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Thomas Sowell comments on the NY Times McCain hit.
The front page of the New York Times has increasingly become the home of editorials disguised as “news” stories. Too often it has become the home of hoaxes.
Going back some years, it was the Tawana Brawley hoax that she had been gang-raped by a bunch of white men. Just a couple of years ago, it was the Duke University “rape” hoax that they fell for.
In between there were the various hoaxes of New York Times reporter Jayson Blair, who was kept on and promoted until too many people found out what he had been doing and the paper had to let him go.
Last month the New York Times created its own hoax with a long front page article about how war veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were killing people back in the United States because of the stress they had gone through in combat.
That hoax was shot down two days later by the New York Post, which showed that the murder rate among returning war veterans was only one-fifth the murder rate among civilians in the same age brackets.
Undaunted, the New York Times has come up with its latest front-page sensation, the claim that some anonymous people either suspected an affair between Senator John McCain and a female lobbyist or tried to forestall an affair.
But apparently no one actually claimed that they knew there was an affair. …
Michael Kinsley with hilarious NY Times satire.
… What I wrote was that some people had expressed concern that the Times article might have created the appearance of charging that McCain had had an affair. My critics have charged that I was charging the Times with charging McCain with having had an affair. Such a charge would be unfair to the New York Times, since the Times article, if you read it carefully (very carefully), does not make any charge against McCain except that people in a meeting eight years ago had suggested that other people eight years ago might reach a conclusion—about which the Times expressed no view whatsoever—that McCain was having an affair. …
David Brooks – The Real McCain.
… Over the course of his career, McCain has tried to do the impossible. He has challenged the winds of the money gale. He has sometimes failed and fallen short. And there have always been critics who cherry-pick his compromises, ignore his larger efforts and accuse him of being a hypocrite.
This is, of course, the gospel of the mediocre man: to ridicule somebody who tries something difficult on the grounds that the effort was not a total success. But any decent person who looks at the McCain record sees that while he has certainly faltered at times, he has also battled concentrated power more doggedly than any other legislator. If this is the record of a candidate with lobbyists on his campaign bus, then every candidate should have lobbyists on the bus.
And here’s the larger point: We’re going to have two extraordinary nominees for president this year. This could be one of the great general election campaigns in American history. The only thing that could ruin it is if the candidates become demagogues and hurl accusations at each other that are an insult to reality and common sense.
Maybe Obama can start this campaign over.
Debra Saunders on the latest Clinton tactics.
… I have to figure that Clintonia is rolling the dice. Her campaign is flailing. Being nice didn’t bump Clinton’s numbers. Along comes a photo that is just a photo of Obama visiting Africa and dressing like the locals, as both tourists and politicians are wont to do. And also a reminder that Obama might seem too exotic to some voters. It’s the wordless way of whispering: Is America ready for a black president?
The real question is: Does America want four years of a shameless victim in chief?
Jack Kelly thinks Obama’s work is cut out for him.
… Barack Obama, noted National Review’s David Frum, has the thinnest resume of any candidate for president since William Jennings Bryan in 1896. Then 36 (the youngest man ever nominated for president), Bryan had been a congressman for only six undistinguished years when he electrified the Democratic convention with his “Cross of Gold” speech.
Bryan got creamed in the general election, which suggests there is a limit to how high a populist with little on his resume besides a charismatic personality and a silver tongue can rise.
“Barack Obama is no Muhammad Ali,” said Tom Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, who is supporting Sen. Hillary Clinton. “He took a walk every time there was a tough vote in the Illinois state senate. He took a walk more than 130 times. That’s what a shadow boxer does. All the right moves. All the right combinations. All the right footwork. But he never steps into the ring.”
“Don’t be deceived by an eloquent but empty call for change that promises no more than a holiday from history,” said Sen. John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee. Eloquent but empty calls for change seem to be working well enough for Sen. Obama in the battle for the Democratic nomination. But that may be due more to the weaknesses of Hillary Clinton than to his strengths. …
American.com writes on “one acre capitalism” in Kenya.
… Its work is easy to explain and difficult to implement. First, it groups farmers, mostly women, together and educates them on agricultural techniques. It then provides them with “inputs†like seeds and fertilizer. During the growing season, staff members monitor the crops’ progress; most of the farmers will grow staples like maize, which are more forgiving than passion fruit, though they are less lucrative. Once the harvest is in, One Acre acts as a bulk seller, enabling the crops to reach larger markets and command higher prices than they would if each farmer hauled his own crop to market. In return for this service, One Acre collects a small portion of the profits to help with costs, though it says the returns for farmers, after reimbursement, are still double what they were making before. “We’re adding value to these farmers’ lives and they’re paying for it,†Youn explains. One Acre reports that 97 percent of farmers have made their payments back to the fund.
More conventional microfinance involves lending money to people who then use it to cover the overhead costs of a small business. Because One Acre takes a risk on the farmers’ harvest, Matthew Forti, the organization’s board chair, who works in Boston, describes it as a “microequity organization.†This reflects the confidence that One Acre has in its farmers and its business model. Farmers will return because their previous yields would qualify as “crop failure†in the United States, Youn says. …