Media
October 20, 2017 — Scott Johnson
The fallacious Brian Fallon had a difficult job as Hillary Clinton’s campaign spokesman. I commented on his efforts several times during the course of the 2016 campaign. His previous communications work on behalf of Senator Schumer and the Obama Department of Justice under Eric Holder must have helped prepare him, but he had to plumb new depths working for Clinton. He now plies his wares at the Priorities USA Action
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October 19, 2017 — Scott Johnson
General Kelly stepped forward on behalf of President Trump to address the hysteria fomented by Rep. Fredrica S. Wilson and her impressionable media friends regarding President Trump’s condolence call to the Gold Star family of Sergeant La David Johnson, one of the four soldiers killed in Niger. The substance of the phone call has become the cause celebre this news cycle. General Kelly’s statement should be a cause of another
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October 18, 2017 — Scott Johnson
The great Jean Yarbrough teaches government at Bowdoin College. Professor Yarbrough is the author of the indispensable and award-winning book Theodore Roosevelt and the American Political Tradition. We have celebrated Professor Yarbrough several times on Power Line, including via Steve Hayward’s induction of her into our (incomplete) Power Line 100. Most recently, we drew attention to her moving speech on the conservative turn in her thought. Yesterday Rush Limbaugh introduced
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October 18, 2017 — Scott Johnson
I posted my “Notes on the Ken Burns version” as a placeholder until the time more knowledgeable observers than I published their comments on the updated left-wing version of the Vietnam War. In place of fairness it gives us a pretense of Olympian if sorrowful detachment. In place of a fair representation of the men who fought the war, it gives us voices ranging from disillusion to shame. The Ken
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October 17, 2017 — Scott Johnson
The mainstream media foster the great forgetting of the facts and lies about underlying Bowe Bergdahl’s plea of guilt to charges of desertion and (even more seriously) misbehavior before the enemy. Nicholas Fondacaro documents the suppression of the record in the NewsBuster post “Nets forget Obama admin championed Bergdahl as a ‘hero’ coming home.” Fondacaro includes the ABC News report on Bergdahl’s plea yesterday (video below). It represents the evidence
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October 16, 2017 — Scott Johnson
CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer scored an interview with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in Tehran to discuss President Trump’s decertification of the Iran deal this past Friday. CBS News reports on the interview here; the transcript is posted here. David Rutz has posted the video excerpt of the interview at the bottom of this post along with his story at the Washington Free Beacon. Palmer also talked about
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October 14, 2017 — Scott Johnson
During his two terms in office President Obama conducted an assault on the Constitution and on limited government in the name of the higher good as he saw it. Obama’s lawlessness was little noted in the mainstream media other than in disparaging accounts of the Republican and conservative reaction to Obama. President Trump appears to be a bull in the White House china shop. He is portrayed as a kind
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October 14, 2017 — Scott Johnson
I put everything I had to offer on the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick/Geoffrey Ward documentary The Vietnam War into “Notes on the Ken Burns version.” I think the documentary seeks to fix the record in falsity. To take only one example, as I say in my “Notes,” Burns and his colleagues were apparently unable to find a soldier to recall his service in anything other than shades of disillusion, disgust and
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October 10, 2017 — Scott Johnson
In 1747 Samuel Johnson announced the plan to write what became his Dictionary of the English Language. Johnson had hoped to get the job done in three years. His friend Richard Adams questioned his ability to complete such a massive undertaking in such a short time. It had taken the 40 members of the French Academy 40 years to compile their Dictionary, Adams reminded him. Boswell reported Johnson’s famous response:
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October 9, 2017 — Scott Johnson
The Weekly Standard has posted a brilliant column by senior editor Lee Smith reflecting on the meaning of the disgrace of Harvey Weinstein. Lee’s piece is titled “The human stain: Why the Harvey Weinstein story is worse than you think.” It is unlike anything else you will read on Weinstein and full of quotable quotes to boot, including this cutting “thought experiment”: Would the Weinstein story have been published if
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October 7, 2017 — Scott Johnson
I want to add a few notes to Paul’s comments as well as my own on the gargantuan Ken Burns/Lynn Novick PBS documentary The Vietnam War. I think it warrants more informed commentary than my own, but let me these offer notes while we wait for knowledgeable observers such as Mackubin Owens, Victor Davis Hanson and James Robbins to weigh in. As of this weekend, we do have George Veith’s
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October 5, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Yesterday provided a case study of why public regard for the news media has plummeted. The frenzy over whether Secretary of State Tillerson called President Trump a moron became a centerpiece of the day’s news cycle because it enabled what my late mentor M. Stanton Evans called “ventriloquist journalism”—reporters finding a way to use a quotation or action of a public figure to back up their favored narrative, and calling
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October 3, 2017 — Steven Hayward
I think it was Charles Murray who first described the pretentious wedding announcements in the New York Times as the “mergers and acquisitions page,” and certainly the typical mix of Stanford MBA working at an investment bank marries Harvard lawyer working at Steptoe and Johnson underlines a phenomenon that Mickey Kaus flagged in his 1992 book The End of Equality, namely, that the higher rates of intermarriage of highly educated
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October 2, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
In a world of blogging and social media, there are plenty of traps for the unwary corporate employee (as I know from experience). But for some events, the only appropriate responses are so obvious that even the unwary need not worry about being trapped. The Las Vegas shooting is an example. At this juncture, one either says nothing or expresses sympathy for the victims. If the need to score a
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October 1, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
I didn’t watch all 18 hours of Ken Burns’ series about the Vietnam War, but I forced myself to endure roughly two-thirds of it. I found Burns’ version of the war biased and superficial. Scott has performed a service by posting a conference about the series held at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). As Scott says, Lewis Sorley’s presentation, which begins at 48:00, provides a devastating critique
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October 1, 2017 — Scott Johnson
If you are a man or woman of the left, it is amazing what you can get away with. Not only get away with, but be celebrated for. Minnesota’s own Ilhan Omar presents a case study. Omar was recently recognized by Time in its September 18 double issue on women “Firsts” for her election to office as the first Somali legislator in the United States, I noted in this City
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October 1, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Having lived through the period of maximum American participation in the Vietnam War as an interested observer and antiwar protester, I have come to doubt much of what I believed to be true at the time. For example, I took at face value the pseudo scholarly 1967 account of The United States in Vietnam by George M. Kahin and John W. Lewis. Kahin and Lewis asserted that the conflict was
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