The Drudge Report notes the front page of Sunday’s Los Angeles Times carries panic that all 20 best-acting Oscar nominees are going to be insufferably white again.
Glenn Whipp began: “As Motion Picture Academy members cast their ballots for Oscar nominations this week, the biggest issue for many voters isn't about who might be nominated but about the diversity of this year's acting class. Their fear: The hashtag #OscarsSoWhite will be trending on social media again.”
In his most recent Washington Post column, Fareed Zakaria, who also works at CNN, told readers that "working-class whites" can no longer handle the fact that they're not an "elite group" any more, and that this loss of status explains an alarming increase in suicide in their ranks. Supposedly, these people support Donald Trump because his "Making America Great Again" is about putting them back on top again.
Assuming that Zakaria actually wrote what appeared in the Post — he was suspended for a single instance of plagiarism in 2012 and has been credibly accused of doing so dozens of other times — his awkward opening paragraph seems to say that Trump's main supporters are people who are tragically no longer with us:
Ben Carson seems to be joining the likes of Michele Bachmann and Howard Dean on the list of presidential candidates who generated a lot of early buzz but became distant also-rans well before a nominee was chosen. According to Washington Monthly blogger David Atkins, Carson’s campaign also offers yet more proof that conservatives tend to be easy marks for scammers.
“The libertarian-conservative ethic of ‘get rich any way you can’ combined with a stubborn dismissal of objective fact makes political conservatism especially ripe for con artistry,” argued Atkins in a Saturday post. “It’s no accident that the tea party has been home to one grifter after another making a quick buck…Fox News itself is a long con perpetrated on fearful, older white Americans with the goal of making Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes rich while keeping Republican politicians in power.”
Reviewing Newsweek veteran Jon Meacham’s biography of former President George H.W. Bush, Thomas J. Duesterberg observed in The Weekly Standard that Meacham portrays the 41st President‘s life through a liberal prism. For instance: “The policies of Ronald Reagan are viewed from a decidedly unsympathetic and formulaic viewpoint, which follows the consensus, left-of-center perspective.”
A time-honored tactic in political TV ads is to use contrasting degrees of photographic exposure, one bright and snappy for your candidate and a darker hue, sometimes even going to old-fashioned black-and-white, for your opponent.
On December 29, at the Washington Post's Wonkblog, Max Ehrenfreund cited a conveniently timed "study" which looked at 2008 ads produced by and on behalf of GOP presidential candidate John McCain, and concluded that the McCain campaign and its supporters, by using such a tactic, were engaging in racism:
It was a new year, but the same lament from MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry. The leftist agenda to curtail gun rights has been frustrated. On Saturday morning, the weekend host and weekday professor treated guns (not people) as the killers as she pleaded for young blacks to have a “separate kind of legal construction to address the violence that they might perpetrate in the world because they're living under this kind of mental constant threat and belief of death. Not even primarily at the hands of police, but at the hands of guns generally.”
Guns don’t have hands. People have hands. From there, as Derek Draplin reported at the Daily Caller, Harris-Perry tried to explain to fellow professor Jon Shane that confiscating "perfectly legal" guns would mean less husbands shooting their wives:
In December, major media outlets gushed over Barack and Michelle Obama “opening up like never before about all of their favorite things of 2015" to People magazine. A cynic could say their picks weren’t very shocking – they liked Bruno Mars and Kendrick Lamar, and movies like The Martian and Inside Out. They might have been honest picks....or they could be calculated to say “See? We’re just like you folks.”
People also questioned a pile of presidential candidates, too, but the laughs in her office were all with Hillary’s answers.
Blame the PBS NewsHour staff for a bad headline? Online, Friday’s week-in-review pundit segment was titled “Shields and Gerson on the biggest political moments of 2015.” Nowhere in that 12-minute segment did Mark Shields and fill-in pseudoconservative Michael Gerson ever discuss Hillary Clintton. So apparently the very likely Democratic nominee didn’t have a noteworthy moment last year.
No e-mails to discuss? A new batch came out Friday. No Clinton Foundation scandals? Why no, PBS anchor Judy Woodruff had to apologize for donating to the Clinton Foundation. At least Mark Shields noted an NBC poll (that NBC ignored) on how voters want a change from Obama policies.
The rich are "horrible people" -- at least those who lean to the right -- declares economist turned pompous New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in Friday’s “Privilege, Pathology and Power.” The text box: “Can we survive rule by self-centered billionaires?” (Liberal billionaire activist George Soros had no comment.) Krugman channeled opportunistic moralism, citing “science” to confirm his prejudices that rich people who disagree with him politically are bad, bad folks, though Krugman is no prince of humility and civility himself.
On Saturday's Good Morning America, co-host Dan Harris suggested Hillary Clinton "may actually have been right" about Donald Trump turning up in ISIS videos. And during the subsequent segment, reporter Mary Bruce said Hillary "predicted" Trump "would" be used in ISIS videos. There's only one hitch: Hillary hadn't "predicted" what ISIS "would" do. On December 19th, during a Democratic debate, Hillary claimed that ISIS was already using Trump in recruitment videos. But no terror group used Trump in a video before today, when he turned up in a video not by ISIS but from an al Qaeda-affiliated group.
As night fell on Christmas Eve, National Public Radio was in its usual holy-day mode, using your tax dollars to mock the traditional Christian creed. This time they promoted an activist movie called The Danish Girl, yet another alleged “true story” about artist Einar Wegener, a married man who wanted to be a woman named Lili. An earlier NPR commercial – sorry, “underwriting announcement” – said he was the first recipient of “gender confirmation surgery.”
Paging Mr. Orwell – it’s NPR on line 1. Focus Features – part of the Comcast “diversity and inclusion” empire of propaganda – is calling this maiming of the male body “gender confirmation surgery.”
On Wednesday, Nate Cohn at the New York Times, who by some accounts is being anointed the next Nate Silver of polling, made a clumsy and despicable attempt to inject race into his political "analysis" of the Donald Trump phenomenon.
Cohn's tediously long writeup, which made Page A3 in the New York version of the Old Gray Lady's print edition on Thursday, attempted to identify and characterize Donald Trump supporters. Apparently troubled by finding that Trump's support crosses into a number of groups with whom Republican presidential candidates have usually fared poorly, he felt the need to go far afield for evidence of something sinister. Thus, he attempted to correlate the level of current support for Trump's presidential candidacy to regional levels of racism as seen in Google searches. That's right, Google searches — 9-12 years ago.
The Wall Street Journal ran a blockbuster story Tuesday afternoon ("U.S. Spy Net on Israel Snares Congress") about how the Obama administration's National Security Agency's "targeting of Israeli leaders swept up the content of private conversations with U.S. lawmakers." In other words, the NSA spied on Congress. As talk-show host and commentator Erick Erickson drily observed: "Congress began impeachment proceedings on Richard Nixon for spying on the opposing political party."
Whether or not Congress has the nerve to defend itself and the Constitution's separation of powers, what the Journal reported is objectively a major story. Yet the Associated Press ignored it on Tuesday, and most of Wednesday. Finally, at 7:15 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, the AP ran a story by Erica Werner — about how Republicans are planning to investigate the matter.
The Hollywood trade paper Variety wrapped up the year with its film critics, and it was surprising to read how several liberal-pleasing films were taken to ask for their artistic failings.
Perhaps the most eye-opening was Peter Debruge whapping Michael Moore. "An embarrassment to America, Michael Moore’s latest editorial cartoon of a documentary is as sloppy as its author’s appearance (easily twice his Bowling for Columbine heft). Unlike his earlier, urgent wake-up-call docs, Where to Invade Next cherry-picks aspects in which other countries can be made to appear more progressive than the States, while conveniently overlooking the limitations of each grass-is-greener locale. At the base, it’s a fine idea, implying the humility to ask what we can learn from others, though Moore is a boorish ambassador at best, and his disingenuous approach undermines his own argument."
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On December 22, Kyle Drennen reported NBC’s Today devoted two full reports to President Obama appearing on Jerry Seinfeld’s web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Once again, Obama plays the part of comedian instead of chief executive, and the networks come running. On December 31 – the day the Seinfeld show was available online – all three networks aired gushy reports.
The longest on Thursday was on CBS This Morning, with Chip Reid reporting from Hawaii with the rest of the “working” White House press corps. It was almost four minutes.