the rival (and some would say mirror) institution Yale, the same academic mindset results in pandering to the single most concentrated community of woman-haters on the planet, the Taliban. The academics don't see any problem with this. They don't see any contradiction. But all the sneering they do at the rest of the country is rooted in their supposed intellectual and moral superiority over the common folk.

There is no explaining this mentality. There is only a disbelieving description of it. They are suffering from a disease of consciousness, similar to Alzheimer's but darker, which is advanced enough that it does not know what of its essential qualities have been destroyed. It operates in a shrunken, distorted and fragmentary world and beholds nothing but a reflection of its own fancied magnificence. The madness has become a separate universe.

The short term is brain damage. The minds of our universities are rotting and taking a once valuable asset away from us. John Fund is wrong about one thing: even mockery is useless. These mental cripples are too far gone.

Do you care?

You damn well should.

Thursday, March 02, 2006

PSAYINGS.5Q.52. This is a real contest. The winner -- and there can be only one -- will receive the following prize: a large can of Three Diamonds tuna:


All you have to do is best Ann Coulter in predicting the winners of the Oscar in the same categories in which she has made predictions. Read her column here. Then submit  your own predictions, including your reasoning, for the same categories in which she has made predictions. The person who gets the most right, with the best reasoning, will win.

All judging will be performed by InstaPunk, himself, in person. You can send your submissions via email, at the address shown on this page, or via the Comments section. We have secured extra bandwidth to accommodate the inevitable landslide volume of traffic. Don't forget, we're talking Three Diamonds. Large. Albacore.

All systems are GO. Start predicting.

UPDATE. Our servers are already taking a beating. But we can handle it. Albacore. We understand. Keep submitting.

UPDATE 2. Just to clarify -- Yes, it's really Three Diamonds tuna. Albacore. Believe it.

Back to Archive Index