THE BRIEF AGAINST OBAMA The Rise, Fall & Epic Fail of the Hope & Change Presidency by Hugh Hewitt Nationally syndicated radio host and New York Times bestselling author Hugh Hewitt makes it perfectly clear-President Obama is not just a failed president, but the most spectacularly failed president of modern times. And the path for the American people is clear and urgent: Barack Obama must not be allowed to run the country for four more years. Before you cast your vote in the upcoming election, get all the facts. Read THE BRIEF AGAINST OBAMA. Click for more. |
NRO Newsletters . . . Morning Jolt . . . with Jim Geraghty
June 27, 2012
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Help out Colorado if you can today -- sounds like those wildfires are now well beyond the "usual" natural-disaster level . . . Jim |
| 1. Secrets of Fox News Channel Headquarters, Revealed!
NEW YORK -- Greetings from the Fox News Channel's green room. As much of my evening will be spent on a long journey back to Morning Jolt World Headquarters in northern Virginia and I'll be arriving in the wee hours, a portion of this morning's Jolt is being prewritten, I figured I should give you what no other morning newsletter can: a look behind the scenes of Fox News Channel! Today Morning Jolt reader Dana Perino -- you know her from behind the podium at the White House a few years ago, and from Fox News's The Five -- invited me to a taping of The Five. A few behind-the-scenes tidbits I can reveal: - Dana Perino is as smart, charming, funny, beautiful and up-to-the-minute informed as you would suspect. Your crushes on her are well-placed, readers.
- Red Eye funnyman and The Five panelist Greg Gutfeld is, pre-show, quieter and more subdued than you might suspect; it's as if he's storing up energy to unleash the Greg-a-logue spouting ball of energy once the show goes live. Also, he mentioned that he, Adrian Zmed, and news anchor Bill Hemmer shared a loft in SoHo back in the 1980s and that they were in a shirtless dance troupe together. For some strange reason, I have a suspicion he was making that up.
- If you have long suspected that Andrea Tarantos is Venus in pundit form, I saw nothing to contradict that theory Tuesday afternoon.
- During commercial breaks, sometimes the Five chat with each other, but oftentimes they are checking their Blackberries, hearing producers talking into their earpieces -- thus having completely separate conversations than the one going on directly in front of them -- and checking reaction to the show (on Twitter, I think).
- A producer calls: "Are you in the studio D green room or the one on 12th?" I reply that I think I'm on the 12th floor, and from across the room, the most dignified British voice confirms that indeed I am where I think I am. It's Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney. There's something surreal about being in an environment where every time you turn around, a face that you're used to seeing in a 2D flat-screen image is right there in front of you.
A few hours before showtime, I'm given the topics for tonight's "Great American Panel": Rielle Hunter went on The View and . . . apparently Joy Behar ate her. BuzzFeed collected the "highlights" here. After watching it . . .Wow. If you harnessed all of the electrical energy in the neurons of Hunter's brain, you could toast a piece of bread . . . lightly. I almost feel bad for Hunter watching this, as she is completely oblivious as to why the general public might find her behavior odious. (It's really, really bizarre to watch a conversation where Whoopi Goldberg is the voice emphasizing the importance of respecting other people's marriages and so on. Ask Casey Danson if Guinan is really the celebrity you want leading the prosecution on this one. And the second segment is on former President Jimmy Carter's op-ed in the New York Times, denouncing Obama -- although he couches it as criticism of American policies: "Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation's violation of human rights has extended. This development began after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has been sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public. As a result, our country can no longer speak with moral authority on these critical issues." So here it is Tuesday night, and the news world has pretty much yawned at a former Democratic president denouncing a current Democratic president on the op-ed page of the Times. Jimmy Carter is less relevant to his party than Richard Nixon was to the GOP in his final years. |
2. Will the Last Democrat to Leave the Party's Convention Turn Out the Lights?
Man, Democrats are fleeing their party's convention in droves. It's as if they heard I would be there or something. Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, one of the most vulnerable Democrats up for re-election in 2012, plans to skip the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C. McCaskill said Tuesday she will spend the week campaigning in her home state instead. She joined a growing list of Democrats in conservative districts who have decided to avoid the convention, which will be a showcase of President Barack Obama's re-election campaign. "Would you go to North Carolina for a bunch of parties and glad-handing, or would you stay home and work as hard as you know how and convince Missourians they should rehire you?" McCaskill said Tuesday between Senate votes. But McCaskill insisted her decision was not about avoiding Obama. She said she's asked the President to campaign with her and will join Vice President Joe Biden for an event soon. McCaskill noted that she appeared recently with Obama at an event in Joplin, Mo. Yes, that was a high school graduation ceremony for a community devastated by a tornado a year ago. Big political risk going to that one! Moe Lane suggests a spin for Democrats: "Charlotte Democratic convention's appeal simply becoming more selective." Then he twists the knife: "You know, RedState can afford a four-day event . . . It would appear that the Democratic party cannot afford a fourth day of festivities, to the point where they're going to cancel their original kickoff event at the Charlotte Motor Speedway. But don't worry: the ceremonial anointing of The One will still be taking place at the Bank of America Stadium. Hold on, let me repeat that, for the benefit of the six remaining progressives out there who are still pretending that the President cares about their somewhat sad attempt to create a populist movement:THE CEREMONIAL ANOINTING OF THE ONE WILL STILL BE TAKING PLACE AT THE BANK OF AMERICA STADIUM." Allahpundit: "How many convention cancellations does this make? McCaskill,Manchin, Tester, Matheson, Tomblin, Rahall, Critz -- who else? Good lord. No wonder they're moving to a smaller venue. At this rate, Obama, Biden, and OWS will be the only ones there." Iowahawk: "At this rate, the DNC in Charlotte is going to look like the stands for a WNBA game on ESPN 12." |
3. Aaron Sorkin's Newsroom Is Exactly as Bad as You'd Expect, in Exactly the Ways You'd Expect
So I caught the new HBO series The Newsroom. I'm sure that a lot of readers will roll their eyes and say, "snotty Hollywood liberal elitist," and . . . yeah. Yeah, he is. But sometimes Sorkin's political passions dissipate a bit and he creates actually entertaining films and television shows -- I'd put Sports Night and Charlie Wilson's War as among his best, and when he can bring himself to put the polemics aside, and just focus on the characters interacting as people, his work can be quite entertaining. This is not one of those times. Newsroom is pretty uniformly insufferable, but it's particularly frustrating because you can see flickers and glimmers of a better show in there. Jake Tapper of ABC News reviewed the show for The New Republic, and offers a very fair critique: The fact, then, that the show begins in 2010-at the height of the Tea Party's fervor-is no accident; it's what enables the show's didacticism. Sorkin's intent is to show how events of recent memory could have been covered better by the media if journalists had only had the courage. Some of Sorkin's lessons are well-taken. We see McAvoy under pressure from his bosses to confirm, or at least repeat, the false NPR report that Representative Gabrielle Giffords had been killed. Those scenes ring true, as do others in which ratings pressures are discussed. But more often than not, Sorkin simply demonstrates his own confusion about what ails journalism. He begins with the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. One of McAvoy's producers has expert inside sources at BP and Halliburton, so ACN's "News Night" leads with the story as a tale of environmental disaster, corporate sloth, and government impotence. Meanwhile every other network-bereft of such information-is myopically focused on the fire on the oil rig and the deaths of eleven workers. But citing the BP oil spill is a curious way to charge journalistic malpractice: By my recollection, that was a story the media covered fairly aggressively and responsibly. I think this is one of the things that grated on me the most; Newsroom is clearly Sorkin's lecture to everyone working in journalism today about how they ought to do their jobs. Except that Sorkin's perfect fictional journalists are -- at least in the pilot episode -- working with ludicrously unrealistic perfect inside sources. One producer has both a sister who works for Halliburton and a college roommate who works for BP, and literally within minutes of the explosion, they're calling the producer to tell him all kinds of derogatory inside information about their bosses -- including why the explosion occurred and remarkably foresighted explanations of why all of the initial efforts to cut off the spill probably won't work. A time-travel storyline would have been more plausible. One: This has never happened in journalism. Two: Both of these people apparently want to lose their jobs, as they've decided to leak information that's extremely damaging to their employers to a journalist who is their brother/former college roommate. You figure any whistleblower would call a reporter they didn't know personally in order to hide their tracks. Then there's the fact that the show is written from the perspective of two years' worth of hindsight. In fact, almost all of the facts that the Sorkin Squad uncovers literally within hours of the explosion are from Sorkin's own research, gathered and written by real-life reporters weeks and months after the disaster began. The show's creator is railing at journalists, asking why they can't be as smart as he is, citing their actual work, and is oblivious to the irony. Oh, and during the broadcast, they show video footage of the burning oil rig labeled, "Baton Rouge, Louisiana." Baton Rouge is not on the ocean. For a show that's all about journalists getting it right and the importance of the truth and so on, it's an appalling error. I figure this is what happens when CIA employees watch (most) spy movies, law-enforcement personnel watch cop movies, lawyers watch legal dramas, doctors watch medical dramas, and folks in the military watch war movies: Ninnies in Hollywood who have never done what you do create a wildly unrealistic portrayal, that make the job look easy and suggest to the public that the people they see doing the jobs in real life are some sort of underachieving disappointment. (And yes, this has real-world consequences; think of the "CSI effect.") Apparently Sorkin hung around on the set of Keith Olbermann's Countdown as research for this show. Hey, Sorkin, work the seafood beat for the Boston Globe for a while, or work 60 hours a week covering every floor vote in the House of Representatives for a year -- you know, the kind of work less conducive to cocaine addicts than, say, playwriting -- and see if you think better quality journalism is just a matter of "deciding to do better." So what's the glimmer of a better show in Newsroom? For starters, as Taranto mentioned on The Five, newsrooms are pretty fun places to work, if you can deal with stress, deadlines, and the occasional meltdown. The news business attracts its own share of . . . odd, often smart characters, often working in this business because they fit in nowhere else. It's a good setting for a dramatic series, or a comedy series, or both. Things are always happening, there's always the ticking clock of the deadline, mistakes are made, good work is done . . . the plots write themselves and the inspiration is fresh every morning, provided by the world itself? Could you imagine a reality series following the Breitbart crew? |
4. Addendum
Ben Shapiro warns us, "A Romney-Pawlenty ticket would implode the world with bland." |
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