Mainstream Media Starts to Notice Obama Sticks to Fundraisers and Vacations Amid Crises

Today on NRO

L. BRENT BOZELL III: The media's unwritten rule for covering political scandals. Hide 'D,' Showcase 'R'.

RICH LOWRY: After boasting for three years that he "ended" the Iraq War, Obama says it was Bush's fault. The Abandoned War.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: An unusual calm for history's constant cauldron. A Quiet Mediterranean?

JILLIAN KAY MELCHIOR: Will a new edict from the EPA kill a business that's made the state wealthy? Welshing on Wyoming's Coal Industry.

SLIDESHOW: Remembering Robin Williams.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

August 12, 2014

Mainstream Media Starts to Notice Obama Sticks to Fundraisers and Vacations Amid Crises

Oh, I get it, mainstream media. It's trite, hackneyed, cliché, and trite when we make this sort of criticism of the president, but accurate, insightful, and witty when Dana Milbank says the same thing:

It would be nice if the media could acknowledge that the vast majority of criticisms of Obama from the Right -- that he's naïve in his understanding of the world, that he underestimates America's foes, overestimates his own persuasiveness and abilities, dismisses criticism from all corners, that he withdraws and tunes out the world when the job gets hard, is a much more ruthless partisan than he claims, ignores Constitutional limits on his power when they prove inconvenient . . .

And yes, the guy prefers to stick to his pre-established schedule as crises erupt:

This is the president who didn't address the country for three days after the attempted bombing of an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, who gave a "shout-out" to an audience member moments before his first comments on the Fort Hood shooting, and who attended a campaign rally on September 12, 2012, when most Americans awoke to the news of the murder of four Americans in a terror attack in Benghazi, Libya.
Liberals will shout "MY PET GOAT" until the end of time, concluding that Bush's actions during those seven minutes somehow could have altered human history. But they'll shrug off this pattern of behavior.

Milbank:

The highly visible wartime vacation (Obama allowed himself to be photographed on a putting green Saturday with NBA star Ray Allen and retired pro-football player Ahmad Rashad) was not looking any better Monday as Iraq's political crisis worsened, NATO's chief declared a "high probability" of Russian military intervention in Ukraine and Gaza remained on a knife edge . . .

White House press secretary Josh Earnest reminded reporters Friday that Obama was traveling to the Vineyard "with an array of communications" and advisers. But when it came time for the president to speak, there was a 20-minute delay because the TV feed didn't work, and when he finally spoke, the audio and video quality was poor…

Criticism from Clinton. War with the Islamic State. Trouble with Maliki. It's enough to make a man hook his drive into the sand trap.

Hey, thanks for noticing, pal.

Must We Fume at Each Other? Can't the Right Argue in Multiple Kinds of Styles?

Here's Project Veritas' James O'Keefe crossing the U.S.-Mexican border in an Osama bin Laden mask recently:

Here's then-GOP congressional candidate Raj Peter Bhakta, crossing the U.S-Mexican border on top of an elephant, with a Mariachi band, in 2006:

Katearthsis -- ignore the Selina Kyle name in her Twitter handle, boys, I'm fairly certain she's not Catwoman -- is one of us. She's a young a woman of deep and growing religious faith and one of the few art students interested in conservatism. I have a tough time believing that she's the problem facing today's Right.

She didn't think much of O'Keefe's latest video. You can scroll through her feed for her full arguments, but the gist is she thinks putting on a bin Laden mask and sloshing through a narrow portion of the Rio Grande, far from any border patrols, is a fairly silly way to illustrate a point that very few people would dispute: At this point it is not terribly difficult to sneak into the United States from Mexico.

Actually, I suspect those people already knew the border wasn't secure; they feel that O'Keefe in a bin Laden mask vividly illustrates the potential danger of an insecure border.

Twitchy ripped into Kate for criticizing O'Keefe; some good folks on Twitter ripped into Twitchy for what they perceived as groupthink.

Maybe O'Keefe's video is your cup of tea, maybe it isn't. It probably does tap into that "get a load of this!" shareable element necessary to take an idea viral, but on the other hand, the obstacle is not really getting Americans to believe the border is unsecure. The obstacle isn't really getting Americans to believe the border ought to be secure, either. The obstacle is getting incumbent politicians, and this administration in particular, to believe that securing the border ought to be a priority -- and that any "path to citizenship" scheme can't be seriously considered until the border and its steady supply of new illegal immigrants is shut off.

The "you're hurting your cause by being a clod" argument sprung up recently in another context.

Ann Coulter recently had her annual slow-news-cycle-dominating national controversy -- she's guaranteed one per year in her contract, right? – contending that missionary work and running medical clinics in poor countries represented a foolish choice for a Christian:

If Dr. Brantly had practiced at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles and turned one single Hollywood power-broker to Christ, he would have done more good for the entire world than anything he could accomplish in a century spent in Liberia. Ebola kills only the body; the virus of spiritual bankruptcy and moral decadence spread by so many Hollywood movies infects the world.

If he had provided health care for the uninsured editors, writers, videographers and pundits in Gotham and managed to open one set of eyes, he would have done more good than marinating himself in medieval diseases of the Third World.

Erick Erickson, the Anchoress, Pete Wehner, and Peter Rosenberger, among others, strongly objected to Coulter's argument.

One point I would note is that while O'Keefe and Coulter are different ages, they've both achieved a certain prominence and status with their respective styles. Whether or not you or I like it, they've decided it works for them. And the proof is in the book contracts, YouTube hits, television appearances, syndicated columns, speaking gigs, and so on. No matter how much someone tells them to change their style or the way they approach advocating for their ideas, these two -- and most of us! -- are never going to change, or at least are extremely unlikely to change.

So I'm not sure it does anyone much good to yell at anybody who's having an impact on the Right and demand they change.

It's been said that "conservatism is a mansion with many rooms." (Somewhere someone is scoffing, "great, even our metaphors make us look like the rich guys.") If we don't all agree on every issue -- military interventions, trade policy, gay marriage, abortion, eliminating the home-mortgage deduction, boosting the child tax credit -- why do we have to agree on styles and tones of public argument?

The creaking-from-book-weight bookshelves are set up in the new house, and on the top shelf, you can see my selections from the more serious side of political thought -- the boss, Robert Novak, Christopher Hitchens, William F. Buckley, George H.W. Bush, Rudy Giuliani . . .

. . . and then a shelf below you can see another side of the political world: Michael Kelly, Mark Steyn, Christopher Buckley, P.J. O'Rourke, Greg Gutfeld, Adam Carolla, Dennis Miller -- and yes, Anthony Bourdain, although I haven't tried to make anything from his cookbook yet.

There's room in the movement for just about everybody -- even the voices that drive us batty sometimes. With metronomic regularity, people cite Buckley driving the John Birch Society out of the conservative movement like St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland, and call for a modern-day equivalent effort to drive out the faction of the conservative movement that irks them most. But that kind of excommunication requires a couple factors that rarely align in today's conservatism: (1) a figure nearly-universally respected or revered the way Buckley was; (2) a faction within the movement that has few allies or other conservatives inclined to keep them inside or defend them; (3) a broad movement that is receptive to the idea that the particular faction is so noxious, wrong-headed, or detrimental to the larger cause that it has to go.

Perhaps we could add a fourth factor: a sense that the movement is sufficiently successful that it can afford to kick out potential allies.

Quick Senate Roundup

Looks like Democrats wasted a bunch of money on the aborted campaign of appointed Sen. John Walsh (D., Mont): "Senate Democrats huddled to support Walsh, making leadership PACs the fresh appointee's second largest contributing industry. 42 Senators -- four out of five of Democrats in the upper chamber -- gave to Walsh through their leadership PACs, for a total of $246,000 . . . Meanwhile, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spent close to $18,000 in outside expenditures in the race, one of its nine targets this cycle. The largest outside spender in the election was the progressive veterans' group VoteVets.org, which spent close to $300,000 backing Walsh."

Who do you think gets the better of this exchange in Colorado?

The ad takes a personal approach to the issue, with [GOP candidate and Representative Cory] Gardner clutching what appears to be the cancellation notice he received concerning his own family's policy. Gardner opted out of the federal health benefits that Congress receives and kept his own policy.
He once again summoned [Senator Mark] Udall's now infamous 2009 comment, "If you have an insurance policy you like . . . you'll be able to keep that doctor or that insurance policy."

"When Mark Udall voted for Obamacare, he promised us if we liked our health care plan, we could keep it. Well you know how that worked out," Gardner says in the ad. "I got a letter saying my family's plan was cancelled. . . . You might have one of those letters in your mailbox right now."

Udall's campaign quickly fired back, suggesting that Gardner would like to return to a "broken health care system that put insurance companies in charge of Coloradans' care."

ADDENDA: Not that the death of Robin Williams isn't enormously sad on its own . . . there's the not-frequently-mentioned aspect of the performer that he was irreverence incarnate, mocking almost every authority in modern life -- the Church, Republicans, government . . . and yet he had a deep and irrepressible affection for America's men and women in uniform.

Here's Robin Williams at a USO show in Afghanistan in 2007; his performance is interrupted by retreat ceremony. (The retreat ceremony "signals the end of the official duty day and serves as a ceremony for paying respect to the flag. Because the time for the end of the duty day varies, the commander designates the specific time for the retreat ceremony . . . When persons not assigned to a formation are outdoors and in uniform, on the first note of retreat, they should face the flag (if visible) or music and assume the position of parade rest.") He handles it like the pro we all admired.

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