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		<title>The Times Finds A Lone Crazed Assassin</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/peter-collier/the-times-finds-a-lone-crazed-assassin-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-times-finds-a-lone-crazed-assassin-2</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/peter-collier/the-times-finds-a-lone-crazed-assassin-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Feb 2010 05:05:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Peter Collier]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=51395</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What the Grey Lady won't tell you about professor Amy Bishop.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/bishop1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-51443" title="bishop" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/bishop1.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="347" /></a></p>
<p><strong>Visit <a href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/">Newsreal</a></strong><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/us/21bishop.html" target="_blank"><em></em></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/us/21bishop.html" target="_blank"><em>The New York Times</em>’ front page profile</a> on Saturday of professor Amy Bishop, who allegedly executed three University of Alabama Biology Department colleagues after being denied tenure, appears to be an exhaustively reported piece based on “numerous interviews with colleagues and others who knew her.” It portrays Bishop as violent and unpredictable, rejected by Harvard because of mediocre work and shunned by a series of neighbors and co-workers scared off by the suppressed rage that kept bubbling up to the surfaces of her social life, and also someone who may already have gotten away with the murder of her brother years earlier possibly because of her mother’s political connections in her home town of Braintree, Mass.</p>
<div>
<p>“Between brilliance and rage” is the caption of the photo of Bishop used by the<em> Times</em> for the story, although the piece makes no case for the former.  But is this all the news that is fit to print about the perpetrator of this murder spree in academe?  What about the “family source” who told the Boston Herald that Bishop was,</p>
<blockquote><p>“<a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=144&amp;type=issue" target="_blank">a far left</a> political activist who was ‘obsessed’ with <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1511" target="_blank">President Obama</a> to the point of being off putting”?</p></blockquote>
<p>What about the student who called her a <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=115&amp;type=issue" target="_blank">“socialist”</a>? What about one report that Bishop complained about a rule issued by University  of Alabama administrators regarding underclassmen living on campus because she believed it was destructive of “diversity.”  And what about the crowning irony of this case, whether or not she made this complaint: that two of the colleagues she allegedly killed were black and one was South Asian, and that Bishop thus wiped out the 14 person Biology department’s entire diversity in one burst of gunfire?</p>
<p>Considering the politics of Bishop’s <em>ressentiment</em> might have helped fill out the Times’ portrait of a psychopathic time bomb who had already gone off several times in her disordered life on her way to the Big Explosion on February 12 in Huntsville. There is no doubt, as the blogosphere has already noted, that the paper would have pursued even the vaguest hint that Bishop had been a fan of Glenn Beck or was a Tea Party fellow traveler as a major story line. For the Grey Lady, only the politics of the Right is personal.</p>
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		<title>Jeffrey Goldberg: Leon Wieseltier, Andrew Sullivan and Anti-Semitism &#8211; The Atlantic</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/jeffrey-goldberg-leon-wieseltier-andrew-sullivan-and-anti-semitism-the-atlantic/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jeffrey-goldberg-leon-wieseltier-andrew-sullivan-and-anti-semitism-the-atlantic</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/jeffrey-goldberg-leon-wieseltier-andrew-sullivan-and-anti-semitism-the-atlantic/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:54:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=49898</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Here are a couple of observations about Leon and Andrew, based on a more careful reading of Leon&#8217;s piece, and a look back at some of Andrew&#38;apos;s greatest hits. 1 I don&#8217;t mean this as a cop-out, but Chait says much of what I would say, but better. 2 Like Chait, I don&#8217;t believe that [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Here are a couple of observations about Leon and Andrew, based on a more careful reading of Leon&#8217;s piece, and a look back at some of Andrew&amp;apos;s greatest hits.</p>
<p>1 I don&#8217;t mean this as a cop-out, but Chait says much of what I would say, but better.</p>
<p>2 Like Chait, I don&#8217;t believe that Andrew is an anti-Semite. I have no doubt that if Andrew happened to come upon a Jewish person being harassed or otherwise tormented, he would ride his ridiculous bicycle into the fray and beat back the anti-Semites with a stick. And he certainly passes the Anne Frank Attic Test.</p>
<p>3 But: His evolution from wild-eyed Zionist to vitriolic Israel-basher is one of the more painful things I&#8217;ve witnessed recently, and not only because we are friends, or were friends. In the old days &#8212; meaning last year, and before &#8212; Andrew was an intemperate defender of the Jews. I remember one exchange in the run-up to the Iraq War in which he told me that seeing the movie &#8220;The Pianist&#8221; made him even &#8220;more pro-war.&#8221; Now he has flipped, to the other extreme.</p>
<p>4 The question of whether Andrew is or is not personally anti-Semitic isn&amp;apos;t entirely relevant. What is relevant is that he sometimes uses his blog to disseminate calumnies that can cause hatred of Jews, and of Israel. I know this from personal experience, because the anti-Semites who e-mail him copy me. Andrew&amp;apos;s posts on Israel and on Jewish political power in America have lately given comfort to some very repulsive people. This doesn&amp;apos;t mean, of course, that the role of AIPAC shouldn&amp;apos;t be debated openly, but it should be done without prejudice; without the axiomatic assumption that American Jews who love Israel are disloyal to America; and without the Judeocentrism of the neo-Lindbergh set.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com/archives/2010/02/weighing_in_on_leon_wieseltier.php">Leon Wieseltier, Andrew Sullivan and Anti-Semitism &#8211; Jeffrey Goldberg</a>.</p>
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		<title>Frank Rich and the State of Liberal Commentary</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/dennis-prager/frank-rich-and-the-state-of-liberal-commentary/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=frank-rich-and-the-state-of-liberal-commentary</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/dennis-prager/frank-rich-and-the-state-of-liberal-commentary/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Feb 2010 05:01:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dennis Prager]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=49512</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[No well-known leftist columnist better exemplifies the worst aspects of today's left. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/frank-rich.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-49514" title="frank-rich" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/frank-rich-300x159.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="159" /></a></p>
<p>If one had to read one columnist to appreciate the state of contemporary  left-wing commentary, my nomination would be Frank Rich of the Sunday New York  Times.</p>
<p>No well-known leftist columnist better exemplifies the worst aspects of  today&#8217;s left. Virtually every piece is filled with anger, filled with ad hominem  responses to arguments, filled with insults of opponents and at the same time  devoid of intellectual arguments. A Frank Rich column is essentially a weekly  tantrum meant to make his readers nod in agreement and reinforce their contempt  for those who differ with them.</p>
<p>I offer this past Sunday&#8217;s column as an example.</p>
<p>The subject was the &#8220;Don&#8217;t Ask, Don&#8217;t Tell&#8221; policy regarding gays in the  military.</p>
<p>Not a single serious argument of proponents of DADT was cited, nor did  Rich did offer a single argument on behalf of repealing it. Instead, the article  was a smear of all supporters of that policy or of retaining the male-female  definition of marriage. The article contains 71 sentences. Twelve sentences  contained an insult. I suspect that Times readers who love his columns &#8212; this  was listed as the second most e-mailed piece in the New York Times &#8212; are  generally people who read Frank Rich so as to have their hatreds reinforced, not  for cogent arguments.</p>
<p>The article&#8217;s title is, appropriately, an insult: &#8220;Smoke the Bigots Out  of the Closet.&#8221;</p>
<p>It is commonplace for liberals and leftists to avoid refuting  conservative arguments and just dismiss the conservative with one of seven  epithets: &#8220;Racist,&#8221; &#8220;Bigoted,&#8221; &#8220;Sexist,&#8221; &#8220;Intolerant,&#8221; and the three phobias:  &#8220;Homophobic,&#8221; Xenophobic,&#8221; &#8220;Islamaphobic.&#8221;</p>
<p>Such ad hominem dismissals of conservatives and their arguments testify  to the shallowness of those using these terms, meaning, unfortunately, most  mainstream commentators and spokesmen on the left. The fact is that epithets  substitute for thought &#8212; and at the same time render it easy to write a  left-wing column. It is the Frank Rich Formula: make believe the other side has  no thoughtful argument, offer no argument of your own and debase your  opponents.</p>
<p>Some examples from just this one column:</p>
<p>RICH: &#8220;&#8230; there is now little political advantage to spewing  homophobia.&#8221;</p>
<p>RICH: (CNN allowed conservative spokesmen to express) &#8220;old homophobic  cliches.&#8221;</p>
<p>RICH: &#8220;Such arguments &#8230; are mere fig leaves to disguise the phobia that  can no longer dare speak its name. &#8230; (T)he flimsy rhetorical camouflage must  be stripped away to expose the prejudice that lies  beneath.&#8221;</p>
<p>RICH: &#8220;Those opposing same-sex marriage are just as eager to mask their  bigotry.&#8221;</p>
<p>RICH: &#8220;The more bigotry pushed out of the closet for all voters to see  &#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>RICH: &#8220;&#8230; the deep prejudice at the root of their (Republicans&#8217;)  arguments.&#8221;</p>
<p>Here are the usual charges of &#8220;homophobia,&#8221; &#8220;prejudice,&#8221; and  &#8220;bigotry.&#8221;</p>
<p>But  also note &#8220;spewing&#8221; because Rich almost never describes conservatives as  speaking normally: In this column alone, they &#8220;spew,&#8221; Sen. Orrin Hatch &#8220;vamped&#8221;  and John McCain &#8220;huffed,&#8221; &#8220;fulminated&#8221; and was &#8220;yapping.&#8221; No conservative  &#8220;says,&#8221; or &#8220;claims&#8221; or &#8220;argues.&#8221; Conservatives spew, vamp, huff, fulminate and  yap. Do Charles Krauthammer, George Will, Thomas Sowell or any other  conservative commentators meant to be taken as seriously as the left takes Rich  use such verbs to describe the speech of prominent liberals? I doubt it. The  gulf in depth of thought and sophistication of expression between Frank Rich and  virtually every mainstream conservative columnist is  enormous.</p>
<p>(I did a 30-day search of the words &#8220;spew&#8221; and &#8220;spewed&#8221; on the Washington  Post and New York Times websites, and every single time they were used, it was  by a liberal writer talking about conservatives.)</p>
<p>RICH: (Conservatives who oppose repeal of DODT are) &#8220;attack dogs.&#8221;</p>
<p>RICH: (McCain is) &#8220;the crazy man in  Washington &#8216;s attic.&#8221;</p>
<p>Rich also called McCain &#8220;unpatriotic&#8221; in his previous column &#8212; a  particularly ugly charge given McCain&#8217;s heroic sacrifices for    America .</p>
<p>RICH: &#8220;Karl Rove and George W. Bush ran a national campaign (in 2004)  exploiting fear of gay people &#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>Rich provided no example. For good reason. Bush did not run &#8220;a national  campaign exploiting fear of gay people&#8221; in 2004 (or any other year). What Bush  called for in 2004 was a constitutional amendment to define marriage as the  union of a man and a woman. In fact, Bush took his own party to task for not  supporting civil unions for same-sex couples. It is mendacity &#8212; indeed it is a  smear &#8212; to label what Bush advocated &#8220;a national campaign exploiting fear of  gay people.&#8221; But to Rich and his supporters anyone &#8212; anyone &#8212; who thinks  marriage should be defined as the union of a man and a woman is a fear-mongering  bigot.</p>
<p>RICH: &#8220;Now that explicit  anti-gay animus is an albatross, those who oppose gay civil rights are driven to  invent ever loopier rationales for denying those rights, whether in the military  or in marriage.&#8221;</p>
<p>RICH: &#8220;The arguments for preserving &#8216;don&#8217;t ask&#8217; have long been blatantly  groundless.&#8221;</p>
<p>Where is this mainstream conservative &#8220;explicit anti-gay animus?&#8221; And why  are the arguments that gays in a military unit may fall in love with one another  (or with a straight person) or that for the same reason &#8212; sexual tension &#8212;  that we do not have men and women in the same units, showering and sleeping  together, we might not deem it a good idea to have sexual tension in an  all-men&#8217;s unit &#8212; why are these arguments &#8220;loopy&#8221; and &#8220;groundless&#8221;? This  conservative columnist and talk show host does not find liberal arguments for  admitting open gays into the military either loopy or groundless. But contrary  to the left&#8217;s self-image, conservatives are far more likely to acknowledge two  sides to this and so many other issues.</p>
<p>The truth is that it is Frank Rich who spews, fulminates, yaps and huffs.  Every Sunday in the New York Times. His column is idea-free, but his readers  want catharsis, not ideas.</p>
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		<title>The New Attack on Palin? Associate Her with John Edwards</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/petercollier/the-new-attack-on-palin-associate-her-with-john-edwards-3/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-new-attack-on-palin-associate-her-with-john-edwards-3</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/petercollier/the-new-attack-on-palin-associate-her-with-john-edwards-3/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Feb 2010 05:11:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Peter Collier]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=48952</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The obsessive attacks on Palin take yet another morbid turn. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/palin.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-48953" title="palin" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/palin-300x188.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="188" /></a></p>
<p>Wednesday, February 3, 2010, marked a new turn in the obsessive attacks on Sarah Palin: associating  her with <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=631" target="_blank">John Edwards</a>.</p>
<p>In the <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/grifters-tale/" target="_blank"><em>New York Times</em></a> Timothy Egan sees them as a pair of ethically similar “grifters” using populism to con the American voter–“playing to outrage while taking care of themselves.” In Egan’s view, both ginned up and profited from fears among a broad segment of the public who increasingly resent the success and power of the elites and feel that “America is passing them by.”</p>
<p>Edwards did this an arrant fashion by tearing the labels off his Armani suits and driving someone else’s clunker to rallies where he preached his blow-dried version of class warfare.  Now Palin is doing the same thing, Egan believes, by “charging Tea Partiers $100,000 to stoke their fears.”  (Yes, she has promised to plow her take back into “the cause,” but Egan assumes that she is a cynic whose only cause is herself.)</p>
<p>The comparison between the pair is asymmetrical and tendentious.  Egan doesn’t consider Edwards’ banality of evil—notably the lying treachery committed against wife and family, and friends and supporters.  But while  Palin’s failings, notably her “incoherence” and her lack of response to Glenn Beck when he asked about her favorite founding father, are not in any way equivalent to Edwards’ evil, they are more fully explored. It’s clear by the end of his piece that Egan isn’t really comparing the two at all, but using Edwards’ nastiness to make Palin seem sleazy by association.</p>
<p>Andrew Sullivan posted a nuttier but more interesting piece on Palin   and Edwards on his blog on thursday   titled <a href="http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/02/my-john-edwards-failure.html" target="_blank">“My John Edwards Failure.”</a></p>
<p>He begins by acknowledging that he committed a double standard treating Palin harshly and giving a pass to Edwards.  But then he immediately reassures the reader that this doesn’t mean he is “backtracking” on Palin.  In fact, says Sullivan,</p>
<blockquote><p>“All I regret is not being  able to expose her for real yet.”</p></blockquote>
<p>A surprising admission of failure by someone who has spent the last year and a half obsessing on her private parts, producing sick innuendoes about her family, and licking his chops over the dull normal baby daddy, Levi Johnston, and the big revelation he’s supposedly getting ready to deliver. Hasn’t he run her to ground yet? What more could Sullivan have done to her after months of subjecting her to the blog equivalent of waterboarding?</p>
<p>In the rest of his post—about his deficiencies is not getting  the Edwards story—he cultivates a weepy tone while making a very big deal out of an inessential disclosure.  He ignored the Edwards story, he says, because of his “leeriness of investigating people’s sex lives” (obviously he made an exception in Palin’s case).  Then he grandiosely struts his “sensitivity” by saying that he also “felt protective toward Elizabeth” whom he didn’t want to hurt at a time when she was “faced with mortality” and that he grieved over her loss of a child.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that he made a mistake “in making an assumption of a baseline of decency in public officials” and won’t do it again. Of course this assumption never did apply to Palin whom Sullivan has been lighting up—especially on the circumstances of Trig’s birth–during all those months when he was studiously ignoring Edwards.</p>
<p>What we can take away from this jive confession is that Sullivan will feel it his duty to concentrate his fire even more fiercely on Palin now that he has “learned” from his kid glove treatment of Edwards.</p>
<p>As if he needed a justification to continue this loony quest.</p>
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		<title>Ross Douthat: Did The Republicans Blunder On Health Care? &#8211; NYTimes.com</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/jlaksin/ross-douthat-did-the-republicans-blunder-on-health-care-nytimes-com/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ross-douthat-did-the-republicans-blunder-on-health-care-nytimes-com</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/jlaksin/ross-douthat-did-the-republicans-blunder-on-health-care-nytimes-com/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:11:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Yes, say Jonathan Chait and David Frum, in pre-mortems for the G.O.P.’s efforts to derail the Democratic bill. Chait argues that the Republicans could have sold moderate Democrats on a “vastly more limited” piece of legislation, if they’d been willing to compromise early in the process. Instead, by uniting in lockstep opposition and gambling that [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Yes, say Jonathan Chait and David Frum, in pre-mortems for the G.O.P.’s efforts to derail the Democratic bill. Chait argues that the Republicans could have sold moderate Democrats on a “vastly more limited” piece of legislation, if they’d been willing to compromise early in the process. Instead, by uniting in lockstep opposition and gambling that the difficulties of getting to sixty would doom the Democratic effort, the G.O.P. has ensured that “they’ll walk away with nothing.” Frum, meanwhile, suggests that Republicans placed too much rhetorical emphasis on “the freedom of healthcare providers to do business in their own way, free of government interference,” and not enough emphasis on holding the line on costs. By fearmongering about death panels and attacking Medicare cuts, he argues, the G.O.P. riled up its ideological base but failed to rally “the institutional supporters of the Republican party, the taxpayers, small business owners and corporate leaders” who care about cost control.</p>
<p>I’m not sure either critique is right. I would like to live in a world where Republicans had come to the negotiating table bearing a cost-controlling, insurance-expanding health care proposal, instead of just offering weak-tea alternatives or nothing at all. But given the ambitions of liberals (visible this week in the revolt over the public option) and the design of the legislation, I’m skeptical that they could have actually negotiated their way to something “vastly more limited,” in Chait’s words. As many liberal pundits have argued, the current health care bill is a package deal: If you regulate insurers then you need to have a mandate to buy insurance, if you need a mandate you need subsidies, and if the subsidies aren’t high enough either insurers or voters are going to revolt … and so the next thing you know, you’re at $800 billion and counting. To get something much more affordable, you wouldn’t just need to persuade the Democrats to shave a few hundred billion off the price tag; you’d have to persuade them to take a radically different approach. And I doubt that was ever going to happen.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/did-the-republicans-blunder-on-health-care/#more-1317">Did The Republicans Blunder On Health Care? &#8211; Ross Douthat Blog &#8211; NYTimes.com</a>.</p>
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