Recovering liberal was reminded of a scene in Nineteen Eighty-Four by the way the liberal mainstream media devotes a special kind of attention to Sarah Palin.

It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate.

The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started.

As usual, the face of Sarah Palin, the Enemy of the Democratic Party and the Main Stream Media and especially leftist bloggers, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. A little red-haired woman journalist gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Palin was the renegade, one of the leading figures of the Republican Party, almost on a level with the near mythological figure “Reagan”, and had engaged in counter-liberal activities, had been condemned to irrelevancy, but had mysteriously escaped from liberal media attacks and gained a mass following. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Palin was not the principal figure. She was the primal enemy, the defiler of the Party’s plans including the Death Panels. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of her teaching. She was still active and hatching her conspiracies: perhaps under the protection of secret paymasters, perhaps even — so it was occasionally rumoured, the mysterious Koch brothers and the equally mysterious Fox Murdoch.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Bill Ivers.

What astonishing news! The Arts & Entertainment Network foolishly dipped a toe in the waters of historical truth and has run shrieking back to the warm comfortable living room of establishment malarkey.

Hollywood Reporter:

In a surprise move, A&E Television Networks has canceled plans to broadcast The Kennedys, the ambitious and much-anticipated miniseries about the American political family that was set to air this spring on the History channel.

“Upon completion of the production of The Kennedys, History has decided not to air the 8-part miniseries on the network,” a rep for the network tells The Hollywood Reporter in a statement. “While the film is produced and acted with the highest quality, after viewing the final product in its totality, we have concluded this dramatic interpretation is not a fit for the History brand.”

The multi-million dollar project—History and Lifetime president and general manager Nancy Dubuc’s first scripted miniseries at the network and its most expensive program ever—has been embroiled in controversy since it was announced in December 2009.

Developed by Joel Surnow, the conservative co-creator of 24, along with production companies Asylum Entertainment and Muse Entertainment and writer Stephen Kronish, the project drew fire from the political left and some Kennedy historians. Even before cameras rolled, a front-page New York Times story last February included a sharp attack from former John F. Kennedy adviser Theodore Sorenson, who called an early version of the script “vindictive” and “malicious.”

History and parent A&E said at the time that the script had been revised and that the final version had been vetted by experts. Indeed, the script used in production had passed muster with History historians for accuracy.

Despite the controversy, History was able to recruit a big-ticket cast to the project, announcing in April that Greg Kinnear (John F. Kennedy), Katie Holmes (Jackie Kennedy), Barry Pepper (Robert F. Kennedy) and Tom Wilkinson (Joe Kennedy) would co-star. The actors and CAA, which reps both Kinnear and Holmes, were told this afternoon of the cancellation. Surnow also was told today.

No advertisers had registered complaints or concerns with the miniseries, confirms an A&E spokesperson, but the content was not considered historically accurate enough for the network’s rigorous standards. So an air date, which had not been announced but was planned for spring, was scrapped.

“We recognize historical fiction is an important medium for storytelling and commend all the hard work and passion that has gone into the making of the series, but ultimately deem this as the right programming decision for our network,” a rep tells THR in the statement.

What facts or well-known scandalous speculations could possibly have provoked such liberal unease in a program depicting the story of America’s leading Irish gangster family?

Was old Joe Kennedy depicted as so dangerous to women that his sons had to caution their dates to lock their doors when visiting the Kennedy mansion to avoid being attacked by their escort’s father?

Did the series show John Kennedy’s senior thesis at Harvard and best-selling history book being ghost-written for him?

I can’t imagine that it actually suggested that it was more than a little unusual for a PT boat to be caught unawares at night by a Japanese destroyer and that, absent very powerful influence, Lieutenant Kennedy would much more likely have been courtmartialed rather than decorated as the result of the affair.

I also doubt that the series actually delved in depth into the fraud by which the election of 1960 was won, or that it remaked on the fraud by which John Kennedy publicly claimed victory in the Cuban missile crisis, while privately trading away US missiles in Turkey and the abandonment of the Monroe Doctrine in return.

Still there was enough truth to make the politically correct suits at A&E squirm. Someone will broadcast it, and that will only highlight A&E’s cowardice, dishonesty, and hypocrisy.

Matthew had a nice comment apropos of all the opportunistic leftist whingeing about “vitriolic political speech.”

The First Amendment is the singer on stage in front of everyone whose voice can not be ignored, while the Second Amendment is the individual in front of the stage making sure no one kills the performance.

Spook86 puts Captain Honors’ grabasstical videos in perspective, speculates on who leaked them to the Virginia Pilot and why, and points out that the lame-stream media generally failed to report a much more impressive scandal featuring an abusive female officer.

[W]hy didn’t anyone raise red flags three or four years ago when Captain Honors was producing those tasteless (but amusing) skits?

We’re guessing that the brass viewed Honors as an effective leader. Unit morale is one of the responsibilities of a ship XO (executive officer), and it looks like Captain Honors inherited a very unhappy crew on Enterprise. Apparently, most of the sailors appreciated his efforts and we’re guessing that the “Big E’s” efficiency improved under his watch. So, the brass was willing to look the other way.

Incidentally, we are not trying to condone Captain Honors morale efforts. While the videos that have found their way into the public realm, we’re also remind us that the Navy has its own, unique culture. Bawdy skits, offensive humor and other customs have long been used to relieve the monotony that sets in after months at sea. It was in this tradition that Honors produced his videos, and judging by the comments on various Facebook pages and other on-line forums, his efforts were appreciated.

But even if his motives were focused on crew morale and mission accomplishment, you still have to ask the essential question: what was Captain Honors thinking? We assume that the former carrier commander was aware that his videos were making their way around the fleet. And surely he knew it was just a matter of time before they showed up on YouTube. The fact they weren’t on-line (until the Virginian-Pilot got hold on them) is another testament to the popularity and respect that Honors earned from his sailors.

They understood that on-board “morale videos” were intended for the crew–and no one else. It was one more shared experience that bonded them together during months of training and long periods at sea. It’s a concept that is almost alien to anyone who hasn’t been a sailor, or part of the wider military community.

You see, there’s something about shared hardships and camaraderie that bring people together–or drive them apart. In that environment, you quickly discover which senior officers genuinely care about their troops, and the ones that are more interested in that next promotion. Captain Honors clearly fell in that latter category, even if his efforts at morale-boosting have been deemed inappropriate. …

As for the “source” of the tapes, it was clearly an inside job. We can’t point to a specific individual, but there are two prime categories of suspects. The first (and most obvious) are individuals who received a poor performance report from Captain Honors (former department heads on the Enterprise would be in that group, along with E-8s and E-9s who were evaluated by Honors since taking command, or during his previous tour as XO).

There’s also the possibility that Honors was torpedoed by one of his peers. As a Naval Academy grad, Top Gun graduate, decorated aviator and tours as a carrier XO and commander, Owen Honors was on track to become an admiral. Now, with his career in tatters, there is no chance he will ever reach flag rank. We’re guessing that Owens was up for his first star in the next year or so–and a presumptive choice for promotion, had the scandal not erupted. Instead, Owens is toast, and there will be one more opening when that board meets. It wouldn’t be the first time that a cut-throat Captain or Colonel has deliberately sabotaged a colleague, to enhance their own chances at promotion.

One final thought: if you’re so inclined, do a Google search for Captain Owens, then do the same thing for Captain Holly Graf. Readers will recall that Captain Graf was fired as skipper of the USS Cowpens last summer, for “cruelty and maltreatment of her crew.” That was the Navy’s description of her actions–not ours. Mark Thompson of Time correctly described her as a “female Captain Bligh” who verbally abused her crew and even throttled a Royal Navy exchange officer who served on her pr evious command, the USS Winston Churchill.

In case you’re wondering, that web search for Graf produces fewer results than a similar query for Captain Honors. But more importantly, much of the coverage of the Graf controversy was limited to Navy Times and military blogs (Time was a notable exception among the MSM). Outside of military circles, few have heard of “Horrible Holly” Graf. Meanwhile, the Honors scandal has been front-page news around the world. We’re not surprised.

Canadian-born Dahlia Lithwick is Slate’s jurisprudential authority and commentator on Supreme Court decisions. Her response to a recent statement by Christine O’Donnell demonstrates both Lithwick’s lack of regard for Constitutional fidelity and her general unfamiliarity with its text.

It is understandable, I suppose, that someone who grew up in Canada might be a little vague on the fine points of the American Constitution and legal system, but it does seem ironic to say the least that she could graduate from Yale and Stanford Law School and be unacquainted with Marbury vs. Madision.

It is often observed that our establishment media characteristically features a perspective differing radically from the viewpoint of most ordinary Americans. It just might be that the prominent contributions of so many not-genuinely-assimilated foreign-born journalists to the commentary of the American establishment plays a significant role in moving the consensus of the elect away from the American mainstream toward the left.

I have been fascinated by Christine O’Donnell’s constitutional worldview since her debate with her opponent Chris Coons last week. O’Donnell explained that “when I go to Washington, D.C., the litmus test by which I cast my vote for every piece of legislation that comes across my desk will be whether or not it is constitutional.” How weird is that, I thought. Isn’t it a court’s job to determine whether or not something is, in fact, constitutional? And isn’t that sort of provided for in, well, the Constitution?

Hat tip to Adam Freedman.

Daniel Greenfield, from across the border in Canada, looks at, and reflects upon, the American mainstream media’s determined self destruction.

Whether it’s Newsweek being sold to the husband of a Democratic congresswoman for a dollar, or ABC deciding to turn This Week into a BBC program by turning it over to Christiane Amanpour, last week the dying media itself provided us with two examples of why it’s dying.

By choosing radicalism over readers, the media continues narrowing its own readership and viewership, pursuing ideological purity, not only over integrity, but even over its own profits and future viability.

Take ABC’s news division, which has always been notorious for its political radicalism and distaste for the average American viewer.

Whether it was Peter Jennings comparing American voters to “a nation two-year olds” throwing a tantrum for voting in a Republican congress in 1994 (expect this metaphor to make a comeback after these midterm elections) or Ted Koppel turning the names of dead servicemen into an anti-war statement (Koppel was the alternative candidate to take over This Week), this has been the ABC way. But turning over This Week to Christiane Amanpour is part of the growing blend of ABC News and the BBC.

The question though is who is Christiane Amanpour meant to appeal to? To viewers who wanted another foreign talking head snootily reading the news at them, not to them. Who were desperately longing for an ABC News on air personality sympathetic to Islamic terrorists? And why would those people even bother with ABC News, when they already have the BBC.

The problem with the American media is that it doesn’t speak to Americans. That’s why FOX News is successful, and CNN is in the basement. Network news exists underwritten by medication and mutual fund commercials, and even so it’s losing money. ABC News is making severe cutbacks even while cutting Amanpour a 2 million dollar paycheck for a show hardly anyone watches anymore. …

And that is why the media is doomed. By putting politics over profitability, the media left alienated viewers and readers exactly during the critical transition period when it needed them most. And the worse its fortunes grow, the more radical its politics have become.

Ruling out NewsMax as a buyer, while selling Newsweek to the husband of a Democratic congresswoman for a dollar (still more than it’s worth) will allow it to keep grinding along for a time as a source of lifestyle tips and left wing rants. It is however only a matter of delaying the inevitable. The media cannot survive as a pity project. Not while it is alienating its remaining viewers and readers. And even a government bailout cannot sustain a financially unsustainable industry. And finally there are only so many jobs available at PBS and NPR.

When the left turned magazines, newspapers and TV news into its own bully pulpit, they helped drive away consumers, while locking up those same publications and broadcasts into a liberal ghetto, that was still not liberal enough for them. As print publications increasingly turn their websites into masses of blogs, it becomes hard to tell the difference between Time Magazine, Foreign Policy and the New York Times—and the Huffington Post and Daily Kos. All of them have angry left wing bloggers denouncing Republicans, America and Israel. The difference is that the official media outlets have more prominent names like Joe Klein or Robert Mackey blogging for them.

The Journalist scandal is the tip of the iceberg that shows just how thin the line between the press and the policies that they advocate really is. But that’s not news to anyone. The liberal media is not some right wing talking point, poll after poll shows most of people who read newspapers and watch the news have come to that conclusion on their own. Because while the media elite may sneer at them, the public knows quite well what they stand for. And the more the media goes left, the less the public trusts it. …

The left’s hijacking of American culture has turned institutions into rags and rubble, and it will only get worse. Because the left does not know when to stop. Does not understand that it should stop. That is why left wing revolutions that do succeed, eventually culminate in multiple levels of purges that exterminate many of the original revolutionaries, or send them off to fight and die somewhere else, turning them into convenient martyrs who look good on blood-red T-shirts.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to the Barrister.

The London Times recently made its content subscription-only (instantly losing 90% of its readership), but Matt Ridley put up his own editorial here (unfortunately, in one of the ugliest blog formats I’ve ever seen), advising readers not to believe all of the media’s environmentalist gloom and doom.

[D]o not underestimate nature’s powers of recovery. After most big oil spills, scientists are pleasantly surprised by how quickly the oil disappears and the marine life reappears. This is true even in Alaska, where the sheltered waters, low temperatures and abundant wildlife conspired to make the slick damaging and persistent. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says on its website: `What scientists have found is that, despite the gloomy outlook in 1989, the intertidal habitats of Prince William Sound have proved to be surprisingly resilient.’ A scientist who led some of the research into the Exxon Valdez says that `Thoughts that this is going to kill the Gulf of Mexico are just wild overreactions’.

When the Braer went aground off Shetland in 1993 and spilled 85,000 tonnes of oil, storms quickly dispersed the oil, so the effect on most of the local wildlife was barely measurable. As one scientific report drily noted, after running through a list of undetected effects on birds, shore life and seabed creatures, `five otters were found dead in the oil spill area. However, three of these were killed by vehicles, one was recovered before the oil could have reached it and the cause of mortality of the fifth did not appear to be oil contamination.’ (One of the road kills was allegedly caused by a television crew’s car.)

This rapid recovery was also a signature of the last big Gulf rig spill, the Ixtoc 1 disaster off Mexico in 1979. Although the number of turtles took decades to recover, much of the rest of the wildlife bounced back fairly rapidly. `To be honest, considering the magnitude of the spill, we thought the Ixtoc spill was going to have catastrophic effects for decades’, Luis Soto of the National Autonomous University of Mexico told a newspaper this year. `But within a couple of years, almost everything was close to 100 percent normal again.’ The warm waters and strong sunshine of the Gulf of Mexico are highly conducive to the chemical decomposition of oil by `photo-oxidation’, and are stuffed full of organisms that actually like to eat the stuff – in moderation.

Indeed, the sea floor in the Gulf is rich in `cold seeps’ — communities of tube worms and other organisms that live off oil naturally seeping from beneath the seabed. (The annual flow of oil through such seeps is about half the total spill.) Hundreds of these clusters of clams and tube worms have been found since the 1980s in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, living off the microbes that eat the oil.

Such ecosystems are not equipped to cope with being inundated with so much oil even if it is their food, but one Texas scientist told the New York Times that `the gulf is such a great fishery because it’s fed organic matter from oil…it’s pre-adapted to crude oil. The image of this spill being a complete disaster is not true.’

Read the whole thing.

Ed Driscoll rubs in the fact that the Internet changed the news and information business permanently, causing establishment media outlets like Newsweek, CBS, and CNN, all notorious for partisan reporting, to wonder where their audience went.

Silicon Graffiti 7:55 video

Flooded neighborhood, Monday, May 3

4:17 video

The flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 obsessed the media and produced a storm of criticism for an insufficiently massive and rapid federal response that turned national opinion finally against George W. Bush, making him into a lame duck for the rest of his second term, and presaging democrat recovery of both Congress and the White House. The New Orleans flood was treated as terribly important.

Recently, the Cumberland River crested Monday at 51.9 feet, 12 feet above flood stage, spilling over its banks into the city of Nashville, Tennessee, flooding a historic downtown, producing billions of dollars in damages and killing at least 30 people. Meanwhile, national news coverage has focused instead on an oil spill in the Gulf which had not even yet reached shore, and a car bomb in Times Square that did not even explode.

Why the differences in perceived significance and coverage? Andrew Romano explains that it’s a herd thing. They all cover what everybody else covers and they have a seriously limited attention range.

As you may have heard, torrential downpours in the southeast flooded the Tennessee capital of Nashville over the weekend, lifting the Cumberland River 13 feet above flood stage, causing an estimated $1 billion in damage, and killing more than 30 people. It could wind up being one of the most expensive natural disasters in U.S. history.

Or, on second thought, maybe you didn’t hear. With two other “disasters” dominating the headlines—the Times Square bombing attempt and the Gulf oil spill—the national media seems to largely to have ignored the plight of Music City since the flood waters began inundating its streets on Sunday. A cursory Google News search shows 8,390 hits for “Times Square bomb” and 13,800 for “BP oil spill.” “Nashville flood,” on the other hand, returns only 2,430 results—many of them local. As Betsy Phillips of the Nashville Scene writes, “it was mind-boggling to flip by CNN, MSNBC, and FOX on Sunday afternoon and see not one station even occasionally bringing their viewers footage of the flood, news of our people dying.”

So why the cold shoulder? I see two main reasons. First, the modern media may be more multifarious than ever, but they’re also remarkably monomaniacal. In a climate where chatter is constant and ubiquitous, newsworthiness now seems to be determined less by what’s most important than by what all those other media outlets are talking about the most. Sheer volume of coverage has become its own qualification for continued coverage. (Witness the Sandra Bullock-Jesse James saga.) In that sense, it’s easy to see why the press can’t seem to focus on more than one or two disasters at the same time. Everyone is talking about BP and Faisal Shahzad 24/7, the “thinking” goes. So there must not be anything else that’s as important to talk about. It’s a horrible feedback loop.

Of course, the media is also notorious for its ADD; no story goes on forever. Which brings us to the second reason the Nashville floods never gained much of a foothold in the national conversation: the “narrative” simply wasn’t as strong. Because it continually needs to fill the airwaves and the Internet with new content, 1,440 minutes a day, the media can only trade on a story’s novelty for a few hours, tops. It is new angles, new characters, and new chapters that keep a story alive for longer. The problem for Nashville was that both the gulf oil spill and the Times Square terror attempt are like the Russian novels of this 24/7 media culture, with all the plot twists and larger themes (energy, environment, terrorism, etc.) required to fuel the blogs and cable shows for weeks on end. What’s more, both stories have political hooks, which provide our increasingly politicized press (MSNBC, FOX News, blogs) with grist for the kind of arguments that further extend a story’s lifespan (Did Obama respond too slowly? Should we Mirandize terrorists?). The Nashville narrative wasn’t compelling enough to break the cycle, so the MSM just continued to blather on about BP and Shahzad.

Some news agency says the Army is dropping bayonet training, and informs its readers that soldiers no longer carry bayonets on their automatic rifles.

Heeding the advice of Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans, commanders are dropping five-mile runs and bayonet drills in favor of zigzag sprints and exercises that hone core muscles. Battlefield sergeants say that’s the kind of fitness needed to dodge across alleys, walk patrol with heavy packs and body armor or haul a buddy out of a burning vehicle.

Trainers also want to toughen recruits who are often more familiar with Facebook than fistfights.

“Soldiers need to be able to move quickly under load, to be mobile under load, with your body armor, your weapons and your helmet, in a stressful situation,” said Frank Palkoska, head of the Army’s Fitness School at Fort Jackson, which has worked several years on overhauling the regime.

“We geared all of our calisthenics, all of our running movements, all of our warrior skills, so soldiers can become stronger, more powerful and more speed driven,” Palkoska said. The exercises are part of the first major overhaul in Army basic fitness training since men and women began training together in 1980, he said.

The new plan is being expanded this month at the Army’s four other basic training installations—Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., Fort Sill, Okla., Fort Benning, Ga., and Fort Knox, Ky.

Drill sergeants with experience in the current wars are credited with urging the Army to change training, in particular to build up core muscle strength. One of them is 1st Sgt. Michael Todd, a veteran of seven deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

On a recent training day Todd was spinning recruits around to give them the feel of rolling out of a tumbled Humvee. Then he tossed on the ground pugil sticks made of plastic pipe and foam, forcing trainees to crawl for their weapons before they pounded away on each other.

“They have to understand hand-to-hand combat, to use something other than their weapon, a piece of wood, a knife, anything they can pick up,” Todd said.

The new training also uses “more calisthenics to build core body power, strength and agility,” Palkoska said in an office bedecked with 60-year-old black and white photos of World War II-era mass exercise drills. Over the 10 weeks of basic, a strict schedule of exercises is done on a varied sequence of days so muscles rest, recover and strengthen.

Another aim is to toughen recruits from a more obese and sedentary generation, trainers said.

Many recruits didn’t have physical education in elementary, middle or high school and therefore tend to lack bone and muscle strength. When they ditch diets replete with soda and fast food for healthier meals and physical training, they drop excess weight and build stronger muscles and denser bones, Palkoska said.

Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, the three-star general in charge of revamping all aspects of initial training, said his overall goal is to drop outmoded drills and focus on what soldiers need today and in the future.

Bayonet drills had continued for decades, even though soldiers no longer carry the blades on their automatic rifles. Hertling ordered the drills dropped.

“We have to make the training relevant to the conditions on the modern battlefield,” Hertling said during a visit to Fort Jackson in January.

Except that the Army is continuing Pugil Stick training and the Pugil Stick was invented during WWII as a method of training to fight with rifle and bayonet.

And the reporter is obviously confused about “carrying blades on automatic rifles,” not realizing perhaps that bayonets are not normally attached to rifles and are only mounted in extremis. The M9 Bayonet was adopted in 1984 and is designed for use with all of the M16 series rifles.

This kind of error should not be surprising. How long has it been, do you suppose, since a professional journalist working for a major news organization was a veteran?

M9 Bayonet mounted on the muzzle of an M4 carbine

Ron Grossman recently tested the historical knowledge of younger colleagues in the Chicago Tribune’s newsroom with sometimes disastrous results.

I took a quick survey in the newsroom the other day, something between a Rorschach test and a pop quiz, asking younger colleagues to identify an iconic photograph of World War II.

While some instantly recognized the image, others couldn’t quite place it.

“I know I ought to know it,” one co-worker said. “It was in the movie, ‘Flags of Our Fathers.’ ” Some, seeing uniforms, realized it must be a war photo. Maybe Vietnam? One got the era right but the battlefield wrong. She guessed it was D-Day, not, as it was, the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima.