Commence the making of popcorn… now

Erickson & Trump. One on One.

By RedState on May 11, 2011

Yes, it is true. On Tuesday, I will be going one on one with Donald Trump in his office in New York.

He has agreed to sit down and have an unfiltered conversation with no topic off limits. Thus I will ask him those questions many of you have wanted to ask him and flesh out why he thinks he is a conservative, why he might run, etc.

You can watch the interview live and for free. But you must register by going here.

RedState

H/t: Spaghetti Lee

More Evidence That We Are Doomed

Greg Sargent has an excellent piece up tracking the reactions of the GOP and notes how many of them are not walking back the birfer nonsense:

Meanwhile, a number of leading Republican figures who have either endorsed birtherism or flirted with it are either refusing to say anything about today’s developments or are still insisting that Obama took too long to come clean.

John Boehner, by contrast, did suggest that it’s time to move on. His spokesman said today that this has “long been a settled issue.”

Until these good people step up and call out birtherism for what it is, we can only conclude that they are either too cowardly to challenge or alienate voters who remain wedded to their birther fantasies, or are hoping to continue capi­tal­izing politically from the out-of-control hatred and paranoia that will continue to be directed at America’s first black president.

Will the media hold them accountable? Don’t hold your breath- they have more pressing issues:

GOTCHA! ZING! BOOM!

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if all the news sources like the NY Times went broke and we only had Fox News, the Daily Caller, and Pajamas Media to provide information. Now I wonder how it could possibly be any worse.

Two Losers

I wasn’t able to follow the lame duck session closely, because the weeks prior to the holidays in this office are ordinarily filled with crisis and drama and last-minute filings, plus, I had to decorate two Christmas trees and talk a lot about possibly baking cookies.

I was catching up, and read this on START:

Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who led the floor fight for the treaty, said the vote will move the world away from the risk of nuclear disaster. “The winners are not defined by party or ideology,” he said. “The winners are the American people, who are safer with fewer Russian missiles aimed at them.”

Which got me thinking about John McCain and John Kerry, and how the two men were and are portrayed, and how things have turned out, in real life.

McCain and Kerry have quite a bit in common. Both long-term Senators, both lifetime “government employees”, both veterans, hell, they both married wealthy women (the second time around), so there’s some similarity even in their personal lives.

They’re also members of a very exclusive club. They both lost Presidential elections.

And that’s where the similarities end.

After John Kerry lost to George W. Bush, he returned to the Senate and simply did his job there, and he’s continued to do his job there.

Kerry lost, big, on climate change this year and he still rallied and led on START, rather than booking time on cable shows to bitch.

Kerry didn’t subject the country to two years of bitter griping, temper tantrums and petulant demands. Kerry didn’t pursue purely personal vendettas against whole groups of voters who (allegedly) “betrayed” him. Kerry didn’t flip-flop on each and every policy position he has ever held. He voted and votes the same way he always did. John McCain, remarkably, considering what we were told about him, has done all those awful things since his loss in 2008.

In the 2004 Presidential election, political media and pundits portrayed John Kerry as an elitist, foppish, slightly silly “flip-flopper” who lacked character and core convictions. The same political media and pundits lovingly and carefully nurtured the fairy tale that John McCain is a rock-ribbed, Country First, straight-shooter. Events since tell a radically different story.

How can this be? Wasn’t this script supposed to run the other way? Could they have been more wrong?

It’s Always Sunny at Kaplan Daily

Via email, Fred Hiatt’s fishwrap provides probably the most disgusting piece of agitprop you’ll read for a while:

But many residents near Kandahar do not share the view. They have lodged repeated complaints about the scope of the destruction with U.S. and Afghan officials. In one October operation near the city, U.S. aircraft dropped about two dozen 2,000-pound bombs.

In another recent operation in the Zhari district, U.S. soldiers fired more than a dozen mine-clearing line charges in a day. Each one creates a clear path that is 100 yards long and wide enough for a truck. Anything that is in the way – trees, crops, huts – is demolished.

“Why do you have to blow up so many of our fields and homes?” a farmer from the Arghandab district asked a top NATO general at a recent community meeting.

Although military officials are apologetic in public, they maintain privately that the tactic has a benefit beyond the elimination of insurgent bombs. By making people travel to the district governor’s office to submit a claim for damaged property, “in effect, you’re connecting the government to the people,” the senior officer said.

While you dirty hippies and evil leftists are focusing on the lives destroyed, what you are overlooking is that if you put on your neocon warface, you’ll realize that when we bomb civilians, kill their family members and friends, destroy their homes, their crops, and their livestock, sure there may be some hard feelings. But let’s not overlook the value of the government meet and greet!

We’re not just killing civilians and destroying their homes, but rather, this is a cleverly disguised government outreach program!

It’s Hard to be Humble When You’re a FOX News Personality

49% of the vote in a low-turnout election and….conservatives are RAMMING THE AGENDA down our throats in Ohio.

UNTIL the suffix is removed from Gov.-elect John Kasich’s title, Ted Strickland remains Ohio’s chief executive. The public pressure Mr. Kasich is exerting on Mr. Strickland to halt spending on studies of a modern passenger rail system in the state is neither helpful nor justified.

I’m waiting for the calls for humility from principled conservatives. Isn’t it time for David Brooks to deliver yet another droning lecture on how Americans in The Heartland value self-effacing, humble leaders who Share Our Values?

President Obama, after his election two years ago but before his inauguration, steered clear of involving himself in foreign-policy issues or the auto industry bailout. He said the country has only “one president at a time.” Similarly, Ohio has one governor as a time. As eager as Mr. Kasich appears to take over, he owes it to Mr. Strickland – on the 3C issue and others – to let the governor complete the last two months of this term before he imposes his own agenda.

Ohio media gave Kasich a complete pass on anything substantive. They were simply bored with the competent and decent Ted Strickland, and, predictably, slobbered all over Kasich, the Lehman director and FOX News personality, like a bunch of star-struck rubes. It was embarrassing to watch.

Now that Kasich has moved the crony-filled wrecking crew in before actually taking office, they’re whining ineffectually about silly procedural issues, and getting around to thinking about, you know, how he might govern.

Too late for that.

“You Don’t Need to Know That, Comrade!”

More of our precious deficit-swelling tax dollars well spent on literary critiques. From the NYTimes, “Secrets in Plain Sight in Censored Book’s Reprint“:

... The Defense Department is buying and destroying the entire uncensored first printing of “Operation Dark Heart,” by Anthony Shaffer, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve and former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, in the name of protecting national security.

A supposed secret removed from the second printing: the location of the Central Intelligence Agency’s training facility — Camp Peary, Va., a fact discoverable from Wikipedia. And the name and abbreviation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, routinely mentioned in news articles. And the fact that Sigint means “signals intelligence.” Not only did the Pentagon black out Colonel Shaffer’s cover name in Afghanistan, Chris Stryker, it deleted the source of his pseudonym: the name of John Wayne’s character in the 1949 movie “The Sands of Iwo Jima.”
[...]

[I]n the case of Colonel Shaffer’s book, uncensored advance copies — possibly as many as 100 — were distributed by St. Martin’s Press before military officials found what they thought were security lapses. The New York Times bought an uncensored copy online this month, and on Friday got the redacted version from the publisher…

The Pentagon’s intervention has greatly increased interest in the book: one uncensored copy sold for more than $2,000 this week on eBay, and when the story broke last week, preorders for the new edition pushed the book as high as No. 4 among best sellers on Amazon.
[...]

A Pentagon spokesman, Colonel David Lapan, said he could not discuss specific redactions “because the information in question is considered classified.” Colonel Shaffer said Friday that his Army bosses asked him not to discuss his book for now. In a statement released by St. Martin’s Press, he suggested that the changes inadvertently offered some insight.

“While I do not agree with the edits in many ways,” Colonel Shaffer wrote, “the Defense Department redactions enhance the reader’s understanding by drawing attention to the flawed results created by a disorganized and heavy handed military intelligence bureaucracy.”

That’s Wikipedia for you—just one unpatriotic spoiler after another!

Assange Sexy Time

The picture accompanying this article (in Swedish) made me laugh. Is Julian Assange the new Swedish sex symbol?

Rough Boys

Kathleen Parker shows us why she deserved that Pulitzer:

No, I’m not calling Obama a girlie president. But . . . he may be suffering a rhetorical-testosterone deficit when it comes to dealing with crises, with which he has been richly endowed.

[...] Obama is a chatterbox who makes Alan Alda look like Genghis Khan.

[...] Obama may prove to be our first male president who pays a political price for acting too much like a woman.

I’m not a DC columnist, so I’m not qualified to judge testosterone levels from speeches and policy statements. Even so, I don’t see a hell of a lot of robust masculinity in politicians of either party. If Parker (and MoDo) are looking for wimps, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell and Joe Lieberman, just to name three of many, seem like better targets than Obama.

(via)

I smell a Pulitzer

The very serious John Harris, who co-runs the Politico with his lover, Pulitzer committe member Jim VandeHei is now writing 1200 word pieces about what Obama staffers wear (Instaputz):

When two White House aides last weekend stripped off their shirts for an afternoon of drinking with friends at a Georgetown bar, there was widespread agreement that it exposed something — beyond the pectorals of speechwriter Jon Favreau and press aide Tommy Vietor — about Washington in the age of Barack Obama.

There was no agreement about what that something was.

Conservative critics said it showed the young Obama crowd needs to get a clue. By these lights, the bare-chested drinking showed the aides acting like — and, thanks to a photo posted on the Web, looking like — frat boys in the midst of two wars and the Gulf oil spill.

[snip]

Erick Erickson on conservative RedState.com complained of a double standard, claiming that a similar picture of Bush White House aides would have sparked a huge uproar.

How many MoDo columns is this story good for?

When You’ve Lost Mark Halperin

I’m as shocked as anyone about this:

It isn’t every day that a consumate inside-game reporter/pundit type like Mark Halperin aggressively calls out one party for lying, but that’s exactly what Halperin did early this morning on MSNBC, talking about the GOP claim that the Dem financial reg reform bill will lead to a permanent bailout. Per the transcript:

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Just this once, defend the Republican position. MARK HALPERIN: I cannot defend what they’re doing. MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Oh, please. SCARBOROUGH: Look at you! Look at you! [CROSSTALK] HALPERIN: They are willfully misreading the bill or they are engaged in a cynical attempt to keep the president from achieving something.

Note how appalled Scarborough is.

Greg says he will have video soon, and that is a good thing, because I need to see this with my own lying eyes.

I Pity Anyone Who Isn’t Them Tonight

At the Pulitzer site, the page on the commentary prize explains a hell of a lot about our current media culture.

For example, “witty” seems to be Pulitizer-code for conservative. Like Kathleen Parker (“perceptive, often witty”), Krauthammer’s ‘87 prize called him “witty and insightful”. I think Parker’s alright, but how perceptive is it to file a whole column on the Stupak compromise without even mentioning the Hyde Amendment?

As for Krauthammer, I suspect he was better before the war, which might explain his ‘87 prize. Not so for Friedman, who got the prize in 2002 for “his clarity of vision, based on extensive reporting, in commenting on the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat.” Suck on that.

That page also lists every Villager who will never be fired, including MoDo (‘99), Ruth Marcus (runner-up in ‘07), and of course Broder, who was the third recipient of the commentary prize in 1973.

Not Worthy

Under the headline A Masters win would be too much too soon for Tiger Woods, some Kaplan sports columnist writes:

We know that bad things happen to good people. We cope with it. But when great things happen to people who have acted badly, especially if the bonanza comes fast and arrives ringed with robes of glory, don’t we have to draw the line? I’m forgiving, but my brain hasn’t turned into pimento cheese. If Woods has a tap-in to win the Masters, I hope his conscience helps him yip it and lip it. Win any other week. But not here. Not now.

Are all sports columnists this fucking stupid, or did I just happen to glance at the sports part of the webpage on a bad day?

If this guy wins a Pulitzer (which I’ll grant is pretty unlikely), I hope he’ll have the common decency to give it back if he cheated on his wife or girlfriend. Because I can’t deal with the cognitive dissonance of someone’s hard work and talent being rewarded if they’ve done anything wrong in their personal life.

BREAKING NEWS- PREZNIT STILL BLACK!!ONE!ELEVEN!

From the front page of the online NY Times:

It is official: Barack Obama is the nation’s first black president.

A White House spokesman confirmed that Mr. Obama, the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas, checked African-American on the 2010 census questionnaire.

I’m going to start drinking now.

We’re All the Politico Now

Steve Clemons has a piece that will generate lots of links because of the title: “Communications Corruption at the White House.” Sounds exciting, until you read it:

What I have learned after discussions over the last several days with several journalists who either have regular access to the White House or are part of the White House press corps is that there is a growing sense that access is traded for positive stories—or perhaps worse, an agreement that things learned will not be reported in the near term.

The White House is working hard to secure deals that yield fluffy, feel good commentary about the Obama White House. One American White House reporter used colorful terms to describe the arrangement. The reporter said, “They want ‘blow jobs’ first [in the press sense]. Then you have to be on good behavior for a bit or be willing to deal, and then you get access.”

That’s quite a catch there, Steve! Hoocoodanode that a WH communication operation might offer more access to people who will write positive stories? SHOCKING! I wonder if Bob Woodward knows this!

Meanwhile, the entire piece is based on “unnamed sources” who have lots to say, none of it on the record so we can verify. This is inside baseball at its absolute worst. A sensational headline with a charge of corruption, a nothingburger of a report with not one piece of original information or a shred of verifiable evidence, all allegedly supplied by anonymous insiders.

Pathetic. I wonder if Robert Gibbs is the new Rahm for the manic progressive set.

*** UPDATE ***

I’VE JUST LEARNED THAT THERE IS AN ENTIRE BUSINESS OPERATION IN THIS COUNTRY DEDICATED TO MAKING PEOPLE LOOK GOOD. THEY CALL THIS CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE PUBLIC RELATIONS, OR PR FOR SHORT. WHERE’S MY PULITZER!

Teabagger v Closet Case

Reading some of the coverage of last night’s Crist/Rubio Fox News debate, and the coverage of the race in general, just makes me think about things that cannot be discussed.

One of the real issues in voters’ minds must be the recent poor track record of beard-loving closet cases. Setting aside homophobia, there’s a real practical issue of whether someone like Crist, who seems more of a Massa/Craig style of closet case than the Lindsey Graham model, will be caught in some airport restroom during his first term.

The other issue is that the role of a Republican Senator from the South could be accomplished by some form of trained animal. It merely requires voting against anything that comes to the floor and taking one’s turn blocking appointments and threatening filibuster.

Instead of confronting these two issues, we get questions about whether Florida should have a sales tax or higher user fees, a real hot topic in recent Senate debates.