Oh, THAT Liberal Bias!

From the WSJ:

So the two men best qualified to give an honest and comprehensive account of events in Iraq have marched through Congress to say--and show--that the surge is working and America's goals are still within reach. Yet it's a sign of the U.S. political debate that their evidence of progress seemed to make the headlines in none of our leading news sources yesterday.

Instead, the "news" seems to be that General David Petraeus has recommended that some 5,000 U.S. troops can rotate out of Iraq by the end of this year, and that U.S. forces might be able to return to pre-surge levels by next July if progress continues. That's no small matter, but it obscures the larger message of the testimony by the General and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. To wit: The U.S. is gaining ground in Iraq--often in the least expected of ways.

Read it here.

The extent to which the MSM take their lead from the DNC and the NYT editorial board is amazing. The synchronized spin is a wonder to behold.

Lists

Here's a fun site -- "Lists of Bests". It compiles "bests" lists from various sources. A sample:

BBC's "50 Things to Eat Before you Die"

"100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know"

Sky News, "33 Things to Do Before You're 10"

"Things to Do Before You Die That Aren't That Hard"

"The 55 Strangest Food Oddities For the Adventurous Eater"

"The World Cheese Index"

And many, many more.

You should find something to amuse you in there.

Check it out here.

Another Front Opens in the War on Individual Choice

AP reports that women who smoke while pregnant are not only failing to toe the line on medical advice, they are also likely to be insane.

The emerging science suggests that decades-old "quit for your baby" messages are too simplistic an approach for many women — and that perhaps prenatal checkups should include screening pregnant smokers for mental health disorders that themselves require care.

Read it here.

Of course -- that's the way it goes here in the theraputic culture. Identify a risky behavior, cite scientific authority to declare it a major problem, specify behavioral changes, declare those who don't conform to be mentally incompetent, then introduce them to Nurse Ratchet.

The Cult of "America the Ugly"

Read Norman Podhoretz [the original neo-con] remembers the rise of the anti-war Left during and after the Vietnam controversies.

[A]s the Vietnam War ground inconclusively on, the institutions that shape our culture were one by one and bit by bit converting to the "faith in America the ugly." By now, indeed, in the world of the arts, in the universities, in the major media of news and entertainment, and even in some of the mainstream churches, that faith had become the regnant orthodoxy.

But it would be a great mistake to suppose that the influence of these sectors of the culture was limited to their inhabitants. John Maynard Keynes once said that "practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." Keynes was referring specifically to businessmen. But bureaucrats and administrators are subject to the same rule, though they tend to be the slaves not of economists, but of historians and sociologists and philosophers and novelists who may be very much alive even when their ideas have, or should have, become defunct.

Nor is it necessary for the "practical men" to have studied the works in question, or even ever to have heard of their authors. All they need do is read the New York Times, or switch on their television sets, or go to the movies--and, drip by drip, a more easily assimilable form of the original material is absorbed into their heads and into their nervous systems.

Read the whole thing here.

Time and again I have been struck by how the ideas and values of long dead scholars -- ideas that were discredited in academic circles several decades ago -- continue to live on in the minds of respected pundits and other journalists. It's as though they never learned anything more except their craft since graduating from college.

Of course, some of the nonsense that replaced the old, discredited perspectives wasn't worth learning anyhow. Still, reading much of the commentary in the MSM is like a trip back in time half a century or more. The "ugly" cult Podhoretz references is only part of the problem.

Lest We Forget....

But a lot of people seem to have forgotten 9/11. "She Who Must Not Be Named", a foodie, has signed us up to attend an event this evening -- not one that commemorates the attacks of 2001, but one at which a local restaurant is rolling out their fall menu.

Jonah Goldberg notes that most of the emotional content seems to have drained out of 9/11.

“Remember 9/11!” once looked like it was going to be a battle cry for the ages up there with “Remember the Alamo!” Now, the only aspect of 9/11 that is acceptable on a bipartisan basis is sadness.

Among the major reasons for this strangely muted response he cites the despicable behavior of the MSM.

But it’s important to remember that from the outset, the media took it as their sworn duty to keep Americans from getting too riled up about 9/11.... Back then the news networks especially saw it as imperative that we not let our outrage get out of hand. I can understand the sentiment, but it’s worth noting that such sentiments vanished entirely during hurricane Katrina. After 9/11, the press withheld objectively accurate and factual images from the public, lest the rubes get too riled up. After Katrina, the press endlessly recycled inaccurate and exaggerated information in order to keep everyone upset. The difference speaks volumes.

But even more important is the behavior of the political parties:

But the chief reason 9/11 has lost its punch is politics. To talk about 9/11 as a justification for any foreign policy position — activist, isolationist or realist — is to start an argument. To suggest, for example, that 9/11 proved the necessity or the folly of the Iraq war, is to risk letting the soup get cold as diners hurl bread rolls, in much the same way as siding with Whittaker Chambers or Alger Hiss wrecked many a fine meal half a century ago. “Remember the Alamo!” was a call to action. “Remember Peal Harbor” needed no explanation. “Remember 9/11” demands the response, “What do you mean by that?”

And here he faults not only the Democrats, who willfully politicized everything, but also Bush who made no serious effort to co-opt the opposition.

Read the whole thing here.

Overlawyering the War

Responding to Jack Goldsmith's new book, The Terror Presidency, which argues that the current conflict in Iraq has been "overlawyered" and that fear of future legal prosecutions has severely inhibited both the military and civilian agencies conducting the war effort, Andy McCarthy makes some excellent points.

In national security matters (including foreign affairs, the collection of intelligence against foreign threats, and the use of force against foreign threats) the framers ingeniously intended there must be an accountability nexus between the decision-makers and the American people whose lives are at stake. That is to say, these matters are political in nature, not legal. The checks in the system — which I believe in deeply, though they have been out of favor since World War II — are primarily political: (a) the ballot box and (b) the competing powers of the executive branch and congress to conduct operations, oversee them (and, to some controversial extent, regulate them), and finance them. The federal courts were not meant to be a significant player (or, perhaps, a player at all) in this equation. They are not institutionally competent to do so and, more importantly, they are not accountable to Americans. When you "legalize" or, as I think Jack puts it, "judicialize" this quintessentially political arena, you are making at least two fundamental errors. First, you are shifting responsibility for protecting our citizens and our system from the most accountable to the least accountable actors, therefore ensuring that life-and-death decisions will be made based not on a self-determining people's sense of what should be the balance between security and liberty, but on an insulated elite's assessment of what its pieties require. (I say "its pieties" rather than "the law" because judges here are applying abstract principles like "due process," which are more than elastic enough for them to impose their subjective sense of right and wrong — which tends to be very subjective). Second, you are unrealistically assuming that the endlessly variant forms of threat posed by people who are not members of our body politic and not subject to our laws can somehow be regulated by antecedent legal rules in which those people are given many (if not all) of the presumptions and rights of Americans accused of crimes.

You can order a copy of Goldsmith's book by clicking on one of the Amazon links at the top of this post.

Reviewers focus on completely different aspects of the book's arguments and sometimes it seems that they are not reading the same book. To get the full argument which is not, as some would claim, an indictment of the administration, read the whole book.

So You Think You Can Dance?

From my Florida correspondent:

I'd like to see those kids from the FOX reality show try some of these moves.

Check out Adrien Mondot's balls.

Primary Sources: The Petraeus Report

General Petraeus' prepared statement is here.

Ambassador Crocker's prepared statement is here.

Here's a link to the General's charts illustrating his major points.

Here's a transcript of the first half of the question period.

Commentary:

The Times [of London] sees the testimony as a "turning point" for America in Iraq. [here]

The WaPo sees no turning point, instead it says General Petraeus simply "kicked the can" down the road. [here]

Ralph Peters says that none of this matters because minds were already made up before the General opened his mouth. [here]

The NYT says the administration is moving the goalposts and not talking about victory anymore. [here]


Spook 86 did analysis of the trend lines displayed in the General's figures and notes: "[they] reveal favorable trends virtually across-the-board, achieved in remarkably short order."

Jane Wyman Has Passed

She was Ronald Reagan's first wife, a fine actress and a beautiful lady. She died this morning at the age of 93. God bless her.

Top News Of the Day -- Britney Bombs

She appeared at the MTV Video Music iAwards, whatever that is, last night and performed her latest recording, "Gimme More". I didn't see it, but according to reports it was horrible. Read about it here.

Now, wasn't that a lot more interesting than some General testifying in front of a ravenous pack of congress-critters?

You bet it was.

A Star Falls to Earth

It’s an old, familiar story — a talented youngster gets a break in show business and rises to fame and fortune only to crash and burn, leaving bewildered fans to wonder “Why? He/she had everything.”

Robert Avrech at Seraphic Secret remembers the life and career of Hollywood’s first major case of celebrity burnout — see if it doesn’t sound familiar.

Her name was Olive Thomas [nee Duffy]. She was born in 1894 in Charleroi, a small industrial town near Pittsburgh. Her early life was a mess. At age fourteen, with her family’s approval, she was working locally as a nude model. At sixteen years of age in a bid for respectability she married a guy from McKees Rocks and took a job as a clerk at Kaufman’s department store. That didn’t last long. Two years later she left her husband and moved to New York where she won a beauty contest and began a career as an artist’s model.

She was the first Vargas girl. You can see his portrait of her here [warning, not work or child safe]. She also posed for a famous painting, “Between Poses” by Penrhyn Stanlaws [here – same warning applies].

Modeling brought her to the attention of Flo Ziegfeld, the Broadway producer. In 1915 she became his mistress [after securing a divorce from her husband] and starred in his famous “Follies” as well as his “Midnight Frolics” [the after-hours shows where the girls appeared nude]. Ziegfeld made the mistake of introducing her to Jack Pickford, brother of Hollywood super-star Mary Pickford, and young Jack was smitten. He and Olive eloped in 1916.

This brought her to the attention of Hollywood and soon she was appearing in motion pictures. Despite limited acting ability and poor work habits her beauty made her an overnight success. She was featured in all the fan mags and worked with the most famous directors and producers in the early film industry. By 1920 she was earning $3,000 a week. Her most famous film, “The Flapper” set a national trend. She and Jack were the toast of two continents. She had it all.

She also had contracted syphilis from her husband and was rumored to have alcohol and drug dependencies as well as numerous extramarital affairs. In the summer of 1920 she and Jack sailed for Paris. There she ingested a large dose of cocaine and bichloride of mercury [prescribed to Jack as a cure for syphilis] and was found dead in their hotel room.

Hollywood covered up the story, claiming that hers was an “accidental” death, but the rumors swirled and were reprinted in the American and European press. Her death, like her life, fascinated millions of people on two continents. In her day she was as famous as Marilyn Monroe would be to a later generation.

Today Olive Thomas is almost completely forgotten, but her story resonates in the lives and careers of far too many of the young and beautiful today.

Interestingly, film scholars note that the public image that made her famous was that of a beautiful young girl, sexually available, but still innocent. Remind you of anyone?

The things people will do to get out of Pittsburgh!

Hat tip: Dirty Harry at Libertas.

Perfidious Democrats

The Examiner reports on Democrat voter fraud financed by George Soros during the 2004 elections:

It appears that lurking in the political shadows with billionaire philanthropist and Democratic financier George Soros is a tar pit of old-fashioned sleaze. It’s hard to conclude otherwise in view of two recent election fraud verdicts against political activist groups heavily financed by Soros.

In the first verdict, the Federal Election Commission handed Americans Coming Together the third-largest fine ever levied by the agency. The $775,000 fine against ACT followed an FEC investigation that found the group, which was organized for the 2004 campaign with substantial funding and active encouragement from Soros, spent $70 million of its $137 million budget on “clearly identified federal candidates in a manner that could only be paid for with federal funds.” ACT claimed it spent the money on voter registration drives. The FEC concluded ACT illegally spent the $70 million to support Democratic candidates. A $775,000 fine for a $70 million crime seems a mere pittance, but that’s an issue for another day.

In the second verdict, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — better known as ACORN — agreed to pay a $25,000 fine to settle vote fraud charges brought by Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed. ACORN employees were supposed to help eligible voters fill out their registration cards, but instead were submitting cards with false names like that of former boxing champion Leon Spinks. Reed called ACORN’s actions “the largest case of voter registration fraud in the state’s history.” Again, the fine seems paltry given the seriousness of the crime, but at least ACORN, which has received much funding from Soros, was caught and made to pay something.

Read it here.

Didn't hear much about this in the MSM did you? No special reports on the major networks. No
outraged editorials from the NYT. Wonder why.

I have friends in Baltimore -- left-wing Democrats -- who have petitioned the city to block distribution of the Examiner in their neighborhoods. Why? They claim it is just because the papers are a unsightly nuisance that might pile up and allow thieves to identify residents who are not at home. I suspect, though, that their real reason is that they don't want information like this disseminated.

If you want to read the Examiner online, check it out here.

Gutfeld on Binnie Laden

If you have not yet seen FOX News' "Red Eye" check it out -- nightly at 2:00 am [hey, that's what TIVO is for]. Each night host Greg Gutfeld delivers his "Gregalogue" in which he addresses some item in the current news. This weekend his subject is Bin Laden's taped message to America.

So you've seen the latest message from our favorite goat-toucher Usama bin Laden. In it, he criticizes Americans for reelecting, instead of punishing, Bush, as well as harping on Democrats for not securing a retreat from Iraq. He also mentions global warming and praises Noam Chomsky, the patron saint of the left.

It was at this point, I thought I was listening to Keith Olbermann. That's when it dawned on me. Bin Laden isn't just a terrorist. He's worse. A liberal!

The show is a mess, but it is a funny mess. Check it out, or if you can't read the "Gregalogues" at the "Daily Gut" here.

UPDATE:

The NeoNeocon notes the similarities between bin Laden's pronouncements and those of Arianna Huffington. [here]

If you want to read a transcript of bin Ladin's remarks go here.

General Petraeus' Letter to the Troops

Read the whole thing here.

Baltimore Horror

Meet Richard Marks. Read about him below.

From the Baltimore Sun:

Brian Jarrell was heading to his kitchen for a middle-of-the-night glass of water Monday when he noticed a chemical odor seeping from his 9-year-old son's room. The Dundalk father checked on the boy and a younger daughter also sleeping in the room.

And then he saw a figure hiding behind the door of an armoire.

The man fled, but Jarrell chased him down. Later, he found a rag doused in a chemical, where his son had been sleeping.

"I just got sick," the father said yesterday, "because I realized he was after my son."

Police have charged a 49-year-old man -- free since April after spending nearly all of the past three decades in prison -- with an attempted sex offense and burglary. And yesterday police issued an alert to parents and anyone else who might have recently smelled any odd chemicals in their home.

....

Richard Lewis Marks, 49, was charged Tuesday with an attempted first-degree sex offense, five counts of assault, burglary and resisting arrest. He was being held at the county Detention Center without bond.

Read it here.

Every time I start to think that the ACLU has a point -- that we are going overboard regarding the threat to children and as a result threatening civil liberties -- something like this happens.

Pitch him in a cell and throw away the key.

UPDATE:

I thought I was being harsh, but a father of five e-mails me saying that life in prison is too kind and a drag on society; he recommends that we:

Fire up Old Sparky, sharpen the needle, grease the trap and test the noose,
bring back Le Guillotine, resurrect the Utah 7, tank-up Caroll Chessman's
last residence... rid the planet of his carbon footprint.

I personally have no problem with the death penalty, but what with the litigation that drags on and on this creep would be pushing seventy before the sentence could be executed -- not much different from a life sentence.

Bremner Fights Back

Writing in the NYT, L. Paul Bremner, III defends his widely criticized decision to disband the Iraqi army after the fall of Saddam.

IT has become conventional wisdom that the decision to disband Saddam Hussein’s army was a mistake, was contrary to American prewar planning and was a decision I made on my own. In fact the policy was carefully considered by top civilian and military members of the American government. And it was the right decision.

He goes on to make four crucial points.

1) The Iraqi army had already disbanded on its own. In effect the decision being made was whether it was better to try to reconstitute the army or to build a new one.

2) The decision not to reconstitute the army was non-controversial at the time and was thoroughly vetted by experts in the military, state, and intelligence agencies, all of whom supported it.

3) Even if reconstituted, the old Iraqi army would be unreliable, ineffective, and mistrusted by the vast majority of Iraqis. If you want to see what a Baathist army would be like, look at the old Iraqi police force which has been reconstituted and is thoroughly corrupt and oppressive.

4) The new Iraqi army, built by the US, is currently the most trusted and effective security force in the country.

Read the whole thing here.

Of course none of this will matter in Washington where the bureaucrats and politicos are only concerned with aggrandizing credit to themselves and their agencies while heaping blame on all others.

Hat tip: Instapundit

Luciano Pavarotti Has Died

He was a great showman and a talented singer. He was also one of the most accessible of the great opera stars of our time, taking the stage alongside pop and rock stars like James Brown, Queen, and Barry White. That openness made him a terrific ambassador for what was once a dying, aristocratic art form. To the extent that opera has a mass following in the United States today it is because of enormously entertaining personalities like Pavarotti.

Here he is performing with Bono [don't snicker, this kind of outreach is important].

The Fall Film Season -- Movies to Miss

There are a lot of films I will not be seeing this fall. Hollywood will be rolling out a whole series of anti-war, anti-Bush films, some of which it is fair to say, are even anti-American.

One of the worst is Redacted by Brian DePalma. Entertainment Weekly describes it as "anti-war porn."

DePalma [has] populated his movie with evil, buffoonish, ugly-American soldier stereotypes who rant about "sand n-----s" before raping and murdering them. If Arabs upset at the American presence in Iraq kidnapped some American actors and forced them to make a propaganda film, they'd be hard-pressed to make one much more simple-minded than Redacted — though at least theirs probably wouldn't resemble a stagy, overacted, off-off-Broadway play quite as much as this one does. On a formal level, Redacted is fascinating; it consists entirely of faked "found" video footage, culled together from soldiers' camcorders, surveillance footage, and even terrorist websites. Yes, it's Casualties of War meets The Blair Witch Project. But the conceit of having sneering American soldiers passionately plan, commit, and cover up their heinous misdeeds in the full view of camera lenses ensures there's not a believable minute in a film that styles itself as a faux documentary. By the time you get to the actual rape scenes, you may feel you're watching a new genre: anti-war porn.

Read it here.

And for you net-flix fans you can give "Shooter" a pass, too. Jonah Goldberg watched it and had this to say:

Director Antoine Fuqua made "The Shooter" into an extended Democratic Underground fantasy flick (at least I can only assume this isn't a loyal adaptation of the book). Not only are the bad guys CIA-Haliburton-Republicans willing to do the most evil and horrific things purely because of their rank greed, but they're stupid enough to admit it in long agitprop style speeches. It's as if Don Rumsfeld shouted at his staff "We're doing this because we're evil men who hate democracy and want to get rich!"

I should have known that Danny Glover as the ex-military CIA contractor guy was all you needed to know about the movie. I used to have a rule that if Ed Asner, Martin Sheen and a few other likely suspects were in a movie even remotely about politics, you could be sure it'd be annoying. I guess I gotta dust-off that list and put Glover on.

There were so many little annoyances. In every office Glover's in, there's a picture of George H.W. Bush or Ronald Reagan on the wall. When the Latino FBI agent sees the light that the entire government is run by evil, murderous, money-grubbing men, he goes rogue and puts on his Che t-shirt. And so on.

The cartoonishness of the whole thing does conjure Soviet theater, but I think it's more pornographic.

Read it here.

Hmmm..., do I sense a theme here -- lefty political porn? Jonah in his post explains why the term is appropriate [go ahead and read it].

And then there is the Bourne Ultimatum, which is still in theaters and is racking up huge receipts outside the US -- we're talking about a 2-3 billion dollar franchise here -- but which Jonathan Foreman describes as:

indeed one of the most anti-American movies made since the early 1970s. It's abundantly clear that the people who made it believe that there is no real threat from terrorists or rogue states — merely a mirage conjured up by sinister right wing politicians. Never mind that there are real international conspirators who carry out murders in foreign cities: in this film the only dangerous people on the planet are the CIA — depicted as a high-tech international gestapo whose many targets are all innocent victims.

Read it here.

Actually, I'm cheating here a bit since "She Who Must Not Be Named" and I have already seen the Bourne flick [for some reason that escapes me "She" likes Matt Damon] and my reaction to it is quite a bit more nuanced than Foreman's. I will have a lot more to say about this film and the franchise in a later post, but for now his criticism is a valid indicator of the movie's tone.

And, I might note, this left-wing paranoia is nothing new in the American film industry. A couple of days ago I again watched Renny Harlin's "The Long Kiss Goodnight" starring his then wife, Geena Davis and Samuel Jackson. It's an amusing film, mostly because of Jackson's performance, but it eerily foreshadows the entire Bourne saga. Davis plays a CIA assassin [superman type] who failed in a mission, suffered amnesia, and slowly begins to regain her memories and deadly skills over the course of the movie [sound familiar?]. In the film the CIA is a rogue agency that is staging fake terrorist attacks [including the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center] in order to get Congress to restore their funding to cold war levels. They do this with full knowledge and tacit approval of the President, and in the process they form shifting alliances with international criminals and terrorists.

The point I'm making is that there is nothing new in this recent spate of anti-Bush films -- the film-makers are simply rolling out tried and true formulas from past seasons. This time, though, they seem to have miscalculated. They assumed, many months ago when these projects were greenlighted, that by now Bush would have capitulated to media and Congressional pressures, that the US would have been driven out of Iraq in disgrace, that the world would have risen to condemn the administration as international criminals, etc. [basically a replay of the Vietnam experience]. Instead Bush has stood firm, the war effort is showing progress, public support is growing, the political coalition supporting the war has held together for the most part, and pro-Bush governments have taken over in Germany, Canada and France.

Whoops!

The Origins of Complex Societies Revisited

In an earlier post I noted that one of the great organizing concepts on the origins of complex human societies -- the fertile crescent -- has been undermined by recent discoveries. It now appears that the zone of interaction and influence among early developing cultures was far more extensive than was once imagined. The result has been that many geographically-specific theories regarding the "rise of civilization" have been drastically weakened.

Now another set of fundamental assumptions has been undermined. Prehistorians long assumed that urban centers, perhaps the most significant marker of social complexity, followed a common course of development, expanding outward from a central point that had some material or strategic advantage. It was also assumed that urban foundations were a mark of centralized political authority.

But recent excavations in northern Syria, at Tel Brak, have complicated matters somewhat. It appears that this early city originated as a number of small villages that, over time, grew together to create an urban center. What is more, there is no evidence to support the idea that there was any central political authority associated with this growth. Instead the city seems to have emerged from a process of "grassroots organization."

Read about it here.

This is an exciting time to be a pre-historian. Old models and consensuses are crumbling right and left and new perspectives emerging. What we thought we knew just ten or twenty years ago is radically different from what we think we know today.

Lies of the Left -- Katrina

Responding to the recent spate of self-congratulatory specials on Katrina and the media coverage thereof, Jonah Goldberg reminds us of just how bad that coverage was. He writes:

Katrina represented an unmitigated media disaster....

Few of us can forget the reports from two years ago. CNN warned that there were "bands of rapists, going block to block." Snipers were reportedly shooting at medical personnel. Bodies at the Superdome, we were told, were stacked like cordwood. The Washington Post proclaimed in a banner headline that New Orleans was a "A City of Despair and Lawlessness," insisting in an editorial that "looters and carjackers, some of them armed, have run rampant." Fox News anchor John Gibson said there were "all kinds of reports of looting, fires and violence. Thugs shooting at rescue crews."

TV reporters raced to the bottom to see who could moralistically preen the most. Interviewers transformed into outright scolds of administration officials. Meanwhile, the distortions, exaggerations and flat-out fictions being offered by New Orleans officials were accelerated and amplified by the media echo chamber. Glib predictions of 10,000 dead, and the chief of police's insistence that there were "little babies getting raped," swirled around the media like so much free-flowing sewage.

It was as though journalistic skepticism of government officials was reserved for the White House, and everyone else got a free pass.

Indeed.

But rather than admitting the egregious falsehood of their coverage, the MSM patted itself on the back and declared that Katrina had ushered in a new era of journalism.

The deluge in New Orleans elicited a deluge of wish-fulfillment in the media, as though the hurricane was a biblical sign that something was very wrong in George W. Bush's America. "Everything changed" because of Katrina, insisted CNN's Anderson Cooper. Translation: We're going to tell the story we want to tell about the country from now on. Race and class become the chief prisms for viewing the disaster. Katrina was portrayed as the result of global warming, which (of course!) is Bush's fault.

Cooper was right -- everything did change in the sense that from Katrina on the MSM has abandoned any pretense of objectivity. What we now have is unabashed advocacy journalism rooted in mid-twentieth century liberal bias. No less than Hollywood the MSM today is telling stories rather than printing the truth.

Read Jonah's piece here.