The Taranto Principle strikes again.
Dr. Tom Frieden, the Director of the Center for Disease Control, has just slammed headlong into the Taranto Principle. No wonder this smart, talented doctor is wandering around staggered at repeated calls to resign, calls coming from everyone from Fox’s Bill O’Reilly to members of Congress and a growing crowd beyond.
Brian Stelter used to work for the New York Times. Apparently he doesn’t read it.
This curious fact came to light recently when Stelter, now the host of CNN’s obviously erroneously named Reliable Sources, invited PBS “science” correspondent Miles O’Brien on his show. The two zeroed in on this statement from Fox’s Andrea Tantaros: “I've said it before, I'll say it again -- in these countries, they do not believe in traditional medical care. So, someone could get off a flight and seek treatment from a witch doctor." This was more than enough to have Stelter and O’Brien foaming.
There’s no tale here of some 18-year-old Russian kid hacking into an American chain store or a super secret Mossad/CIA plot to insert the Stuxnet cyber worm into the computers running the Iranian nuclear program.
This time these stories of cyber warfare or cyber fraud are all homegrown. The fingers on the keyboard belong to American leftists and two of the three targets are exactly those you would expect leftist digital warriors of social media to target -- Rush Limbaugh and Fox News
The movie star and the millionaire aristocrats have been questioned and found wanting. Uh-oh.
After almost six years of unrelenting class warfare enthusiastically promoted by President Obama, with all the precision of historic inevitability the rhetoric and policies of the Occupy Wall Street enthusiasts have now rounded on two of the more famous members of the One Percent.
You can’t make it up.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has taken a Rush Limbaugh discussion on sexual assault, deliberately lied about it, then turned it into a fundraising pitch with a blast e-mail. And oh yes: the DCCC, in yet another liberal assault on free speech, wants to pressure advertisers to drop Rush and take him off the air based on the lie, so a petition has been launched.
Feminist senators and a CBS sportscaster mount a high horse against domestic violence by dismissed NFL running back Ray Rice. But did they ever care when a woman came forward to say she was raped by Bill Clinton?
Somehow, liberal politicians and media companies will excuse a white liberal politician when he is accused of a violent sexual assault. Who cares to get to the bottom of it?
In a bizarre twist of reality, the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) has demanded The Five co-host Andrea Tantaros and Fox apologize for “Islamophobia.”
Why is Ms. Tantaros in the dock? (She actually made her remarks on another Fox show, Outnumbered.) And Fox too?
Call it the Ebola of Journalism. And its spreading -- to Time and CNN.
The cover of the September 1, 2014 issue of Time could not be more explicit. Showing a dramatic image of a black man on his knees, hands raised with the cover bearing the title "The Tragedy of Ferguson," it was written by David Von Drehle and Alex Altman in the tones of the standard liberal “I-told-you-so” thinking on race . It included the line: “We’ve been here before—and failed to learn the lessons.”
The headline couldn’t be missed.
The Huffington Post could not be any plainer if Arianna Huffington herself were walking down the main street of Ferguson at the head of a screaming mob swinging a noose. The liberal online web site wanted Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson arrested - pronto - and damn any investigation into the facts of the case - aka the truth - surrounding the shooting of Michael Brown.
Within the space of a week, the Public Editor of The New York Times, Margaret Sullivan, and Sarah Durand, a senior editor of publisher Simon & Schuster subsidiary Atria Books, have vividly illustrated how the game of liberal media bias works.
Let’s start with the Times.
Moral clarity. Or moral relativity.
The Prime Minister of Israel, sitting across from a visiting Sean Hannity, looked Hannity and his Fox News audience in the eye, using the phrase “moral clarity” with reference to Israel’s on-going battle with Hamas and the larger conflict with radical Islamists. Hannity himself has used the phrase. Yet the phrase Benjamin Netanyahu used can just as easily apply to Hannity himself, Hannity’s trip to Israel bringing desperately needed moral clarity to the larger media coverage of the current events in the Middle East.
The media are furious.
The Poynter Institute, which keeps an eye on all things journalistic, is maintaining a list of media people and institutions who have decided they are so enraged by the idea of calling the Washington Redskins the …well, you know..….that they will no longer participate in this heinous practice.
Who’da thunk it? A winning Super Bowl coach and Israel combine to teach Americans a lesson in how the media’s religion bigots operate.
The coach, of course, is Tony Dungy, the now retired coach of the Indianapolis Colts, the team he led to the 2007 Super Bowl win over the Chicago Bears. And Israel? Israel is, thank God, still Israel. (Oops! Can I still say “God”?)
“Their entire economic philosophy — cut taxes for the rich and it trickles down — is a zombie lie.” (Video below)
Bill Maher is a funny guy, so say his fans. If money is a measure, he’s very good at being funny. How good? Over here at Celebrity Net Worth it says ole Bill is so funny that over the years he has amassed a fortune of $23 million.
There were 937 of them.
Some 937 souls fleeing their native country - fleeing for their lives. They made it across an ocean and were refused - by Cuba. Next, they sailed to the Unites States. So close were they to the shores of Florida that it was said they could see the lights of Miami. Desperately, a cable was sent to the President of the United States. He never responded. Instead, what these terrified human beings received was an answering cable from the US State Department. The passengers, the cable warned sternly, must:
The Washington Post is apoplectic.
In a front page story about a new Supreme Court decision involving birth control and Wheaton College, a conservative Christian school, the Post story by Robert Barnes began this way: “The three female justices of the Supreme Court sharply rebuked their colleagues Thursday for siding with a Christian college in the latest battle over providing women with contraceptive coverage under the Affordable Care Act, saying the court was retreating from assurances offered only days ago.”
To borrow from the Bill Clinton mantra per James Carville in 1992 (“It’s the economy, stupid”), America’s increasing landslide of crises foreign and domestic comes from a very simple understanding of what’s at play: It’s the ideology, stupid.
The other night, Bill O’Reilly had an interesting segment that he titled: “Were the conservative radio talk show hosts correct?” To wax Carvillian, O’Reilly’s conclusion was that, well, yes, they were kinda sorta correct because: It’s the competence, stupid.
The other Sunday, Bob Schieffer, the longtime CBS journalist and anchor of the network’s Sunday morning show Face the Nation, had Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on his show.
Mysteriously, a seriously hard fact of the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign -- a fact about the role of CBS News itself -- disappeared from Mr. Schieffer’s recounting of that “historic landslide” to Mr. Priebus and the CBS audience. Vaporized more thoroughly than Lois Lerner’s e-mails from the IRS. As noted here by Jeffrey Meyer, the two had the following exchange about the state of the Repubican Party:
The Liberal Clerisy Media never saw it coming. They never heard of Dave Brat. And therein lies a considerable media tale.
Let's be clear. The person responsible for electing Dave Brat and defeating Eric Cantor is...Dave Brat. But this is as good a moment as any to have a discussion about conservative talk radio and its role in various races around the country.
Oh how they loved it. It wasn’t just love, either. It was glee.
Witness liberal journalist Michael Kinsley, (announced in January as a contributing editor of Vanity Fair ) who was positively gleeful when he wrote a piece in The New Republic on the burgeoning Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal and the liberal media feeding frenzy that was reporting it. It originally appeared in the magazine's December 22, 1986 issue, titled "The Case for Glee." Wrote Kinsley (as re-titled in its new Internet form by Philly.com ):
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