Posted on May 19, 2013 by Paul Mirengoff in Media, soccer

No tears for Piers

In early March, I wrote a post called “Tears for Piers” about the meltdown of Piers Morgan on Fox Soccer Channel as he watched Arsenal, the soccer team he supports, lose to Tottenham Hotspur, the club’s North London rival. In a tirade the sophistication of which failed to meet the standards of a 3:00 a.m. sports call-in show, Morgan castigated Arsenal’s long-time, hugely-successful manager, Arsene Wenger. He concluded by advising the legendary manager to look at himself and admit that he’s no longer the man for the job.

How, you may be wondering, has Arsenal fared under Wenger since Morgan’s ridiculous rant? Quite well, actually.

Since the loss to Spurs, the Gunners have played 11 matches. They have won 9, drawn 2, and lost none, outscoring the opposition 21-5 in the process.

The two draws came against Everton (0-0) and EPL champions Manchester United (1-1). Arsenal had the better of it in both matches. Indeed, Arsenal outshot Man U by a 19-12 and had a majority of ball possession.

But Arsenal’s most impressive result came in the very next match after Morgan’s rant — a 2-0 victory over Bayern Munich in Munich. Bayern is hands down the best team in Europe this year. For example, they thrashed mighty Barcelona by 4-0 in Germany and 3-0 in Spain. Bayern’s only other home loss this season in Bundesliga and European Champions League competition came last October against a strong Bayer Leverkusen team (1-2).

Today, Arsenal capped off its fabulous run by defeating Newcastle United away from home. With that win, Arsenal edged out Tottenham for a place in next year’s Champions League. Wenger has guided the Gunners into that prestigious and obscenely lucrative competition in each of his 16 seasons in charge of the club.

So tonight, his misanalysis of the situation at Arsenal notwithstanding, Piers Morgan must be smiling. And not just because he has been able to parlay his British accent, knee-jerk liberalism, modest intellect, and poor judgment into a prime-time CNN gig with clownish soccer commentary on the side.

Posted on by John Hinderaker in Obama Administration Scandals

How Much Are Obama’s Scandals Hurting Him?

Is Obama being hurt by the scandals that have engulfed his administration? That sounds like a silly question: of course the scandals have damaged his image, thrown his administration off message, weakened his ability to get anything through Congress. Haven’t they?

If you believe the Gallup Poll, the scandals might be a boon to Obama. Currently he sits at 51%/42%, as measured from May 15 through May 17. This represents an improvement. You can see the trend in this graph:

So the great mass of television watchers and supermarket magazine readers are not yet shocked by the depths of the administration’s depravity. To put it mildly.

Scott Rasmussen shows Obama taking a bit of a hit over the last week or so, with his approval/disapproval among likely voters at 49%/49%. (I assume Rasmussen has tweaked his definition of likely voter, now that the Democrats have shown they can turn out non-taxpayers just as though they had a legitimate interest in the proceedings.) Of interest, as always, is Rasmussen’s Presidential Approval Index, calculated by subtracting the number who strongly disapprove of the president’s performance from those who strongly approve. This chart shows Obama’s history with that index:

These data suggest that Obama may have been hurt somewhat by the scandals, but for the most part, the long-term pattern seems to be dominant. Since very early in his administration, a plurality of Americans have strongly disapproved of Obama’s job performance. For almost his term in office, 40% to 45% of likely voters have not just disapproved of Obama, but disapproved of him strongly. That has almost always exceeded, by a considerable margin, the number who strongly approve. But as the 2012 campaign wore on, the number of strong approvers began to rise. This was entirely foreseeable: it represented Democrats coming home to their party’s candidate in the midst of a hotly contested campaign. Those who were willing to tell pollsters that they were strong approvers never did come close to catching up, but it didn’t matter. The lukewarm approvers, loyal Democrats who realized, I suspect, that Obama is a lousy president, but still didn’t want to vote for a Republican, gave Obama his winning margin.

Once the election was past, Republicans, in their usual spirit of generosity, gave Obama a second honeymoon. You can see the sudden (but temporary) drop in strong disapproval immediately after November’s election. Since the election, as one might expect, everyone has been returning to form. The Republicans and independents who disagree with Obama about nearly everything are expressing ever stronger disapproval of his policies, while the Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents who never thought much of Obama, or who are underemployed as a result of his policies, have rapidly fallen away from the “strong approval” category. It seems obvious that before long, the Approval Index will be more or less where it has been for nearly all of Obama’s term in office. In that context, the current scandals certainly could hurt Obama, but at the moment they are being swamped by larger trends–trends, however, that they are likely to reinforce.

It may be futile to look for the effects of any scandal in the first few days or weeks. Certainly Watergate, to take one obvious example, did not hurt Nixon significantly until long after the fact. It is the drip-drip of headlines and revelations over the course of months that makes a scandal debilitating, not the initial revelations. More important, it is the long-term impact in how voters view an administration that matters. For example, Fast and Furious deserved to be a major scandal. But it didn’t resonate with most voters because it didn’t jibe with their image of Barack Obama, and it wasn’t enough, in itself, to change that image significantly. This is why multiple, reinforcing scandals can be so hurtful: they have a better chance of reorienting perceptions of an administration.

So the Benghazi/IRS/AP scandals haven’t had much effect, yet, on the standing of President Obama or his administration with voters. But their potential to do so is clear. A great deal depends on whether the national news media, normally stalwart supporters of the Democratic Party, keep the scandals in the news over the next few months. Right now, I would rate that prospect at even money, at best. Likely as not, news coverage of the scandals will be dominated by speculation about whether Republicans have “overreached,” an obsession that has never been manifested in connection with any Republican scandal.

Posted on by John Hinderaker in History, Photography

Electrifying California

Over a period of decades, Edison Electric Company documented the electrification of southern California in approximately 70,000 photographs. Recently Edison donated or loaned these images to the Huntington Museum, which has now put some of them online. They are historically interesting and, in many instances, aesthetically beautiful. They remind us of the romance of southern California in the 30s, 40s and 50s. Click to enlarge:

I like the sign at this gas station: “Serv-ur-self, we serv Ladies.” Not to mention. of course, the price of the gasoline:

Los Angeles in 1915:

There are plenty of diners in evidence, naturally. This one was taken in 1956:

There are lots of interior photos, too, showing the effects of electrification on the home. Would my wife like this 1935 powder room? Yes:

If you like this kind of thing–and who doesn’t?–there are many more at the link.

Posted on by Paul Mirengoff in Obama Administration Scandals

Obama denies role in government

Andy Borowitz of the The New Yorker provides this somewhat fictitious account of our president’s reaction to the current series of scandals:

President Obama used his weekly radio address on Saturday to reassure the American people that he has “played no role whatsoever” in the U.S. government over the past four years.

“Right now, many of you are angry at the government, and no one is angrier than I am,” he said. “Quite frankly, I am glad that I have had no involvement in such an organization.”

The President’s outrage only increased, he said, when he “recently became aware of a part of that government called the Department of Justice.”

“The more I learn about the activities of these individuals, the more certain I am that I would not want to be associated with them,” he said. “They sound like bad news.”

Mr. Obama closed his address by indicating that beginning next week he would enforce what he called a “zero tolerance policy on governing.”

“If I find that any members of my Administration have had any intimate knowledge of, or involvement in, the workings of the United States government, they will be dealt with accordingly,” he said.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Anti-Semitism, Israel, Media

A durable libel

Charles Enderlin is the France 2 Jerusalem correspondent who broadcast the incendiary account of the death of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura at the hands of Israeli troops operating in the Gaza Strip in September 2000. Based on film footage provided by a Palestinian cameraman, Enderlin’s report has become infamous among students of Arab propaganda both for its destructive effects and for its probable falsity. The al-Dura affair bids to join the Dreyfus affair in the French hall of shame.

Dreyfus was innocent, of course, and now an Israeli government report has concluded that al-Dura survived the incident depicted in Enderlin’s report. Historian Richard Landes has done a great job of compiling the evidence of Israel’s innocence in the al-Dura case over the years at The Second Draft. Now Mitch Ginsburg updates the saga in this Times of Israel report:

Muhammad al-Dura, the Palestinian child who appeared to have been shockingly killed at his father’s feet in Gaza on September 30, 2000 — an iconic image that helped fuel the Second Intifada — was not harmed by Israeli forces and did not die in the exchange of fire, according to an Israeli government report released Sunday, three days before a French court rules on a related matter.

“Contrary to the report’s claim that the boy was killed, the committee’s review of the raw footage showed that in the final scenes, which were not broadcast by France 2, the boy is seen to be alive,” the Ministry of International Affairs and Strategy report stated regarding the television report.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who tasked the ministry with assembling the report in 2012, said the accusations aired on France 2 were “a manifestation of the ongoing, mendacious campaign to delegitimize Israel.”

Minister of International Affairs and Strategy Yuval Steinitz called the accusations baseless and said the affair was “a modern-day blood libel against the State of Israel.”

The 55 seconds of edited footage, filmed two days after Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, contributed to the October 2000 protest in which 13 Arab citizens of Israel were killed and quickly became the defining image of that Palestinian uprising against Israel.

The picture of Dura, apparently dead across his father’s knees, was shown for days on Arab and international TV stations and was cited as inspiration by both Osama bin Laden and the killers of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

Israel initially did not dispute that IDF troops had inadvertently killed the child. “It could very much be — this is an estimation — that a soldier in our position, who has a very narrow field of vision, saw somebody hiding behind a cement block in the direction from which he was being fired at, and he shot in that direction,” Maj. Gen. Yom-Tov Samia said at the time.

Only months later did the army complete an investigation that it said showed with certainty that, if Dura was killed, it could not have been from shots fired from the IDF position.

Is al-Dura alive? It would be nice to know what happened to him.

The variations on the blood libel are endless. Most recently, we have had the BBC, the Washington Post and others falsely asserting that Israeli forces killed the son of the aptly named BBC cameraman Jihad Masharawi on the first day of Operation Cast Lead. I wrote about that in the five-part series “Tools of Jihad.” By contrast with Muhammad al-Dura, the young Masharawi was killed (if by friendly fire). In any event, Jihad lives.

Posted on by Paul Mirengoff in 2012 Presidential Election, Benghazigate, Mitt Romney

What would you expect Romney to say?

Mitt Romney says that the Benghazi talking points had no bearing on the outcome of the 2012 presidential election. He made this remark in response to a question by an inquisitive Jay Leno.

Romney added that he doesn’t spend a lot of time reflecting on what could have been done differently during his campaign. “I don’t go back and look at: ‘Gee, if this would have happened differently, could I have won?’” Romney explained.

For Romney’s sake, I hope he has been able to move beyond that sort of thinking. I don’t imagine it’s easy to do so.

As for Benghazi, it is clearly in Romney’s interest to talk down the impact Benghazi could have made. Why? Because Romney made a hash out his justified attempt to use the issue during the second debate.

It wasn’t entirely Romney’s fault; moderator Candy Crowley disgraced herself by vouching for President Obama’s misleading statements on the subject. But there’s no getting around the fact that Romney didn’t have the necessary command of the facts to refute Obama’s contention that he called the attacks terrorism. And Romney erred, in my opinion, by steering clear of Benghazi in the final debate.

Moreover, quite apart from Romney’s performance, it is not in his interest to whine about the talking points at this late date. Doing so, especially on Leno’s show, would only make him look like a bad loser.

Whether intentionally or not, Leno was asking a win-win question from the Obama perspective. Either Romney would admit that the talking points controversy is irrelevant to Obama’s victory or Romney would cast himself in a bad light. Romney took the shrewder, and higher, road.

Romney also happens to be right. As John has said, Benghazi could not have changed the outcome of the 2012 election. But we didn’t know this at the time, and I wish Romney had made a better run at making it an issue.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Barack Obama, Benghazigate

Analyze this

What did President Obama do on the evening of 9/11/12 when our men were under attack in Benghazi? The invaluable Andrew McCarthy reminds us that Obama and Secretary Clinton had a 10:00 p.m. phone call of which many (including, I think, Chris Wallace) have lost sight. This morning when Wallace asked Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer what Obama was up to that evening, Pfeiffer declared the line of inquiry “offensive.” Translation: Obama and his minions would prefer to “move on” and are warning the likes of FNC off:

The Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper has posted the rush transcript of this illuminating exchange. Obama to the contrary notwithstanding, it’s almost enough to make one think that there is something there there.