Six weeks.

That’s the length of an election campaign here on the other side of the pond – and even that’s too long for some people.

Furthermore we do not have zillions of professional “consultants” and “strategists” pimping themselves for campaign employment. Because there are quite strict UK laws governing electoral expenditure almost all our campaigning is done by amateur volunteer activists often working out of their own homes (a bit like O4P, perhaps….)

So the reports coming to us out of Hot Air and other political media (“Perrypalooza”) fifteen months before the actual election give us the impression of a nation in a state of stretched out permanent political hyperventilation. Ed and Allahpundit, bless their little hearts, descend in a frenzy upon every opinion poll and analyse each cross tab with the zeal of an augur in Ancient Rome examining a bunch of chicken livers.

They then present the findings as if they are tablets of stone from Mount Sinai itself.

But a few days ago Pollinsider provided a refreshing dash of ice cold water to dissipate the heat generated by the Bachmann/Perry feeding frenzy and the speculation about Governor Palin.

Believe it or not, in their quests (or probable quest in Palin’s case) for the GOP nomination both Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney are working under the same premise: No one is paying attention right now. Sure, some people are paying attention. But that “some” is probably you and me and maybe 5% of the rest of the voting population.

See his point? Only political junkies are paying attention at this moment in time. However much the media play it up (and after all they have columns and screens to fill) he hazards a guess that Ames/Iowa had very little impact on the consciousness of most Americans.

As Palin has said, most people are not interested in the primary process right now, most people are worried about their families, their jobs, their kids, and what to make for dinner tonight. She is right. Being the most politically interested of my family and friends, I nevertheless have many friends and family who fall into the 96% group. These are people who know and follow politics to a degree, but are not uber-involved in the process and what is going on.

The media especially gets all wound up over who is where and what he/she said. They are constantly searching for new angles….

All of these candidates announced at different times. All of them had a short time frame when they were the “it” candidate. The Media Flavor of the Month. Right now, Perry is the flavor of the month. Why? Because 96% of the population is not paying attention. Everything they know comes from passing, a brief blip on the tv or radio, or by word of mouth. And these are the people who are polled, and this is why the race changes so dramatically so often, with so many new and frequent “frontrunners” challenging Romney.

Read the rest here then just unclench those muscles and relax for a few moments. The circus is in town but it could be that most people are probably not paying too much attention.

Am I wrong or am I wrong?

BTW…maybe Sarah Palin has been reading these words from one of the greatest poems ever written

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting….

After all there might well be a definite need for adult supervision later……

My other piece of advice, Copperfield, said Mr. Micawber, you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and, in short, you are for ever floored. As I am!

Ah, Wilkins Micawber….if only you were in Washington to talk some sense to President Obama. The politicians might be able to conjure up some sort of last minute Debt Ceiling fix that can flatter the markets for a few microseconds but some would argue that it will really be like covering plague sores with heavy theatrical make up – and in a way the actor analogy is highly appropriate. Boston University’s Professor Laurence Kotlikoff sees the current situation as a piece of political theatre choreographed to distract the public from the cold stark facts of economic reality.

Let’s get real. The U.S. is bankrupt. Neither spending more nor taxing less will help the country pay its bills.

Kotlikoff differentiates between the “official” debt of approximately 14 trillion and what he calls actual net indebtedness of 202 trillion. The true extent of the government’s liabilities have been hidden by a deft piece of legerdemain, that oh so useful tool of the crooked accountant – relabelling.

Congress has been very careful over the years to label most of its liabilities“unofficial” to keep them off the books and far in the future.

But unofficial or not the liabilities are already there, dark clouds on the horizon that will never clear but will eventually blacken the whole sky.

Why?

We have 78 million baby boomers who, when fully retired, will collect benefits from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid that, on average, exceed per-capita GDP. The annual costs of these entitlements will total about $4 trillion in today’s dollars. Yes, our economy will be bigger in 20 years, but not big enough to handle this size load year after year.
This is what happens when you run a massive Ponzi scheme for six decades straight, taking ever larger resources from the young and giving them to the old while promising the young their eventual turn at passing the generational buck.

This isn’t just a problem for America. It’s a problem for most of the western world. It’s the eternal confidence trick that promises rainbows and unicorns with just one rub of the genie’s lamp.

We shake our heads at the tortured self destruction of Amy Winehouse. We congratulate ourselves they we have never been weak enough to become enslaved to the drug dealers haunting the other side of the tracks. But in reality the massive amounts of debt carried by western governments are the symptoms of our own society’s addiction to robbing the future to pleasure the present.

Read the rest of Kotlikoff’s piece here – it paints a chilling picture but implicit within the message is the desperate need for political leaders who have the courage to tell the truth to their fellow citizens and the steel to confront the pied pipers of the Obama left or, as Jeff Randall of the UK Daily Telegraph calls them

media dons, Princeton’s Paul Krugman and British-born David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, championing fiscal incontinence as the route to salvation.

In 1940, when Churchill promised the British people nothing but “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” it was the first time for decades that they had heard a politician treating them as adults by telling them the truth. They responded, not with despair but with a grim determination to confront the harsh realities of the present with a shared sacrifice so that future generations could live in peace and freedom.

That was leadership.

Where are the Churchills of the 21st century?

The BBC’s Jonny Dymond has been sounding out some of the usual suspects from the US liberal left over their reaction to the News of the World phone hacking affair.

The top brass at the Beeb have obviously got the nod from their friends at the New York Times (“the Democratic Party at prayer”) that the Obama machine is very interested in the possibility of slipping a knife between Murdoch’s ribs and defenestrating Fox News. Dymond, therefore, was temporarily withdrawn from the Tea Party=militias=KKK =racism desk at AgitProp HQ and ordered to link up with the planners at Operation Fox Hunter.

Washington correspondent Jonny Dymond reports on whether any “bad habits have slipped over to the Atlantic”

Jonny isn’t talking about his own bad habits of slipping things across borders… Lithuanian customs officers still have him on file. Nor was he talking about CNN’s Piers Morgan’s habits because, so far, the BBC doesn’t appear to be too interested in a left wing tabloid not owned by Murdoch.

No – we are now reaching what I predicted was the most important item on the agenda…..the preparation of a full frontal attack on Fox News.

Others with noses closer to the DC beltway have also been sniffing the air, particularly the UK Telegraph’s Toby Harnden. He tried for ages to get a feel on the Murdoch/USA issue from Obama apparatchiks in Congress and the White House but kept on getting blanked.

They were all waiting for Valerie Jarrett to tell Obama what his decision would be.

It was a go.

Straight away Sen Jay Rockefeller had new batteries inserted and was wheeled out to transmit the official party line.

SEIU is almost certainly being fed more Soros money to add to it’s taxpayer funded coffers in order to organise “spontaneous” demonstrations of anger outside Fox properties. “Independent” op-ed scribblers at NYT and WaPo have received templates for their thoughtful “fairness” pieces.

I called this Dan Rather’s revenge not because it was Fox that pulled that neat little trick. Fox is too timid to operate behind enemy lines like the right blogosphere. Fox’s importance is to act, like the UK’s Mail and Sun, as a counter balance to the distortion of the news as it is passed through the left wing filters of the establishment media. The right blogosphere’s role is to dig up the evidence for the lies, corruption and hypocrisy of the left’s mouthpieces in New York, Hollywood and elsewhere.

Unlike Chappaquidick and the NYT/Guardian Wikileaks campaign nobody has been killed as a result of News of the World phone hacking. Yes it was unsavoury and seedy – but that is the nature of journalism. It’s a competitive dog eat dog world where you are only as good as your last story – just like Hollywood, politics and drug dealing. So the key to fighting the forthcoming onslaught is not to excuse the activities that took place several years ago under the Blair/Brown Labour government that refused to take action because at the time they were supported by the Murdoch press.

The line to take is to condemn all dirty tricks then follow up with just a representative sample of nefarious activities undertaken by the Democrats and their surrogates over the last ten years….you’ll be spoiled for choice.

Then, as was once suggested by a certain Chicago Light Bringer, get in their faces.

The big question is – what will the GOP political/media”leadership” do over this? Surely it won’t bolt for cover and hide under the table with its thumb in its mouth while the mob is baying outside the door….will it?

Surely there will be someone who will run to the fight – with a smile and a rapier….

In the old Soviet Union one tool Kremlinologists used to forecast shifts in the political climate was to peruse the inside pages of Pravda and spot the apparently insignificant article that they could identify as a marker for any forthcoming reconfiguration.

The articles were placed as signposts for mid level Communist Party members to prepare for changes in direction in their party “work” which, for the CPSU, as with any other totalitarian party, was almost exclusively agitprop –agitation and propaganda.

The BBC in very many ways can be seen as an agitprop arm of the British liberal/left cultural elite, a group which usually manages to direct the UK’s political and social agenda even though much of it (EU membership, unrestricted immigration, political correctness etc etc)is deeply unpopular with the majority of the population.

Moreover, with the globalisation of information media ,the lack of any patriotic affinity in the mindset of this elite allows it to integrate seamlessly with its equivalents in the USA and elsewhere

So the appearance of this article by Tom Geoghegan on the BBC website “Rupert Murdoch:Could his US empire be affected?” should be ringing alarm bells for conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic. For this is not really about the rather shady ethics of a few phone hacking tabloid journalists. Indeed, while the story only appeared to involve celebrities and politicians it never really gained traction. Moreover, because the hacking took place several years ago under a Blair/Brown Labour government that at the time was very cosy with Rupert Murdoch and his tabloids meant that it remained low key with Milliband, Balls and co. Besides News of the World staff had been jailed and the editor at the time had resigned so heads had rolled.

But what has given it legs in New York and London is the revelation that the paper’s staff had hacked into a murder victim’s mobile phone. This has, quite rightly, created immense public anger – and given the liberal/left media elite, so often out of tune with popular opinion, a golden opportunity to spearhead a lynch mob.

It’s not about Murdoch and his papers – after all the dead tree press as a vehicle for news is a dinosaur on its way to extinction. The real target is Murdoch the TV baron with Fox News in the USA and Sky News in Britain. Note how Geoghan slips “right wing” into the mix. It’s a standard adjective that is permanently attached to any comment about Fox News in the UK and, it must be admitted, a brilliant example of the effectiveness of well organised agitprop. The fact that every other US network/cable news platform is imbued as deeply as the BBC in the liberal/left metro mindset is always studiously ignored.

It is no accident that the long buried phone hacking story was disinterred by the New York Times last autumn and quickly picked up in Britain by the Guardian and the BBC just as Murdoch’s bid for the whole of Sky. the BBC’s only meaningful TV competitor was about to go under public scrutiny. All three have a keen interest in undermining Murdoch and emasculating Fox because they know that Murdoch is the only player in the game who threatens the dominant position of the liberal/left cultural elite in the UK and the USA.

A perceptive piece in The Commentator reads the runes with chilling accuracy. This is not about journalistic ethics. It’s a fight to protect the authority of the great and the good against the upstarts of the new media – and, at the moment, the right wing establishment is doing what it does best….running for cover.

It’s the revenge of Dan Rather.

Who are they, these Palinistas?

Some, of course claim to know them.

Palinbots, wingnuts, cultists….the list could go on and on – and that is just from some of the comments critical of Palin and her supporters at Hot Air, a leading conservative internet hang out.

From the left, of course, a more nuanced critique of the Palinistas from Chris Matthews

“I don’t think she is a thoughtful politician. I think she’s talking to people who don’t read newspapers, don’t pay attention to serious television broadcasts, whether the Lehrer Hour or anything like it or even this program, don’t pay attention to anything that’s even in the middle, who don’t have any effort at all to learn anything.”

Now as a lifelong student of American history and political junkie I have to confess an interest here. In the early hours of a September morning in 2008, with my wife away on a family visit, I watched Sarah Palin’s speech to the GOP convention livestreamed through my laptop.

I was fascinated.

In seventy years of politicking (well, to be truthful, sixty years as my first burst of activism saw me chanting a party slogan in the school playground during the British general election of 1950) I have never seen the like.

I liked her straight-from-the-hip, head-for-the fight style. I liked her authenticity – I find it embarrassing when so many so wealthy/private school/Ivy League US politicos come down from the big house into the fields and act faux folksy. But I am sure we had met Palin when we drove around America. She had been working a check out at Albertsons – or had she taken my breakfast order at Dennys? Maybe she was the high school teacher in Allentown? At my age memory dims but, dammit, we recognised her.

Dan Riehl (who has not been uncritical of her at times) felt the same

Like many, I had no idea if she would deliver, or crash and burn in just one more bit of political miscalculation by the McCain campaign. Yet, instead, she soared! Sarah Palin delivered what many a sincere conservative wanted and needed to become excited about the 2008 race. And she went right on doing it throughout the Fall – and continues to do it, even now, in many ways.

Unlike the vast majority of British media hacks who never look beyond the New York Times or Washington Post after her speech I googled as much as I could about her career in Alaska and liked her story. Come up the ranks not because she was some suit’s wife or born into a silver spoon family or had contacts from an elite university but under her own steam while raising a nestful of lively kids. What’s more she hadn’t made her name by sitting in a legislature making pretty speeches stroking constituency egos or posturing over her own bravery in voting for this or that motion. She had run a town, helped supervise an energy agency and governed a state – and fought against a corrupt network of backscratching power brokers from her own party…

…..and she had never been to one of Tina Brown’s parties.

Which is why the vicious US media firestorm that followed her nomination initially left me puzzled, especially when in the UK it was repeated across the pages of conservative papers like the Telegraph and Mail….”McCain chooses a former beauty queen”

Did they know something that I, as a mere retired teacher with no journalistic “training” had missed? Were there dark secrets and therefore skilled PR operatives spinning obfuscating webs to cover them up?

I began to feel unsure.

But then I came across another narrative, not, of course from the American media and certainly not from the pathetic fumblings and bumblings of the McCain campaign team. I found it, initially in the wild and reckless alleyways of Free Republic and the slightly more genteel corridors of Lucianne. I began to recognise some regulars drawing swords to defend Palin in the threads at Hot Air.

I was witnessing the emergence of the Palinistas – and, through C4P and Palintwibe and hundreds of other websites they have been fighting her corner ever since, through thick and through thin.

John Nolte, unlike many commentators, has grasped the political implications of this phenomenon

Besides a trial by media fire and a growing savvy when it comes to getting her message out, besides a charisma and personal touch no other candidate comes close to, something else Palin uniquely offers is a mammoth base of fervent supporters ready to fight to the death for her –a base as passionate and motivated as President Obama’s in 2008. No other GOP contender has anything close to this army of supporters and volunteers who are not only standing by but pretty well organized through various “Such-and-such State for Palin” communities.

So who are they, these “fervent supporters” and, more significantly, why are they so fervent.

Oddly enough, though many in the media love to wax eloquently about their shortcomings, pace Chris Matthews, very few have made any serious attempt to check them out. Is it because most of the big cheeses of the media elite prefer to operate within the confines of New York or Washington? Do they now not have enough time or money or experience to expend on Stacy McCain style shoe-leather? Surely it cannot relate to political bias within their ranks – can it?

Which is why late last year I flew from London (on my own dime, as Americans might say) to join a hundred of these “fervent supporters” for a weekend in Chicago.

Now I’m a fairly cynical soul about politicians and their supporters and couldn’t help wondering if, when I reached the get together it would be a little like wandering into the world of Badlands

How wrong I was. Every one of those people was very well grounded. They weren’t wingnuts (I can spot one at fifty miles) and most of them were not particularly wealthy – but they had been willing to spend several hundred dollars to attend the event. They were young, old, long, short and from all points of the US compass. About two thirds were women (although we are told by David Frum that women don’t like Palin) and many were religious but not in the snake handling holy roller “you’ll all burn in hell” way that the media elite love to stereotype on screen. We drank beer and ate well and they were very kind and welcoming and extremely tolerant of my quirky British sense of humour.

If these people were mad wild eyed cultists who put Palin on a pedestal and knelt in adoration then they fooled me 100%. They were ordinary straightforward everyday folk like the people who shop at my local supermarket. But what was interesting was that a substantial number of the attendees at this political event had never been particularly active in politics before September 2008.

It was Palin who had set them on fire. A woman totally unknown to most of them from a backwater of the USA that hardly ever registers on the richter scale of American culture – until September 3rd 2008.

And they have stayed loyal to her ever since.

“Why?” I asked Heather Hunt, a quietly spoken New Englander who I originally met at the Chicago gathering. She works in business publishing and is as far removed from the Chris Matthews airhead characterisation of the Palin supporter as his own convoluted splutterings are from the eloquence and lyrical enunciation of Alistair Cooke.

She gave it to me straight.

No-nonsense, common sense, constitutional commitment to public service. Clear-headed pragmatism. Ability to find commonalities and unite people to work on mutual interests; even if the parties involved don’t agree on other issues, they can work together on the one issue they do agree on. Track record of prioritizing and focusing on getting a few key items accomplished.

Wait a minute – that is all so practical, so down to earth. Where is the Light Bringer, where is that messianic shining that electrifies all cults?

I asked Heather for three words that encapsulated the essence of Palin. I was looking for those words of worship that sparkled around the halo of Barack Obama in 2008 – words like messiah/brilliant/erudite.

But she wouldn’t play ball

Competitive, loyal, principled

Fine attributes – but not easy to reconcile with her determination to dedicate herself to working flat out for Palin if she declares for 2012. A Tea Party Patriots district organiser in Connecticut (where she was born and bred and where she still lives) Heather is organising for the raising of the banner.

We stand for limited government, fiscal responsibility, and free markets. We have a lot of work to do here in CT to that end; we’re one of the few states who missed the Red Wave election of 2010. But we’re still in the fight. If/when Palin announces her run, I will most likely step down from tea party responsibilities in order to organize both in CT and in New Hampshire, an early primary state a few hours north of CT.

A born again Christian and regular churchgoer her faith is at the very front of her life.

I believe eternal issues are more important than temporal ones. That’s one reason I haven’t been involved politically beyond informed voting. And will never put all my hopes in a temporary political system or politicians.

Apart from standing on a street corner holding a sign for Ross Perot in 1992 Heather, until September 2008 had been a quiet and dutiful citizen, voting in every election, but not involved in any campaign.

The Perot exception provides a clue to the reason why she, and millions of others like her, are drawn to Palin. Codevilla’s book on The Ruling Class articulated her long held suspicion that the political posturing of the two major parties were in many ways a well choreographed piece of play acting to mask the fact that all the levers of American power are controlled by a self perpetuating elite that only recruits outsiders willing to sustain the masquerade in return for a share of the spoils.

But she believes the USA has now reached a tipping point and, like her fellow Tea Partiers, she pins her faith on the Constitution

We need to restore the checks and balances established at our founding, both within the federal government between the three branches, but more importantly, between the people, the Sovereign States, and the federal government. And the structure is that the most power lies with the people, who then give some power to the States, who then give some power to the Feds. Not the other way around, as it is now, when the Feds put unfunded, unsustainable, and most importantly, unconstitutional, mandates on the States. Remember, the People sent representatives from their States to create the federal government. That is still how the power structure must flow.

And this is the key to her support of Sarah Palin, this is where one gets a glimpse of the fire that drives the astonishing levels of commitment and support for this woman who three years ago appeared, to most of them, from nowhere. She knew nothing of her until McCain’s announcement. But over the next few days two things made a deep impression on Heather Hunt. Palin’s record as Governor of Alaska – and the vitriolic reaction, not just of the liberal media but many of the so-called pillars of the Republican establishment.

That vitriol, however, has served only to strengthen her conviction that Palin would be a transformative President by shaking up DC

Starting in the White House with cutting of staff and personal expenses, thus setting an example of smaller, smarter government from the top. I think that will extend to her cabinet, i.e., no czars, and to federal government agencies that have no constitutional authority, such as Education, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, the Food and Drug Administration, etc.
However, I expect she’ll prioritize and focus on a few key issues, such as cutting spending, incentivizing energy development, and meeting regularly with members of Congress. IOW, the exact opposite of Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama.
Oh. And Priority Number One? Signing the repeal of Obamacare.

Others I spoke with in Chicago echoed all of Heather’s sentiments. They weren’t looking for Joan of Arc but someone who they felt they could trust even when she had to give bad news or things went pear shaped.

Sure they admired Palin for her positions and record. But there was also a feeling that she was a different type of politician in the sense that she appeared to be natural, not artificial or forced, an impression strengthened by the evidence gathered from the recent e mail frenzy which seems to suggest that what you get from Palin is exactly what it says on the tin.

And maybe that is the connection.

As Dan Riehl said in his moving and heartfelt review of “The Undefeated”

Indeed, while Sarah Palin is by far the central character in “The Undefeated”, the film includes insightful, thought provoking commentary from Mark Levin, Tammy Bruce, Andrew Breitbart and a host of others, all undefeated voices of the Right on their own terms. In a sense, they are as much Palin, as she is them, and all of us together comprise, a common sense, genuine, Reagan conservatism.

That reminded me of one of the most compelling moments in the history of film. It’s at the end of “Spartacus” when the Romans have captured the remnants of the rebellious slave army and offer clemency to anyone who betrays Spartacus, the leader of the revolt.
Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) prepares to stand and give himself up when his closest friends rise up at the same moment, each one saying, proudly “I am Spartacus”. Soon hundreds, then thousands of the prisoners do exactly the same – for Spartacus is not just one individual but the eternal idea of man’s fight for freedom.

So it is with Heather Hunt and all the other Palinistas, not just the ones I met in Chicago. They see in Palin a person from a modest background like themselves who has been mocked and demeaned because of that very fact. But, although their attacks drew blood the woman stood her ground and fought back – and every attack, every insult has become an endorsement, a badge of honour.

As someone on a recent Hot Air thread put it

I see this and all I can say is, if those jokers really wanted to get rid of her, they should have just let her go home to Alaska after ’08, finish out her first term, score a second term and stay up there in the wilderness, where she could still be a voice, but little more. But that’s not what they did.
They held her in the flames and stoked them, thinking she would melt and burn, but instead, she became steel. Worse for them, they gave a woman who was already a quick study a full on crash doctorate in the game of national electoral politics.
For their desired purposes they would have been better off if they’d just left her alone. For our sake, I’m glad they didn’t.
Game on.

I would wager that it is the support of the thousands, maybe millions of Heather Hunts who have stood by Palin through this fire that has given her the heart and spirit to fight on as they rise alongside her and say

She regularly digs a very large hole, lures the media truck to it and it always falls in

You might think, being highly trained professional journalists. they would have learned their lesson.

Or even, as Dan Riehl suggested, done a highly trained google…

Note the presence of the UK Guardian down the hole. You would think the Guardianistas had enough problems of their own without going lemming.

On the other hand there is always a delicious whiff of schadenfreude when someone from the great and the good loses his trousers….

H/T Ben Franklin

Remember how the BBC regularly hit us hard every day with stories about the arrogance and inefficiency of the Bush presidency? So hard, in fact, that you would have thought we had become the 51st (or, according to Obama, the 58th) state of the union. Also how any mistake made by an officer of the administration was the President’s responsibility?

How times change.

Not much from the Beeb about the Gunrunner scandal involving the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) allowing Mexican drug cartel operatives to buy firearms from US gunshops, ostensibly to track smuggling routes.

Some terribly nasty people say that DoJ Eric Holder, who supervises the ATF was really looking for some juicy soundbites to boost the Obama administration ambition of imposing stricter gun controls in the US.

Dear me – how unchivalrous.

Naturally Holder and Obama knew nothing about Gunrunner – just as, apparently, the BBC knows nothing about Holder and the Black Panthers voter intimidation incident in the 2008 election.

Then there are those Congressional concerns about the legality of America’s involvement in Libya’s civil war. Not much at all apart from this classic from the highly professional and even handed Mark Mardell, highlighted by David Preiser recently at bBBC.

However the US media has been fairly slow to unleash much shoe-leather on both these stories, until recently – and it has been said that the BBC takes all its US cues from the New York Times and Washington Post.

So, whatever the reason we all know that it can’t be because the Beeb is still in the tank for Obama……that can’t possibly be the case…can it?

New media methods!!!

What a bunch of hypocritical snake oil salesmen.

New techniques?

It’s called RESEARCH you doughnuts, what Robert Stacy McCain calls shoe-leather. You start out with no pre conceived ideas for that will colour your judgement. You spend hours, days, weeks interviewing people, looking up documents, cross checking sources, getting a “feel” for the story.

You go forensic.

Then you spend time fitting all the pieces together to see if it makes sense.

Then you run it past your grizzled, cynical editor who regards anybody under 35 as a wet behind the ears naïve teenage airhead.

In other words you become an anteater, shoving your snout deep into the earth until you uncover a few tasty morsels.
But that takes time, money, experience and no hidden agenda.

That’s journalism.

What all these NYT/WaPo/Guardian/Mother Jones hacks did was to act like lemmings, heading towards what they thought was the sword in the stone that would finally slay the Palin dragon.

Instead they fell off the cliff and lost all credibility.

That’s journolism.

One letter makes a big difference.

And they wonder why so many Americans are reading the UK Daily Mail…

Having read DB’s post at Biased BBC and the frenetic overture to the Palin e mails saga trumpeted on the BBC website a few days ago

Critics say the e-mails may damage Palin’s presidential chances

I thought I would check out the Beeb’s reaction to the general consensus in the US media that the much vaunted NYT/WaPo “investigation” had spectacularly backfired.

Even plodding Politico hack Molly Ball at Politico (probably through gritted teeth) had to admit

She was hands-on and averse to partisan politics. She championed openness in government and had normal relations with the media. She was a little starstruck by her interactions with national politicians but unafraid to do battle with the chief executives of the world’s largest oil companies.

though, being Molly, she had to inject a some squirts of bitchiness a few lines later.

Her colleague Andy Barr, no admirer of Palin, was more generous, as was CNN’s Drew Griffin. In the Daily Telegraph, after the usual set of ill informed bleats from the master of cut and paste “journalism” Alex Spillius, Toby Harnden took Molly Ball’s words and juggled them around to give a semblance of originality.

Even blogging nonentity Ryan Streeter at ConservativeHomeUSA (thought by many to be financed by Lord Ashcroft) who thinks Palin’s role in the GOP should be to strut her stuff as a pretty cheerleader twirling her baton for Superwonk Paul Ryan thought the e mail colonoscopy had proved a damp squib (though, par for the course, he was more mealy mouthed than even Molly Ball.

But from the BBC – zilch, zero, a big fat nothing……I wonder why?

Fortunately, Cornell’s Professor Jacobson, managed to capture the video….

cross posted at Biased BBC

Kathleen Parker dumps on C4P over Romney as flip-flopper.

The mere mention of a human role (vs., presumably, a divine plan) was enough to bestir the guardians of scientific inquiry at Conservatives4Palin, who averred that Romney is “simpatico” with Obama and that he “totally bought into the man-made global warming hoax.”

Construe it as a badge of honour.

Plus a heart warming bonus – Parker finds C4P irritating.

That is even better news because a lot of people have been finding Parker as annoying as nettlerash, not just since September 2008 but also when, angered by the sweaty multitudes of the Tea Party she launched her own Arugula Party.

What she hasn’t grasped, of course, is that nobody is saying that politicians should never alter their stance on a particular issue. In many ways an admission that their mind has been changed by a persuasive argument reflects well upon a person’s honesty and integrity.

However suspicions are aroused if the motive for the change of mind is more to please a constituency than a genuine conversion. When, as in Romney’s case, these shifts of position become legion then the mantle of flip floppery surely becomes deserved.

Or, as Auric Goldfinger once told James bond

‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action’.”

cross posted at C4P