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News OF Another Shooting
Cross-posted:TobyToons.com
Nazis are attacking Florida newspapers!
Nazis are attacking the St. Petersburg Times! Those poor journalists! Hitler is coming for them!
Well, of course that is not actually true. But it’s understandable why someone might think so, from the panicked headlines the St. Pete Times has been posting lately.
First there was Wednesday’s hysterically-titled blog post by Adam Smith, “Has Adam Hasner gone off the deep end?” in which he claims that Adam Hasner is comparing our government to the Third Reich.
Then, today, Daniel Ruth writes an op-ed, “Hasner mining for fear,” in which he says that Hasner was attempting to “link the nation’s economic woes to the threat Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich posed to the world.”
OMG! Hitler?
Nazis?!?!?!?!!!
NAZIS!!!!!!!! HITLER!!!!!!! OMG!!!!!!
Hold on a second here. What exactly did Hasner write? Would someone who’s Jewish really be so careless with a Hitler reference?
What has the St. Pete Times’ panties in a bunch is Hasner’s July Fourth message. You can read the entire note here on his Facebook page.
Let’s look at the key language in the second through fourth paragraphs:
…The very freedom we celebrate this weekend is threatened like few times in our nation’s history.
On July 4, 1941, as Hitler’s Reich spread its influence across Europe, President Roosevelt used a radio address to proclaim the Fourth of July holiday as an example to the world in its fight for freedom. President Roosevelt said, “several new practices of tyranny have been making such headway that the fundamentals of 1776 are being struck down abroad, and definitely, they are threatened here.”
Nearly five months to the day later, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Despite the challenges, a generation of Americans would answer the call to save America, and the world, from a dark future under the control of brutal empires and savage dictators.
Today, the biggest threat to our liberty is not a foreign government, but our own. The worst practice of tyranny is not from a dictator, but from our debt – a debt which threatens to enslave future generations of Americans to a diminished future, a lower standard of living, and a reduction of our freedoms. We face more restrictions on our liberties from stifling bureaucrats than from threats abroad.
Wait. Go back and look at parts I highlighted with bold print.
Hasner mentions Hitler once, and only once, in a reference to the challenges that Franklin D. Roosevelt was facing on July 4, 1941. Sooo…let me get this straight…Hasner mentioned Hitler only as part of a reference to the President who fought the war against the Nazis.
If that’s “going off the deep end,” then I guess it’s also crazy to mention King George III if you’re talking George Washington, or mention that Abraham Lincoln fought to free the slaves, or Ronald Reagan’s efforts to end communism. Take note, politicos: the St. Pete Times does not want you to discuss history! Only an extremist would reference American history and past struggles for freedom in a July Fourth message!
Well what about the rest of the message? Does Hasner connect current events to the Nazis?
No, the exact opposite is true. Hasner said the “biggest threat” is not a foreign government, but abuses of power within our own government. And we’re not facing a threat from a dictator, but from our crushing debt. In other words, FDR fought Hitler and the Nazis, and Americans today are fighting something entirely different, “not a foreign government,” “not a dictator.”
Maybe Adam Smith and Daniel Ruth need to go take an SAT prep course and brush up on their reading comprehension. When someone says “we are not fighting X, we are fighting Y,” that is not “comparing” X and Y! That is saying that X and Y are different. It’s really not that complicated.
[Cross-posted at Sunshine State Sarah]
Has The Media Finally Awoken?
I keep thinking/hoping, eventually journalists are going to wake up.
I’ve spent 30 years in the business, always cynical about its mission (the business is supposed to attract cynics), and waiting and wondering if good sense and logic will finally win out over the obvious politics.
A ray of hope.
Veteran journalists (many now retired) are starting to speak out about what they are seeing with today’s “journalists.”
“If you watch an Obama news conference, and watched a Bush news conference previous to that, where correspondents sit in their seats with their hands folded on their laps, [it's] as if they are in the room with a monarch and they have to wait to be recognized by the president,” says Sid Davis, the former NBC Washington bureau chief who covered nine presidents. “It looks like they are watching a funeral service at [Washington funeral firm] Joseph Gawler’s and it shouldn’t be that way.”
Gawler draws no distinction between Obama and Bush as far as news conferences go, but we’ll leave that one alone for now. At least Bush held news conferences. JFK held one every 16.4 days, every two weeks, twice a month (word it as you wish). And, I’m talking about the wide open, “anything goes” news conferences where any question can be asked–not the quickies where 2 people are hand-picked for their ability to fire fluff balls. “Excuse me, you, in the back, from Better Homes and Leftist Gardens.”
Obama has played 10 times as many rounds of golf as he has held news conferences—so don’t say this job is just too tough and he’s too busy.
NY-26 Special Election Heats Up
We are now just a week away from the special election in New York’s 26th District, and Syracuse-area blogger The Lonely Conservative reports:
The Tea Party Express showed up in the Rochester, NY area [Monday] to officially endorse Jane Corwin in the NY26 special election. They also denounced the fake Tea Party candidate Jack Davis.
State and local Tea Party activists joined with Amy Kremer of the Tea Party Express, who said: “Jack Davis is no more ‘Tea Party’ than Barack Obama. . . . Jack Davis is a phony who has run three times as a Democrat and has endorsed and supported Nancy Pelosi and Charlie Rangel.”
It is perhaps necessary to make mention of what should be obvious: The liberal media are trying to elect the Democrat, Kathy Hochul, by hyping Crazy Jack so that they can claim a Democrat win in NY-26 as a repudiation of the GOP’s conservative agenda. The New York Times:
Mr. Davis’s ascension comes as a race that had once seemed a certain Republican victory has become fiercely competitive because of a House Republican plan that calls for overhauling Medicare.
Read the whole thing, even thought it tells only part of the story, and tells it from a biased viewpoint. It’s bad that Paul Ryan has to defend himself against Newt Gingrich without Ryan also being scapegoated for the dysfunctional condition of the New York GOP establishment. However, if Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) can trick enough idiots into voting for Crazy Jack, that result will be headlined as evidence that the Paul Ryan budget plan is a political liability for Republicans.
(Cross-posted at The Other McCain. Follow Robert Stacy McCain on Twitter.)
The 3 Take Home Points on McChrystal and the Skunks at Rolling Stone
Y’all know the drill. When the story first broke regarding General Stanley McChrystal supposedly “committing an act of insubordination” by trashing President Obama to Rolling Stone magazine, the conventional wisdom was to say that “he should be fired”. Well, then, after reading Michael Rulle’s excellent article titled, “Has Anyone Actually Read the Rolling Stone Article?”, it became apparent to me that A.) most of the general public and the mainstream media had not read the infamous article, and B.) that it is foolish to take anything that the MSM says at face value. In other words, this whole story began to stink as though a skunk had scurried across the backyard.
Why You Should Go See “Robin Hood”.
Yeah, yeah, I know. The new Russell Crowe movie, “Robin Hood”, opened to mixed reviews (most implied that it was mediocre, at best); therefore, like a lot of you, I was going to wait until it came out on video to see it. Then, I happened to stumble upon this column on Real Clear Politics written by Cathy Young. Ms. Young begins her column by writing the following–
“The new Ridley Scott film “Robin Hood”, which has opened to mixed reviews on its merits as entertainment, is also drawing some critics’ political ire. In New York’s leftist weekly, The Village Voice, Karina Longworth laments that “instead of robbing from the rich to give to the poor, this Robin Hood preaches about ‘liberty’ and the rights of the individual” and battles against “government greed”; the film, she scoffs, is “a rousing love letter to the tea party movement.” On a similar note, the New York Times’ A.O. Scott mocks “Robin Hood” as “one big medieval tea party”:
“You may have heard that Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor, but that was just liberal media propaganda. This Robin is … a manly libertarian rebel striking out against high taxes and a big government scheme to trample the ancient liberties of property owners and provincial nobles.”
Whatever one may think of Scott’s newest incarnation of the Robin Hood legend, it is more than a little troubling to see alleged liberals speak of liberty and individual rights in a tone of sarcastic dismissal. This is especially ironic since the Robin Hood of myth and folklore probably has much more in common with the “libertarian rebel” played by Russell Crowe than with the medieval socialist of “rob from the rich, give to the poor” cliché. At heart, the noble-outlaw legend that has captured the human imagination for centuries is about freedom, not wealth redistribution — and this is reflected in many previous screen versions of the Robin Hood story.”
So after reading Ms. Young’s column, my curiosity was piqued. I, then, went on YouTube and deliberately sought out the “Robin Hood” trailer to ascertain for myself if it looked to be any good (see the embed below).
