The Dear Old MSM in Their Liberal Bubble

Conservatives love to twit the mainstream media for their bias and their insularity. And now that we really have a voice in the national debate we can afford to be more generous to our adversaries, and humorously represent them as jolly old dinosaurs “asking each other what’s happened to all the tasty fronds,” as Jonah Goldberg does.

He can’t help chuckling as three old dinosaurs, Tim Russert, Ted Koppel, and Tom Brokaw agree with each other about the shocking state of the nation.

These three giants of television journalism tut-tutted about one government failure after another, from the Katrina response to the government’s inability to provide health care for everybody to our dismayingly low taxes. Brokaw agreed with Koppel, Koppel agreed with Brokaw. Russert nodded as one newsman repeated what the other one just said.

But of course, things are in a parlous state, if you are a liberal MSM dinosaur. Things just aren’t the same as in the good old days when what the TV news said was accepted as objective news and there was no way you could escape the liberal bubble.

The trouble is that the liberal bubble leads the MSM not just into tut-tutting, but into seriously flawed journalism, as Michael Barone points out in critiquing The New York Times “Dec. 16 story reporting the National Security Agency intercepts of telephone conversations between terrorism suspects abroad and U.S. citizens or legal residents in the United States. The Times didn’t bother telling its readers this practice is far from new and is entirely legal.”

Let’s put the issue very simply. The president has the power as commander in chief under the Constitution to intercept and monitor the communications of America’s enemies. Indeed, it would be a very weird interpretation of the Constitution to say the commander in chief could order U.S. forces to kill America’s enemies but not to wiretap -- or, more likely these days, electronically intercept -- their communications. Presidents have asserted and exercised this power repeatedly and consistently over the last quarter-century.

In the old days, the Times could get away with this, because there would never be a chance for the conservative case to see the light of day. But not any more. Within a day or two of the Dec 16 Times story, conservatives had posted on the web examples of Democratic presidents—not just the evil Bush—invoking the power to do warrantless intercepts of foreign powers, and the MSM has been on defense ever since.

Muslims Don't Read Western Media

Should we forget the Bush strategy of using cold hard steel to push back the Islamist terrorists or can we win the war on terror by winning hearts and minds?

According to Daniel Pipes, winning hearts and minds isn’t going to do the job. Muslims the world over prefer to read only Muslim media and thus are impervious to western outreach through the media.

Many indications suggest that Muslims favor tuning in to or reading media prepared by their coreligionists, trusting these more than what comes from non-Muslims.

As an example of this Pipes offers the murder in 1994 of a Jewish boy, Ari Halberstam, on the Brooklyn Bridge by Rashid Baz, a Lebanese immigrant who killed Halberstam in revenge for the killing of 29 Muslims in a mosque in Hebron by Israeli Baruch Goldstein. It didn’t matter that the Israeli government had strongly condemned Goldstein’s attack. The Muslim media that Baz read never reported the Israeli condemnation. Instead they had encouraged revenge against an agent of the Israeli will.

Of course, everyone lives in a bubble. President Bush lives in a bubble, according to Newsweek. And liberals live in a bubble, according to Thomas Lifson.

One of the reasons people choose to live in a bubble is to stay focused on their goal. President Bush is focused on the war on terror. Liberals are focused on working towards a progressive millennium. Muslims are focused upon bringing Islam to the whole world.

All this focus is great. Unless it distracts you from noticing that you are heading into disaster. To avoid this fate it is best to keep a weather eye on what the other guys are saying and writing.

Now We Can Fight Back

It used to be there was little we could do if The New York Times put a lump of coal into the nation’s Xmas stocking. And it was hard to fight against Democrats when they undermined the cold war during and after Vietnam.

But now we have the conservative blogosphere and we have commentators like Michael Barone who writes an article—drawing on the conservative counterblasts to the NYT NSA screed of Dec 16—to point out that the courts have always recognized the president’s power to intercept foreign communications for intelligence purposes.

The Constitution, Justice Robert Jackson famously wrote, should not be interpreted in a way that makes it "a suicide pact." The notion that terrorists’ privacy must be respected when they place a cell-phone call to someone in the United States is in the nature of a suicide pact. The Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures in the United States should not be stretched into a ban on interceptions of communications from America’s enemies abroad.

And now we have Amir Taheri reminding us, against the elite push to declare the war on terror a failure, just how much has been achieved in the last four years since the shock of 9/11. In Afghanistan and Iraq the

democratic forces may fail because of their mistakes, or be defeated by Islamist and secular despotic opponents. But they also have a chance to win. And that — as seen from the United States, which should be supportive of democratic forces everywhere — is certainly a success.

The United States, Taheri writes, cannot change its foreign policy on an instant. And let us be under no illusion:

The spread of democracy is good for American safety and security, not to mention trade and economic interests. And it is also good for nations that wish to enter the mainstream of global life.

The lesson of the Bush years is that there are democratic forces out there longing to get a chance in the benighted dictatorships of the world. All they are saying is give us a chance.

A Christmas Story from the Land of the Elves

At Christmastime it is right and proper that we step back from the hurly burly of everyday life and think a little. For instance, we could think a little about the land of the elves, writes Robert Cole.

Once upon a time in the far off Land of Cold Commerce there lived some elves. Lots and lots of elves.
Some of the elves wore overalls. Some wore white collars and some wore blue collars.

You can see where this is going. “Some of the elves thought that they had power.”

The Elf Lord of Nevele thought he could change things. Long, long ago he’d granted the elves of Knab independence and robbed the Elves of Snoisnep of tax relief. He’d given the working-class elves credits, but not enough credit for being able to look after themselves as elves.

It seems that this particular land of the elves is on the other side of the Atlantic. The Elf Lord of Nevele is Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchecquer at No. Eleven, Downing Street. Of course, he wants to be a bigger Lord, the Lord High Elfship of Number Ten. Anyway, one day, the Spirit of Business woke up from a very long nap and

Light shone all around, scales dropped from the eyes of the elves and they began to hear with a clarity never before known.

Yeah, like we should be so lucky.

Anyway, guess what happened. People started to think of themselves not as workers or capitalists or Elf Lords of this and that, but as “all of these types of people simultaneously.”

They realised that it was only by behaving with mutual consideration, and by having respect for the fragility of the interwined relationships that supported them all, that they could thrive.


The Land of Cold Commerce became a Warm Weald of Wealth. Things began to make sense. And everyone lived happily ever after.

Ah, yes. And God bless us every one, eh, Bob Cratchit?

Will "Kos" Lead Democrats Off a Cliff?

Who is Markos Moulitsas and what does he want? That is what Democrats must be asking themselves as “Kos” has propelled his Daily Kos into the stratosphere as the No. 1 liberal blog in the nation, and that is what writer Benjamin Wallace-Wells wonders as he interviews Moulitsas in Berkeley, California for Washington Monthly.

Wallace-Wells finds that Moulitsas is a tactician. He doesn’t really seem to know what he wants, except that he wants to win, wants Democrats to win. But the trouble is that all the Democrats he supports tend to lose. In 2004 he raised money for 13 Democrats and every one of them lost. All through the fall of 2004 he was confidently predicting victory, and, well, you know what happened.

But he seems to represent a real constituency.

The younger-than-35 liberal professionals who account for most of his audience seem an ideologically satisfied group, with no fundamental paradigm — changing demands to make of the Democratic Party.

Moulitsas and his supporters don’t have a coherent political philosophy. They just want to beat Bush and the evil neo-cons. And the Democratic leadership feels like placing “a gaudy bet” on Kos and his chums.

But the more that the Democratic Party turns to Moulitsas for help, the more the limits to his movement become apparent, the less the raw animus of many liberals for the Iraq war seems likely to translate into any lasting liberal movement.

Wallace-Wells paints Moulitsas as a fanatic, a slight man with a high pitched voice:

He speaks in twenty-minute chunks, so you don’t need to ask questions so much as provision buckets to catch the flood.

For a conservative, this all seems like great fun, it feels like the Democrats digging themselves into a hole. The great prosperous middle of the nation will never turn to a fanatic like Kos who wants to enroll them into a mass movement. Go ahead, Democrats, we chuckle, wrap yourself around this fanatic and see where it gets you.

Of course, if things really go south, then all bets are off. America might rally to a tactical ruthless Democratic Party.

But before then “Kos” is more likely to lead the Democratic Party off an electoral cliff. After all, back in the 1980s the secret weapon of the evil neo-cons was Ronald Reagan, a man who offered America radical change with a smile and a bob of the head. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Kos and his chums don’t understand that the Democrats are not hungry revolutionaries with nothing to lose that can afford to take big risks to win a great prize. Democratic voters have a lot to lose if things go the wrong way: their government pensions, their first-dollar health benefits, their government jobs, their government subsidies, for a start.

Is the Worm Turning in NY Subways?

Studies show that state and local government workers earn about 40 percent more than workers in the private sector. That is what Steve Malanga reports in City Journal.

So why do unions like the transit workers union in the New York metropolitan area get away with striking when their semi-skilled bus and train operators get paid around $50,000 a year with full health benefits and pensions at 55?

Maybe they aren’t going to get away with it for much longer. According to Ryan Sager comments on the TWU website were running 4-1 against the strike until the union took the comments section down. Wrote one person on the TWU site:

My annual salary is less than half than the lowest paid transit worker in the system, and now I am going to lose at least one if not more days of pay due to the strike . . . Thanks for that — and happy holidays.

The fat salaries and benefits of government workers will only last as long as the average voter puts up with them. When the day comes that the average voter turns against the overpaid, under-challenged government worker then the public employee unions will suddenly find that their good friends the municipal politicians will be nowhere to be found.

Politicians always go where the votes are. Nothing personal, you understand.

Unsustainable Medicare

As commentator Bruce Bartlett writes, the federal budget is dangerously out of whack. Never mind the gross federal debt of $9.9 trillion. The real number is the unfunded liabilities on Social Security and Medicare. On President Bush’s watch

Social Security’s indebtedness has risen to $5.7 trillion, Medicare Part A is now up to $8.8 trillion and Part B has grown to $12.4 trillion. In addition, there is now another Medicare program -- Part D for prescription drugs -- that George W. Bush rammed through Congress. The unfunded liability for just this one program is $8.7 trillion, for a total of $35.6 trillion.

It is going to be interesting to see what happens with Medicare over the years. What do America’s senior citizens really want from their government health care program? What are they willing to pay for it? What is the rest of the nation prepared to pay?

That is why the $35.6 trillion number is meaningless. So we’ve made a ridiculous promise that cannot be redeemed. As Herbert Stein said, years ago, If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.

The interesting thing is how the politics of this is going to work out and how the government will hide from the senior citizens of the day that it is not going to redeem its promise of abundant, affordable health care for senior citizens.

We can see how it works out in nations with government monopoly health systems. They restrict the provision of health care by rationing. How will it work out here?