June 11,
2004
Posted at
3:00 PM, Pacific
The service
this morning was inspiring and memorable, with every
speaker hitting a different, but crucial note.
The singing of Jerusalem
surprised me, but fit perfectly a ceremony that included
Lady Thatcher's moving tribute, and the presence of
Prime Minister Tony Blair. This hymn, so English,
was nevertheless perfect for a ceremony that celebrated
what the English-speaking peoples had accomplished in
the '80s through the leadership of Reagan and Thatcher.
The tribute of former Candian PM Mulroney added to the
unspoken theme of the allies who, far more than any
others, saw the Soviet Union for what it was and brought
it down.
President
Bush's tribute was obviously hearfelt and reminded the
nation of the long expanse of Reagan's life and of his
love of family, country and freedom. Former President
Bush was the most emotional of the eulogists, reflecting
his indebtedness to Reagan, an indebtedness the first
President Bush was quick to acknowledge. (I appreciated
President Bush's reference to the fact that Ronald Reagan
bested two good men to reach the presidency, one from
Plains and one from Houston. Watchers from around
the world would get a lesson in that comment on the
underlying strength of the democratic traditions of
the country.)
The Washington
Post collected some observation from around the
city which makes for fine reading, but if you missed
the funeral, it would be well worth the effort to find
a replay this evening. Rarely does such a tribute
occur because such men are rare.
Winston Churchill's
grave is far from London, in the cemetary of St. Martin's
Church in Bladon, Oxfordshire. But in Westminster
Abbey there is a marble slab near the entrance that
records the simple command: "Remember Winston Churchill."
Such a memorial
in our nation's Capitol would be fitting.
Charles Krauthammer
gives President Reagan a great send-off in his Washington
Post column today.
The New York
Times, on the other hand, runs a
column by an obscure history professor that uses
the occasion to try to score points on President Bush
by arguing that unlike Reagan, Bush has been mastered
by those dangerous neocons. "But many neocons
came to hate Mr. Reagan," claims the piece.
Oh? Could we have some names please? Like
Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, or Bill Kristol?
The Times allowed this column to run without a single
name to bolster this wildly partisan and inaccurate
thesis?
There is panic
on the left as the connections between Reagan and Bush
are so vivid. What a silly piece to run on such
a significant day. The New York Times: Wrong about
Reagan then; wrong about Reagan now.
The Times
also has a silly piece that argues only
5% of the electorate is yet to decide between Bush
and Kerry., and that the election turns on these 5%.
While late-deciding voters surely are important, many
more will change their minds between now and November,
and some portion of one or the other's base will grow
demoralized and stay home.
Which is why
the Boston
Globe's article on John Edwards "pick me, pick
me" operation is so interesting. The
Kerry people know their man is as dull as dirt, as inspiring
as liquid versus solid detergent. But Edwards
would only underscore the dreariness of Kerry, making
Democratic voters regret their nomination every day
that the fresh and energetic Edwards appeared on the
trail, followed by the lugubrious Kerry.
Would a Yugo
dealer really want a Lexus dealer to open up next door?
Time to go
watch the farewells to a great man.
June 10,
2004
Lileks
e-mailed me a link
to Michael Moore's website that gives you a quick
education on the DNC's
new favorite film-maker. If the deal has in
fact been struck, we also have to ask if the Moore distributor
has made an illegal campaign contribution to the DNC/Kerry
campaign by subsidizing the purchase of the DVDs of
Moore's new agit-prop.
UPDATE: Friday's
Los Angeles Times carries a
very amusing story of a blustering Jabba the propagandist
threatening to turn the least feared p.r. consultants
in America loose on anyone who attacks his film.
That's right, he's hired Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani,
last seen working together as a team advising Gray Davis
on California's energy crisis, though both have moved
on to other high profile efforts --like Lehane's assistance
to Wesley Clark. Said Moore: "Employing
the Clinton strategy of '92, we will allow no attack
on this film to go without a response immediately.
And we will go after anyone who slanders me or my work,
and we will do it without mercy. And when you
thin 'without mercy,' you think Chris Lehane."
What's he
going to do? Sit on people? And Lehane as
fearsome? When I think of Lehane, I think of Monty
Python's The Comfy Chair.
Still, the
boys at Powerline who have revealed Moore
to be a fraud, and Fred Barnes, who has documented
Moore as a liar are on notice. No mercy for
you! You get...the Comfy Chair!
Command
Post, Rantburg,
Llama
Butchers, and Tim
Worstall are all over the very significant news
that U.N. weapons inspectors have found banned missile
parts from Iraq in Jordan. It will be interesting
to see if the media's editing-with-a-purpose (see Patterico
and New
England Republican on the subject) hits this story
as well.
Oh, and give
a look at American
Thinker's thoughts on Ronald Reagan, and Powerline's
comments on the same Washington Post article that
launched my morning blogging.
Pay no attention
to Fraters.
They've all been in
the bottle again.
Reuters
reporting that four men tried to pass themselves off
as journalists in Baghdad were nabbed when security
detected explosive residue on their clothes.
Explosives were then found in their hotel room.
This is similar
to the trick the Taliban-Al Qaeda used to assassinate
the leader of the Northern Alliance, Ahmed
Shah Massoud, just prior to the invasion of Afghanistan.
Obviously the new government in Iraq are marked men,
and deserve enormous respect for their courage.
The
American Spectator is reporting an unbelievable
story: That the Democratic National Committee will purchase
a half-million DVDs of Michael Moore's hate-filled,
anti-American, French- and Hollywood-approved movie.
Of course this has the effect of putting, what, $4 million
in Moore's pocket, which would be a nice payday for
the leading propagandist of the left.
Of course the DNC sponsorship, if
proven true, has the effect of putting John Kerry squarely
behind Michael Moore. There is no other way to
interpret the backing of the DNC, except as a Kerry-endorsement.
Now Moore did wonders for General Clark in the primaries,
and is the sort of repulsive figure whom most mainstream
Democrats don't want hanging around the party's front
door.
But there he is, a sort of Kerry running-mate.
So when will the elite media get around to asking Terry
McAuliffe --who's under a gag order these days-- whether
this is his latest brainstorm?
UPDATE: Caller
Leslie from Houston points out that had the RNC purchased
a half-million copies of the Clinton Chronicles when
that hit-video appeared in the '90s, the media would
have melted down in indignation. But of course
today's media doesn't really think Moore's a nut.
Edgy, maybe, but not a nut.
Even though
he's a nut.
My WeeklyStandard.com
column from today:"Both
Great and Right." It shamelessly steals
from Peter Robinson's declaration on my program earlier
this week that "Ronald Reagan was great because
Ronald Reagan was right." Peter's book remains
your best bet for understanding why people are so moved:
How
Ronald Reagan Changed My Life.
Here's an
e-mail I received from Jayson Javitz (Polipundit.com)
concerning my morning post.
"Hugh:
Today
you wrote: “Some stories cannot be spun, and all of
those things favor the President because facts are stubborn
things.”
How
right you are.
Indeed,
the job market is the Sine Qua Non of an incumbent President’s
re-election chances. Why? Two reasons: (1) when it
comes down to brass tacks, the American electorate votes
the way their pocket books tell them to vote; (2) unlike
virtually every other issue, the job market cannot be
self-censored or spun by the media.
Although
vast swaths of our electorate admittedly do not know
the difference between GDP and GOP, they know if they’re
working or not. They know if their machine shops are
hiring or not. They can see the “help wanted” signs
with their own two eyes. They drive to work, instead
of the unemployment office, in their own vehicles.
Or
to put it another way: Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
Has
there ever been an incumbent President in “worse shape”
at this point of the election cycle than Tricky Dick? He
presided over the worst years of the Vietnam War. Then,
there was Kent State . And the abrupt end to our Moon
exploration program as a result of the Apollo 13 near-disaster
to boot.
McGovern
was swept to the nomination by a grass-roots campaign
of angry, young liberal voters. It was a “revolution,”
right? And, of course, back then, there was no Fox News,
or Rush, or the internet, to counter the mind-numbing
bias of the national media.
So,
President McGovern, right? Wrong.
The
job market surged in 1972. As a result, Nixon, of course,
annihilated McGovern in arguably the most preposterous
landslide in history.
Same
for Reagan.
The
recession in 1982 was the worst since the Great Depression
(in fact, not just in the media). There were huge job
losses. Then there was Beirut in 1983. And continuing
tensions with the Soviet Union .
Mondale
was a former Vice President, not a mere Junior Senator
from the Northeast. He named a woman to be his running
mate. My God, that should have energized the base and
locked up the national female vote, right? And, again,
still no Fox News, Rush, or Hugh Hewitt, to counteract
the astonishing propaganda campaign in which the national
liberal media engaged. In light of the prior job losses,
the still-high rates of inflation and mortgage rates,
Beirut , the gender gap, and media bias, Reagan should
have been defeated, right?
Wrong.
The
economy turned around in the third quarter of Reagan’s
third year (exactly as it did last year). The job market
started surging in roughly March of 1984 (exactly as
it did this year).
Reagan,
of course, destroyed Mondale in arguably the most preposterous
landslide in history.
Hugh,
we’re heading for Kael-ish moment on November 3rd. George
Bush will win this election in an electoral landslide,
with perhaps as much as 56 percent of the total vote.
The next day, the Aaron Browns, Meyersons, Finemans,
Rathers, Brokaws, Krugmans, John Carrolls, and the Eleanor
Clifts of the World literally will not know what hit
them. It truly will be self parody.
“Why,
I don’t know how Bush won; nobody * I
know * voted for him.”
Yes,
Virginia, there’s a whole other country out there west
of the Hudson River and east of Glendale.
Best
regards,
Jayson Javitz"
Polipundit.com
The
Los Angeles Times says Kerry is building a lead. Right. They
thought Gray Davis was in the hunt last fall as well. But
the folks who have decided to turn on Bush, like Andrew
Sullivan, have seized on the Times' push-polling
via crack-pot sampling to proclaim doom and gloom. The
president's pollster, Matthew Dowd, replied in a story
at MSNBC. Sure
enough, the oversampling of Dems drives the results
the Times wanted to achieve, a technique perfected in
2002 by the Minneapolis Star Tribune when it was puffing
first Wellstone and then Mondale.
As noted
below, Deborah Orin in the New
York Post is keeping her eye on the Iowa Political
Futures market. You should as well.
UPDATE:
Captain's
Quarters reminds us why the Los Angeles Times
is not to be trusted on matters of polling.
Ed links to the Times poll one month before Gray Davis
was recalled by a landslide and Arnold won by 16%.
The Times poll showed the vote on Davis to be within
the margin of error, and Cruz Bustamante leading Arnold
by 5%.
The Times recently announced it was
cutting
many positions from its editorial staff.
If any of these are good reporters, they might want
to ask why money is being spent on worthless polls
that bring scorn onto the paper while slashing keeps
up in the newsroom.
The Washington
Post's Jonathan Weisman is
"shocked, shocked" that the strong economy
hasn't helped President Bush's poll numbers.
After three
years of negative stories about his economic policy,
and then nine months of minimizing the robust recovery,
only recently have the nation's elite media outlets
begun to report the breadth and scope of the economic
boom underway. First it was a "jobless recovery."
Then the jobs were the right kind of jobs. Now
that the job growth is spread across the economy and
the GDP is galloping, the scribblers are worrying about
interest rates and oil shocks.
Weisman speculates
--and that's what it is, pure speculation playing on
page 1 of the Post-- that the war is obscuring the economy.
But the war doesn't report. The media reports.
And on the war much of the coverage has been bleak as
well, even as despotism and terrorism give way to genuine
democracy. (For an example of turning good news
into dreary news, read Thomas
Friedman's column this morning.)
Why are Bush's
numbers down? Because the media has been about
driving them down for months. Why will they spring
back? Because facts are stubborn things, and the
genuine progress in Iraq combined with the undeniable
economic boom are great things touching the lives of
millions of voters.
Pew has a
vast
new report out on the news habits of Americans that
concludes among other things that Americans are growing
more polarized in their news choices --that they
have definite views about which news source to trust
and modify their news acquisition habits accordingly.
My favorite section of the report: "Media
Credibility Declines." What a surprise.
This election cycle has ratified every suspicion the
center-right has about elite media bias, and so polling
that doesn't reflect good news in Bush's numbers doesn't
surprise me.
Inevitably,
however, elections are about choices, not about news
spin. Voters focusing on the choice between Bush
and Kerry haven't bolted for Kerry despite two months
of non-stop negative coverage of Iraq and avoidance
of the economic sparkle. As November draws closer,
the nets and the papers have to compare and contrast
and are obliged to cover both candidates and the day's
stories, just as they are obliged to cover Reagan's
funeral and the D-Day memorials. Some stories
cannot be spun, and all of those favor the president
because facts are stubborn things.
Weisman's
story seems a jammed-in gift to Democrats in a week
where they must be feeling run over by Ronald Reagan
--again. Not only are they watching the country
and the world celebrate a political life they opposed
at every turn, they also know what happened at the U.N.
Monday, and they see the support for America that is
flowing from the new Iraqi government.
So the Post
gives the Dems some ice-cream on the front page.
The cruel
political reality for the left is that if the Dems hold
on to the hope that Bush's numbers are down because
of what Bush has done, they will continue to criticize
what Bush has done, making themselves the enemy of liberation
and economic expansion. As Dems on the Senate
Judiciary Committee did on Tuesday, Kerry and his surrogates
will continue to berate everything Bush has undertaken,
thus cementing in the public's mind the knowledge that
Kerry would do everything differently. He would
fight the war on terror differently. He would
raise taxes. He would cut-and-run from Iraq, etc.
Fine by me.
The clearest choice since 1980 straight ahead, and the
parallels to the campaign of 1980 are also pretty amazing.
(See
the New York Post's Deborah Orin's commentary this morning.
Orin is always ahead of the media pack with both news
and analysis.) We know how that contest turned
out when the American people were offered a choice between
fear and timidity on the one hand and bold leadership
on the other.
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