Would Washington or the press be giving ACORN a second look if Breitbart, O'Keefe, and Giles' prank hadn't revealed the, um, unknown dimension of the organization? I doubt it. And that brings me back to my original observation: One of the great strengths of American journalism is that it will accept contributions from everybody from amateurs to entertainers (I'm looking at you, Jon Stewart) to gadflies to billionaires to activists to students to genocidal tyrants. The system is so delightfully open that even pornographers can spill worthwhile journalistic ink. That Breitbart comes swinging a political ax should bother nobody, unless the journalism published in Mother Jones, The Nation, the Huffington Post, Salon, the New Republic, the American Prospect, Reason, the Weekly Standard, or the National Review gives them similar fits. Viewing the world through an ideological lens can sometimes help a journalist to discover a story.
Breitbart proved this week that his site can make news without having anybody play dress-up when he posted the full transcript and audio of an August National Endowment for the Arts conference call. In it, NEA honchos urge artists to push President Obama's political agenda. That's news by anybody's measure, including the New York Times'. Give the man two cheers. If he keeps up the good work, toss him a third.
Posted by: Fred ||
09/25/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
Fox reported this also and should get credit for exposing this criminality. The MSM was conspicuously absent; didn't want to rock the boat for their chosen one.
#2
I think that the two kids who did the film and Breitbart are going to need some bucks for lawyers, because the Soros types will be funding Acorn. I am planning to send them some money for the legal fund. I hope to see some viscious discovery battles, and it ain't cheap.
#1
Paging Dr. Milankovitch to the white courtesy phone. Hopefully, some of this will eventually sink in as general knowledge and we can stop this incessant wanking over carbon dioxide. 380 parts per million. For the love of God, Montresor!
Posted by: Mitch H. ||
09/25/2009 9:45 Comments ||
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#3
West Virginia university site, looks like. Huh.
Thought it sounded too reasonable and even-tempered to be a "respectable" source. Damned hillbilly provincials, getting their biased facts all over perfectly good urgency-promoting narratives...
^_^
Posted by: Mitch H. ||
09/25/2009 9:48 Comments ||
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#4
Only missed a couple that were ambiguous.
"Has there been GW?" Well, since when? Since the Ice Age, yes; since the MCO, no. Gotta get more specific.
There was an international uproar when, on Sept. 4, in Afghanistan's Kunduz province, an American fighter jet under NATO command bombed a group of Taliban fighters who had hijacked two fuel tanker trucks. The trucks exploded, the fighters were killed, and so were a still-undetermined number of Afghan civilians.
The civilian deaths sent shudders through the American military command, already fearful that civilian casualties would further alienate the Afghan public. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, was said to be angry and determined to tighten the U.S. force's already-strict rules of engagement even more to avoid future civilian deaths.
Then something odd happened. When McChrystal met with local leaders in Kunduz, a few days after the bombing, he got an earful -- but not what he expected.
According to a detailed account in The Washington Post -- a story that has received too little attention in the ongoing debate over U.S. policy in Afghanistan -- the local Afghan leaders told McChrystal to stop being so fussy and to go ahead and kill the enemy, which they said would help bring stability to the region.
Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran was given extraordinary access to the bombing investigation. According to his account, McChrystal began the meeting with a show of sympathy for those who had been killed or wounded. The general didn't get very far before he was interrupted by the provincial council chairman, Ahmadullah Wardak.
The security situation has been getting worse in Kunduz, Wardak told McChrystal. American and NATO troops haven't been aggressive enough in pursuing and killing the Taliban. In Wardak's view, the bombing of the fuel tankers, rather than a mistake, was the right thing to do.
"If we do three more operations like was done the other night, stability will come to Kunduz," Wardak said, according to the Post account. "If people do not want to live in peace and harmony, that's not our fault."
Chandrasekaran reported that McChrystal "seemed caught off guard." Wardak clarified a bit more: "We've been too nice to the thugs," he said.
So instead of receiving an angry lecture on America's disregard for Afghan life, the general received an angry lecture on America's hesitance to go after the enemy.
Cut from that scene to a letter written to Sen. Susan Collins last July. It was from a New Portland, Maine, man named John Bernard, father of Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard, then serving with the Marines in Afghanistan.
John Bernard, himself a 26-year veteran of the Marines, was enraged by the military's new, restrictive rules of engagement in Afghanistan. The rules are "nothing less than disgraceful, immoral and fatal for our Marines, sailors and soldiers on the ground," Bernard wrote. Under those rules, U.S. forces "without reinforcement, denial of fire support and refusal to allow them to hunt and kill the very enemy we are there to confront are nothing more than sitting ducks."
The letter, disturbing at the time, became heartbreaking three weeks later, when Joshua Bernard was killed fighting the Taliban in Helmand province.
His death became national news when the Associated Press published a clearly inappropriate photo of Bernard as he lay wounded. But the bigger news should have been his father's concerns about the rules of engagement.
Now cut again, this time to Sept. 8, when four U.S. Marines were killed when the Taliban ambushed their patrol in Kunar province. The Marines were taken completely by surprise and pinned down under heavy Taliban fire. McClatchy reporter Jonathan Landay was with them and wrote a harrowing account of their desperate battle to survive.
The rules of engagement again played a role. "U.S. commanders, citing new rules to avoid civilian casualties, rejected repeated calls to unleash artillery rounds at attackers dug into the slopes and treelines," Landay wrote, "despite being told repeatedly that they weren't near the village."
President Obama is in the middle of a new reassessment of his original reassessment of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. The big question consuming the press is whether Obama will send more troops, and if so, how many. But what American troops are actually doing in Afghanistan is even more important.
Will the president listen to John Bernard, to the troops who are fighting under tight restrictions, and even to Ahmadullah Wardak? Will he let them fight the fight? It's simply wrong to place Americans at risk otherwise.
#1
Federal Reserve actions and the mis-regulation and insolvency of the banking system are twin elephants under the national rug. Problems there are complex, not titillating, and don't fit into soundbites or political slogans.
In the debate over the PATRIOT Act, the Bush White House insisted it needed the authority to search people's homes without their permission or knowledge so that terrorists wouldn't be tipped off that they're under investigation.
Now that the authority is law, how has the Department of Justice used the new power? To go after drug dealers.
Only three of the 763 "sneak-and-peek" requests in fiscal year 2008 involved terrorism cases, according to a July 2009 report from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Sixty-five percent were drug cases.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
