The media love “moderate” Republicans. All you have to do is favor abortion under just about any circumstance, and you get to be a moderate. You could be in favor of nuking gay black homosexuals, but if you’re pro-abortion, you’re a moderate. Arlen Specter, Bill Weld, and Christie Todd Whitman are prominent members of this species. They get showered with acclamations about their intelligence, prudence, and superiority over your normal, gun-toting, snake-handling GOP politician. Quite often, the “moderate” Republican favors gun control; he will make frowny faces about high government spending and high taxes, but will usually support both in the end.
Then when election time comes, the “moderate” Republican finds that his buddies in the press, along with previously friendly Democrats, have turned against him. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the latest to find out that just because you favor abortion, gun control, and scads of money for “the children,” you’re not immune from being lumped in with the snake handlers.
According to this article, lots of Hollywood people are lining up against him in his bid to become governor of California. You can guess most of the names mentioned: Tom Hanks, Woody Harrelson, Martin Sheen, Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds (still alive, apparently), Cybill Shepherd, Barbra Streisand (natch), Steven Spielberg, Warren Beatty, Susan Sarandon, and Al Franken. (Good golly! Not Franken!)
Note to liberal Republicans: you should certainly follow your conscience and act on your beliefs. However, if you’re thinking of adjusting your positions to make yourself popular, you might as well be conservative. Having that (R) next to your name makes you a target. The media and the Left will see it, their Pavlovian response will kick in, and they’ll automatically hate you anyway.
Author: Eric Johnson
What the heck happened to ‘acts of God’?
This post is so, like, 15 minutes ago, but I have some thoughts on the Great Blackout of 2003, which didn’t affect us Virginians a bit:
— The blackout represents a huge failure of American journalism. I realize that our aging power transmission infrastructure isn’t nearly as important as a basketball player getting arrested for rape, but isn’t our watchdog press supposed to be reporting on things such as the potential for gigantic, potentially disastrous failures of public utilities? Covering an expectant mother’s murder in San Francisco just isn’t as important.
— The majority of Americans are decent, helpful people. The news from around the country didn’t report any crime wave, much less rioting. People got through the trouble without a lot of complaining, and assisted others in need. Why didn’t anybody talk about that?
— It took Hillary about ten minutes before she started running her mouth about how the blackout was President Bush’s fault. Her husband was in office throughout the 1990s. Does anyone recall him making a big push for electrical infrastructure reform? No? Then will no one rid us of this meddlesome Queen of the Harpies? (Two points for identifying the king and the “Simpsons” reference in the last sentence.)
— What the heck happened to ‘acts of God’? There seem to be a lot of people who can’t accept that “things fall apart,” as Yeats wrote: fallible humans create fallible objects and systems. (Yeah, he was writing about the Antichrist, but you get it.) It would seem that we need to fix a few things, but this isn’t Haiti. Not very many people have generator backups because of unreliable electrical supplies. The only people who got really excited about all this are people who want to spend more taxpayers’ dollars (see the Queen reference above.)
Camera crews do “shoot” things, don’t they?
Before I go to bed, I have to comment on this story about a Reuters cameraman accidently killed in Iraq. He was killed in the middle of a combat area, and Reporters without Borders is essentially saying he was murdered. The soldiers involved said they fired on a man who looked like he had a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
In the absence of any contrary evidence, I’ll believe the soldiers. They were in the middle of an attack that caused 66 casualties, and when they saw a man in “a house with a vantage point” — a classic sniper position to hide — they fired. How can a camera look like an RPG? Shadows, a flash of movement, the way it’s carried on the shoulder. The soldiers who fired had maybe a second or two to evaluate the threat and act on it. They were possibly negligent, but the idea they woke up this morning and said, “I’m gonna kill me a journalist,” is far-fetched.
The Power of Dr. Joe
Grovel Week has arrived on PBS, and they’re begging us for money to keep their Very Special Programs on the air. Lord knows we watch a lot of public broadcasting in our house, but it’s limited to fare like Clifford the Big Red Dog. I don’t feel guilty about watching their shows and not paying for them, because we gave at the office — the tax office, that is. On average, tax-paying households “donate” $6.40 to the IRS every year for PBS funding, and in gratitude for your cooperation, the congenial folks at the IRS refrain from confiscating your home, freezing your bank accounts, or throwing you in jail.
Quick “Simpsons” moment:
Marge: What are you gonna spend your money on, kids?
Bart: There’s a special down at the Tacomat: a hundred tacos for a hundred dollars. I’m gonna get that.
Lisa: I’m going to contribute my money to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Marge: Tacos? Public broadcasting? I will not have either of you waste your money.
To convince recalcitrant viewers to cough up more clams, PBS re-ran “The Power of Myth,” a conversation between LBJ advisor Bill Moyers and Professor Joseph Campbell of Sarah Lawrence College. They filmed the six episodes of the series back in 1987, so this is probably a re-re-re-re-re-re-rerun at least….
Unfair and imbalanced?
Fametracker is a site devoted to demotic pop-culture analysis. The featured essays and comedy bits are often hysterically funny, if you pay attention to the entertainment industry even a little. Their forums often direct a stream of invective against the fraudulence of our cultural icons, and so they are a refreshing departure from the usual butt-kissing-party you see in People magazine. A recent forum topic tackled the subject of Fox News and right-wing bias. Most of the people posting to the forum agreed that it skewed the news and it was awful; I took the opportunity to discuss liberal bias and the mainstream news industry’s freakish death wish.
[Another forum participant asked:] Exactly how the hell is network news “liberal biased?” My answer:
1. The selection of news stories. Here’s one example: self-identified homosexuals make up about 3% of the population. Something like 30-40% of the American population go to a place of worship once a week; a similar proportion goes at least occasionally. Yet the number of stories about homosexuals is far higher than for religious topics.
2. The people who make the news. The journalists comprising the upper tier of the profession (at big-city newspapers, weekly newsmagazines, and television networks) are about as liberal as any identifiable segment of the population. (sources) Throughout the industry in general, journalists are twice as likely to call themselves Democrats as Republicans, though that percentage has decreased in the last decade (as it has in the population as a whole). A person’s worldview affects what one considers important; it is naive to think that it wouldn’t affect the selection of news….