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“Arise and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.” Winston Churchill
“Proclaim Liberty throughout All the land unto All the Inhabitants Thereof.” Inscription on the Liberty Bell
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Media
Investigate reporters, but only when there’s something to investigate
The emerging conservative line on the Obama administration’s aggressive investigations of journalists is that national security leaks should be dealt with by going after the leaker, not the reporter. I’ve heard this line from a number of conservative commentators, most notably Karl Rove. I couldn’t disagree more. Reporters are not above the law. And, as John has explained, the law (per the Espionage Act, 18 US Code Section 793) prohibits »
NR on Watergate
Writing from memory yesterday morning, I recalled the role George Will had played as National Review’s Washington columnist during Watergate. I was faithfully reading the magazine in 1973 and 1974, and I think I was remembering Will’s NR columns accurately, but I was also recalling an inside account written, I thought, by William Buckley or NR senior editor Jeffrey Hart. I couldn’t find what I was thinking of in Buckley’s »
A New Front in the Administration’s War on Journalism?
The two most honest and independent reporters in Washington are, I think, Jake Tapper, now of CNN, and CBS’s Sharyl Attkisson. I’m probably forgetting someone, but those are the two that come to mind. Ms. Attkisson reported on Fast and Furious more fearlessly and effectively than any other reporter. Today she disclosed that her personal and work computers have been “compromised.” The circumstances are being investigated: “I can confirm that »
In search of an honest liberal journalist
Having lived through the Watergate scandal and the impeachment of President Nixon, I recall that one conservative journalist stood out from the pack. As the Washington columnist for National Review, George Will regularly exposed the Nixon administration’s lines of defense as the lies that they were. He distinguished himself both for his merciless analytical rigor and his skills as an anatomist. Will was in the infancy of his now long »
DOJ’s Fox News Surveillance: Legitimate Leak Investigation, Or Outrageous Violation of the First Amendment?
Yesterday the Washington Post broke an explosive story: as part of a leak investigation, the Department of Justice obtained access to Fox News reporter James Rosen’s email account, without giving notice of such access to Rosen, Fox or anyone else: When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving »
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 »
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 »
On first looking into Chapman’s Nixon
Our friends at RealClearPolitics have posted Steve Chapman’s Chicago Tribune column “The false Nixon equivalence.” It addresses the subject I took up in “Nixon’s IRS” and, more broadly, in “A Watergate footnote.” Chapman makes the case that comparisons of Obama with Nixon in the matter of the current IRS scandal are misguided. I think the comparison is useful. The outrages committed by the IRS under Obama in the past few »
Kevin Williamson, Stud
I already thought National Review‘s Kevin Williamson, author of the fine new book The End Is Near And It’s Going to Be Awesome was a total stud, but after last night’s bravado performance in a New York theater, he’s a total heroic stud. If you haven’t heard the story yet, check out how he dealt with cell phone rudeness during a performance: The lady seated to my immediate right (very »
P.S. on the AP
According to Eric Holder, Eric Holder is no more responsible for the investigation of the Associated Press than Barack Obama is for events in Benghazi according to Barack Obama. That was Holder’s theme in his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, which I first read about yesterday in a post by Allahpundit at Hot Air. Looking around for a narrative account of Holder’s testimony this morning, I find the liberal »
Marco Rubio ducks genuine debate over his amnesty legislation
Last week, Bret Baier’s Special Report program on Fox News featured interviews with Marco Rubio and Jeff Sessions about the Rubio-Schumer amnesty legislation. The interviews were given separately. Although Baier tried his best to make it into a point-counterpoint kind of affair, it couldn’t really be a debate because Rubio and Sessions didn’t appear together. I understand that Baier, naturally enough, would have preferred to have Sessions and Rubio on »
Applying for Obamacare
Last month Time’s Joe Klein decried the Obama administration’s “incompetence” implementing Obamacare. This month Klein expressed relief in an “Exclusive” report. In his “Exclusive” Klein praised the administration for streamlining the complex 21-page online Obamacare application to a mere three pages. Klein called it “a spiffy, new three-page application for individuals (find it here)” (footnote omitted). He added: “There will be a seven-page application for families (11 including the appendix), »
Battling over Beck
When I wrote my much-misunderstood and mischaracterized feature on “Is Conservatism Brain-Dead?” in the Washington Post four years ago (wow–can it really be four years already?), no passage caused a more mixed reaction than my mixed judgment on Glenn Beck: The case of Glenn Beck, Time magazine’s “Mad Man,” is more interesting. His on-air weepiness is unmanly, his flirtation with conspiracy theories a debilitating dead-end, and his judgments sometimes loopy »
New, improved, exclusive!
Last month Time’s Joe Klein decried the Obama administration’s “incompetence” implementing Obamacare. This week Klein expressed relief in an “Exclusive” report. In his “Exclusive” Klein praised the administration for streamlining the complex 21-page online Obamacare application to a mere three pages. Klein called it “a spiffy, new three-page application for individuals (find it here)” (footnote omitted). He added: “There will be a seven-page application for families (11 including the appendix), »
Have the Kochs Already Bought the LA Times?
I spent last evening at a splendid dinner of the Friends of Ronald Reagan at the California Club in downtown Los Angeles, where our special guest was Senator John Thune. It was off the record, so no, I won’t tell you what he said, except that when I mentioned I was from Power Line, he recalled running into Scott at the airport recently and was wondering if we were starting »
Is Fox News fair and balanced on immigration reform?
Strip away the pro-illegal alien rhetoric and name-calling in this piece by NBC Latino contributor Stephen Nuno and you will find an important truth — the immigration reform game is dominated by money, and the pro-amnesty side has nearly all of it. Nuno points out that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has put together a coalition of like-minded billionaires to sell Schumer-Rubio style immigration reform to Republicans. Michael Bloomberg has been »
The Weekly Winston: Correspondents Dinner Edition
There’s likely an inverse relationship between the decline of the legacy media and the increasingly over-the-top desperation, self-congratulation and spectacle of the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, held last night. You would think the media would do themselves a favor and not televise the proceedings of their Otherness on C-SPAN, just as the Gridiron dinner is not open to cameras. Even Tom Brokaw has had enough; isn’t this almost a »
