Why Won't the Media Cover Huma Abedin's Ties to Global Jihad Movement?

By Diana West

http://www.dianawest.net

July 25, 2013

Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton

Nationalized health care was one of the first programs enacted by the Bolsheviks after they seized power in 1917. Nearly a century later, the U.S. enacted “Obamacare.”

Who won the Cold War again? This is one of the questions I work over in my new book, “American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character” (St. Martin’s Press). Can we realistically claim liberty and free markets triumphed over collectivism when today there is only a thin Senate line trying to fend off Obamacare’s totalitarian intrusions into citizens’ lives? We see perhaps a dozen or so patriots led by conservative ace Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, gallantly mustering forces to defund further enforcement of this government behemoth aborning. (Call your senators and ask them to join – or tell you why they didn’t at the next town hall.) How can we maintain that the republic endured when a centralized super-state has taken its place?

So, once more, who really won the Cold War? The question is better framed when we realize that the battleground where the Free World met Marx was also psychological. Consciously or not, we struggled against an insidious Marxist ideology that was always, at root, an assault on our nation’s character.

The most recent manifestation of victory over the American character shows through the Anthony Weiner-Huma Abedin scandal. This scandal is a paradoxical double whammy of both exposure and cover-up.

Everyone knows (too much) about the exposure part: Anthony Weiner, candidate for mayor of New York City, turns out to be a recidivist pervert. The fatuous conversation that has followed this “news” has turned on the decision of Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, to step forward to try to salvage her husband’s bid for public office. The Wall Street Journal’s response to Abedin’s decision was typical: “Watching the elegant Huma Abedin stand next to her man Tuesday as he explained his latest sexually charged online exchanges was painful for a normal human being to watch.”

The media want to know why the “elegant Huma” – Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide and former deputy chief of staff – would do such an inelegant thing. Was this couple’s therapy writ large? Was it for their child? Was it … love?

True, the barbs of Huma’s ambition – as naked as her husband’s dirty pics – have broken through the gauzy chatter. But cut off from context, they, too, end up perpetuating what is, in fact, the great Huma Abedin cover-up.

It is not enough to analyze Huma Abedin as a “political wife.” Abedin is also a veritable Muslim Brotherhood princess. As such, the ideological implications of her actions – plus her long and privileged access to U.S. policy-making through Hillary Clinton – must be considered, particularly in the context of national security.

But talk about paradoxes. In an era when the most minute and lurid descriptions of her husband’s anatomical and sexual details are common talk, Huma Abedin’s familial and professional connections to the world of jihad are unspeakable.

In a nutshell – quoting former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy writing at National Review this week – Huma Abedin “worked for many years at a journal that promotes Islamic supremacist ideology that was founded by a top al-Qaida financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef.” That would be for at least seven years (1996-2003), by the way, during which Abedin also worked for Hillary Clinton.

Let this sink in for just a moment. The journal Huma worked for – which promotes Islamic supremacism and was founded by al-Qaida financer Naseef, who also headed the Muslim World League, a leading Muslim Brotherhood organization – is called the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. It was edited first by Huma’s father, Syed Abedin, and now by her mother, Saleha Abedin. Saleha is a member of the Muslim Sisterhood. Mother Abedin also directs an organization (the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child) that comes under the umbrella of the Union for Good, another U.S.-designated terrorist organization. As McCarthy reminds us, “the Union for Good is led by Sheikh Yusef al-Qaradawi, the notorious Muslim Brotherhood jurist who has issued fatwas calling for the killing of American military and support personnel in Iraq as well as suicide bombings in Israel.”

Given these alarming professional and family associations, it is hard to imagine how Huma Abedin ever received the security clearance necessary to work closely with the secretary of state. But she did, and from her powerful post, she undoubtedly exerted influence over U.S. policy-making. (In his National Review piece, McCarthy lists specific actions that bespeak a shift in U.S. foreign policy to favor the Muslim Brotherhood.)

Isn’t the Abedin-Clinton national security story at least as newsworthy as Weiner’s private parts?

At this point, only McCarthy’s National Review piece reprises these well-documented facts. In other words, it is not only CNN and the New York Times that draw blanks for their readers. Most “conservative” outlets, including Fox News, the New York Post, The Blaze, Breitbart.com and Rush Limbaugh, are ignoring this story, too.

If the Abedin-Muslim Brotherhood story rings any bells, it is probably because of Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. Last summer, Bachmann, along with four other House Republicans, raised the issue of Huma Abedin among other examples of possible Muslim Brotherhood penetration of the federal policy-making chain. They asked inspectors general at five departments, including the State Department, to investigate their concerns, but nothing happened – nothing, that is, except that Bachmann was crucified, by Democrats and Republicans alike for asking urgently important questions about national security.

This made the entire subject, already taboo, positively radioactive – with Huma Abedin becoming the poster victim of this supposed “McCarthyism” redux. End of story. Never mind facts. Never mind also that in his day, Sen. Joseph McCarthy was asking urgently important questions about national security, too.

But don’t worry. We “won” the Cold War. Obamacare, here we come. At this rate, we’ll declare “victory” in the so-called war on terror and, before you know it, become a leading outpost of the caliphate.

The Graffiti on the Wall

By Mark Steyn

http://www.steynonline.com

National Review's Happy Warrior
July 23, 2013

Timing is everything, even in apocalyptic doom-mongering. When my book America Alone came out in 2006, the conventional wisdom was that its argument about Europe's demographic death spiral was "alarmist" (The Economist). Seven years on, it's so non-alarmist that even the Washington Post is running stories about the Continent's "plummeting" birth rates. The Post's focus was on a small corner of the Portuguese interior, wherein their reporter met Maria Jesus Rodrigues, 87, who recently moved into the old folks' home from her nearby village. The youngest resident is 57. Not in the old folks' home, but in the village. That's to say, the entire parish qualifies for membership in the AARP, which regards you as a potentially "retired person" from the age of 50.

"Retirement" is an invention of the 20th century, and will not long outlive it. When everyone's a senior, nobody is — because, if there are no young people around to pave the roads, police the streets, weed your garden, fix your roof, give you a bed bath, and change your feeding tube, you're going to have to do it yourself. In The Children of Men, P. D. James's dystopian novel of a world turned mysteriously barren, the roads are potholed and broken, and the buildings crumbling, for want of a sufficiently able-bodied population to maintain them. By 2021, the year Lady James's story is set in, much of inland Portugal will be approaching the same condition — not through biological affliction, but through a kind of silent mass consensus that this is no longer a world worth bringing children into. "A country without children is a nation without a future," warned Aníbal Cavaco Silva, Portugal's president, in 2007, since when the fertility rate has nosedived. Why would you have a kid in Portugal? The country's youth-unemployment rate is over 40 percent. In Spain it's 57 percent, and in Greece just shy of 63 percent.

I don't know the rest of the country terribly well, but I love Lisbon, and I love returning there. There is something about the jacarandas in bloom that always reminds me of a brief youthful fling long ago.

Because I was young, and she was young and lovely, I find it sad to think of Portugal as a geriatric ward with insufficient "carers" to change the bedpans. Today, Lisbon remains an architecturally splendid city — a beautiful museum, as one Commonwealth foreign minister described it to me after a flying visit. But the buildings are defaced from top to toe with graffiti, which the stylish Portuguese ladies bustling through the upmarket boutiques no longer even notice. Even as a beautiful museum, Lisbon is already decaying. "The writing on the wall" is from Belshazzar's feast, but who knows his Bible in post-Christian Europe? So, even when the writing is all over every wall, nobody sees it.

Once upon a time, Portugal was an empire that reached as far as Brazil. Now the empire is a backwater, and soon it will be a graveyard, and then an untended graveyard. I wrote in these pages four years ago that this was the first demographic recession, a valse macabre between economic sclerosis and population decline. Eurostat, the European Commission's official statistics agency, is now singing the same mournful dirge: In May, they released a report titled "Towards a 'Baby Recession' in Europe?" By 2011, the fertility rate had fallen in two dozen countries, and in none is it at replacement rate.

The Eurostat report makes much of the difference between fertility rates varying from 2.05 in Ireland to 1.2 in Romania. But the easiest way to get the picture is to take a map of the Continent and draw a diagonal line from northeast to southwest. In northern and western Europe, obstetrics is still just about a viable profession; in eastern and southern Europe, the maternity wards are out of business. One can speculate about the reasons for this difference: The Left argues that it's because of a more generous social safety net in the northwest than in the Mediterranean states and the recovering Soviet satellites. On the other hand, it's obvious that Denmark, Belgium, France, and Britain's healthier fertility rates owe something to the fecund Muslim populations they've attracted. A united Germany has a foot in both camps, being both prosperous with generous maternity benefits and a large Muslim population, and well down the demographic death spiral.

Setting Islam to one side, there is a horrible enfeebling fatalism on both sides of that demographic line. As I wrote in my "alarmist" book seven years ago, the future belongs to those who show up for it, and the nations that built the modern world — which is to say the last half-millennium of human history — have collectively checked in to one of those Swiss euthanasia clinics. In 1905, Theodore Roosevelt spoke to the National Congress of Mothers about the citizen who consciously forgoes "the blessings of children": "Why," he declared, "such a creature merits contempt as hearty as any visited upon the soldier who runs away in battle, or upon the man who refuses to work for the support of those dependent upon him, and who though able-bodied is yet content to eat in idleness the bread which others provide."

Today, millions of able-bodied citizens are content to eat in idleness the bread provided by others, and it is a long time since Europeans were called on to fight any battle. But a society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for. Only the Portuguese can change the destination they're headed to: have a kid, have two or three, and vote for the possibility of a future.

See more Blu + more Os Gémeos.

artists: Blu + Os Gémeos
location: Lisbon

via Os Gémeos' blog

Read more: http://www.unurth.com/Os-Gemeos-Blu-Lisbon-1#ixzz2aDOiyA4Z

Today's Tune: Reckless Kelly - Wicked Twisted Road (Live)

Mann vs. Steyn: Heresy Shall Be Crushed

By Daren Jonescu
http://americanthinker.com/
July 26, 2013


Michael Mann

Remember when scientists and other truth-seekers used to get all riled up about the way the Catholic Church treated Galileo? The outcry was not over the fact that Galileo was a "peer-reviewed" researcher, and therefore beyond question. Quite the contrary: the argument was that, from the point of view of the quest for truth, no one, including the representatives of official orthodoxy and authority, ought to be regarded as beyond question. In the Michael Mann lawsuit against Mark Steyn and National Review, it is the "award-winning researcher" who is joining the fight for Church orthodoxy, while the defendants are the persecuted Galileos.

Mann, of course, is the creator of the famous "hockey stick graph" that has been employed doggedly throughout the doctrinaire climate science community and the mainstream media as proof that the Earth has shown a marked and unprecedented increase in global mean temperature during the brief period of industrial society's extreme CO2 production, which increase is consequently cited as proof that man's industrial activity is causing the temperature rise. Let us leave aside the climate religion's little logical problem, namely the contradiction between (a) its complete dependence on the premise that rising CO2 levels can and do have an immediate and substantial effect on global temperature, and (b) its attempts to dismiss the significance of the fact that global temperature has not increased significantly since 1995 while CO2 emissions have continued to rise, on the grounds that this is supposedly too short a period to prove anything.

The concern in this context is not so much the truth or falsity of the global warming theory, but the implications of this lawsuit, and its social importance, should Mann actually win.
Steyn, along with many researchers on whom he has leaned in developing his critique, have questioned both the methods and the conclusions of the research which led to Mann's hockey stick graph. In particular, there has been a good deal of concern over the possibility that Mann cherry-picked his Siberian tree ring samples in order to present the strongest data in support of his anthropogenic global warming conclusion, by discarding the samples which would have muddied the (desired?) statistical result. Then there was the infamous "hide the decline" e-mail scandal involving Mann's British colleague Phil Jones of East Anglia University. Both Jones and Mann were investigated and exonerated -- by their own respective universities, which have built much of their recent prestige and global influence on the global warming research industry led by Mann and Jones.

Now a U.S. district court judge has joined the academic employers and ideological beneficiaries of the famed global warming scientists in rejecting out of hand any suggestion that Mann might have engaged in questionable research practices. In her denial of the defendants' request for dismissal of the case, Judge Natalia M. Combs Greene draws a line between harsh opinions expressed independently of factual claims (acceptable speech), and harsh opinions expressed on the basis of false factual claims (unacceptable speech). Hence, Steyn's and NRO's accusations that Mann's hockey stick graph is "fraudulent" and "intellectually bogus" are, the judge concludes, unacceptable expressions of opinion, as they claim to be based upon facts (the e-mails and information about the tree ring samples, for example), whereas:

[A]ssertions of fraud "rely on facts which are provably false" particularly in light of the fact that Plaintiff [Mann] has been investigated by several bodies (including the EPA) and determined that Plaintiff's research and conclusions are sound and not based on misleading information. (p. 15)

Aside from the fact that the passage, like many in Judge Combs Greene's discussion, is a grammatical nightmare -- due to the slip "and determined," she literally says that "Plaintiff has determined that Plaintiff's research is sound" -- notice that she singles out the EPA as a particularly reputable independent investigator in defense of Mann's research. Given that the EPA is a federal agency led by appointees of a U.S. administration thoroughly invested in the climate change narrative, and currently moving to take drastic economic steps on the issue through the agency of the EPA itself, and that the EPA's own website declares its adherence to the climate change science and has made climate change-based regulation and activism its primary mission for the coming years, the judge's particular reliance on the EPA's judgment of Mann as evidence against the defendants' harsh criticisms reveals the court's disingenuousness and/or complete confusion about the nature of the public debate on this issue.

Mann has taken his critics to court -- all of them, in effect, with Steyn and NRO as stand-ins -- for saying his research is fraudulent and bogus. The court has upheld the legitimacy of his suit by citing the support of his research by precisely the organizations with the greatest vested interest in his vindication -- including government agencies deeply involved in climate change advocacy (EPA and NOAA), and a public university. The message: the State is on board with Mr. Mann, and has had enough of his work being challenged.

There has been much discussion of late of the use of the IRS, the DHS, and potentially the NSA, to thwart and intimidate opponents of the progressive agenda. The concern is not only that such uses of government agencies and resources are unjust in themselves, but that they will -- and are intended to -- have a "cooling effect" (if we're still allowed to talk about "cooling") on opponents and critics of government policy. Mann's lawsuit and the judge's rejection of the defendants' move for dismissal are further evidence of the use of state authority to intimidate and silence private criticism, i.e., to put the squeeze on the unreserved pursuit of controversial but legitimate free speech.

Again bringing to bear the weight of the predictable judgment of Mann's supporters and beneficiaries, the judge argues:

Having been investigated by almost one dozen bodies due to accusations of fraud, and none of those accusations [she means "investigations"] having found Plaintiff's work to be fraudulent, it must be concluded that the accusations are provably false. Reference to Plaintiff, as a fraud is a misstatement of fact. The NR defendants' reference to Plaintiff as "the man behind the fraudulent climate-change 'hockey stick' graph" is arguably [she means provably] a misstatement of fact (the evidence indicates otherwise as Plaintiff's work has been found to be sound). (p. 19)

The official supporters of global warming theory, who have used Mann's hockey stick graph as a chief support beam in their edifice of anti-freedom policy advocacy, national sovereignty circumvention, and a rich cottage industry of academic grants, university specializations, and career-boosting publication records, have all "looked at the evidence" and concluded that Mann conducted his research in the purest spirit of good science. Therefore, anyone who suggests, however hyperbolically, that his work does not meet the standards of good science, is out of line, and deserves legal retribution.

The lesson here: the Church condemned Galileo, or any scientist who seemed to contradict Church doctrine, because they were afraid of the public challenge -- i.e. afraid official doctrine could not withstand the presence of an alternative position. Mann's lawsuit might suggest a similar discomfort on the part of the supporters of the unraveling "science" of anthropogenic global warming/cooling/climate change. Governments throughout the world (the "Church" in this case) are taking active steps to undermine human freedom and to eliminate property rights in the name of a scientific position that is rife with alarmists working under the auspices of scholarly research, and models and predictions that are daily being contradicted by facts.

Hundreds of scholars like Michael Mann and Phil Jones, in the face of legitimate challenges to their theories, not just by men but by reality, have chosen to circle the wagons, to obfuscate and deny all problems with their proposals. Furthermore, knowing that their theories are being used to buttress political action of a most undemocratic and questionable sort, they have said nothing to dilute the fervor with which their ideas and models are trumpeted as rationalizations for tyranny.

In response, some critics and skeptics (this one included) have taken to portraying some of the global warming theorists themselves in an unflattering light; tangible losses of liberty tend to cause men to question the integrity of those who are providing the intellectual support for the practical degradations they are facing. This personal side of the anti-climate change argument is therefore perhaps unavoidable. For the representatives of the government-approved status quo on this issue to brand these personal criticisms as "provably false," and to allow a defamation lawsuit to proceed against those who make them, seems to fall within the standard contemporary rubric of today's progressive assault on humanity. Heretics will be condemned; beware all ye who would question the Church.

For all the progressive outcry in defense of Mann, his defenders (including, apparently, Judge Combs Greene) seem to have no problem with the smear of all who question the climate change pseudo-orthodoxy as "flat-earthers," "anti-science," "extremists," and "lackeys of big oil." What about the thousands of legitimate, accredited scientists who believe anthropogenic global warming is untenable, including even some (well-buried) dissenters within the UN's IPCC itself? If a court can decide that Mann's research "and conclusions" have been sufficiently vindicated as to be judged provably "sound" -- that is, sound enough to be regarded as legally unassailable -- then what does this imply about the research and results of all those who believe they are proving Mann's conclusions false? The implication is clear enough: anthropogenic global warming is one area of truth-seeking that is no longer merely "settled science" (whatever that means), but is now settled law. It is now, apparently, legally dangerous to question this theory, unless one prefaces one's questions with the proviso that the research supporting the theory was conducted with the purest scientific heart, and that its conclusions are sound. Meanwhile, again, the same proviso need not be proffered when ripping up the research, opinions, and character of the "flat-earthers."

The story of Galileo's condemnation is typically presented as an example of the struggle of independent scientific investigation against coercive authority. We're looking through the other end of the telescope now. Men are being condemned by coercive authority in the name of science. A district court judge has determined that Michael Mann's hockey stick graph is "provably sound" science in good standing, because his friends -- and in particular his government friends -- say so. Skeptics shall be silenced.

Final Note: Judge Combs Greene recently announced her retirement from the District of Columbia Superior Court as of September, 2013, and is under review for her requested appointment as a senior judge.  (At least you won't have to worry about her working as a substitute English teacher.)

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/07/mann_vs_steyn_heresy_shall_be_crushed.html at July 26, 2013 - 05:25:22 AM CDT

Beauty, Brains, and Bias

Huma Abedin shows how liberals earn praise merely for being liberal.

By ROBERT STACY MCCAIN

http://spectator.org/

July 26, 2013

New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, left, listens as his wife, Huma Abedin, speaks during a news conference at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis headquarters, Tuesday, July 23, 2013, in New York. (Photo by Kathy Willens/AP)

Every picture tells a story and if you ever visit R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.’s office, you might notice a photo of The American Spectator‘s Editor-in-Chief grinning with a martini in his hand. There is a story behind that photo, which was taken in the lobby bar of D.C.’s fabulous Omni Shoreham Hotel, on the occasion of the publication of Bob’s 2007 book, The Clinton Crack-Up.

Tyrrell and The American Spectator had then only recently emerged from an extended period of troubles that began during the Clinton presidency, when the magazine’s investigation of the Lecher-in-Chief’s womanizing led rather directly to Clinton’s impeachment. The Spectator reported about a certain Arkansas woman named “Paula,” who later became the plaintiff in the Jones v. Clinton federal lawsuit, during the depositions for which suit the president perjured himself about his tawdry affair with a certain Miss Lewinsky. Anyone who doubts that Democrats are masters of the “politics of personal destruction” — to borrow a memorable Clintonian phrase — should ask Tyrrell about the orchestrated payback campaign against The American Spectator that ensued. The magazine was quite nearly destroyed and yet, by 2007, here was the scrappy editor still on his feet ready to do battle, with a new book published even as the former First Lady’s seemingly unstoppable 2008 presidential bandwagon was beginning to roll.

A remarkable story, and I was the guy assigned to tell that story in my job at the time as Culture page editor for the Washington Times. Among other things, my article referred to Tyrrell as a raconteur and a bon vivant — a charming sophisticate, famed for his sarcastic wit — and, thinking how best to illustrate this image, it was I who conceived the idea of having him pose for that photo with the martini. You see, I had in mind the scene at Hillary’s campaign headquarters when someone picked up the paper and saw that feature article: “Tyrrell? He’s still at it? With a new book? Didn’t we assign our goon squad to destroy this guy — bankrupt, discredit and neutralize him?” Just imagine Hillary looking at that picture of Tyrrell, visibly undestroyed, with his martini and mischievous grin as if toasting her: “Here’s mud in your eye!”

That was a fun article to write, and American Spectator readers need not wonder why Tyrrell’s journalistic accomplishments have seldom gotten the recognition they deserve. If he were a liberal, Tyrrell would be relentlessly applauded by the press corps which, asstudies compiled by the Media Research Center show, reliably votes Democrat by landslide margins. Republicans are as rare in America’s newsrooms as on American university faculties. The New York Times is never going to do a warm human-interest story about R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. for the same reason that mass-market women’s magazines — Cosmopolitan and so forth — never celebrate the remarkable careers of Phyllis Schlafly, Ann Coulter, or Michelle Malkin. Likewise, the media never mention Rush Limbaugh except to denounce him, despite the fact that his program is the most popular national radio show in modern history. The unrecognized greatness of such people is a byproduct of liberal bias, so pervasive in the media that most journalists never notice it for the same reason fish don’t notice water.

Consider a striking counter-example: Huma Abedin, a woman recently in the news because her husband Anthony Weiner has again been caught exchanging lurid messages with a girl less than half his age. A former assistant to Hillary Clinton, Abedin has for years been the subject of glowing media coverage and apparently nobody in the media ever bothered to ask the simple question, “Why?”

Dave Weigel finally asked that question Thursday in an article at Slate, and couldn’t find any good answer. “Before this week, she had a sterling reputation… based on… what, exactly?” Weigel wrote of Mrs. Weiner. “If you return to the early profiles that created Abedin’s image, they’re based on very little.” Abedin is a capable and intelligent woman, not bad to look at, but in this she differs not at all from many other capable, intelligent, nice-looking women who work in politics. Weigel pointed out, however, that the press has for years gone out of its way to praise Abedin as though she were more beautiful than Grace Kelly and more intelligent than Albert Einstein. An unsuspecting reader might have thought Huma spent her evenings as a fashion model and her weekends working to cure cancer.

The double standard is obvious. Can anyone think of any aide to a Republican politician, or any Republican politician’s wife, who ever received the kind of celebrity treatment that the media provided to Huma Abedin? And yet, until Weigel raised the question, it seem no one had ever thought twice about it. This is merely one example of the unexamined prejudices that compose the enormous edifice of one-sided journalism we call liberal media bias. Every day, there are questions that “mainstream” reporters (the scare-quotes denoting how liberals arrogate to themselves the authority to define “mainstream”) simply never ask.

For example, why did Weiner’s erstwhile cybersex mistress tell her tale to a gossip blog, TheDirty.com, and not to the New York Times? Furthermore, who tipped the liberal blog BuzzFeed to the name of this 23-year-old cybersexer, Sydney Leathers? Back in 2011, when Andrew Breitbart led the way in reporting Weiner’s first cybersex scandal, a taint of disrepute was attached to the story, simply because Breitbart was a conservative. All sorts of conspiracy theories floated around the original WeinerGate scandal. It was a hoax perpetrated by hackers, Weiner’s defenders claimed, and there was rampant speculation about shady shenanigans by secretive Republican operatives. Yet in WeinerGate II, as we might call this latest episode, nobody seems to care why the story developed the way it did. My suspicion that Sydney Leathers’ name was leaked by Team Weiner — “outing” her as an act of reprisal — isn’t something that the New York Times seems interested in investigating the way they explored various angles that seemed to cast shadows of suspicion over Breitbart’s reporting in 2011. If no liberal journalists suspect dirty tricks are involved in the latest Weiner scandal, it’s because any dirty tricks this time would seem to be the work of Democrats, and no one at the New York Times or any other “mainstream” news organization would ever dare so much as hint that Democrats are capable of dirty tricks.

Liberal bias is not a matter of unfairness, but rather a matter of dishonesty — deliberately ignoring some facts, and misrepresenting other facts, in order to misinform the public by portraying to them a politically falsified view of events and personalities. If there were ever any honest person employed by the  New York Times (we stipulate the hypothetical), that person would have been obligated to quit Thursday morning, when the banner headline on the front page of the paper should have been: “ANDREW BREITBART WAS RIGHT.” (An appropriate subhead might be, “Anthony Weiner Is a Typically Dishonest Democrat Dirtbag.”)

Cheating a great man out of his posthumous vindication is, however, just small change in the vast franchise of journalistic dishonesty of which the New York Times is the flagship enterprise. The fundamental falsehood of the whole Big Lie business is that Democrats are virtuous simply because they are Democrats, which is the only reason any fool ever could have thought a wretched human stain like Anthony Weiner worthy of admiration. A shrewd observer will notice an interesting aspect of how the media covers political scandals: When a Republican is caught in corruption or immorality, the individual’s disgrace is invariably depicted as reflecting poorly on the GOP as a whole. Yet when Democrats are caught in scandals, their wrongdoing is made to seem anomalous, in no way disgracing the party or its political agenda. In fact, the liberal glory of the Democrat Party adds nobility to its scandal-tainted members, so that Bill Clinton is still deemed praiseworthy — a beloved elder statesman — for no reason except being a Democrat. When the most reprehensibly loathsome Democrat dies, the dead politician is universally celebrated as a saint by the “mainstream” media, simply because he was a Democrat (and never mind that poor campaign aide who died in a submerged Oldsmobile).

Liars, cheats, and perverts are drawn to the Democrat Party for this very reason. Get elected to office with a “D” beside your name, and reporters won’t say a word about your notorious corruption or moral depravity. Anthony Weiner was always a despicable creep, but because he was a loudmouthed liberal, he was praised as a courageous hero by the media. When Weiner was driven out of Congress by his 2011 scandal, liberal journalists mourned his fall as a lamentable misfortune for a promising politician and, well, wasn’t it just awful for his brilliant and beautiful wife? So the media establishment then lent its enthusiastic assistance to Weiner’s rehabilitation and you could tell they were excited by the prospect of his election as mayor of New York — the courageous crusader’s comeback! Alas, it was revealed that this inspiring tale of redemption was just another liberal lie. Everyone pretended to be shocked that Weiner thought he could get away with doing the same thing he’d done before, but why should he have thought otherwise, when the media seemed so willing to believe whatever lies he told them?

Weiner is a mendacious pervert, and his wife was never as smart or as beautiful as the liberal press would have had us believe. This latest Democrat disgrace is as much as a scandal for Weiner’s media enablers as it is for Weiner himself. Just as the New York Times won’t admit that the late Andrew Breitbart has been vindicated nor recognize Bob Tyrrell’s achievements, neither will they confess their own lack of credibility. But you can never accuse liberals of having no standards, because they have exactly two: One for them, and one for everybody else.

Cynic-in-Chief

President Obama ran against cynicism — and defined his presidency by it. 

By Jonah Goldberg

http://www.nationalreview.com/

July 26, 2013

President Obama as he delivers an speech on the economy at Knox College in Illinois on Wednesday.  White House/screenshot

"My rival in this race,” President Obama announced early in 2007, “is not other candidates. It’s cynicism.” Sadly, it’s now evident cynicism won.

In a much-hyped speech at Knox College on Wednesday, Obama sought to pivot back to the economy — as the journalistic cliché goes — and shape the issue environment for the 2014 congressional elections.

Because of an “endless parade of distractions and political posturing and phony scandals,” the president said, “Washington’s taken its eye off the ball.” The ball here is the economy, in case you didn’t know.

It’s an odd claim. Elected twice, Obama is in the fifth year of his presidency. During his first two years in office, his party controlled both houses of Congress and rammed through its agenda. Largely as a result, Democrats lost the House in 2010, but they have retained the Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid has been playing the Igor to Obama’s Dr. Frankenstein ever since (though reporters have yet to catch Reid actually saying “Yetthhhh master” on tape). At Obama’s bidding, the Senate failed to pass a budget for four years and refused to take up any meaningful legislation passed by the House.

That’s not the narrative you usually hear, because for most of Obama’s presidency, the Washington press corps was enthralled with him. It wasn’t until the dawn of his second term that most reporters stopped asking questions like “Can you create a boulder too heavy for you to lift?”

It’s also odd that Obama has pivoted back to the economy when, depending on whose estimates you use, he’s made similar “pivots” on average once every two to four months since he’s been elected. As one wag told The Weekly Standard, “You do that on the basketball court, you get called for traveling.” But the more apt image is of a basketball player with one shoe nailed to the floor, constantly pivoting in a circle.

But it’s not just odd, it’s deeply cynical. For starters, it was the reelected president — not “Washington” — who took his eyes off the economy to exploit a tragedy for new gun controls that would not have prevented the tragedy itself. His unilateral crackdown on carbon emissions isn’t exactly a full-throated effort to create jobs either. When Congress took its eye off the ball by taking up immigration reform, the White House cheered.

Even now, the Cynic-in-Chief admits that his “highest priority” is neither economic growth nor job creation but reducing income inequality. In fairness, he says he wants to reduce inequality through something called “middle-out” economic growth by taxing the wealthy (again). But my hunch is that the highest priority for those without work is . . . work. While the president’s highest priority is to exploit resentments.

But most cynical of all is Obama’s contempt for the “phony scandals” that have plagued him. Which ones are phony, exactly? The Justice Department’s monitoring of journalists was sufficiently outrageous that Obama ordered the attorney general to review DOJ policies. Why do that if the concerns were phony? When a few rogue IRS agents in Cincinnati were alleged to have deliberately targeted conservative groups, Obama said it would be “outrageous” if those allegations were proven true. But when that cover story is proved a deliberate lie from an IRS official in Washington, and it’s revealed thanks to congressional oversight that the policy actually went all the way to the office of an Obama political appointee, the scandal suddenly becomes “phony.” Odd how that works.

On the NSA wiretapping revelations, I agree with Obama that it is not necessarily a scandal but a significant policy dispute. Then again, many of the people who do think widespread secret electronic surveillance is scandalous happen to be members of Obama’s base. He can have that argument with them.

Finally, there was last year’s September 11 attack on our Benghazi compound and the president’s response to it. The White House has long said this was a phony scandal. They also said that the deadly attack was sparked by a YouTube video, until that was proven to be a lie. That deliberate deceit sparked a national conversation about whether we needed to give savages a heckler’s veto on American free-speech rights.

But that’s the theme of this entire presidency. Others — Washington, the Republicans, the Constitution, the global economy, Bush, et al. — are always to blame. In 2014, alas, cynicism won’t be on the ballot. He’ll be in the White House.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of The Tyranny of Clichés, now on sale in paperback. You can write to him by e-mail atJonahsColumn@aol.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Today's Tune: Billy Joe Shaver - Heart of Texas (Live)

UN Honors Human Rights Abuser Che Guevara

Posted By Humberto Fontova On July 25, 2013 @ 12:10 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | No Comments

http://frontpagemag.com/

At a ceremony in Havana last week UNESCO (U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) honored Che Guevara by enshrining his writings in its hallowed “Memory of the World Register.”  The ceremony included several members of Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s family.

“UNESCO’s work is part of our support for freedom of expression as an inalienable human right set down in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” declares the UN’s mission statement.

But not far from where this UNESCO/Guevara ceremony took place Cubans were being starved and beaten in pestiferous torture chambers for the crime of quoting the UN Declaration of Human Rights in public.

“UNESCO is known as the intellectual agency of the United Nations,” which stands for “Protecting freedom of expression: an essential condition for democracy, development and human dignity,” reads the UN charter.

But not far from where this UNESCO/Guevara ceremony took place, the regime being honored by UNESCO burned hundreds of books and documents in a ceremony slightly less spectacular than the one hosted by Joseph Goebbels in Berlin’s Opera Square in 1933. The bonfire was accompanied by the beating and jailing of the owners and purveyors of these works. The Castroite bonfire was fueled by such works as Orwell’s Animal Farm, the works of Martin Luther King and the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

“I plead with Fidel Castro and his government to immediately take their hands off [Cuba’s] independent librarians,” entreated none other than Ray Bradbury at the time. “And to release all those librarians in prison, and to send them back into Cuban culture to inform the people.”

Instead of heeding Bradbury, for the crime of stocking some of the world’s bestselling books (along with the UN Declaration of Human Rights), the Stalinist regime honored by UNESCO condemned the Cuban librarians to prison terms similar to the one a South African judge handed Nelson Mandela for planting bombs in public places. “As to the disposition of the books, magazines and pamphlets they are to be destroyed by means of incineration because they lack usefulness,” ruled the Castroite “judge.”

Just last week, by the way, the UN honored Nelson Mandela with an “International Nelson Mandela Day.”  The longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history (all Cubans jailed and tortured by the regime honored by the UN last week) have never received so much as a nod or wink from the United Nations.

“As the United Nations agency with a specific mandate to promote ‘the free flow of ideas by word and image’, UNESCO works to foster free, independent and pluralistic media in print, broadcast and online. This foundation is why UNESCO today promotes policies for press freedom and the safety of journalists,” reads the UNESCO charter.

But the regime honored by UNESCO last week also holds the honor, according to the Paris-based “Reporters Without Borders,” of jailing and torturing the most journalists per capita on earth. Stunningly, the total number of journalists jailed by the nation honored by UNESCO (pop. 11 million) is only slightly behind that of China (pop. 1.4 billion).

“Our purpose is to contribute to peace and security by promoting international collaboration through education, science, and culture in order to further universal respect for justice, the rule of law, and human rights along with fundamental freedom,” declares the UNESCO charter.
“We reject any peaceful approach!” declared the man they honored last week in Havana.

Violence is inevitable! To establish Socialism rivers of blood must flow! If the nuclear missiles had remained [in Cuba] we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims!

“My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any surrendered enemy that falls in my hands! We must keep our hatred alive and fan it to paroxysm!” This passage, by the way, comes from the very works enshrined and honored by UNESCO last week.

The “acrid odor of gunpowder and blood” rarely reached Che Guevara’s nostril from actual combat. It always came from the close-range murder of bound, gagged or blindfolded men (and boys).

Rigoberto Hernandez was 17 when Che’s soldiers dragged him from his cell in La Cabana, jerked his head back to gag him, and started dragging him to the stake. Little “Rigo” pleaded his innocence to the very bloody end. But his pleas were garbled and difficult to understand. His struggles while being gagged and bound to the stake were also awkward. The boy had been a janitor in a Havana high school and was mentally retarded. His single mother had pleaded his case with hysterical sobs. She had begged, beseeched and finally proven to his “prosecutors” that it was a case of mistaken identity. Her only son, a boy in such a condition, couldn’t possibly have been “a CIA agent planting bombs.”

“FUEGO!” and the firing squad volley shattered Rigo’s little bent body as he moaned and struggled awkwardly against his bounds, blindfold and gag.

“Certainly we execute!” boasted the man honored by UNESCO last week. “And we will continue executing as long as it is necessary!” Those executions (murders, actually; execution implies a judicial process) had reached about 16,000 by the time of Che Guevara’s statement, the equivalent, given the relative populations, of almost a million executions in the U.S. (This figure comes from “The Black Book of Communism,” by the way, written by French scholars and published in English by Harvard University Press, neither an outpost of “right-wing Cuban exiles.”)

Quite fittingly, Che’s bloodthirsty boast was made on Dec. 9, 1964 while addressing the hallowed halls of the United Nations.

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The Real Helen Thomas

She’s touted as a dogged reporter, but what were her actual journalistic accomplishments? 

By Jonah Goldberg

http://www.nationalreview.com

July 24, 2013

In this Aug. 4, 2009, file photo, veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas celebrates her 89th birthday with President Barack Obama, celebrating his 48th birthday, in the White House Press Briefing Room in Washington. Thomas, a pioneer for women in journalism and an irrepressible White House correspondent, has died Saturday, July 20, 2013. She was 92. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

In the movie Animal House, the Deltas are put on trial for their antics. When offered a chance to defend themselves, the best argument the fraternity’s president can come up with is, “But sir, Delta Tau Chi has a long tradition of existence both to its members and the community at large.”

The line came to mind as I read through the obituaries for Helen Thomas, the longtime White House correspondent for UPI and, for a decade, a left-wing columnist for the Hearst newspapers.

Thomas did help break down the barriers to women in the D.C. press corps. “Helen Thomas made it possible for all of us who followed,” NBC’s Andrea Mitchell wrote on Twitter. Obviously, it’s an exaggeration to suggest that women wouldn’t have made so many worthwhile gains in journalism were it not for Thomas. But she was the first female member of a lot of clubs, and that counts for something.

So it was no surprise that the encomiums poured forth in response to the news. From President Obama, the Gridiron Club, the White House Correspondents’ Association, Hamas.

Hamas was less interested in Thomas’s role as a path-breaking feminist icon than in the fact that, at a 2010 White House Jewish heritage event, she growled into a camera that the Jews should “get the hell out” of Israel (or “Palestine” in her telling) and go back to Poland, Germany, and America. That statement, cheered by Hezbollah at the time, was too much for Hearst, which quickly ushered her off to retirement, where she cultivated her status as a truth-teller martyred by the Zionists who control everything in America.

In most obituaries, this incident comes out of the blue, often chalked up to the fact that her parents were Lebanese immigrants (an odd slap at Lebanese Americans). There’s no mention of the fact that her hatred of Israel — and of supporters of Israel — was a constant for most of her career.

Indeed, if you go back and look at many of her famously tough questions of U.S. presidents and press secretaries with that in mind, what seems to many as skepticism about U.S. foreign policy is better understood as special pleading for Israel’s enemies. “Thank God for Hezbollah,” Thomas told a CNN cameraman in 2002, according to the Washington Post. Israel, she added, was responsible for “99 percent of all this terrorism.” Her first question of President Obama referred to members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban as “so-called terrorists.”

Ironically, her views on Israel made the woman who knocked down doors quite eager to lock them behind her. It was widely rumored — and reported by Slate magazine — that she kept pro-Israel New York Timescolumnist Bill Safire out of the Gridiron Club for years until he turned 70. When Slate asked her about this, she replied, “I don’t think I’ll talk to you anymore,” and hung up.

Thomas spent much of her career as the “epitome of a wire-service stenographer,” then–New Republic writer Jonathan Chait wrote in 2006. Contrary to this myth of the dogged journalist, she wrote mostly puff pieces — about Democratic presidents. She only became a left-wing icon when, as a columnist, she started ranting at the George W. Bush White House.

Indeed, NPR’s media correspondent, David Folkenflik, observed in his obituary that Thomas “put a premium on shoe-leather reporting out of view.” He fails to mention any stories Thomas actually broke.

The New York Times managed to identify a scoop: her reports of her phone conversations with Martha Mitchell, the emotionally disturbed wife of Watergate-era attorney general John Mitchell. Mrs. Mitchell had a habit — owing in part to her reported alcoholism — of getting drunk and telephoning whoever would listen to her rants. Most reporters stopped exploiting Mitchell once it became clear how ill the woman was. Not Thomas. She happily transcribed the calls, even reporting how Mitchell’s young daughter was begging her mother to get off the phone with Thomas. “Don’t talk to her, she’s no friend.”

Still, as time went by, the awards poured in as Thomas became a Washington institution, with cameos in Hollywood movies and even The Simpsons. But the “odd thing about her awards and citations,” Chait noted, “is that they almost never mention any specific contributions she has made to journalism save for being female and, well, old.”

Or as journalist Andrew Ferguson once put it, “Everybody admires Helen, though nobody can tell you why.”

The best answer I can come up with: She had a long tradition of existence.

— Jonah Goldberg is the author of The Tyranny of Clichés, now on sale in paperback. You can write to him by e-mail at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Stalled Motor City

By John Stossel - July 24, 2013

http://www.realclearpolitics.com

Detroit: Hitting bottom. (Carlos Osorio/AP)

MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry -- the same TV commentator who said Americans need to stop raising kids as if they belong to individual families -- had an extraordinary explanation for why the city of Detroit sought to declare bankruptcy last week: not enough government.

"This is what it looks like when government is small enough to drown in your bathtub, and it is not a pretty picture." She says budget-cutting Republicans threaten to transform all of the U.S. into Detroit.

What? Detroit has been a "model city" for big-government! All Detroit's mayors since 1962 were Democrats who were eager to micromanage. And spend. Detroit has the only utility tax in Michigan, and its income tax is the third-highest of any big city in America (only Philadelphia and Louisville take more, and they aren't doing great, either).

Detroit's automakers got billions in federal bailouts.

The Detroit News revealed that Detroit in 2011 had around twice as many municipal employees per capita as cities with comparable populations. The city water and sewer department employed a "horseshoer" even though it keeps no horses.

This is "small enough government"? Harris-Perry must have one heck of a bathtub.

Politicians think they know best, but they can't alter the laws of economics. They can't make mismanaged industries, constant government meddling, welfare and bureaucratic labor union rules (Detroit has 47 unions) into a formula for success.

County Judge Rosemarie Aquilina wants to stop the bankruptcy process on the grounds that state law forbids Detroit to cut government services. But how will Detroit pay for the services? Unsustainable public-sector pensions, a bloated workforce -- it's all supposed to continue somehow.

Politicians on Detroit's city council aren't even willing to sell off vacant lots that the city owns, or even a portion of the billions of dollars in art in its government-subsidized museum (including the original "Howdy Doody" puppet).
On my TV show, I confronted the council's second in command about his refusal to let Detroit sell land. He says he voted against it "because the developer wants to grow trees. We don't need any more new trees in our city."

The politicians micromanaged themselves into bankruptcy, and they want to keep digging.

A member of the British Parliament writes that Detroit is like the fictional city of Starnesville in Ayn Rand's 1957 novel "Atlas Shrugged" -- a car-manufacturing city that became a ghost town after experimenting with socialism. In the novel, Starnesville's demise is the first sign that the entire society is approaching collapse.

Detroit is already there. 911 calls sometimes go unanswered. Two-thirds of the population left town.

As usual, the politicians want to try more of the same. They constantly come up with plans, but the plans are always big, simple-minded ones that run roughshod over the thousands of little plans made by ordinary citizens. Politicians want new stadiums, new transportation schemes, housing projects.

Andrew Rodney, a documentary filmmaker from Detroit, says many bad, big-government ideas that have plagued the U.S. were tried out first in Detroit. "It's the first city to experience a lot of the planning that went into a lot of cities."

Home loan subsidies, public housing, stadium subsidies, a $350 million project called "Renaissance Center" (the city ended up selling it for just $50 million), an automated People Mover system that not many people feel moved to use (it moves people in only one direction), endless favors to unions -- if a government idea has failed anywhere in America, there's a good chance it failed in Detroit first.

And if you criticized them for it, politicians like former Mayor Coleman Young called you a racist. "To attack Detroit is to attack black," Young said. That tends to shut critics up.

But the laws of economics apply to us all.

Insulated from serious criticism, insulated from economic reality, Detroit thought somehow it'd muddle through -- until now. There is a big lesson, if people elsewhere are willing to learn before it's too late. 

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