Posted on February 9, 2012 by Scott Johnson in Books, Media Bias

CRB: Measuring the slant

This morning we continue our preview of the new (winter) issue of the Claremont Review of Books (subscribe here — please). One of the good things about the magazine is its occasional presentation of books that escape review in other publications aimed at a general audience of intelligent readers.

One such book is Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind, by Tim Groseclose. Groseclose is a distinguished professor of political science. He is the Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics at UCLA. He holds joint appointments in the political science and economics departments. He has held previous faculty appointments at universities including Stanford and Harvard. He is not, shall we say, a right-wing ranter, and his book has been published by a respected commercial publisher. Yet it has evoked the sound of one hand clapping.

We thought that the publication of Professor Groseclose’s book last summer was a signal event. To the vexed question of media bias, Professor Groselose brings the methodology of the social sciences. With Professor Groseclose’s permission we posted generous excerpts of the book that remain accessible here. For some reason, however, Professor Groseclose’s book has remained a secret against which editors have faithfully guarded readers of the New York Times, the Washington Post and other organs of the mainstream media.

The CRB asked James Q. Wilson — the man who is perhaps the most prominent living American social scientist, “the Sinatra of social science” — to review the book, and Professor Wilson has answered the call in “Measuring the slant.” Thanks to the editors of the CRB for letting us bring the review to your attention. Please check it out, and please spread the word.

Posted on by Steven Hayward in Climate

And the House of Cards Starts to Come Down

As John noted here Tuesday, and I have noted several times over the last few weeks, the climate campaign is suffering body blows on an almost daily basis.  The latest is the report, based on new and more comprehensive satellite data, that the ice melt in the Himalayas has been nil—zip, zilch, nada—over the last ten years.  Here’s how the left-wing Guardian newspaper in Britain reports it:

The world’s greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows.

The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall.

The study is the first to survey all the world’s icecaps and glaciers and was made possible by the use of satellite data. Overall, the contribution of melting ice outside the two largest caps – Greenland and Antarctica – is much less than previously estimated, with the lack of ice loss in the Himalayas and the other high peaks of Asia responsible for most of the discrepancy.

Bristol University glaciologist Prof Jonathan Bamber, who was not part of the research team, said: “The very unexpected result was the negligible mass loss from high mountain Asia, which is not significantly different from zero.”

It’s fun watching these guys fall on their face in real time.  The whole circus is falling apart much faster than I expected.  I can tell you that around Washington the whole climate change angle is slowly being dropped from conversation about everything.  It’s almost like talking with normal people again.

Posted on February 8, 2012 by John Hinderaker in Obama administration

Obama, the Billion-Dollar Hypocrite

The breathtaking hypocrisy of Barack Obama is hard to get your arms around, but Michael Ramirez takes a good stab at it: (more…)

Posted on by Steven Hayward in 2012 Presidential election, GOP Presidential Race 2012

Romney Agonistes, Part 3: The Upside of Low Expectations

In light of yesterday’s setback for Romney, I’ve decided to rechristen this “deconstructing” series as Romney Agonistes.  Anyway. . .

Up in our “Picks” section is a link to those madcaps at The Onion, who offer a spoof of Obamamania called “Romneymania Sweeps America!”  This may be their best spoof since their bit about Grover Norquist’s tryst with the corporate income tax a while ago (“I Engaged in a Week-Long Drug-Fueled Orgy With Corporate Income Taxes”).

Many young Americans acknowledged they had felt disillusioned by politics until hearing Romney’s explanation of how his coordination of corporate funding for the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics renders him uniquely qualified to be president, an assertion they said immediately revived their faith in American democracy.

“Simply put, when Mitt Romney speaks, he inspires people to be better,” said political scientist Deborah Klein of Brown University, adding that given his effusive charisma, people are likely to follow the Republican candidate anywhere. “Anytime he meets factory workers on the campaign trail or stands at the podium in a debate, his reputation as a highly relatable man of the people is indisputable.”

This really is a nice and semi-subtle sendup of the over-the-top Obamamania.  But here’s the thing.  Even discounting all of Romney’s defects, conservatives just don’t swoon for candidates and think them messiah-like figures the way liberals do.  Reagan was popular, to be sure, but was never the object of worship anything like we saw with Obama four years ago.  At the root of this is a substantive difference between left and right.

Second, as suggested here the other day, our low expectations of Romney could be to our benefit (if he holds on and wins not just the nomination but the election—two very big “ifs” right now).  Conservatives will be on a hair-trigger from day one, and will sound the alarm early and loudly if he goes wobbly.  He won’t have the same leeway that Reagan or George W. Bush had to wobble.  He’ll need to worry about a primary challenge in 2016 from day one.

Got your copy ordered yet?

Third, one difference a President Romney will have over Reagan is that Reagan had a hostile Congress, and at least 15 liberal Republicans in the Senate.  Romney might well find a Congress slightly to the right of him.  Moreover, an atmosphere of low expectations from conservatives may lead conservatives to concentrate more on finding leadership from Congress, which would be a very healthy thing, as a great new book argues (hint, hint).  (David Freddoso argued a similar point in The Examiner the other day, saying conservatives should put more effort into getting the Senate elections to come out right.)

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Culture, Ideological Leachcraft, Terrorism

What price Ayers? The finale

In “What price Ayers?” we reported on the Illinois Humanities Council’s remarkable online fundraising auction item: dinner for six with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the unrepentant terrorists and at least onetime friends of Barack Obama. In search of funds, the IHC made the item available for immediate purchase for $2,500; at the time we noted it the item had attracted one bid of $350.

The IHC offered supporters the priceless opportunity to walk down memory lane with the celebrity terrorists over dinner, revisiting their life and crimes in the Weather Underground, or to ask the author of Fugititve Days to compare his memoir with Dreams From My Father by “Barack Obama.”

Well, Jack Cashill was a little slow off the mark, but Daily Caller proprietor Tucker Carlson moved quickly to fill the void. Carlson bought the dinner.

This past Sunday evening was the big night. Joining Carlson for dinner with Ayers and Dohrn were Carlson’s brother Buckley, Daily Caller columnist and Weekly Standard senior writer Matt Labash, online media mogul Andrew Breitbart, a Daily Caller contest winner and Daily Caller reporter Jamie Weinstein.

Ayers and Dohrn had their own seconds for support. According to Weinstein, they enlisted friends such as University of Chicago history professor Adam Green and dinner host Lisa Yun Lee, among others, to serve dinner, while the two principal hosts sporadically joined the table for conversation.

Weinstein reports:

Though guarded and seeking to avoid controversial topics, the two former terrorists revealed interesting tidbits about their lives, political philosophy and relationship with President Obama.

“I’m so unhappy with electoral politics that I switched to sports radio,” Dohrn said early in the dinner, adding that she has dropped NPR in favor of ESPN radio’s “Mike & Mike in the Morning.”

Speaking of her disenchantment with politics, Dohrn later said that in her adult life, she has felt hopeful about electoral politics only once: “in Grant Park when Obama was elected.” But that, she said, was “short-lived.”

As for Ayers, he said that he likes some policies of Texas Rep. Ron Paul.

“I find some unity with Ron Paul,” he said. Ayers noted earlier, however, that he has only voted for a Democrat or Republican in a national election once in his life, presumably for Obama in 2008.

Speaking of the situation in Syria, whose government is massacring pro-democracy demonstrators, Dohrn said that while Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is unsavory, she believes “humanitarian intervention is a ridiculous idea.”

Later, Dohrn told Tucker Carlson that the United States is becoming “like Sparta”: strong militarily, but weak in everything else. “It has happened to a lot of countries, including in recent history.” Asked by Tucker Carlson to name one, Dohrn cited Nazi Germany

Weinstein reports that the DC crew covered Jack Cashill’s angle on the authorship of Obama’s Dreams:

Before leaving, TheDC asked Ayers about reports that he helped write Obama’s memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” Initially, as he has done several times in recent years when asked this question, Ayers answered that of course he wrote it — with tongue planted firmly in cheek.

But when TheDC cited a book by non-partisan author Christopher Andersen, which straightforwardly reports from interviews with mutual friends of Ayers and Obama in Chicago that Ayers contributed significantly to Obama’s book, Ayers said he hadn’t heard of Andersen’s claim — but that it was “bullshit.” An agitated Ayers didn’t offer any insight into how he imagined Andersen could have gotten it so wrong despite his seemingly extensive reporting.

Weinstein concludes by noting that the Daily Caller had invited President Obama to join the dinner with Ayers and Dohrn. In an email response, the White House scheduling office declined the request, but did state that the president would miss the event with “sincere regret.”

There is of course a real issue buried in the chain of events leading up to last night’s dinner. “The real issue,” Ron Radosh explains, “is the legitimization of Ayers and Dohrn. That was not the fault of those who attended the dinner, but of the Illinois Humanities Council, the state’s facilitator and affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which is subsidized by your taxpayer dollars.”

Posted on by Steven Hayward in Books, Conservatism, Liberals

Liberals and Their Dragons: Voegeli’s Got My Back

One of the many things left undone on my long To-Do list was a response to the sequel to the response (still with me?) to my controversial “Modernizing Conservatism” essay in the Breakthrough Journal a few weeks back from Mark Schmitt of the Roosevelt Institute.  I thought our exchange in the Journal was reasonably productive and cordial, but in his sequel Mark wanted to extend the argument, in particular by rejecting my central point that modern liberalism has no limit in principle to its aspirations to extend political solutions for all social problems.  Mark thought my one example—comparable worth—was my only example, confusing a respect for brevity in a response to several commentators with the whole of the argument.  I could have gone on with examples large and small (perhaps the rat eradication program of the Great Society would also illustrate the point), but it is clear from Mark’s response that he completely misses the point.

To concentrate on the essential: he attributes to me and Bill Voegeli the idea that liberalism is without a principled limit to its ambitions, and pushes back on my example of comparable worth by saying—look! liberals backed off the idea because of practical politics!  Which isn’t exactly the same as explaining a philosophical principle that would prescribe a limit if there wasn’t adverse public opinion to constrain them.

Fortunately for me, Bill Voegeli’s got my back, with a terrific smackdown of Schmitt over on NRO’s Corner on Monday.  For my part, I want to add that the idea that liberalism is without a principled limit to its ambitions to extend the reach of government didn’t originate with me or Bill.  I’m not quite sure who should get the credit, but one of the best early explications of this is in the classic 1963 book, The Liberal Mind, by the eminent British political scientist Kenneth Minogue.  There he defines liberalism by its irrepressible drive to alleviate all “suffering situations,” as though it is possible through politics ultimately to eradicate all tragic outcomes in the world (a telos it shares in common with Marxism, though less self-consciously).

Minogue has a wonderful image in the opening paragraph of The Liberal Mind that perhaps conveys the argument in terms Schmitt can understand more clearly:

The story of liberalism, as liberals tell it, is rather like the legend of St. George and the dragon.  After many centuries of hopelessness and superstition, St. George, in the guise of Rationality, appeared in the world somewhere about the sixteenth century.  The first dragons upon whom he turned his lance were those of despotic kingship and religious intolerance.  These battles won, he rested for a time, until such questions as slavery, or prison conditions, or the state of the poor, began to command his attention. During the nineteenth century, his lance was never still, prodding this way and that against the inert scaliness of privilege, vested interest, or patrician insolence.  But, unlike St. George, he did not know when to retire.  The more he succeeded, the more he became bewitched with the thought of a world free of dragons, and the less capable he became of ever returning to private life.  He needed his dragons.  He could only live by fighting for causes—the people, the poor, the exploited, the colonially oppressed, the underprivileged and the underdeveloped.  As an ageing warrior, he grew breathless in his pursuit of smaller and smaller dragons—for the big dragons were now harder to come by.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in GOP Presidential Race 2012

The once and future non-Romney

In my new year’s predictions for 2012 I anticipated that we would be recycling non-Romneys in this year’s primary and caucus contests for the GOP presidential nomination. The prediction has proved accurate, except in one small detail. I thought the recycled non-Romney of 2012 would be Rick Perry. Wrong, moose breath!

But I had the right idea. Newt having risen and fallen again in a manner that reminded us of his weaknesses, Rick Santorum now rises again as the non-Romney of the hour. He seems to me the logical conservative alternative to Romney in the field if there is to be one. The Wall Street Journal provides a fair journalistic account of last night’s caucus results in “Santorum delivers a GOP stunner.”

I think John Fund does a good job of deliberating over last night’s results in “Mitt Romney has reason to be concerned.” In his quick take on last night’s results, Bill Kristol fastens on one of Romney’s weaker moments in the Jacksonville debate that I highlighted in “The moon is a harsh mistress.”