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Mark Steyn thinks the best defense is being offensive.
The holiday season is here, and that means it’s time to engage in the time-honored Christmas tradition of objecting to every time-honored Christmas tradition. Australia is a gazillion time zones ahead of the United States – it may even be Boxing Day there already – so they got in first this year with a truly fantastic headline:
“Santas Warned ‘Ho Ho Ho’ Offensive To Women.”
Really. As the story continued: “Sydney’s Santa Clauses have instead been instructed to say ‘ha ha ha’ instead, the Daily Telegraph reported. One disgruntled Santa told the newspaper a recruitment firm warned him not to use ‘ho ho ho’ because it could frighten children and was too close to ‘ho’, a U.S. slang term for prostitute.”
If I were a female resident of Sydney, I think I’d be more offended by the assumption that Australian women and U.S. prostitutes are that easily confused. As the old gangsta-rap vaudeville routine used to go: “Who was that ho I saw you with last night?” “That was no ho, that was my bitch.”
But the point is that the right not to be offended is now the most sacred right in the world. The right to freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of movement, all are as nothing compared with the universal right to freedom from offense. …
Gerard Baker of the London Times looks at the celebrity Clinton dragged out to counter Obama’s Oprah.
… Streisand long ago crossed the blurry boundary between celebrity and politics. She is yesterday’s news, proudly waving the banner of liberal preposterousness since 1965. Her only memorable recent cinematic performance, for all the wrong reasons, was as the oversexed sexuagenarian alongside Dustin Hoffman in the utterly tasteless Meet The Fockers sequel.
Her intervention this week is fitting, though, precisely because it captures what looms as the largest impediment to the increasingly troubled ambitions of Mrs Clinton, that what the former First Lady is offering is a better yesterday. Mrs Clinton’s campaign might in fact be summed up in the lyrics of Streisand’s most famous locution, back when she was still a bona fide celebrity:
Memories, like the corners of my mind,
Misty, water-coloured memories
Of the way we were.
Despite her efforts to portray herself as something new, voters know well enough that Mrs Clinton represents a restoration rather than a revolution. …
The Captain posts on the Iraqi cleric Ali Sistani.
Earlier this week, the leading Shi’ite cleric in Iraq issued a fatwa that has largely gone unnoticed by the world media, but could have an impact on reconciliation and the political gridlock in Baghdad. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani forbade the killings of Sunnis by Shi’ites on Tuesday while meeting with Sunni clerics in an ecumenical council, and called for a renewed sense of Iraqi nationalism to replace sectarian divides in the country (via SCSU Scholars): …
And he posts on the dénouement for the latest New Republic fabulist.
John Fund reports Tom Lantos has fun with Dutch Euro-weenies.
And Mr. Fund will kick off the coverage of the debacle created by CNN at the YouTube debate.
… The debates so far have largely been political theater. Polls show that voters are most concerned about Iraq, the economy and Washington corruption. But most of the debates featuring GOP candidates have been loaded up with questions on God, guns, gays and abortion that, while important, do not make the list of pressing issues news outlets such as CNN routinely compile. In the wake of the Kerr fiasco, a full autopsy of just how these debates are put together is called for. I would never have thought I would be pining for the days when PBS sponsored GOP debates, but that’s where we are now.
Hugh Hewitt has a phrase; “premeditated mediocrity.”
… this [is] premeditated mediocrity. The network had months to prepare and consider and execute. But even with all that time, it lacked the minimal talent necessary to produce a serious debate about important issues using new technology. All it could deliver was a carnival of bad taste, trick questions, and full frontal left wing bias.
Hugh’s interview with Mark Steyn touched on the debate.
MS: Yes, and I think in fact, CNN behaved disgracefully. I don’t know, I mean, you’ve been on CNN before. I find CNN a very tiresome network in part because when you, when they try to book you on something, they want to have these pre-interviews, which are big time wasters, and I never agree to do them, where they want to discuss your views for an hour beforehand, before you do your two minute on-air bit with whoever the host is. So it seems to me incredible on its face that for example, this gay general who’s supporting Hillary, that they couldn’t have done the minimal amount of work necessary to find out that this guy is not Mr. Undecided Voter, but he is in fact on the Hillary campaign, that the woman who asked the abortion question is not, you know, Little Miss Undecided Feminist Voter, but in fact an explicit John Edwards supporter. I simply don’t buy the fact that even the overmanned, deadbeat production staff at CNN simply were incapable of finding out the truth of this thing.
Howard Kurtz with CNN comments.
The Captain weighs in.
… Memo to CNN: quit trying to excuse this away. No one tried “extremely hard” to vet these questions. Obviously, no one tried vetting them at all. The continuation of the pretense only damages your credibility even further than the debate did.
What a shame, too, because the questions themselves weren’t so bad. The plants revealed their own prejudices against the GOP, and the candidates did a good job of swatting them aside. The worst inclusions didn’t come from the plants, but from CNN’s decision to include insulting questions about Confederate flags and the Bible, which revealed CNN’s prejudices about Republicans. Mitt Romney gave the best response to this when he asked contemptuously why the flag question even got selected for a presidential debate. Otherwise, with just over 30 questions in the debate, most of them focused on policy in substantive ways and provoked perhaps the best intramural exchanges in the debates this year.
CNN blew it, and blew it big — and they didn’t try extremely hard to avoid it. They got extremely sloppy and careless, and they got caught. …
Stephen Green from Pajamas Media.
… What didn’t happen was a real debate, although what we saw was certainly, if only occasionally, entertaining. What we saw tonight was the usual for a presidential “debate.†In other words, it was a joint press conference, the only real difference being that, this time, it was punctuated by cute videos made by “real Americans†“just like you.†That’s the hype, anyway.
What we really saw was CNN playing out its own agenda in front of a couple million viewers and seven or eight candidates, without anyone calling them on it. …
Phil Valentine from the Tennessean is back with more on the marxists in the globalony movement.
Apparently, I hit a nerve with a column I wrote a couple of weeks ago on global warming. Many of you took umbrage with my daring to connect the global warming movement to Marxism. Don’t get me wrong. I do not believe everyone involved in the global warming movement subscribes to Karl Marx’s philosophy. However, make no mistake about it. Those at the epicenter of this movement have ulterior motives, many of them socialist or even Marxist. What I wrote that caused such a fuss was that global warming is being used as a template to rob from the rich nations and give to the poor ones. …
American Thinker posts on a Brit who’s compiled a list of all the calamities caused by global warming, according to the media.
… The site’s stated mission is to expose all the “scares, scams, junk, panics and flummery cooked up by the media, politicians, bureaucrats and so-called scientists and others that try to confuse the public with wrong numbers” Professor Brignell’s motto is “Working to Combat Math Hysteria.” …
James Taranto finds another calamity.