Those of us who observe the media are aware of the blatant double standard in political reporting. Sometimes a string of events simply overwhelms the bias and the truth escapes into public view. Such was the case with Joe Biden last week.
Media bias in general, and Joe Biden in particular are very well dissected in this column from Townhall.
Conservatives can explain their reasons; Liberals can tell you their feelings. Two recent columns have explored the idea that conservatives understand and honor their past intellectual leaders and liberals do not. At Powerline, Steven Hayward asks, Why Is There No Liberal Ayn Rand?, and at Pajamas Media, Ed Driscoll expands on the theme. Here’s a quote from the Driscoll column:
Everyone agrees that President Obama is not only a man but a symbol. He is a symbol of America’s decisive victory over bigotry. But he is also a symbol, a living embodiment, of the failure of American education and its ongoing replacement by political indoctrination. He is a symbol of the new American elite, the new establishment, where left-liberal politics is no longer a conviction, no longer a way of thinking: it is built-in mind-furniture you take for granted without needing to think.”
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Read: An Instance of Liberals’ Preference For Narrative Over Reality. Obama is his brother’s keeper only in the “other people’s money” sense.
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“The events of the last 44 months are no accident. The state of the current economy does not represent the unintended consequence of a well-intentioned leader “in over his head….” John McLaughlin analyzes the Battle of Ideologies here.
Quotes without comments…
Obama: “I don’t think you or anybody who’s been watching the campaign would say that in any way we have tried to divide the country.”
Wrong Century Biden: “Folks, Where’s it written we cannot lead the world in the 20th century in making automobiles?’
Nancy Pelosi: “Unemployment checks are the fastest way to create jobs.”
CNN’s Soledad O’Brien: “I dont think I show bias.”
Treat yourself to this priceless video of Ryan eating Obama’s lunch for real. Ryan schools the empty suit on Obamacare:
Senator Alan Simpson had this to say about Ryan in the race:
“There will be an adult conversation, therefore the children will throw emotion, fear, guilt, and racism on him,” he added. “They will bomb him, bomb him, shell him coastline and bunker, and he will survive. He has facts. He uses math. He’s damn good. He’s excellent.”
Not much of a big deal was made out of the event, but on Sunday night there was a human achievement of epic proportions. I am not referring to Olympians who could run fast, or jump high, I’m talking about the staggering achievement of gently landing a complex mobile science laboratory, with pinpoint accuracy, on the surface of another planet. The Mars Curiosity Rover exemplifies rational Man at his very best.
Curiosity left this planet 8 months ago and traveled 352 million miles at about 13,000 miles per hour to rendezvous with the red planet. A gentle landing required that many completely new inventions all would work flawlessly the first time they were tried. There would be no possibility of human intervention during landing. The millions of lines of code directing the landing events all had to be written correctly in advance.
I watched the successful landing and had the same feelings I had 8 years ago when a much smaller Rover landed on Mars. I thought again about the relatively trivial things that are considered big news and the relatively meaningless things that capture human emotions. I wrote an essay back then about my counter-cultural views on human achievement – real vs. imagined: Continue reading
Douglas Herz, in a column at American Thinker asks some questions about the “you didn’t build that” philosophy:
“If I owe others for my success, don’t they owe me? Doesn’t everyone owe everyone else? Wouldn’t all this just cancel out, leaving only individual drive, initiative, and entrepreneurship?
•Variation: if everyone owes everyone else, shouldn’t it be by the amount of taxes they pay? So, shouldn’t the 50% who pay no taxes owe the top 5% the most? And, since the 50% who pay no taxes vote mainly for Obama, doesn’t he actually owe the top 5% for his presidency, and so shouldn’t he represent their views? “
Milton Friedman, great defender of freedom, would have been 100 years old yesterday. His television series, “Free To Choose” was one of the best things ever shown on public television. Watching Friedman clips on YouTube is time well spent because he so simply and concisely explains principles of liberty.
This is one of my favorites:
Two Friedman quotes:
“If you put the Federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”
“Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.”