Media Turns on Clintons

The fundamental thing to understand about the media is the blood-in-the-water principle.

The media is always lovey-dovey with people in power. But as soon as there’s blood in the water, and a powerful person appears wounded, then the media sharks appear from near and far to take a bite. It’s called the feeding frenzy.

I remember when I first understood this. It was twenty years ago when the coach of the Seattle Seahawks, Jack Patera, was fired. All of a sudden we learned that the sports personalities who had been interviewing Patera on the “Jack Patera Show” before every Seahawks game for years—with Jack this and Jack that—never really liked the guy. And they thought he was a lousy coach. Oh good. Now they tell us.

This week it looks like there’s blood in the water for the Clintons. Jennifer Rubin writes that the media really don’t like the Clintons. She quotes Tucker Carlson:

They’re awful to the media: let’s be totally blunt. They’re awful to the press. They treat the press like enemies. [Clinton Communication Director] Howard Wolfson’s always calling around threatening people. Threatening people! News organizations! They do that! People hate you if you do that. I mean, they’ve earned the enmity of the press, in my view. They have. I mean, it’s been hard but they’ve done it.

Really. You mean all along in the Nineties while the MSM was rolling on the floor at Bill Clinton’s feet they really didn’t like him? And the Clintons are meanie-jellybeanies? Now you tell us.

OK. I’m grownup. I can take it.

This must mean that Hillary Clinton really is down for the count. Forget the polls. The Texas and Ohio primaries are going to be blowouts. It’s blood-in-the-water time. Sharks appearing from near and far. Feeding frenzy. Otherwise nobody would dare.

I reckon that over the years the Clintons have probably used their power to wreck the careers of several journalists they didn’t like. It’s the sort of thing that media insiders all know about. Only we never got to read about it.

Well, you wouldn’t want to cross the powerful Clintons.

Not until now.

Bill Buckley Dead at 82

Even the New York Times agrees that William F. Buckley, Jr., dead at 82, was essential to the modern American conservative movement. Quoting Hugh Kenner, Douglas Martin writes:

“Without Bill — if he had decided to become an academic or a businessman or something else — without him, there probably would be no respectable conservative movement in this country.”

I’m not sure that Bill Buckley had many good ideas, but he put his head above the parapet and became, for 50 years, America’s Mr. Conservative. He made it difficult to assert that all conservatives were beetle-browed Torquemadas.

His high spirits, his kindness, his goodness, and his capacity for work were an inspiration to all.

His passing certainly emphasizes, as if we needed any reminding, that the conservative movement that grew out of Bill Buckley’s youthful enthusiasm in the 1950s, was joined by Jewish New York intellectuals in the late 1960s, was given national political power with Ronald Reagan, and was allied with ordinary religious people with the Christian Right, is now in retreat.

The call goes out now to a new generation to renew the conservative message, and Bill Buckley, always a sponsor of young talent, would be the first to second the call.

When Liberals Write About Religion

Ever since the Enlightenment liberals have liked to talk about religion as something they are separate from. Liberals are the voice of reason, freed from the superstitions of conservatives, reactionaries, and other simple people.

So when liberal religion writer Alan Wolfe writes in The Atlantic about “the coming religious peace,” he doesn’t mention the great secular religions. No, what he’s talking about is the coming peace between Islam and Christianity and their reconciliation into the modern secular world of reason and tolerance. What a good thing, to end this pernicious religious war.

Still, many people, he writes, are expecting an upsurge in religious violence.

A common worry is that intense competition for souls could produce another era in which religious conflict leads to religious war—only this time with nuclear weapons. If we are really in for anything like the kind of zeal that accompanied earlier periods of religious expansion, we might as well say goodbye to the Enlightenment and its principles of tolerance.

But don’t worry. Over most of the world, religious belief is declining.

[M]any areas of the world are experiencing a decline in religious belief and practice. Second, where religions are flourishing, they are also generally evolving—very often in ways that allow them to fit more easily into secular societies, and that weaken them as politically disruptive forces.

You can see what is going on here in the mind of Alan Wolfe. Religion and faith are things that other people do, and the Platonic Guardians like himself, looking at the world from a higher place—presumably up at the entrance to the Cave, far above the lesser mortals still chained and looking at shadows on the wall—can look forward to the day when the shadow-watchers will have seen the light.

But the great fact of the world since the Enlightenment has been the growth and militant expansion of secular religions like nationalism, socialism, fascism, and the “politics of meaning.” And that’s leaving out other enthusiasms like anarchism, New Age spirituality, and general left-wing terrorism like the Weathermen and the Baader-Meinhof gang.

We conservatives see an inevitable clash, at some point, between the moderate, religious forces of democratic capitalism, and the secular religions which in general are arrayed against the gentle world of trust and reciprocity of the global commonwealth. They want to terminate the differentiation of society into separate political, economic, and moral/cultural sectors. They want to collapse these sectors into a nostalgic compact society secular politics and secular religion.

As a secularist, Alan Wolfe cannot see the persecutions carried out by the militant secularists: the endless secular propaganda on the media and in the schools, and the speech code enforcers, human rights commissions, and informal tribunals that daily show ordinary religious people the instruments of torture.

Yet that is where the flashpoint will occur. Between the militant secular believers and the moderate religious believers. But people like Alan Wolfe define the world to exclude such a possibility.

And in my view the clash will come over the question of human life. Secularist ethics is profoundly self-centered and directed towards amorphous questions like a free-floating compassion, obesity (!) and saving the planet with government programs. Religious ethics is centered around the need for people to purge themselves of selfishness and rage, to practice the difficult process of forgiveness and compassion towards those nearest and dearest and between generations within a family.

The question is how much inconvenience people are willing to tolerate with respect to inconvenient life. That would be inconvenient unborn life and inconvenient older life.

NYT Trashes Working Women

In politics, or at least the politics of personal destruction, anything goes.

So if the New York Times wants to trash John McCain by dredging up a ten year old story about McCain and an attractive female lobbyist, well all’s fair in love and war. Even if there’s no evidence, apart from the fears of staffers, that anything “happened.”

But think of what a story like this does to working women in general, writes Carol Platt Liebau.

Huh?

Remember the Clarence Thomas nomination hearings, she writes.

When Anita Hill launched her still-unproven assault on Clarence Thomas’ character seventeen years ago, men all over America discovered that their reputations could be threatened by a simple accusation from a woman, offered without even a scintilla of evidence[.]

Obviously the appropriate thing for men to do then was to minimize contact with attractive young professional women. Because you never knew when some liberal with an agenda would drag up some perfectly innocent relationship and use it as a bludgeon to ruin your career.

With last week’s McCain Smear, the New York Times has given the ratchet another twist.

Now, it seems that their fidelity to their wives can be publicly questioned for nothing more than spending time in the company of an attractive, young professional woman.

Obviously, feminists all over America should be descending on the New York Times with a hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-woman-scorned kind of rage.

Only they won’t. Because gender equity and the status of women in the workplace takes a back seat to liberal politics.

All across America, there are young women attempting to advance at work by being just as smart, just as prepared, and just as diligent as their male counterparts. But if the senior (most often male) employees they need to impress are hyper-sensitive about the reputational damage that can result from spending time with them, female workers going to be deprived of opportunities they need to showcase their talent.

Oh well. Too bad. That’s not as important as electing a Democrat for president, after all.

Obama: Read the Commenters

Never mind about the vapid messianic tone of the Obama campaign.  Never mind about his snobby wife’s disdain for America.  When you get down to specifics this is a pretty left-wing guy, writes The Times’ Gerard Baker

He plans large increases in government spending on health and education. He wants to tax the rich more to pay for it. He is against companies using the opportunities of free markets to restructure their operations in the US. He is vehemently protectionist. He continues to insist, despite the growing evidence that this left-wing nostrum would be lunacy, that the US must pull its troops out of Iraq with the utmost dispatch.

Pretty normal comment, you’d think.  But Baker provoked a number of Obama-heads to respond.

Here’s one:

It is NOT unpatriotic to question your government or your country. It is the most patriotic thing you can do. Barack Obama is bringing my country hope, and it’s the most important thing a president can do for his country.

And this:

Coming from someone who is supposedly liberal and a campaign worker for Mr. Obama, I have not had anything to be proud about this country for until he came along.

A disabled voter:

I am a disabled mother... My fiancé is blind and he is disabled... And I haven’t been proud of my country since Bush took office!

Well, we know where she’s coming from.  And no, Obama isn’t a left-winger, retorts this writer:

Gerard Baker: He is against companies using the opportunities of free markets to restructure their operations in the US. He is vehemently protectionist.
Barack Obama: I believe in the Free Market. I believe in Capitalism. I believe in Free Trade. I am not worried about us being able to compete anywhere on earth with American workers.

Of course, Obama is still fighting for Democratic votes right now.  We’ll get a better idea of his general election agenda in the months ahead. 

But let’s face it.  An Obama adminstration is going to feature another expansion of the welfare state and more national resources under the control of the political sector.

Like I keep saying.  We won’t abandon the follies of the welfare state until it hits the buffers.

"Another Reagan" Wouldn't Run

Today’s Republicans all live in hope of “another Reagan.”  Not a chance, says lawyer Ann Coulter.  It could never happen.  And you can think the campaign-finance laws for that.

I ask: How many Reagans have we lost to campaign-finance reform?

Coulter goes through the progress of Reagan from the first time that businessman Holmes Tuttle approached him with an offer to help finance him in a run for office.

At every step along the way, from the first $1,000 a plate fundraiser (now illegal at the inflated cost of about $7,000 a plate) to the nationwide broadcast of his speech “Rendezvous with History,” his run for the governership of California and his run for president, Reagan and his backers would have been stymied by the limits and the bookkeeping of modern campaign finance law.

It is appropriate, is it not, that the Republican presumptive nominee for president is an author of a campaign finance law.  What a coincidence.  It reminds me of the McGovern reforms of the nominating rules of the Democratic Party after the debacle of 1968.  Funny how McGovern turned out to the first beneficiary of those rules.

Coulter reckons that only four kinds of people can now run for office:

1. High-school fatties like Bill Clinton
2. Billionaires or near billionaires like Mitt Romney
3. Celebrities like Arnold
4. MSM-anointed candidates like McCain and Obama

Er, well yes.  But wasn’t Reagan something of a celebrity in his day?  B-movie actor and TV host?

Back to the drawing boards.

Really Proud of America

Liberals have always had a real problem feeling proud of America.  In fact you could say that the defining mark of an American liberal is that he or she is proudly ashamed of America.

So Michelle Obama’s statement that now, for the first time in her life, she could feel “really proud” of America is unremarkable.  All liberals think and feel similar thoughts until America does what they want for them.

But another Michelle, the notorious conservative “woman of color” Michelle Malkin, wants to know what planet Michelle Obama is living on.  Obama is seven years older than Malkin.

We were both adults when the Berlin Wall fell, Michelle. That was earth-shattering change.
We’ve lived through two decades’ worth of peaceful, if contentious, election cycles under the rule of law, which have brought about “change” and upheaval, both good and bad.

Then there are all the breakthroughs in medicine, communications, and technology of the last generation.

If American ingenuity, a robust constitutional republic, and the fall of communism don’t do it for you, hon, then how about American heroism and sacrifice?

Who couldn’t feel proud of the American response to the Indonesian earthquake, and the private response to Hurricane Katrina and 9/11.

There’s a problem here: a great American problem.  And it’s not America that’s the problem.  It’s American liberals and their snooty disdain for the nation that showered them with benefits and subsidies and made them into privileged Don’t-You-Know-Who-I-Am elitists utterly lacking in gratitude.

Now that’s an area where we really need “change.”