This morning, while dropping the little phisch off at school and running an errand, I caught a bit of Laura Ingraham. She was discussing and taking calls about David Letterman’s treatment of Bill O’Reilly when the latter appeared on the former’s show earlier this week.
I’m not an O’Reilly fan in the least, and I am an infrequent watcher of Letterman, but when I have tuned in, I too have noticed the late night host’s slide toward the radical left.
The late night shows, Leno and Letterman, have always poked fun at whomever is the current President, and the Congress. That’s not the issue here. Carson did the same, and it’s to be expected. They are public figures, and one of the great things about our country, as opposed to, say, the workers’ paradise ninety miles off the coast of Florida, is that we can poke fun at our leaders without fear of reprisal. We have come to accept, and expect, such fun-poking from the late-night hosts.
Within the past couple of years, however, both Leno and Letterman have increasingly been slinging barbs, instead of zingers, with regard to the President in particular, and conservatives in general. Leno, at least, remains funny and charming about it, and tries to be balanced. Letterman, however, appears bitter, his comments aren’t funny, and he certainly isn’t interested in trying to be fair.
From the clips I heard, O’Reilly was trying to keep things light, quipping that Dave should tune in to O’Reilly’s show, and maybe they would “send him a hat.” Letterman’s response was something along the lines of, “So long as it’s a Cindy Sheehan hat.” Cindy Sheehan, Dave? She’s so last year. No one even showed up for her book signing.
Letterman’s strength has always been his and his staff’s writing. Among the reasons I’ve tuned in less and less to Letterman is that strength is waning, and he’s allowing too much of his political beliefs come through in what is supposed to be an entertainment show. No one tunes in to Letterman or Leno to listen to political rants, from either perspective, or to discuss world events. People tune in to get the latest entertainment gossip, watch the “interviews,” and get a good laugh. Letterman has become fallow ground for the latter.
Tag: politics
[T]he establishment media clearly leans toward the view that the NSA leak was in the public interest. Unlike the Plame probe, the Justice Department career employees trying to investigate the NSA case can expect no laudatory editorials urging them to pursue their job relentlessly and, above all, no media bloodhounds conducting their own parallel investigations.
The old adage that politics should stop at the water’s edge was abandoned long ago. Now the idea that all of us, regardless of political stripe, have a stake in preventing harm to national security from unauthorized intelligence leaks seems to have similarly entered the dustbin of history.
The last major war the United States was involved in was Vietnam. The modern Democratic Party leadership all came of age during that war, as did most of the editorial staff in the manistream media. It wasn’t just a defining moment in the modern American left, it was the defining moment, the prism through which the left would view the world from that moment on. Vietnam was justification for every pacifist tendency that every liberal has ever had. When they said that war didn’t solve anything, they could point to Vietnam. When they wanted to show the consequences of war, they could point to Vietnam. When they wanted to show the failure of military force as a tool for political change, they could point to Vietnam. It was the last major war this country was ever involved in. Sure we’ve had military operations, from Grenada to the Gulf War to the Balkans, but Vietnam our last big one, and it was a war we ended up losing. Vietnam has been their de facto answer for everything for the past 30 years.
Iraq threatens their entire belief system.
[Emphasis added. –R]
Jeff takes the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s (“Intelligencer”? Granted, I know it’s a real word, but come one. Couldn’t you have just said “Reporter”?) Thomas Shapley–hereafter referred to as “Tom”–to task for the latter’s confusing of the Valerie Plame non-event and the recent leak on NSA surveillance:
How peculiar indeed that the President and his administration should respond differently to these two situations. How very odd that when something right out of the pages of a movie of the week crops up and administration opponents do their level best to capitalize on it in order to harm the President and obstruct his second-term agenda, that the administration should respond one way, but when a loose-lipped grudge-bearer calls up a reporter and blows the lid on an operation that saves American lives, the administration does something else entirely.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say the White House is doing its job, Tom.
From the level-headed responses I’ve read regarding the NSA’s web cookie whoopsie, Captain Ed has to have the best analysis:
In the great spectrum of Internet privacy dangers, “persistent cookies” sits on the weakest end. Spyware from free downloads cause more security problems than cookies, and even the ones used by the NSA can be blocked by any browser on the market. The AP uses the mistake to make cookies sound vaguely sinister when they’re almost as ubiquitous on the Internet as pop-up ads, if not more so. The Guardian gets even more hysterical, in all senses of the word, when it says that the “[e]xposure adds to pressure over White House powers”.
The silliest part of the story is that no one can understand why the cookies would present any danger to visitors to the NSA website. Both versions of the story call the risk to surfers “uncertain”, but a more accurate description would be “irrelevant”. Even if the NSA used it to track where casual visitors to its site surfed afterwards, it would discover nothing that any casual surfer wouldn’t already be able to access on their own with Google or a quick check on Free Republic. Now imagine who stops to check on the NSA website and try very hard to come up with any good reason to spend precious resources on scouring the web preferences of bloggers and privacy groups instead of focusing on real signal intelligence, which already comes in such volume that the agency has trouble keeping up with their primary task.
[Emphasis in the original.]
I find it amusing the producers of Syriana are touting the fact of their whopping two Golden Globe nominations. The movie cost $50 million, and has only made $33.6 million after being in theaters a month, a third of that made on its opening weekend. Then there are all of those marketing costs, such as commercials touting your two Golden Globe nominations.
[Figures courtesy of Box Office Mojo.]
Mary Katharine Ham notes a Boston Globe piece on how, just under three years away from the next presidential election, the Democratic Party is already seeking dirt on a potential Republican contender.
This is yet further proof that the Democrats are out of ideas. Their only platform continues to be “We’re everything the Republicans aren’t.” That may work with the lunatic fringe of the Left, but in mainstream America, voters like to hear about plans and ideas for moving the country forward.
By now, most people have heard John Kerry’s slanderous comments about our servicemen terrorizing women and children in Iraq. James Taranto turns the table on the man who would be President, noting a CNN story about what a handful of our servicemen are really up to: doing everything possible, with help from folks stateside, to see that a little Iraqi girl doesn’t die from spina bifida.
Jeff does an outstanding job of showing the flip side of the coin the press doesn’t want to admit:
Yes, the President is responsible for making the decision to go to war based in part on intelligence that turned out to be incomplete. But the President is also responsible for acting with swift resolve to unseat a brutal dictator, terrorist and friend to terrorists. He’s also responsible for having the sheer guts to go it alone when a great many of the West’s liberal democracies shirked their responsibility both as leaders of the world and as members of the Security Council of the United Nations. He’s also responsible for bringing Saddam Hussein to justice, for capturing or killing his cohorts in crime, for cutting off a huge source of funding to Palestinian murder gangs, for shattering Ansar al-Islam, and for freeing the Shiite people of Iraq from decades of illegitimate rule by a Stalinist political party. And in many ways, President Bush is personally responsible for bringing liberty to Iraq for the first time ever, and for changing the history of the Middle East, and the Arab and Muslim worlds.
The Democratic Party’s national leadership has plumbed a record depth in its search to score points against the Republicans. In the past week and a half, both House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean have called for the United States to surrender in Iraq. Not since George McGovern in 1972 has one party called for the United States military to surrender to an enemy during wartime.
Some will object to the word, “surrender,” but there is no other word to describe the immediate withdrawal of troops from the war zone in Iraq. The simple fact is that two of the nation’s three highest-ranking Democrats are advocating an enemy victory over U.S. forces in a foreign land. That not only is appalling in its contempt for the troops who have died to liberate Iraq, it is astonishing in its brazen disregard for the lives and well-being of the Iraqi people.
[Via Political Diary.]