Tuesday, June 05, 2012

CNN shows election bias with victory margin language

CNN said tonight on TV that Republican Scott Walker "narrowly defeats" Democrat Tom Barrett with only a 57%-42% win. That's odd because back in November '08, CNN called Obama's 53%-46% an "overwhelming victory".

Wow. The English language sure changed a lot in 3 1/2 years!

The video has since been removed.

But other sites have picked up on this too, including The PJ Tatler and ConservativeFact.com.

Compare that to CNN’s Obama victory article in November 2008.

Sunday, June 03, 2012

Associated Press finally reports that Osama Bin Laden was broke when he died, squandering his fortune on the jihad

This is not news. This has been reported extensively in books for the past 15 years. Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower detailed how Bin Laden USED to be wealthy, but once he left his family and spent his inheritance on Al Qaeda, recruiting, and training in the 90's and early 2000's, he was broke. The media, for some reason until now, failed to report this important fact and continued portraying Bin Laden as a charismatic billionaire who could go on funding attacks against the U.S. for decades. It's all hogwash.

Read: "Al-Qaeda leader: Bin Laden spent wealth on jihad", USA Today (AP)

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Obama’s Campaign Speech Strategy and Why it’s Failing Among Women

There was something familiar about all of Obama’s campaign speeches for years, but I couldn’t really put my finger on it.  Something was tying all these speeches together.  There was a recurring theme.  But I couldn’t put it into words.

I finally figured it out.

EVERY SINGLE campaign speech that Obama has given tells his audience that they are victims of some nefarious force out there and that only He and Democrat-led government programs can protect them and rescue them from such an overwhelming threat.

I’m not kidding.  There are no exceptions.  Every! Single! Speech!

Obama’s support among women lately has been declining, and Romney’s has been rising.  I guess—maybe—modern women are tired of being treated like pathetic weaklings that need some big strong man or big strong politician or big strong government program to save them.

Women’s empowerment over the past 60 years has been all about how women no longer need someone to give them everything they need.  All they want is to be treated as equals, treated with respect, treated like they are necessary and important to society.  But Obama comes along and tells them they will never be equals, so they must rely on him (a “big strong man”) to save them.

I guess even for The Anointed One, eventually you have to stop being condescending to everybody around you.  Eventually.

Friday, April 27, 2012

European Confusion over American "Liberals vs Conservatives"

I've been thinking more about the European (and specifically Friedrich Hayek's) confusion over the American use of the terms liberal and conservative.  To the European crowd, they think we have the terms backwards, since in Europe the term liberal tends to refer to the "liberation" of oneself from the control of the older monarchial governments that once prevailed across the continent.  An in fact, it was this "classical liberal" ideology that gave birth to the United States and dominated political thought here until the mid-20th century.

But that's when the "modern liberal" ideology, which has socialism in its genealogy, started taking root in this country and now dominates academia and mainstream media.  It is this new political thought that has commandeered the liberal identity and is not just a far cry from the European concept of a liberal, it is oftentimes a polar opposite.

And because classical liberal thinking makes up the foundation of traditional American culture and politics, those who hold the old ways close to their hearts are, by American definition, conservatives.  Whereas in Europe, the term conservative has always referred to those with a fondness for strong monarchies and the societal organization and law & order that come with that form of government.

So after 200 years, in a near complete reversal, the modern day liberal in the United States is now defined as someone with a preference for a strong government (but not a monarchy) and a strongly organized society, a sort of "moderate socialist".  Meanwhile the term conservative is now defining people who prefer smaller governments and more individual freedom.

Hayek writes about his confusion over our use of these terms in The Road to Serfdom and I've seen the same sentiments echoes repeatedly in German and British media.  It's pretty interesting though how we use these terms so differently and how we arrived at this point.