Liberal bias goes pathological

I've gotten pretty used to seeing liberal bias in the media, but at least it's usually fairly subtle. Not so with this breathtaking example by Emily Sohn in Discovery News:

Still don't see the bias? Ok, here...I've highlighted it for you:

I'm not sure why this piece hasn't picked up more traction on conservative blogs or conservative Twitterdom. In fact, I lifted this from one of my favorite righty blogs, Ace of Spades HQ, which doesn't even remark on the obvious bias. Maybe they've become so accustomed to this type of bias that they don't even notice it any more.

The bias is so deep and widespread now, it's become a pathology. When I tweeted a link to the Discovery article inviting people (sarcastically, I thought) to spot the liberal bias, I received this response from @LouYoungNY:

So pathological is this bias that it's taken by liberals as an absolute truth that conservatives are intolerant and close-minded. Keep in mind that this article (presumably) got past fact-checkers and editors before publication.

Oh, and you may want to keep an eye on what your kids are reading for science.

The failure of PC, multi-culti thought

I've related the anecdote before here of a conversation I had with a very liberal friend of mine. I'd asked my friend first if he believed it was possible for one culture to be objectively superior to another, to which he emphatically replied "no". I then asked him if he believed in the existence of universal rights, those rights to which all human beings are unconditionally entitled. He saw the contradiction and said I'd "worked him into a corner". Indeed.

We're exhorted over and over again to "celebrate" all cultures and hold them in equal esteem. Yet in certain regions of Afghanistan, it's an accepted practice for grown men to take young boys as sexual playthings. In Saudi culture, women have a social standing roughly equivalent to that of breeding stock. In parts of Pakistan and elsewhere, women are routinely stoned as adulteresses for the crime of being raped. In Iran, homosexuals are hanged in public. And hardly a week goes by without a story in the news of a Muslim male killing a female family member to restore the family's honor.

Are these just cultural oddities that are to be laughed off so we can get on with the more lofty goal of celebrating those cultures? No. To claim that all cultures are on an equal moral footing is to deny the existence of universal human rights.

The logic here is simple and unassailable. If one believes in such universal rights then one cannot believe that all cultures are equal and worthy of being "celebrated". To believe both betrays not just a complete failure of logic but a despicable moral dishonesty.

Watch the World Cup, you racists!

From The Nation by way of NPR, über-enlightened opinionator Dave Zirin explains why righty wingnuts hate soccer...it's because they're racists, of course:

Among adults, the sport is also growing because people from Latin America, Africa, and the West Indies have brought their love of the beautiful game to an increasingly multicultural United States. As sports journalist Simon Kuper wrote very adroitly in his book Soccer Against the Enemy, "When we say Americans don't play soccer we are thinking of the big white people who live in the suburbs. Tens of millions of Hispanic Americans [and other nationalities] do play, and watch and read about soccer." In other words, Beck rejects soccer because his idealized "real America" - in all its monochromatic glory – rejects it as well. To be clear, I know a lot of folks who can't stand soccer. It's simply a matter of taste. But for Beck it's a lot more than, "Gee. It's kind of boring." Instead it's, "Look out whitey! Felipe Melo's gonna get your mama!"

Makes sense. So instead of soccer, racist Americans would much prefer to tune

in to baseball and American football, sports clearly dominated by all-white, all-American players. Oh, wait...

But that's just the NFL! Major League Baseball is nothing but white guys! Oh, wait...

And David "Big Papi" Ortiz is from Dominican Republic. He's a twofer! Not shown here are Hideki Okajima, Daisuke Matsuzaka and Junichi Tazawa, all from Japan.

Ace makes some great points about why soccer hasn't exactly caught fire here as a spectator sport.

The mask slips

On the occasion of Helen Thomas' abrupt retirement from her perch in the White House press room, I suppose it's only right to offer her our gratitude. Without her jarring expression of her opinion of Jews in Israel, we might still be laboring under the assumption that the Left is every bit as tolerant and unbigoted as they claim to be.

In case you missed it, here's what Helen Thomas had to say about Israeli Jews in Israel:

Earlier today I caught this tweet from a liberal on Twitter, @Shoq:

I was stunned. I shouldn't have been, but I was. I've long known that Lefties are mostly hostile to the policies of the state of Israel, but not necessarily to Israeli Jews. Yet here was a pretty popular Lefty on Twitter (he's got well north of 8000 followers) agreeing that we all might be better off if Israeli Jews were forced back into the Diaspora.

Yeah, I know...that's one guy. So I checked Daily Kos and came across this post from a barely-literate subscriber, who of course blames the evil Jews at AIPAC for Helen Thomas' downfall:

Whether you believe her statements or not, Thomas knows that saying things like that in public would come with the risk of dealing with a mob like Henry and all using the chances they can get to rid of her once and for all. Especially when AIPAC always hovering around. There just seemed like there was no way she was going to survive this one.

Still though, thank you DC Stenography society of stupidity for going after an 89 year respected wonderful journalist instead of doing your job and calling out your other colleagues who said controversial cringe like things about Muslims over the years.

So, that's two guys, plus the zillion or so commenters on the post. I'm sorry, but looking for more support for these sentiments is just too depressing because there's too much of it out there.

Cheap shot

I've said before that one constant in life is that liberals always feel themselves intellectually superior to their ideological counterparts. Always. A column on the special senate election in Massachusetts in today's Boston Globe by Brian McGrory is a case in point.

McGrory starts by spinning Democrat Martha Coakley's free fall in the polls as nothing more than crappy campaigning on her part. While that's certainly true in part, the idea that voters in such a deep-blue state are weary of Democratic policies isn't even considered.

Then, while describing Republican Scott Brown's effective and tireless campaigning, McGrory just can't help himself...he's got to slip this in:

And, let’s be honest, his nights probably aren’t tied up with Mensa meetings.

Cheap shot from a cheap journalist.

Redefining racism

I've observed an emerging theme on the Left which says, in effect, that unless you wield power, you can't be accused of racism, the implication being that you have to be an establishment white male in order to be a racist. Just Google racism+prejudice+power and you'll see what I mean, but here's a sample:

Thus, from a macro perspective, only Whites as [a] group can be labeled as racist in society, for the socioeconomic system is structured in their favor.

Just for the record, here's what the dictionary says about the word:

rac⋅ism [rey-siz-uhm]
–noun
1. a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule others.
2. a policy, system of government, etc., based upon or fostering such a doctrine; discrimination.
3. hatred or intolerance of another race or other races.

I guess in broad terms, the second definition meets the power prerequisite, but it's really referring to institutional racism and not individual racism, so the argument that one must wield power in order to be a racist still doesn't hold water.

The real danger in this thinking is that according to this bit of multi-culti Leftist doctrine, a crazy white guy living in his mom's basement who decides to go out and torch a black church can't be a racist because he lacks power. The notion that he holds power just because he's white is, in itself, racist.

The death of statesmanship

Un-fucking-believable. Barney Frank demonstrates his class and statesmanship in the health care debate by mocking and insulting the intelligence of Americans protesting the health care bill.

Frank, a Massachusetts liberal, told an audience: "Some of the people (at the rally) that wanted to engage me in conversation appeared to have been the losers in the 'Are you smarter than Michele Bachmann contest?'."

Rep. Bachmann, R-Minn., had organized Thursday's rally attended by thousands of conservatives critical of the Democrats' health care plan. Her spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment. Frank, who recently compared arguing with an angry voter to conversing with a dining room table, said this week's protest was like being trapped inside a furniture warehouse.

One thing I've learned about liberals is that they invariably believe themselves the intellectual superior of everybody else. That's fine if you're a coffee house poet or even a lefty columnist, but for a senior member of Congress to be smearing the intelligence of the 50% or so of Americans who disagree with him politically is outrageous. C'mon, Massachusetts...it's time to vote this cretin out of office.

Required reading: Leftism is NOT liberalism

Twitter user @vermontaigne tweeted a link to this article yesterday, in which a self-described "secular humanist Enlightenment liberal" separates "leftism" from "liberalism" like white from yolk.

It's long, but well worth the read. Michael Strong first establishes his liberal cred, then describes how classic liberalism has been co-opted by leftists, particularly on university campuses. Here's a stand-out paragraph:

But despite the healthy, productive, and necessary debate concerning global economic history and contemporary policy measures, often the loudest and most aggressive voices in academia do not represent healthy, positive or informed debate. The anti-globalization movement, anti-Americanism, and lingering communism that are common in some academic departments do not offer a useful, positive, or well-considered means of making the world a better place. Hatred and bitterness are no substitute for intellectual coherence. The social and intellectual atmosphere at most universities (and, significantly, the two cannot be distinguished) continues to support views that are better described as “Leftist” than as Liberal. It is not socially acceptable in the humanities departments of most universities to suggest that Hong Kong and Singapore are economically successful today in large part because they had the good fortune to have inherited classical liberal principles as a legacy of British colonialism, or that free trade is the best means available of alleviating global poverty today, or to debate whether FDR or LBJ was the most destructive U.S. president in the 20th century.

Strong offers a checklist to determine whether classic liberalism has returned to college campuses:

1. Are most students and professors aware that under 19th century free market capitalism in the United States and Britain that it was not true that “the rich got richer and the poor got poorer?” i.e., that the working class standard of living steadily increased under laissez-faire capitalism?
2. Do most students and professors understand that wealth is created almost exclusively by private enterprise (given a framework based on the rule of law)?
3. Are most students and professors aware that Marxist governments murdered over 100 million people in the 20th century, vastly exceeding the loss of human life due to the Nazis?
4. Do most students and professors acknowledge that those humanely-motivated academics who self-identified as Marxists should, indeed, accept responsibility for having advocated a repeatedly murderous ideology? (“We didn't intend those outcomes” is not an adequate excuse after the fourth totalitarian Marxist regime, predictably enough, committed mass murder.)
5. Do most students and professors understand public choice theory?
6. Do most students and professors understand the necessary relationship between economic freedom, on the one hand, and creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship, on the other?

You go read now.

Howler monkey watch: The torture drumbeat

The Left is really going to town on the torture thing. Just looking at the front page of Huffington Post this morning, there were three featured articles (including the lead story in blaring NY Post-like headline font) on the subject. Of the 39 blog entries linked on the left-hand side, 16 - nearly half - were on the topic of torture. At the Daily Kos, four out of the eight "recommended diaries" are on the torture story. For the Left, it's all torture all the time.

Never mind that little new has surfaced in the past week that wasn't already widely known, or that calling waterboarding torture is akin to calling checkers a sport. The howler monkeys on the Left have outrage to whip up and they're going to keep howling about torture until there's something else to howl about.

Daily Kos: Bringing teh krazy

Here's a Daily Kos diary making the Right-wing Extremist™ rounds...

Captain Phillips of the Maersk Alabama recklessly put himself, the crew, and the Navy Seals at unnecessary risk.

The pirates' modus operandi is that they hold the crew, ship, and cargo harmlessly until a lot of money is paid to them. Phillips "heroic" actions put his crew and himself at risk. If he'd done nothing except acquiesce to the pirates' demands, there would have been no risk, just possible discomfort until the extortion money was paid. Instead he put himself and the Seals at grave risk.

To be fair, though, the comments on the post roundly denounce the diarist and support Capt. Phillips' decision. But even there you can see the "blame America first" mentality that's so pervasive on the American left:

The Somalis loathe Americans. There are good reasons for that hatred, but those reasons have zero to do with Captain Phillips.

What good reasons? That we tried to alleviate suffering there and in return our troops were attacked and we fought back? Fuck you, Kossacks.

Where's MoveOn.org on deficit spending now?

I saw this linked at Hot Air from Red State today. A pointed example of the hypocrisy and outright dishonesty of the left. Watch both videos...they're short. First, the Red State video:



And here's the MoveOn.org video from a year ago:



As Treacher tweeted the other night:

Remember: The guy who's trying to nationalize industry and start his own youth corps isn't the fascist. That was the previous occupant.

Republican deficit spending? Bad! Democrat deficit spending? Good! A president who says "nookewlar"? Moron! A president who presents as a gift to the Queen of England something anyone can get at Best Buy? Brilliant!

Back to the deficit spending thing. Besides Bush's support for amnesty for illegal aliens, the one thing over which he took the most heat from conservatives was his rampant spending and resulting deficits. But compare the two deficits (Bush's actual and Obama's projected):


That's not even an apples to oranges comparison...it's apples to rocks. And yet - unlike the righties with Bush - the lefties are OK with this as long as it's their guy in office.

Lying, hypocritical pieces of shit.

Well, that didn't take long

Spotted over at Weasel Zippers, under the title "Pic of the day: Lefties Turning on Obama the War Monger.....". While it's almost certain that Obama enjoyed the support of something like 100% of the World Can't Wait crowd, they'll ALWAYS find a reason to be hatin' on whomever happens to be in power.

Where's the outrage now?

Hey...remember when the left went batshit crazy over George W. Bush using troops as "props" when he delivered speeches at military installations? Being the rational, objective types that they are, I guess we'll be seeing similar invective toward Obama.

Yessiree...any time now...

Lightbulb jokes for the Obama Era

The People's Cube has a bunch of lightbulb-changing jokes for the Age of Obama.

Q: How many Obama voters does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None. Hoping that it would change is quite enough.

Q: How many autoworkers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: 17 at GM, Ford and Chrysler; 1 at Honda, Hyundai and Toyota.

Q: How many Chicago pols does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: F--- you, what am I gettin' outta this?

Q: How many Democrats does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: It's burnt out on the Republican side, so we're not changing it.

Q: How many MSM journalists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: No need, Obama is the Light.

More at the link.

Ferrell's Bush show will "surprise"

Will Ferrell, who parodies George Bush on Saturday Night Live, has a one-man show coming up he says will "surprise" viewers.

Will Ferrell says audiences should expect the unexpected from his upcoming one-man Broadway show and HBO special about President George W. Bush.

Ferrell, known for his Bush impersonation on "Saturday Night Live," said Friday there's nothing derivative about the production. He says it will surprise people with its twists and turns and what it has to say about Bush.

Executive producer Adam McKay says the show aims to be funny but also hold the Bush administration's feet to the fire.

And that will surprise anyone how? Oh, I get it...maybe he meant the "funny" part.

Gender roles

The city of Gainesville, Florida last year made an amendment to their anti-discrimination ordinance allowing "transgender" people to use which ever public restroom they feel comfortable using, and not everyone's happy about it.

A blond girl heads from a playground into a women's restroom. A scruffy man, lurking outside, darts in behind her. "Your City Commission Made This Legal," the words on the TV screen read.

The dark ad came from opponents of a gender identity provision added last year to the city's anti-discrimination ordinance, which now allows the city's roughly 100 transgender residents to use whichever restroom they're most comfortable using.

Foes want to repeal the new protection with a March 24 ballot measure that has divided Gainesville, a generally gay-friendly university city surrounded by staunchly conservative north Florida.

Whether Gainesville is "gay-friendly" or not is orthogonal to the discussion. A lesbian or a gay man is not necessarily "transgender". According to the dictionary, a "transgender" person is one "appearing or attempting to be a member of the opposite sex, as a transsexual or habitual cross-dresser." In other words, they're by definition weird.

What Gainesville is effectively saying here is that if some perv is feeling a bit frisky, he can throw on some make-up and a dress and cruise public womens' toilets all day long.

This really isn't all that goddamn difficult...if your driver's license says "male", you use the men's room, if it says "female", you use the women's room.

Conditional patriotism

I've noted before that the patriotism of the left appears conditional upon who's president at a given point in time. Via Hot Air we're provided additional evidence of that.

The hundreds who massed at the University of California [Berkeley, natch. --ed.] campus here on election night responded to Barack Obama's victory by heading off on a route that has been for a generation the sacred way for the activist left: out the campus gates, through Sproul Plaza, and down Telegraph Avenue toward People's Park.

By the time they arrived at the intersection of Telegraph and Durant avenues, where a tie-dye vendor occupies one corner, it became clear they did not come to challenge the system now preparing to consecrate a new regime in Washington. At one point, a man scaled a lamppost and unfurled the Stars and Stripes. The crowd broke out in the national anthem.

"People finally felt like our generation had reclaimed patriotism," said Haley Fagan, 24, a Berkeley paralegal who got stuck in a car trying to cross the street as the crowd surged. "It was a moment that we felt comfortable with it."

After generations of finding their voice in dissidence, some Americans on the left wing are adjusting not only to a new postelection comfort with patriotic symbols, but also to the political reality they represent. Believing in Obama after Inauguration Day will mean identifying with the machinery of U.S. power.

Of course, us knuckle-dragging, slack-jawed wingnuts on the right will continue to be just as patriotic and love our country just as much in another two weeks when Barack Obama is sworn in as president, while in another four or eight years the leftists can go back to hating the country that offers them the freedom to do so. More likely, they'll find out in a year or so that America is still America regardless of who's president and they can go right back to hating it that much sooner.

'We must refight the battles of the 1970s'

As I read this opinion piece in the Telegraph, I was struck by how easily it could have appeared in any US paper...just swap "Labour" for "Democrat" and "Conservative" for "Republican".

The Left sees capitalism gasping for breath, and hopes a well-aimed blow could do mortal damage. Invigorated by the market's collapse, socialists are on the march. No more talk about a third way. No more twaddle like the Blairite "what matters is what works". Pulsating with core belief and conviction, the Left are preaching "the state can save us".

Belief and conviction. Where does this leave the Conservatives? Having worked with David Cameron, I can vouch for his strong Conservative beliefs, as well as his cool head in a crisis. The task that befalls him and his team is to spell out those convictions, loud and clear, and to join battle with the Left. Britain needs a clarion cry for a just cause, a noble object, something [that] appeals not just to the head, but also the heart and makes people understand that, unless we have a change of government and direction, we will all go the way of Woolies.

What is that noble object? Not a policy, but a call to arms. "We want to work with the grain of human nature, helping people to help themselves – and others. This is the way to restore that self-reliance and self-confidence which are the basis of personal responsibility and national success. Attempting to do too much, politicians have failed to do those things that should be done. This has damaged the country and the authority of government. The balance of our society has been increasingly tilted in favour of the state at the expense of individual freedom. This election may be the last chance we have to reverse that process, to restore the balance of power in favour of the people. It is therefore the most crucial election since the war."

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

'Our culture is better'

I think I've posted before about a conversation I had with a lib friend of mine who holds all the usual multi-culti beliefs and moral relativism that goes along with them. To make a point, I asked him if he thought it was possible for one culture to be superior to another...not to just believe itself superior, but to actually be superior. Naturally, he responded with an emphatic "no". Then I asked him if he believed there were universal rights to which all humans were unquestionably entitled, and he acknowledged that I'd backed him into a corner.

The outspoken Dutch politician Geert Wilders believes it is possible for one culture to be superior to another on the basis of universal rights.

Having his own party liberates Mr. Wilders to speak his mind. As he sees it, the West suffers from an excess of toleration for those who do not share its tradition of tolerance. "We believe that -- 'we' means the political elite -- that all cultures are equal," he says. "I believe this is the biggest disease today facing Europe. . . . We should wake up and tell ourselves: You're not a xenophobe, you're not a racist, you're not a crazy guy if you say, 'My culture is better than yours.' A culture based on Christianity, Judaism, humanism is better. Look at how we treat women, look at how we treat apostates, look at how we go with the separation of church and state. I can give you 500 examples why our culture is better."

Read the whole article. I have to admit that I'm apparently brainwashed enough to not be entirely comfortable saying our culture is "better" than others, but if we don't defend our culture and values we'll have no choice but to accept theirs.

Change we can Google

As Charles at Little Green Footballs points out, "The power of Obama has reached out and healed Google." Here's a little background for the confused...

Google often modifies their logo in light-hearted ways to mark various holidays and occasions. Until this year, they've never honored Veteran's Day. Nor, I think, Memorial Day for that matter. Charles Johnson at LGF has taken Google to task for this over and over again. Their excuse, usually, is something along the lines of "We try to be whimsical when taking note of an occasion with our logo, but Veteran's Day and Memorial Day are too solemn...blah...blah...etc." But now? Behold the power of change!

Here's the difference between conservatives and liberals (and have no doubt Google is very liberal): Conservatives love their country unconditionally, no matter who's president. Liberals love their country...as long as there's a liberal in the White House. Other times? Not so much.