Category: Media

There was a lovely debate between Bill O’Reilly and Paul Krugman on Tim Russert’s Saturday show this weekend (see transcript here), and I have to say that in my humble and unbiased opinion O’Reilly mopped the floor with the man Lying in Ponds consistently rates as the number one or two most partisan columnist in America. That’s not to say that O’Reilly wasn’t way over the top or that he didn’t come across as a loon and a bully, just that Krugman’s arguments were weak and his general personal demeanor was sad to the extreme – at several points his voice cracked and his hands were visibly shaking. I’ve seen Krugman on the air before, and he always has this weasly demeanor like a little kid who’s just learned that he can get attention by using big words, or cuss words, or by reciting obscure facts, but he was at a real extreme this time.

There’s a real nice account of the show over at Donald Luskin for your enjoyment:

This marks the first time that anyone has really stood up to America?s most dangerous liberal pundit on television. And Krugman simply didn?t know how to handle it. At several points in the show Krugman was practically in shock, with hands visibly trembling.

O?Reilly was masterful. He didn?t for one moment grant Krugman the undeserved respect that everyone else grants him, thanks to the prestigious aura of his Princeton professorship and his New York Times column. And O?Reilly didn?t let Krugman get away with any of his usual stunts.

O?Reilly uncompromisingly held Krugman to account for some of the outrageous (and outrageously wrong) things Krugman?s written in his Times columns.

Check it out.

This threat really annoys me, and so does this. The Left must be pretty unsure of the quality of its debating points if it feels the only way it can win is to muzzle the other side.

It seems that Michael Moore has been caught playing fast and loose with the truth again:

The (Bloomington) Pantagraph in central Illinois has sent a letter to Moore asking him to apologize for using what the newspaper says was a doctored front page in the film.

A scene early in the movie shows newspaper headlines related to the legally contested presidential election of 2000. It includes a shot of The Pantagraph’s front page with the prominent headline: “Latest Florida recount shows Gore won election.”

But the Pantagraph says that headline was never on the front page. It only appeared — in much smaller type — above a letter to the editor.

Why does this not surprise me? It’s just like the staged scene in Columbine where an actor hands a rifle to Moore on a stage; banks don’t really hand out guns in their lobbies, for obvious reasons, and newspapers don’t generally tell bald-faced lies in headlines on their front pages. Moore likes to put his most egregious lies in the mouths of others, and sometimes they object.

Here’s another one, via Tim Blair:

THE movie Fahrenheit 9/11 asserts the children of US congressmen are under-represented in US forces in Iraq.

There are 300 million Americans; 130,000 US troops in Iraq; 535 congressmen and women; and at least five children of congressmen serving in Iraq.

Thirty seconds of intellectual effort shows that children of US congressmen are very over-represented in Iraq; but 30 seconds is way over the capacity of admirers of Fahrenheit 9/11.

The fun never stops in the world of Moore’s delusions.

The Democratic Leadership Council has an excellent review on its website of Michael Moore’s overheated, paranoid rambings:

Clearly, the author’s imaginative powers far outstrip his reporting or analytical skills. Consider, for example, his riff that bounds from showing a Bush family business connection with the bin Laden family (true) to the suggestion that 9/11 was not merely the work of 15 Saudi Arabian terrorists and four others, but the work of the Saudi Arabian Air Force (not true). Moore asks Bush:

“Who attacked the United States on September 11 — a guy on dialysis from a cave in Afghanistan, or your friends, Saudi Arabia? … You do not get this skilled at learning how to fly jumbo jets by being taught on a video game machine at some dipshit flight training school in Arizona. You learn to do this in the air force. Someone’s air force. The Saudi Air Force? What if these weren’t wacko terrorists, but military pilots who signed on to a suicide mission? What if they were doing this at the behest of either the Saudi government or certain disgruntled members of the Saudi royal family? … Why do you refuse to say, ‘Saudi Arabia attacked the United States!’?”

When Moore has his facts right — on, say, the troubled state of U.S. public education — he still undermines his message by presenting it in a shock-jock tone, like the Howard Stern of print. “A nation that not only churns out illiterate students BUT GOES OUT OF ITS WAY TO REMAIN IGNORANT AND STUPID should not be running the world …,” shouts Moore in Stupid White Men.

Via Mr. Reynolds.

Moore was on Bill Maher’s show on HBO tonight, along with a woman who used to be Prime Minister of Canada and California congressman David Dreier, the chairman of the Schwarzenegger campaign and one of the most decent people in the entire political system. Maher, Moore, and the Canadian spent nearly the entire show taking cheap shots at Dreier by way of showing their seething hate for President Bush, and wouldn’t let him get a word in, even to answer their loaded questions. Maher is no great piece of work himself, but I’ve never seen him sink so low in his entire career (and I’ve been watching him since he was on Comedy Central) so I have to put a large part of the blame on Moore.

The half-truths, untruths, conspiracy theories, personal attacks and cheap shots Moore peddles are having a corrosive effect on our entire political dialog in this country, and somebody needs to put this sadistic bastard in his place, so I applaud the DLC for taking the first step with this review. Their interest in taking Moore down a notch is clear — if he has his way, the Democrats will be the party of Carter instead of the party of Clinton, an irrelevency at the fringes of politics incapable of winning an election for dog-catcher.

This is some truly sick shit:

While a swift-boat commander in Vietnam, Sen. John Kerry filmed re-enactments of combat which Democrats plan to use in the official video introducing their presidential nominee tomorrow night in Boston.

During the Vietnam War, Sen. John Kerry filmed re-enactments of combat scenes with a home camera.

A new book, “Unfit for Command,” written by John O’Neill, who took over Kerry’s swift boat, PCF-94, charges the Massachusetts senator carried a home movie camera to “record his exploits,” according to the Drudge Report

The convention video is directed by James Smoll, who works with Steven Spielberg…

O’Neill’s book says Kerry “would revisit ambush locations for re-enacting combat scenes where he would portray the hero, catching it all on film. Kerry would take movies of himself walking around in combat gear, sometimes dressed as an infantryman walking resolutely through the terrain. He even filmed mock interviews of himself narrating his exploits. A joke circulated among Swiftees was that Kerry left Vietnam early not because he received three Purple Hearts, but because he had recorded enough film of himself to take home for his planned political campaigns.”

I mean, really.

H/T Ken Layne.

Now that we know that Atrios is a fellow named Duncan Black who works for the George Soros-funded Media Matters organization, we can apply some Michael Moore logic and uncover his motivation. Soros is a major investor in the Carlyle Group, which Moore has explained is a vehicle through which the Saudis control American politics and media. (According to Moore, President Bush flew Saudis out of the country after Sept. 11 as a favor to the Saudis, who had paid him $1.4 billion.) Soros has $100 million invested in Carlyle, so he’s clearly 100 times more a tool of the Saudis than the entire bin Laden family, who only had $1 million at their peak (they’ve since dis-invested.)

So here’s the way it works: the Saudis want to keep Iraqi oil off the market, to maintain high prices for their own crude, so they support an anti-war movement in the US through Soros’ funding of Moveon.org, Media Matters, Atrios, and Oliver Willis. They can’t get what they want from Bush, so they try and replace him with Kerry. Atrios wants to keep his Saudi connection hidden, so he blogs anonymously. Now that the Saudis have their boy Kerry in the race, he can safely unmask.

This is a completely insane theory, of course, as anyone on his right mind can see; but it’s no more insane than the crap that readers of Atrios and viewers of Michael Moore swallow every day.

Atrios is a Saudi agent – pass it on.

H/T Jarvis.

A recent John Stossel report in ABC’s 20/20 points out that 76% of Las Vegas obstetricians have been sued by lawyers like John Edwards, who famously won huge awards in dubious cases:

Cerebral palsy is a central nervous system defect that makes it hard for people to control their muscles. At the time of Edwards’ cases, the defect was often said to be caused by a lack of oxygen to the baby’s brain during delivery. Edwards and other lawyers have argued that if the doctor involved had only done a Caesarean section, the child’s cerebral palsy could have been prevented.

He won a record verdict in a cerebral palsy case after he told the jury he was speaking for the injured infant, in the womb. He was very convincing and the jury awarded his clients over $6 million. Scruggs told me, “Wouldn’t you want your lawyer to be just as clever and just as effective?”

One thing doctors may have learned from these kinds of cases was to do more C-sections. The procedure is more common today for many reasons, including scheduling convenience, but doctors say fear of a cerebral palsy lawsuit has had a big impact.

Since 1970 C-sections have gone from 6 percent of all births to 26 percent. “And there has not been one small decrease in the cerebral palsy rate across the board,” said Mandeville.

See ABC’s message boards for some discussion of the unusual disclaimer.

H/T Mr. Reynolds.

From Silent Running:

Wilson was interviewed by Margaret Warner, who at one point was almost trying to help him out by throwing him a ‘possible wording’ but Wilson even discarded that and flailed away in the face of direct exposure from Senator Kit Bond. Senator Bond read almost directly from the Senate Intelligence report, and cited the Butler Inquiry conclusions. He summarized by stating that Wilson was a liar, and owed the President and Vice President an apology.

Hmmm…..But Wilson has a good defense, if he wants to use it: he’s a liar, but at least he’s not a spy.

I’m off to Japan for a week of meetings, so I don’t expect to be posting much until I get back. I can recommend all the blogs in the right-hand column, especially Blogs for Bush, Roger L. Simon, Terrorism Unveiled, Red State, and The Fat Guy.

Simon has done yeoman’s work covering the Lyin’ Joe Wilson story, and I hope that it continues to unfold in the days to come. The blogger triumphalism that emerged following the downfall of Trent Lott has suffered a major blow in the failure of Big Media to follow the lead of bloggers in exposing Wilson for what it is, lending credence to my theory that Trent Lott was primarily a product of Democratic activist Sid Blumenthal acting through Josh Marshall. The Democratic Party blogs (Marshall, Atrios, Kos, and Kevin Drum) are shying away from the Wilson story because he’s their man and the centerpiece of the “Bush lied, people died” hysteria.

As they will continue to do that, we’ll see whether the center and right blogs have the power to make the media go where it doesn’t want to go in the next few days.