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Division of Labour starts us off with quotes from Milton Friedman, Adam Smith, and Will Rogers. They’re all related. It’s cool.
Power Line posts on the NY Times bogus attempt to smear American soldiers.
… In Fayetteville, North Carolina, the local paper was intrigued by the Times’ claims and decided to check its own archives for evidence. Fayetteville, located near Fort Bragg, home to the 82nd Airborne and special operations units, is an excellent place to conduct the experiment; few localities, if any, have been home to as many soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Fayetteville Observer checked its own archives, with predictable results:
Twelve Fort Bragg soldiers have been accused of killing 13 people in the six-plus years since Sept. 11, 2001, according to Observer records. In the six years before the terrorist attacks, 16 Fort Bragg soldiers were accused of killing 18 people.
There you have it: wartime and peacetime yield the same low homicide rates for soldiers. In reporting these findings, the Observer referred to the claim made by the New York Times that reported instances of alleged homicide involving a veteran increased by 89% in the period 2001-2007 compared with the six-year period preceding the war in Afghanistan. That claim, insofar as it related to Fort Bragg personnel, was refuted by the Observer’s research. …
They also post on Obama and Clinton and start a flood as many of our favorites have Clinton/Obama thoughts.
The Democratic presidential debate descended into a series of gotcha personal attacks last night between frontrunners Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, leaving John Edwards as more of a spectator than a participant in the debate. Sounding more like a therapy session than a debate, Obama accused the Clintons of lying while Hillary accused Obama of being irresponsible, as well as being a bit of a coward. …
Most of the conversation about last night’s Democratic debate in South Carolina is about how strikingly personal and heated the exchanges were between Senators Clinton and Obama. It appears as if having to deal with the flood of false charges made by Bill Clinton is starting to agitate the young Senator from Illinois. Bill Clinton is an icon among many Democrats; he is also a promiscuous liar. Barack Obama is having to deal with both things.
But last night there were also two important moments on substantive issues. …
… The brilliance of a Clinton attack is that it need not be consistent or even logical — what matters is that it can be joined to an easily digested soundbite (â€you won’t take responsibility for your voteâ€) and that there is a tiny sunbeam of truth dwarfed by a giant cloud of deliberate obfuscation. …
One of our favorite Bill Clinton anecdotes involves a confrontation he had with Bob Dole in the Oval Office after the 1996 election. Mr. Dole protested Mr. Clinton’s attack ads claiming the Republican wanted to harm Medicare, but the President merely smiled that Bubba grin and said, “You gotta do what you gotta do.”
We’re reminded of that story listening to Barack Obama protest his treatment by the now ex-President Clinton on behalf of his wanna-be-President wife. “You know the former President, who I think all of us have a lot of regard for, has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling,” Mr. Obama told a TV interviewer. “He continues to make statements that are not supported by the facts — whether it’s about my record of opposition to the war in Iraq or our approach to organizing in Las Vegas.”
Now he knows how the rest of us feel. …
If Bill Clinton has to trash his legacy to protect his legacy, so be it. If he has to put a dagger through the heart of hope to give Hillary hope, so be it.
If he has to preside in this state as the former first black president stopping the would-be first black president, so be it.
The Clintons — or “the 2-headed monster,†as the The New York Post dubbed the tag team that clawed out wins in New Hampshire and Nevada — always go where they need to go, no matter the collateral damage. Even if the damage is to themselves and their party.
Bill’s transition from elder statesman, leader of his party and bipartisan ambassador to ward heeler and hatchet man has been seamless — and seamy. …
… Blacks in Nevada overwhelmingly backed Obama and will obviously do so again in South Carolina, no matter how loudly former President Clinton protests. So why is he making such a fuss over a contest he knows he’s going to lose?
Precisely because he is going to lose it. If Hillary loses South Carolina and the defeat serves to demonstrate Obama’s ability to attract a bloc vote among black Democrats, the message will go out loud and clear to white voters that this is a racial fight. It’s one thing for polls to show, as they now do, that Obama beats Hillary among African-Americans by better than 4-to-1 and Hillary carries whites by almost 2-to-1. But most people don’t read the fine print on the polls. But if blacks deliver South Carolina to Obama, everybody will know that they are bloc-voting. That will trigger a massive white backlash against Obama and will drive white voters to Hillary Clinton.
Obama has done everything he possibly could to keep race out of this election. And the Clintons attracted national scorn when they tried to bring it back in by attempting to minimize the role Martin Luther King Jr. played in the civil rights movement. But here they have a way of appearing to seek the black vote, losing it, and getting their white backlash, all without any fingerprints showing. …
The Onion finishes off this section with Bill’s announcement he is running for president.
After spending two months accompanying his wife, Hillary, on the campaign trail, former president Bill Clinton announced Monday that he is joining the 2008 presidential race, saying he “could no longer resist the urge.” …
Dilbert has figured out celebs are killed by the media.
In 1997 The Dilbert Future was published. One of my predictions was that the media would start killing celebrities just to generate new sensational headlines. I based this prediction on three inescapable truths:
1. The media can influence people’s actions
2. Death is the most interesting form of news
3. The news business is a capitalist enterprise …