Elections 2008 – ILANA MERCER

Bachmann: Bling For Ron Paul?

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A day after the GOP debate in New Hampshire, mainstream media awoke to Rep. Michele Bachmann’s undeniable abilities and magnetism. Before June 13, this mummified lot had turned to Meghan McCain and Chris Matthews for information about the congresswoman from Minnesota.

Matthews’ mock-Bachmann routine is almost as notorious as the carnal excitement the host of Hardball displays periodically over Barack Obama. By Slate.com’s count, Rep. Bachmann, who is running for president, has been “discussed”—more like dissed—on 127 episodes of Matthews’ MSNBC show. In January, he accused Ms. Bachmann of looking dazed, hypnotized, and acting irrationally, all because she remained unrattled by the host’s hectoring.

At the time, I blogged that “to Matthews, a fully engaged female is someone like Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida), who talks up a storm in promoting statist schemes. Simpletons perceive a fulminating statist as ‘good,’ ‘caring,’ and certainly ‘smart.'”Bachmann’s “rational, steely quality drives Chris crazy.” After all, Matthews is the man who exposed himself to his viewers, having divulged that he had experienced something akin to a (daytime) nocturnal emission” while thinking about Obama.

No better were establishment Republicans. They dubbed Bachmann a kook—strategist Mike Murphy said she “makes Sarah Palin look like Count Metternich.” “The media scrum hates her with a purple passion,” I concluded, which is why “one hears very little about Ms. Bachmann’s intellectual aptitude.”

Rep. Bachmann catapulted to fame late in 2008. Yet not a thing was said in the muckraking media—Republican included—about her background. Just imagine what publicity Wasserman Schultz (or Sarah Palin) would receive had she provided foster care to 23 children in addition to raising five of her own! Bachmann, moreover, earned a Master of Laws in tax law from the William & Mary Law School. (Women lawyers tend to flock to the less-taxing field of family law.)

Not that you’d know it from the way she has been portrayed, but Bachmann is very clever. With a perfectly straight face, Lawrence O’Donnell, also of MSNBC (a fertile seedbed for mind-sapping stupidity), lapped up the sub-intelligent message issued by the “Snooki” of the commentariat: Michele Bachmann is “no better than a poor man’s Sarah Palin,” Meghan McCain announced. “I take none of this seriously,” our Meghan declared grandiosely, following Bachmann’s Tea Party address, delivered to great effect.

No conservative with clout (except for Glenn Beck) dared to eviscerate this licentious, self-adoring, dense libertine. (A response at BigGovernment.com was mild, at best.) In fin de siècle America, idiots proceed unimpeded—especially if blessed with a famous father and a moneyed mother.

Sarah Palin is Bush in a bra (with all the implications about brain power that implies). She’s nothing like Bachmann. Mrs. Palin has an area of expertise: energy. Instead of a role as an energy ace, Palin opted to be a generalist, whose rambling, run-off sentences (peppered as they are with gerunds), are almost as grating as Meaghan’s Valley-Girl inflection.

When Sarah Palin still thought QE2 was a ship set to sail from Alaska, Bachmann was sitting happily on panels with Ron Paul, Federal-Reserve-Bank slayer. By 2009, Bachmann was ready for that flotilla of fiat money the Fed Chairmen floated in support of his political masters. This representative was “beefing-up her knowledge of the Fed and was familiar with the works of libertarian economic historian Tom Woods,” I blogged.

Belatedly, The Wall Street Journal has awoken (as of June 11) to Michele Bachmann’s intellectual heft. She is conversant with “Human Action” and “Bureaucracy,” the works of classical liberal economist Ludwig von Mises. Yet just the other day (January, 2011), the same outfit had patronizingly dismissed Bachmann’s challenge to the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul as “an interesting strategy to gain more attention.”

Masters at sweating the smaller, safer stuff, some Beltway libertarians asserted that Bachmann, one of the few people in Congress who understands and protests monetary policy, is a philosophical spender because of the “agricultural subsidies her family farm has [allegedly] received.” This case is not worth a straw.

Search and you’ll find minor blemishes in Ron Paul’s impeccable defense of the Constitution. But when it comes to the big issues—entitlements, monetary and foreign policy—Paul remains unbeatable, where Beltway libertarians (also known in some libertarian circles as The “Kochtopus”) have been inconsistent.

Bachmann is eloquent and is seldom fazed. As attractive as Sarah, she is also cerebral, a quality poor Palin is without. Bachmann is not yet a libertarian, but neither is she wedded to the warfare state, and is wise enough to recognize the political value of denouncing America’s forays abroad in order to bring moderates and independents into the fold. Given guidance (and a good kick), she is not beyond apologizing for her unforgivable vote for the Patriot Act.

Conversely—attests” NRO’s Kevin D. Williamson (a libertarian behind enemy lines)—Paul has gone from immigration hawk to toying with amnesty (with an asterisk or two). Bachmann will bring Paul back from the brink.

Americans inhabit a world of reality TV and other frivolity. To win the GOP nomination in this parallel universe, Ron Paul needs political bling—he will want the punch, pizazz and money bombs a Bachmann can provide. What do you know? In September of 2009, this column had already picked the GOP’s winning ticket: Ron Paul for commander-in-chief; Michele Bachmann as second-in-command.

Bundle Rand (Paul) and Michele Bachmann—and the opposition, both Republican and Democratic, will be vanquished. But that’s for another day.

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The Big Lie About Obama And Race

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A government-employed affirmative action officer by the name of Carolyn Pitts wrote the following:

“All white individuals are racist. In the United States, at present, only whites can be racists since whites dominate and control the institutions that create and enforce American cultural norms and values. …” [Frederick R. Lynch, “Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action,” 1991.]

Pitts is insignificant in the grand scheme of the state’s racial re-education machine. She worked for the New York State Insurance Fund writing hate-filled manuals used in employee training seminars. The poison Pitts penned for a pretty price—in 1985, this black woman earned $38,872—encapsulates the life-sentence pronounced upon white America. From media megaphones to pedagogues, the hoary old fallacy of American racism is amplified and reinforced ad nauseam.

Throughout the presidential campaign—and to emphasize the country’s racial backwardness—the popular press kept at it: “Is the country ready for a black president?” “Will Americans ever elect a black man as president?” These were the campaign’s most repeated refrains. To which my response has been consistent: America is not remotely racist. If anything; Americans are remarkably naïve about human differences—cultural or racial.

Alas, as one wag said, “Any idea, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought.” Non-stop, relentless propaganda, enforced by the tyranny of political correctness, helps explain why most Americans, who harbor no racial animus, believe racism saturates their society. As they see it, in electing Barack Obama, they’ve begun to atone for their original sin.

The prevailing “we’ve come along way” inanity is not the exclusive province of liberal guilt; obeisance to PC has induced the same curvature of the spine among the conservative priesthood. These were certainly the sentiments expressed by the highly animated crowds of African Americans, gathered to celebrate the Obama coronation. Like Pitts, the affirmative action officer, most of these men and women had grown up in an America of quotas and affirmative action—a country that in fact privileges underachieving minorities. Yet on-and-on they complained about the improbability of living to see an African American elected president.

White liberals, the vast majority of Obama’s base, lap up the libel of a racist America. Sane individuals reject this Mark of Cain; as they should a false accusation of hate they don’t harbor; hate The Other harbors. Hate that bubbled up in the Rev. Joseph Lowery’s inauguration benediction:

“Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around – when yellow will be mellow – when the red man can get ahead, man – and when white will embrace what is right.”

There’s the Pitts postulate again: To be white is never to be right. To be black is to have an eternal claim against whites—for no other reason than that they are white. For ever after, whites are destined to be roped into the Sisyphean struggle to appease the unappeasable. Or so African Americans repeatedly tell them. Franklin D. Roosevelt—in whose steps Obama aims to follow—knew a thing or two about sustaining The Big Lie. The author of the first New Deal (the New New deal is in the pipeline) quipped: “Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.”

If nothing else, the election of Barack Obama is proof positive of how fair-minded Americans are, not how far honky has come. The waning Anglo-American majority is responsible for electing the first African-American president. This they did not because of the “color of Obama’s epidermis,” but for what they perceived to be the content of his character.

Allow me to put forth a simple proposition. The election of Obama is no racial milestone; it’s not that whites have come to their senses. But rather that African Americans have finally done what’s right (to paraphrase the childish, churlish prose of one Rev. Lowery). For the first time in a long time, the black community has put forward a candidate of caliber; a candidate the American people were only too willing to consider for the highest office in the land.

Until Barack, the black community had disgorged the likes of Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton. Be he black, brown, yellow or red (Rev. Lowery’s classification)—no sane American would elect those two phonies to serve on their local PTA board, much less in the Oval Office.

Ironically, Barack the boy was raised by his white maternal grandparents; his Kenyan father abandoned him. The qualities Americans appeared to find universally appealing in the ambitious, affable Obama—his confidence and calm, and his commitment to community and kin, education and excellence—these came from Kansas, not Kenya.

©By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
January 23, 2009

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The Left’s Gallery of Cretins

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

This is the age of the idiot. The triumph Of Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber in American culture and politics can no longer be disputed. However, my modest proposal of last week still stands.

I ventured that the developing consensus among some self-styled elites (as opposed natural elites) with respect to Sarah Palin’s aptitude was premature. I am simply unconvinced Gov. Palin is an exemplar of dumbed down, distaff America.

Smart Alec lefty Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone magazine disagrees. He calls Sarah Palin “a puffed-up dimwit with primitive religious beliefs. … 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV.” Hardly an argument, is it? (Hence “Smart Alec,” and not smart.)

Once Taibbi dispensed with the niceties, he got dirty. What Palin represents to Taibbi is “being a fat f-cking pig who pins ‘Country First’ buttons on his man titties and chants ‘U-S-A! U-S-A!'”

Another smarmy Smart Alec is the libertine Bill Maher. The host of HBO’s “Real Time” called Palin “a category five moron.” “She thought the Bush doctrine has something to do with forbidding her daughters to shave down there,” he snickered, adding cruelly that “her favorite welcome-home sign on arriving back in Alaska was her daughter’s. It read: ‘I got my period.'”

In case you don’t know him, Maher is the intellectual pigmy who once told TV Talker Joe Scarborough he wanted Bush impeached—but not for anything meaningful, such as, say, prosecuting an illegal and unjust war. Rather, Maher argued impassionedly, and quite seriously, that impeachment proceedings ought to be initiated on no other grounds than that, on 9/11, after Bush had been told by Andrew Card that America had been attacked, he sat put for seven minutes at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School. Maher’s motivation for impeachment is as frivolous as the impetus for Clinton’s. (Or as mindless as Maher’s anti-corn syrup carping.)

The Left has offered accolades to individuals infinitely more asinine and far less accomplished than Gov. Palin.

Take Jesse Jackson. I’m completely comfortable calling the revered reverend a deeply silly “dude.” The evidence is incontrovertible and decades old. A public berating of that bit of dreck is long overdue. Granted, Jackson is not running for vice president, but he did run for president. And I’m willing to bet that not many establishment media men have identified Jackson for the jackass he is.

On the subprime mortgage mess Jackson served up a word salad that gave Lauren Caitlin Upton of the 2007 Miss Teen USA fame a run for her money. (Caitlin was asked why so many “Americans can’t locate the U.S. on a world map.” Her reply included references to “U.S. Americans,” “South Africa,” “Eyeraq,” “Asian countries,” “our children,” each prefaced by the “sophisticated” phrase “such as.”)

The following is vintage Jackson verbiage disgorged to a receptive Amy Goodman of Democracy Now: “22 percent of those subprimes went to African Americans. About 22 percent went to Latinos. But the water came in the ship on the black and brown side”:

“The water did not stay; the water kept coming across. So now what you have is whole communities without their—when one house goes, suddenly the houses lose value. And so, the value is leaving, tax base eroding, schools are suffering, all because unregulated banking up top and lack of fair lending laws. If you were to enforce fair lending laws at the base, the water—you know, the sink—the ship did not sink because chairs blew off the deck; water came in the bottom. And water came in the bottom, because the poor people and middle-class people in fact were taken advantage of and slaughtered.”

The jury is no longer out about Cynthia McKinney’s intelligence. A former United States Representative and the Green Party’s nominee for president, McKinney is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist who believes the Bush administration orchestrated the events of that day. Among her legislative accomplishments: the “Tupac Shakur Records Act.”

The Left didn’t laugh these one-time White-House hopefuls off the political stage, did it?

Presidential candidates, past and present (and their spouses), flock to a television show called “The View,” where they snuggle up to—and play footsie with—some seriously foolish females.

On “The View” the earth is often flat—at least to co-host Sherri Shepherd, who has also “argued,” convincingly to some, that Jesus preceded the Greeks.

Speaking of the Left’s intelligentsia, unlike Taibbi and Maher, who made a “case” against Palin’s candidacy by cussing, Joy Behar at least tried to “argue.” The result? The most originally asinine anti-Palin argument to date:

“You know, the one thing that I don’t think anybody’s said yet is that she’s very mean to animals, this woman. Why does she have it in for these poor polar bear and the caribou and she aerial kills wolves? That’s a very mean thing to do. … I don’t think that’s very nice, do you? I think that that’s an important point we should all be looking at.”

So now it’s Palin’s PETA papers that aren’t in order. Put it this way: If Rep. Ron Paul clubbed seals to death on ice floes; I’d still consider him a smashing potential president. (If he fired a trooper who abused his power, all the better.)

For advancing such “argument,” the not-very-bright Behar ought to have been intellectually disemboweled. Needless to say, she’s more often than not applauded by mediacrats.

Besides, and to press my point, what is this standard against which Palin is being measured and found so woefully inadequate? Cheney? Bush? John Kerry? Heinz Kerry? Hillary? Harry Reid? Harriet Miers? King Henry (Paulson)? Barney, had-an-affair-with-a-male-prostitute, Frank? Nancy Pelosi? Al Sharpton? Chuck Schumer? Charlie Rangel? Joe Biden (who stated during the vice presidential debate” that “the Constitution calls for” “same-sex benefits,” when it says nothing about benefits, hetero or homo)?

Come now.

When it comes to their cretinism quotient, there are plenty candidates more qualified than Sarah Palin, starting in Washington, on Wall Street, and in the nation’s editorial rooms.

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Who’s Stupid? Not Sarah

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Governor Sarah Palin’s alleged lack of cerebral alacrity is probably less in doubt after the first vice-presidential debate. Prior to that, a bipartisan consensus had been developing among the ideologically converging political class and their parrot pundits that she was indeed an idiot.

The biggest hitter was conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, who demanded that Governor Palin bow out of the race. “Only Palin can save McCain, the Party, and the country she loves. Do it for your country, please,” pleaded Parker histrionically.

How like a woman to implicate causes not in evidence for the country’s undoing.

Where was Sarah Palin when the Bush/Bernanke bulldozer was running up debts and deficits financed by promiscuous printing and borrowing? Whodunit? Who so debased the country’s coin?

John McCain would like everyone to believe that he has only just stumbled into the fleshpots of Washington. But he was right by Bush’s side as the latter presided over the greatest expansion of government since Lyndon B. Johnson.

Sarah Palin, on the other hand, has an alibi. When these characters were gassing-up the economy with hot air, she was in Alaska getting her house in order. This does nothing to excuse Sarah’s subsequent sell-out, but it doesn’t put her at the original crime scene.

Elementary, my dear Ms. Parker: Palin quitting will not save your Party or the country.

Still, Sarah Palin’s performance at St. Louis was at best uneven, despite “GOP Turkey” Rich Lowry’s effusing. In pumped-up, poor prose, fit for a lad-mag, Lowry gobbled that Governor Palin was “so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting [sic] around the living rooms of America.” (Where’s the editor at National Review? Oh, Lowry is the editor.)

The governor did not win the debate against Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. And it’s not because she isn’t working with much. On the contrary: Sarah Palin is a woman of singular charm and a sinewy intelligence.

The stock, scripted, repetitive lines (“we need to send the maverick from the Senate and put him in the White House”), run-on sentences, and politically anemic positions—these are what happen when a bedrock conservative adopts a creed counterintuitive to her own. (This might be too charitable, but perhaps Bush babble is less a consequence of congenital stupidity than it is of the confusion caused by incessant, habitual lying.)

A young, ambitious, easily co-opted politician abandons some of her conservative core beliefs and restrains her political persona for a ticket and candidate that have neither: This is likely the reason for the mangled, mixed massages, absent from the governor’s Alaskan record.

Most conspicuously, Palin slammed a cause she had, at one time, saluted: that of the Alaskan Independence Party. It advocates what was once a fundament of the American founding: peaceful secession. As leading economic historian Tom DiLorenzo has documented in rich detail, the Union was a voluntary one. If the States had believed it was a “one-way Venus flytrap,” they would never have ratified the Constitution.

Palin’s incessant praise for McCain the regulator was interspersed with inconsistent calls for less regulation: “[A]s for John McCain’s adherence to rules and regulations and pushing for even harder and tougher regulations, that is another thing that he is known for though. Look at the tobacco industry. Look at campaign finance reform.”

Contrast that with this: “government, you know, you’re not always the solution. In fact, too often you’re the problem so, government, lessen the tax burden and on our families and get out of the way and let the private sector and our families grow and thrive and prosper.” Similarly, predatory lenders were denounced; borrowers who live beyond their means only mildly rebuked.

Someone less cattie than Katie Couric would have, moreover, picked up on how Palin recoiled viscerally in response to the anchor’s question about the $700 billion Bush bailout. Palin began by stating how ill she felt over the thing. Then, remembering the bulletin points with which she’d been bamboozled, she lost the moment (and her mind) and launched into stream-of-consciousness mishmash.

Clearly, the governor’s instincts and positions are too often at odds with McCain’s and are being diluted daily by the Barnum-circus confidence tricksters who’re handling her. This is a woman who, when asked in 2006 about the surge, shot back that “she hoped for an ‘exit plan.'” Her ideas about energy exploration and global warming contrast with McCain’s, who has also opposed drilling in ANWAR, the Alaskan National Wilderness Reserve. McCain talks about balancing a budget; Palin has delivered.

At the very least, the developing consensus as to Palin’s aptitude, I venture, is premature. Conservative women rushing to expose her alleged stupidity may fear that unless they do so, posthaste, their own smarts will be called into question. Call me confident, but I have no need to call Palin clueless—clever and easily co-opted, perhaps, but not clueless.

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Sensational Sarah

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

With the Liberty Bell on the big screen behind her, Sarah Palin was the Belle of the Ball at the Republican National Convention. The governor of the State of Alaska was more than picture perfect, she was pitch perfect. She’s a pit-bull with lipstick, alright—lipstick, and sharp stilettos. A potent mix of style and substance.

Before Palin delivered her spectacular speech, the Obama campaign had indicated it was observing closely, but did not believe there was any need to shift strategy. By now the campaign must be rethinking its folly. For one, Palin has pushed Obama off the TV screens—a welcome occurrence. That alone ought to have alerted the Obama juggernaut to the power of Palin. Post speech, the qualifications and accomplishments of Barack Obama are being juxtaposed to those of the Republican vice-presidential nominee. This can’t be good for a man who is more chimerical than real.

The sneering sniveling responses from her “opponents” have been tellingly weak. “This is one nasty lady,” whined a blogger on the bug-eyed Markos Moulitsas’ influential website. Another called Palin’s speech “snarky, amateurish, almost Student Council-like.”

Palin is tough and brave, but never nasty or snarky.

The Obama camp then noodled about Palin’s “divisive, partisan attacks.” Partisan is good. The greater the bipartisan collusion between quislings in both parties, the less competition in government Americans end-up with. “Sarah Barracuda” can leave it to her boss to slip between the sheets with members of the opposition.

Palin has what Washington harpies, Democrat and Republican, lack: authenticity, character and a personality. She’s a mensch. There are plenty of plastic people doing the Republican Party’s biding—vicious, vacuous, vain men and women who’ll embrace her and try and change her. Consider the consummate Court Courtesan, Peggy Noonan. This Washington insider, lapdog to the powerful, was caught on an open mike trashing Palin, decrying her appointment as “political Bullshit” and “Gimmicky.” Palin is not a member of Noonan’s claque—not yet. “The permanent political establishment” Palin decried is a bipartisan plague. Let us hope she remains on the outs with “the Washington elite,” Democratic and Republican alike.

Indeed, unlike Hillary Clinton, the deadpan, listless Condi Rice, or the anemic Dana Perino, and others of “the establishment elite,” Democrat and Republican, Sarah Palin has lived a real life real people can relate to. And lived it splendidly. It doesn’t matter that I disagreed with many of her positions, not least her enthusiasm for an unjust war. Palin’s achievements in the communities she has graced clearly transcend her party’s rickety plank and attest to how good and gifted a “gal” she is.

The best of America is without, not within, Washington.

The charming Palin family was introduced in a manner that quelled any uneasiness I had about that earlier, excessively exuberant press release about Bristol Palin’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Last night, Sarah Palin made no unnecessary allusions to her daughter’s condition. No unappetizing details were disclosed: “Our family has the same ups and downs as any other, the same challenges and the same joys.” That’s all there was to it.

She glowed, but was gladiatorial, as she spoke of her “perfectly beautiful baby boy named Trig,” who has Down’s syndrome. Up on the screen, Trig’s little sister applied spittle to his sparse hair, as he slept peacefully through his mother’s speech, and his sister’s coiffing.

Then Alaska’s First Gentleman was introduced: “Todd is a story all by himself. He’s a lifelong commercial fisherman and a production operator in the oil fields of Alaska’s North Slope, and a proud member of the United Steelworkers union. And Todd is a world champion snow machine racer. Throw in his Yup’ik Eskimo ancestry, and it all makes for quite a package. And we met in high school. And two decades and five children later, he’s still my guy.” (Said in that endearing Marge Gunderson twang—to quote John Lifton—”the fictional chief of police of Brainerd, Minnesota in the Oscar-winning movie Fargo.”) Real women who’ve raised children with good men know exactly what Sarah Palin means when she speaks about her man.

The reason Palin is unlike the types who’re going to be embracing her and may even bamboozle and change her is that she hasn’t orbited close to their corrupt comet. Instead, she has lived most of her life in a small town, with people “who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our food, and run our factories, and fight our wars. They love their country in good times and bad, and they’re always proud of America.”

One can never mock Michelle Obama enough for her mindless meandering. Or her husband for getting so carried away with himself.

Sarah Palin’s style: What a contrast it is to McCain’s nasal mutterings. Neither has Sarah any qualms about savaging “Our Opponent”—first she depersonalized her rival, rendering him nameless, and then moved in for the kill. Conversely, to attack or not to attack is McCain’s eternal dilemma. He can’t make up his mind. When he had time on his liver-spotted hands, McCain even produced a commercial congratulating his opponent on a “job well done.” (Would that Rep. Ron Paul, the only politician who adheres to America’s founding philosophy, was Palin’s running mate, wisely steering her boundless energy and excellent instincts in excising the cancer from the body politic.)

McCain comes off weak. Sarah’s strong. A sturdy, rugged individualist.

Palin’s powerful presence aside, the most gripping portions of her speech concerned her love of country, her convictions and her attendant accomplishments as mayor and governor. The weakest link in the address was John McCain. As she stood there in all her resplendence, it was crystal clear that Sarah Palin was the outsider; McCain the insider. Palin’s the candidate of change; McCain the Manchurian candidate. She’s the maverick and the man he’s not.

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Mindless Monolith: Media Pick Obama

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The top Democratic dogs finally got their way: Senator Clinton, who lost her party’s delegates but won the people, will concede the Democratic nomination. Media pack animals are also on top of the world.

From the AP’s Charles Babington to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews to Wolf Blitzer and his “best political team on television”: They had all worked their hearts out for Obama. Now they were overcome by soggy sentimentality. The Obama win was declared an historic victory. Every American, vaporized a misty-eyed Matthews, will remember where he was on this momentous day—momentous because of Obama’s alleged pigment burden.

Americans had come out in droves for Barack, not because he’s a black man, but because they think he’s the right man. Yet the journalistic herd never stopped riding the same old racism ass. In so doing, they were insulting Americans. For how was it their fault that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton had been the best the African-American community had to offer before Obama?

The usually dignified Andrea Mitchell of NBC swelled the Obama chorus, to say nothing of wild man Keith Olbermann, a Daily Kos blogger, and his side kick, Air America‘s Rachel Maddow. Walter Shorenstein, founder of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, summed up the Obama-centric campaign coverage as “biased, blasé, and baseless.”

I suspect most media cheered for Obama reflexively, rather than consciously—too stupid to ask themselves whether what they were doing was journalism or advocacy. A couple of older news guys, ABC’s Charles Gibson comes to mind, failed to take sides. Consequently, the pack pounced on him and on George Stephanopoulos for asking the senator some pointed questions. But good newsmen are a dying breed. Good newswomen are mostly dead already. By the time she died, the brilliant and brave Oriana Fallaci had long since been buried professionally by mediocrities like Barbara Walters of the “cutting edge” anti-aging reportage and colonic crusader Katie Couric.

So how did a mindless monolith’s hunger for Hussein help the Obama momentum?

Early in 2008, a melodramatic media latched on to the phony supposition that the Democratic Party was in crisis because two candidates were battling bitterly over the nomination for the highest office in the land. If MSM was to be believed, the American people were incapable of tolerating the tussle. If Hillary and Barack didn’t stop bickering, Americans the country over would curl-up in the fetal position and never unfurl. This was the subtext transmitted daily, even hourly.

So began the media-manufactured storm in the D. camp.

Soon Howard Dean was placed on emergency call. Al Gore was volunteered as mediator. Pelosi achieved the impossible: a perpetual furrow on that botoxed brow. Next came the talking heads’ obsessive calls for the candidate who wasn’t winning to quit the race. Hillary was commanded to bow-out. Throughout, debate was framed as disunity. Words like “spoiler” were bandied about regularly.

The kick-Hillary-out clucking reached a crescendo as she swept Texas, Ohio, and Rhode Island.

Character assassination was another of the strategies the stumblebums stumbled upon. Obama’s lies were always white as lilies; Hillary’s as black as her heart was said to be. Barack beefed up his community activist’s résumé—he was never a professor. He also conjured a familial Camelot connection during a speech he gave at Selma. These episodes of amnesia the Washington Post called “overstatements.” For her flights of fancy, Hillary should have been chided too. Instead, the same idio-experts who had demonstrated an allergy to the truth in the build-up to war against Iraq diagnosed her as a pathological liar.

When the Rev. Wright scandal percolated with great difficulty into cable’s quarters (thanks to Sean Hannity), that grizzled “newswoman” Anderson Cooper crumbled: “How do we make this go away?” he cried on air. Greta van Susteren was the only anchor to protest the unadulterated racism that was the attack on Hillary by Pfleger, another of the pornographic preachers at the Trinity cesspit. Not one member of a MSM that never swims upstream was capable of concluding that Obama needed to be confronted about his adopted philosophy of two decades, not for his presence or absence in the pews during sermons.<

Clinton carried Florida and Michigan, the states that were guilty of violating party protocol. It seemed plain that procedural violations should not have trumped the truth as represented by the voters of these states. But the impending miscarriage of justice was minimized by the media collective. They were only too happy to mislead the man on the street into believing that Democratic Party petty rules were as sacred as those governing the Electoral College. The rules committee of the Democratic National Committee subsequently chose to halve the votes of the Florida and Michigan delegates.

Slaves got a slightly better deal under the “Three-Fifths Compromise” during the Constitutional Convention.

By now the red/blue split in the Democratic Party had become a gash. Clinton was getting the red, Reagan Democrats—seniors, whites, blue collar and rural voters. “Barack Obama,” in the words of another veteran news guy, the always-edifying William Schneider, “was winning the blue Democrats: young voters, upscale urban professionals, well-educated liberals and African-Americans.”

Red versus blue meant left versus right. Those who own guns voted for Hillary; those who don’t, and think you should not, voted for Obama. One more thing: Because they’re older, more blue collar, and more conservative, Clinton voters will be more likely to vote for McCain than Obama. Obama voters would have countenanced Clinton over McCain.

Barack Obama didn’t exactly sprint for the finish. Rather, he limped across the line, having lost Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, and Puerto Rico. He was the delegate’s choice; Hillary the democratic choice.

Obama was also the media’s Anointed One from day one.

WorldNetDaily.com

June 6, 2008

The post Mindless Monolith: Media Pick Obama appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

The Hillary, Hussein, McCain Axis of Evil

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

So what do I think of the next president? I didn’t like his predecessor’s “New New Deal,” so why would I like Barack Hussein Obama’s Great Great Society?

H. L. Mencken called elections “a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.” Henry Hazlitt said that “government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn’t first take from somebody else.” But while robbing Peter to pay Paul is a philosophical given to the clowns competing for the commander-in-chief’s crown, it’s really much worse than that.

The nation’s treasury is empty. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the three musketeers plan on a whole lot of deficit spending. To keep running-up debt on an account that is not yours is fraud by any other name. It’s manifestly clear how close on the unconstitutional continuum Hillary, Hussein and McCain stand.

Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), in his treatise on the Principles of Politics, defined liberty as the people’s right to “enjoy a boundless freedom in the use of their property and the exercise of their labor, as long as in disposing of their property or exercising their labor they do not harm others who have the same rights.”

This writer holds that the sole role of a legitimate government is to protect only the inalienable rights to life, liberty and property, and the pursuit of happiness. Why life, liberty, and property, and not housing, food, education, health care, child benefits, emotional well-being, enriching employment, adequate vacations, ad infinitum, as promised variously by the remaining (viable) presidential contenders? Because the former impose no obligations on other free individuals; the latter enslave some in the service of others.

The Constitution is with Constant (and Mercer), with some variations. All the “giving” Hussein and Hillary plan to do is extraconstitutional. Obama’s Manna From Heaven Healthcare Plan, and Hillary’s Cuba Care—these are not inalienable rights.

The welfare clause, “and Congress will have the power…to provide for the general welfare”—Article I, Section 8—our overlords have taken to mean that government can pick The People’s pocketbooks for any possible project, even though the general clause is followed by a detailed enumeration of the limited powers so delegated.

Asks historian Thomas E. Woods Jr.: “What point would there be in specifically listing the federal government’s powers if the general welfare clause had already provided the government with an essentially boundless authority to enact whatever it thought would contribute to people’s well-being?” Woods evokes no less an authority than the “Father of the Constitution,” James Madison: “Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars.”

Yet Professor Obama, that “brilliant” constitutional scholar, vows to “make available a new national health plan to all Americans … to buy affordable health coverage that is similar to the plan available to members of Congress.” This is but a tiny facet in his Manna From Heaven Healthcare windfall, which is not dissimilar to Hillary’s exhumed health plan, with varying degrees of coercion.

First of all, it’s not Obama who is funding Cures for Congress; it’s Yo Mama. Taxpayers fund the health care of Congress members and federal employees. Obama’s pious, but specious, prattle, and Hillary’s honeyed words mean one thing: In addition to Congress, the taxpayer will now carry the entire country. Added to the existing deadwood will be many more bureaucrats demanding to be kept in the lap of luxury—pensions and perks in perpetuity.

Second, the multiplying government “projects” the Obama (and Hillary) cult calls for under the guise of “change,” involve unethical takings. But since a bit of stealing between friends is no cause for complaint, let us also point out—as do the better economists; the ones politicians don’t hire—that government projects are unsuccessful.

The inverted and perverse incentive structure that characterizes these endeavors guarantees failure. Unlike the private sector, which must constantly cleanse itself if it is to survive and thrive, wrongdoing and incompetence in government sectors are seldom punished. They are, rather, rewarded with budgetary increases. A government department accretes through inefficiency. Failure translates into ever-growing budgets and powers and a further collectivization of accountability.

Last, but not least, on the scale of destruction: McCain. The Senator recently absented himself from a vote on that obscene Stimulus Package. Nary a murmur did he emit about Bush’s $3.1 trillion budget. And he has promised a monstrous “Marshall Plan” for Iraq. What cuts to welfare he will deliver stateside, McCain will divert to Iraq in the form of massive government make-work schemes.

It’s all in the McCain manifesto. The global wa
rmonger is also a global-warming wing nut, another unconstitutional mega expense account the three scofflaws intend on maxing out.

If only the high-minded Framers had written the Constitution with crooks in mind. But as Joe Sobran once quipped, “the U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government.” It certainly doesn’t intimidate the Hillary, Hussein and McCain axis of evil.

WorldNetDaily.com

February 15

The post The Hillary, Hussein, McCain Axis of Evil appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Jackass Cooper & The 1-Trick Donkeys

Ilana Mercer — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

“Tarting up” and “dumbing down” the news is how veteran reporter Dan Rather dubbed Katie Couric’s effect on the “CBS Evening News.” The job description does not belong exclusively to Couric. The many females manning the front desks on cable, Y chromosome carriers included, do their daily bit to entrench a shift from hard to soft-news stories.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper is a major culprit in changing the face of news. Forehead furrowed into a perpetual I-feel-your-pain frown, Cooper’s broadcasts are an interminable kvetch that elevates feelings above facts.

Needless to say, the Cooper/Couric effect has not enhanced the numbing presidential debates. Cooper presided over a Q&A session between YouTube users and the eight Democratic candidates. CNN’s Senior Vice President David Bohrman and Political Director Sam Feist, no less, were said to have helped Cooper and the crew handpick the cross-section of freaks and exhibitionists who debuted during the debate.

Here’s Cooper unraveling a skein of complex topics aimed at “keeping them honest” (a tagline he uses on his “Anderson Cooper 360º” sob-along): “Senator Dodd, you’ve been in Congress more than 30 years. Can you honestly say you’re any different? Congressman Kucinich, your supporters certainly say you are different. Even your critics would certainly say you are different… What do you have that Senator Clinton and Senator Obama do not have?” [A trophy wife?] And the deft follow-up: “Senator Clinton, you were involved in that [how-am-I-different] question. I want to give you a chance to respond. Senator Obama, you were also involved in that [how-am-I-different] question as well. Please respond.”

Asked by a YouTubester to define “liberal,” Hillary Clinton revealed that she knows the word originally denoted the classical liberalism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, but then settled on “progressive” as the label of choice for her Fabian plank.

Classical liberals (this writer) are distinguished in that the only rights they recognize are the individual’s right to life, liberty and property, and the pursuit of happiness. The sole role of a legitimate government is to protect only those liberties. Why life, liberty, and property, and not housing, food, education, health care, child benefits, emotional well-being, enriching employment, ad infinitum? Because the former impose no obligations on other free individuals; the latter enslave some in the service of others.

Which is what Hillary and her fellow front-runners all want. Indeed, Clinton was correct to state that the old liberalism, which she knows of but doesn’t value, entailed “the freedom to achieve.” What Hillary failed to divulge is that the founding fathers were classical liberals; she is a Fabian socialist. Social democrats like Hillary (and the Republican candidates bar Ron Paul) presuppose a strong centralized state to ensure “effective” wealth distribution. State intervention, naturally, always leads to more of the same, beginning with selective nationalization of sections of the economy such as health care. Individuals unfortunate enough to have chosen medicine as a vocation will soon be turned into rightless serfs.

Contra Hillary’s illiberalism, the liberalism of the founders holds that the individual has the right to pursue happiness, but no right whatsoever to demand that government rope others into working to make him happy and healthy. Although the Hildebeest professed a belief in individual rights and freedoms, her idea of individual rights comports with what Harvard scholar Richard Pipes termed “the right to the necessities of life at public expense, i.e., the right to something that was not one’s own.” Her claim to the contrary notwithstanding, Hillary’s “progressivism” is as American as Jalal Talabani is Jeffersonian.

Next, a pontifically solemn Cooper announced that questions on race would feature prominently in his YouTube selection. Intrepid journalist that he is, Cooper swooped down for the kill. Did he raise the need to address injustices inherent in the fact that “blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa”? Did he take up the inequities that flow from blacks being “2.25 times more likely to commit officially-designated hate crimes against whites than vice versa”? Perish the thought! After all, Cooper has his finger on the political pulse: “Senator Obama, how do you address those who say you’re not authentically black enough?” (Ignore the syntactical redundancy; grammar is so yesterday.)

Then came shake-down time. The conscience of the nation (and the son of heiress Gloria Vanderbilt to whom money is no object), Cooper featured the following YouTubester’s demand: “Is [sic] African-Americans ever going to get reparations for slavery?” Most of the candidates disavowed reparations. But, coupled with assorted race-based redistribution plans, they vowed to continue to take “jobs away from one group in order to compensate a second group to correct injustices caused by a third group who mistreated a fourth group at an earlier point in history”—that’s Edwin Locke of the Ayn Rand Institute’s distillation of America’s discriminatory hiring practices.

The evening meandered into mindless prattle about Iraq—to stay or to go or to decamp to Darfur, That Was the Question. Cooper, however, was quick to retreat to less shaky grounds, preferring to plunge deep into the guts of the education crisis:

Cooper: “Who was your favorite teacher and why? Senator Gravel?”

WorldNetDaily.com

June 27

The post Jackass Cooper & The 1-Trick Donkeys appeared first on ILANA MERCER.