Court jester journalists. Pretty sad the President thinks that the toughest interview he faced in the 2012 election year was from a comedian.

Hopefully with the Benghazi coverup unraveling and some Presidential fluffers masquerading as journalists starting to realize how stupid they look parroting administration talking points, maybe future interviews will actually be tougher than those from comedians. I'm not holding my breath. One or two or three journalists asking hard questions will be marginalized. A large majority will have to remember what a journalist is supposed to do if they are going to save their profession and regain the public trust.

I don't want to hear one more damn thing about the reason why things suck is because of Bush. Evidently, two years is enough to get past something according to this dude. I dare this POS to say "dude, it was so two years ago" to the families of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone S. Woods. The President is fond of saying "I got your back". Well, evidently not when it is politically inconvenient to his personal fortunes. more...

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Dr. Wehby released that great ad "Trust" a few weeks back, bragging on herself for saving children on a daily basis.

As Mark Pryor would say, she has a real sense of entitlement.

But apparently some voters think maybe she would be a good Senator, because she now has (per one poll) a not-statistically-significant lead of one point over Jeff Merkely, 40-39.

The poll also indicates that a plurality of voters in the deep-blue state see Obamacare as a mostly failed venture. Forty-six percent of respondents said Obamacare and Cover Oregon, the state’s disastrously flawed health care exchange, were failures, while 17 percent said they were successes, and 37 percent said they were “somewhere in between.”

And she's running against Obamacare, naturally. Another ad "signalized" her day job as a pediatric neurosurgeon, declaring it wasn't "brain surgery" to conclude Obamacare was a failure.

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Instapundit links this interesting piece.

In economics terms, political correctness would be called a "positional good," a good acquired not for its own inherent usefulness, but for what it signals about the owner. (He says "signalize" -- I guess this is a term of art.)

He notes that positional goods only retain their power to signal something about the owner -- that he is high-status -- so long as a relatively few people also possess the good. Once many, many people possess the good, it can no longer serve the function of being positional.

Think about any faddish mode of dress; the fad's ability to signal that the wearer is fashion-forward is destroyed the moment "everyone" begins wearing it. At that point, the fashion-chaser will have to find some new outrageous variation to wear in order to signal his high fashion status.

And of course he wouldn't be caught dead wearing the togs that everyone else is wearing.

Political Correctness works the same way. As 90% of the population has adopted the basic idea of tolerance, the basic ideas of tolerance can no longer serve as a positional good, as "everyone is wearing it now," and new, ever-more ostentatious signals of Moral/Intellectual High Status must be conceived.

Thus, for example: microaggressions. Begin by noting the "micro" that introduces the term; only those of exquisitely fine taste in Racism can detect such subtle notes. Rather like a wine connoisseur's acute palate permitting the detection and appreciation of trace notes of blackberry and even wet manure.

Those who wish to signal their absolute tip-top status in the #NoH8 camp now talk endlessly about microaggressions, because this signals their (self-believed) membership in a cognitive elite. Should "microaggressions" ever become a generally-accepted way to think about racial slights, they will immediately abandon this term, searching out a Hot New Fashion in Anti-Racism.

He says this:

Over the past few years, spiked online magazine has consistently and robustly defended the principle of free speech against the censorship demands of the politically correct, whatever quarter they may come from. It is great, of course, that there is at least one magazine in which the phrase ‘I believe in free speech’ is unlikely to be followed by a ‘but…’, and more likely to be followed by an ‘even for…’. But while I fully support the spiked line, I also think the spiked authors sometimes misinterpret the intentions of the ‘PC brigade’, and would like to offer an alternative interpretation rooted in boring, old-fashioned textbook economics.

Spiked authors believe that PC is driven by a loathing for ordinary people. According to spiked, PC brigadiers view ordinary folks as extremely impressionable, easily excitable, and full of latent resentment. Exposure to the wrong opinions, even isolated words, could immediately awaken the lynch mob. PC, then, is about protecting ‘the vulnerable’ from the nasty tendencies of the majority population.
But if PC was not really about protecting anyone, and really all about expressing one’s own moral superiority, PC credentials would be akin to what economists call a ‘positional good’.

It seems to me that the "spiked online" explanation is the narrative of the PC brigades themselves -- that is, this is how they convince themselves of their superiority and how they justify their judgmental, and frequently thuggish and stupid, behavior. As a Cognitive Elite, after all, they have the duty to protect their lessors from cognitive faux pas, just as a Wine Connoisseur has the duty (he thinks) to inform people that the particular wine they're enjoying is actually jejune, crude, and lacking in angularity.

The snob has the duty to instruct his inferiors.

But I think this author is right-- while the PC Brigade explains its behavior by positing that, as the Cognitive One Percent, they have the duty to make life miserable for everyone else, the actual explanation is simply the signaling of a highly refined palate and a cultivated sense of racism connoisseurship.

I've written about this myself.

What is the point of connoisseurship? Well, as a primary matter, to develop a refined, cultured, and sensitive palate for detecting the most subtle effects of a thing. The wine connoisseur trains himself to pick out "smoky notes" and "hints of blackberry" and wines that profited from "good ash in the soil."

Of course connoisseurship is not restricted to the physical sense of taste; art connoisseurs are fond of saying things like "It's the colors that aren't present that really stand out!"

And connoisseurs of music are given to saying things as "What wonderful silences are in this piece, where you can simply enjoy the room's tone, the vibrations and echoes in the walls themselves."

The connoisseur is trained to sense things that no one else can sense, or, at least, no one but an elite cadre of dedicated Detectors of the Subtle and Sublime.

The secondary value of connoisseurship is, of course, impressing other connoisseurs, intimidating non-connoisseurs, and, by these effects, gaining a Social Advantage which maximizes one's chances for financial and sexual success.

I actually think the secondary value is really the primary one but let's be generous and just say it's a nice unintended consequence.

Now maybe I was goofing on connoisseurship a little bit there, but I have to admit, I'd like to pick up that kind of skill. So long as it does not take a great deal of time and effort, I mean.

But of course it would take that. One can fake these things, as one can fake most things, but there's nothing more embarrassing than a fake connoisseur outed as a poser.

I am suggesting, of course, that people of little talent and little liking of hard work and training have created a new connoisseurship, a connoisseurship rather easily achieved, requiring, as it does, so very little practice and so very little reading; they have created a connoisseurship of Racism, savoring (or so they say) each note so delicate as to be imperceptible to the proletarians whose sense are too unrefined to detect anything but the boldest, most obvious flavors.

And by demonstrating their connoisseurship of racism, they gain a social advantage, that of impressing the other would-be racist connoisseurs, and the various stooges and goons stupid enough to be impressed by this shabby parlor trick.

And, as with any fake connoisseur, as with any bluffer, they gain the most when they make the most ludicrous claims: "I can virtually taste the post-war global depression in this wine; there's a character in the sweat of the grape-stompers that imparts to it a sadness that is almost transcendent."

For connoisseurs, noting that a wine has a chocolate aftertaste is rather elementary and crude. No, to really impress people -- or to really bluff -- you have to really commit to it and claim that your tastes are so refined that they can perceive flavors which exist only on an atomic level:

"Mmm.. those d-orbital electrons are really a kick, aren't they? The complexity of flavors he's managed to achieve while working within the confines of just a few electron states is simply magnificent."

And so it is with the Connoisseurs of Racism.

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Reason magazine editor Nick Gillespie joins Ace, Drew, John & me to talk about some "big L" Libertarianism.

Intro/Outro: Warren Zevon-Lawyers, Guns & Money / U2-Beautiful Day

Questions & comments here: Ask the Blog

Listen: Stitcher | MP3 Download
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Browse (and even search!) the archives

Follow on Twitter:
AoSHQ Podcast (@AoSHQPodcast)
Ace (@AceofSpadesHQ)
Drew M. (@DrewMTips)
Gabriel Malor (@GabrielMalor)
John E. (@JohnEkdahl)
Andy (@TheH2 and @AndyM1911)

Open thread in the comments.

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• The WH Has Electrolytes: "Dude, That Was Like Two Years Ago"
  
• Why Liberals Don't Care About Consequences
  
• Vapor Madness
  
• Some Thoughts On Nerd Prom
  
• The Heavy Hand Of The IRS Seizes Innocent Americans' Assets
  
• The Right Wrestles With The Inequality Debate
  
• Why Vox Dot Com Is A Smart Investment For General Electric
  
• Watch Obamacare Make Health Care Costs Soar
  
• Shellacking II: The Sequel
  
• No, George Orwell's "Animal Farm" Was Not An Endorsement Of Socialism
  
• General: We Should Have Tried A Rescue In Benghazi
  
• Ungrateful Loaf Writes Somewhere Else, Maybe You Should Read It
  
• Michaelangelo's David At Risk Of Collapse
  
• WTF Happened To AIPAC?
  
• Funny Video Of Shirtless Man Asking Out Reporter While Being Interviewed
  

The AOSHQ Decision Desk will be covering state primaries this month. Stay tuned for updates from CAC.

Follow me on twitter.

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Happy Friday.

It will not shock anyone to know that in his rush to criticize Justice Scalia for the error (now corrected) in his latest opinion, the New Republic's Brian Beutler made plenty of careless errors of his own.

How is this front page news?

More gossip on David Gregory's 'Meet the Press' troubles.

A Democratic group is suing—successfully—to enforce Citizens United at the state level. It's a good thing, but demonstrates once again Democratic protestations about the case are just noise. more...

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Michael Barone on All the Things Wrong with Thomas Piketty's Inequality Thesis

He starts with these.

But is his picture of current trends complete? The Manhattan Institute's Scott Winship points out that relying, as Piketty does, on tax returns for the U.S. statistics means omitting income from Social Security, food stamps, public housing, Medicare and Medicaid.

Tax returns count roommates and unmarried partners as separate units when they are part of a larger household.

They don't include employer-paid health insurance -- an increasing share of employee compensation in recent decades.

Including these factors, Winship notes, means that incomes below the top 10 percent have not stagnated but have risen significantly since the 1970s. Increasing inequality is compatible with increases in ordinary people's incomes.

Economist Tyler Cowen takes issue with another of Piketty's assumptions, that the rich can earn 4 to 5 percent on their wealth "automatically, with the mere passage of time, rather than as the result of strategic risk taking."

And here's why the 'moderate' MSM/Left's sudden Piketty-driven obsession with inequality may not amount to much politically:

Respondents were not particularly worried about income inequality, which President Obama identified in December as the "defining challenge of our time." Just five percent said that inequality was a major problem needing attention. And nearly all - 93 percent - of those who listed inequality as a problem said they were not at all or only slightly confident that the government could make real progress in addressing inequality in 2014.

Rich Owens: Oklahoma's Official Executioner

From a fascinating 1948 newspaper article on Rich Owens who executed condemned men for over three decades while serving as a guard at Oklahoma's McAlester State Penitentiary. In his life he killed 75 men: 65 by electrocution, one by the gallows, two with a knife, six with a gun and one with a shovel, not counting 'peckerwoods'.

And he took his job very seriously - studying techniques and learning from the failures of others as well as running execution rehearsals beforehand - in order to guarantee a smooth quick death with a minimum of pain, mess, or fuss.

Which leads to his story of how he once executed a friend of his who had raped and killed a girl while drunk. He spent the evening praying with the man in his cell and when the time came he walked him to the electric chair, prepped him, and then pulled the switch himself. Afterwards he gave his executioner's fee ($100) to the man's wife.

Given the in-artful demise of Clayton Lockett on Thursday perhaps it's time for Oklahoma to bring back a professional like Owens.

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Tasty.

Democrats have long railed against the lack of transparency in political funding, but security was airtight this week as a hush-hush network of progressive moneymen and activists held a closed-door conference to map out their plan to shift U.S. policy to the left.

At the elegant Ritz Carlton hotel in downtown Chicago, wealthy donors, Democratic politicians, and representatives from left-leaning activist groups met for a conference hosted by the Democracy Alliance, a progressive donor network that funnels millions of dollars to undisclosed activist groups and political causes.

The four-day conference, which was closed to the public and media, drew high-profile Democrats including DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, and White House adviser Valerie Jarrett.

Access to the conference was invite-only and tightly controlled...

Most attendees were not allowed in the “Partners Only” room.

Partners in the Democracy Alliance are reportedly required to contribute a minimum of $200,000 per year to activist groups approved by the organization and pay annual dues of $30,000.

Why does this keep happening to them?

...

David Axelrod dined at the hotel’s restaurant Deca, which had a sign outside advertising its $100 grilled cheese sandwich filled with “40-year aged Wisconsin cheddar infused with 24K gold flakes.”

Picture at the link.

Incidentally, the Free Beacon has published a picture of its Income Inequality Venn Diagram, I assume by popular demand.

This is completely unrelated, I'm certain.

If You Want To Live Fat Like Socialists, You'd Better Vote Red Like Republicans

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This is from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. It's a Democratic-written document, but in terms of the actual emails, I assume it's reliable enough-- they can't fake emails.

Point is, I keep saying, incorrectly, that the White House and/or Ben Rhodes created the "spontaneously evolving protests" lie.

This idea -- for which I have never seen a single drop of evidence -- is alluded to, in a way, in these talking points, from the unnamed Director of the CIA Office of Terrorism.

Read carefully-- it doesn't say what you expect it to say, as you've been conditioned to expect the fiction that would be spontaneously inspired from this first attempt at a cover story.

1) Fri., Sept. 14th 2012,_11:15 a.m.-· ·written by Director, CIA Office of Terrorism Analysis

• We believe based on currently available information that the attacks in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the US Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the US Consulate and subsequently its annex.

See what they did there?

Note that this does not claim there were protests at Benghazi -- rather, this seems to be some kind of compromise language which drags this fiction of the protests into the matter, without saying there were actually protests at Benghazi.

Read it closely -- it claims the "attacks" in Benghazi were "spontaneously inspired" by protests not occurring in Benghazi, but rather in Cairo.

No actual claim of demonstrations in Benghazi -- rather that the "attacks" were "spontaneously inspired by" (and what the f*** does that mean) demonstrations in Cairo.

While all the elements for the ultimate fiction are present -- "spontaneously" evolving and "demonstrations" -- the Talking Points do not yet claim that demonstrations in Benghazi got out of hand and spontaneously evolved into a highly coordinated pre-planned attack.

They will, oh they will. But it will take some further edits.

This reads to me like someone was trying to get the idea of "protests spontaneously evolving into attacks" into the talking points early, and the writer was agreeing to meet that individual half-way, without fully blessing this fictitious claim.

Only after a series of edits -- with various State, White House, and CIA officials massaging the talking points -- do the talking points themselves "spontaneously evolve" to include a direct claim that there were demonstrations in Benghazi:

9) Saturdav, Sept. 15th 9:45 a.m.-edits made by CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell

• The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the US Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the US Consulate and subsequently its annex

The Talking Points began by speaking of "attacks" with no prior "demonstrations" occurring in Benghazi, to ultimately claiming there were in fact "demonstrations."

While that the earlier draft said the "attacks" had been "spontaneous inspired" by demonstrations occurring elsewhere, this new edit -- even as more information comes in, further disproving the idea of "protests" in Benghazi -- the talking points actually move towards the fictitious notion of protests evolving into an attack.

As the evidence moves away from the "demonstrations" story, the talking points actually move closer to that story.

Later, the Senate report, in reviewing the record, claims:

We now know that the CIA's September 15, 2012, talking points were inaccurate in that they wrongly attributed the genesis of the Benghazi attacks to protests that became violent. However, as stated in the report, this characterization reflected the assessment by the IC of the information available at that time, which lacked sufficient intelligence and eyewitness statements to conclude that there were no protests.

Note that it was Mike Morrel who rejected efforts to get this "spontaneous protest" fiction out of the talking points, claiming there was insufficient evidence to disprove it.

This whole episode has an Alice in Wonderland quality.

I have never seen Tweets from jihadis about a protest in Benghazi.

I have never seen pictures of a protest in Benghazi.

I have never heard eyewitness accounts of a protest in Benghazi.

In fact I've heard the opposite. For example, one of the men killed that day reported that the annex was being cased by men who looked like they were plotting an attack.

He did not report a "protest." He reported men alone or in pairs looking the place over.

Eyewitnesses present at Benghazi, and military leaders getting information in real time, fail to report any "protests" going on.

In fact, they report the attack came out of the blue, rather than "evolving." Like a planned, coordinated attack.

I have never seen a single bit of evidence suggesting there was even a single protester near the Annex on September 11, 2012, and yet this "factoid" was inserted into the talking points and resisted all efforts at dislodgement.

Furthermore, when military and intelligence analysts as well as on-site, first-hand witnesses attempted to get this fiction removed from the talking points, it was claimed that there was not enough evidence to disprove the "protests" took place.

Not enough evidence to disprove they took place?

What evidence ever existed in favor of their existence? The convenient factoid just shows up in the talking points, without any evidence for it having ever been presented by anyone at any time, and all challenges to this utterly-lacking-in-evidence factoid are rejected on the grounds that first-hand accounts of no protest occurring in Benghazi are not enough to disprove the "protests" which the talking points, and no one else on earth, claim to have "spontaneously evolved" into an attack.

The White House, and State, and the CIA are all fond of saying that the "currently available intelligence" they had at that time suggested there was a "protest."

They admit this was wrong, now, but they claim, at the time, that was their best "currently available intelligence."

Has anyone ever seen any intelligence from that time showing evidence of a protest?

If so, let me know.

Serendipity: On FoxNews, Bret Baier interviewed Tommy Vietor (a White House flack who was involved in the editing of the talking points).

He specifically asked him about the "attacks" to "demonstrations" edit.

I only discovered this change thirty minutes ago myself.

Here was Tommy Vietor's answer to whether he was responsible for the change in wording. He claimed he couldn't remember, shrugged, and then chided Baier:

"Dude, this was like two years ago."

Bret Baier exploded at him, "Dude, it's what everyone's talking about today."

More: From that interview, which I missed:

Jim Hoft ‏@gatewaypundit 2m
HUGE!!! Tommy Vietor – Former NSA Spox – Admits Obama Never Made it to Situation Room During Benghazi Attack! (Video) http://shar.es/SgwvS

Tommy Vietor: I was in the Situation Room that night. Ok. And we didnÂ’t know where the ambassador was. Definitively.

Bret Baier: Was the president in the Situation Room?

Vietor: NoÂ…

Baier: Where was the president.

Vietor: In the White House.

Baier: He wasnÂ’t in the Situation Room.

Vietor: Uhh. At what point in the evening. He was constantlyÂ… ItÂ’s well known that when the attack was first briefed to him it was in the Oval Office. And he was updated constantlyÂ…

Baier: Sp then when Hillary Clinton talks to him by phone at 10 PM, heÂ’s where?

Vietor: I donÂ’t know. I donÂ’t have a tracking device on him in the residence.

Baier: But you were in the Situation Room and he wasnÂ’t there.

Vietor: Yes.

Thanks to Costanza Defense.

Video: "Attacks" evolve into "demonstrations" in the Talking Points, and hence "demonstrations" evolve into "attacks" in the historical record.

"That's what bureaucrats do all day long," Vietor reassures us.

more...

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Even David Gregory understands the emails scotch the White House lies, and he's no Rhodes Scholar.

Speaking of Rhodes Scholars, Sharyl Atkkisson, before she was forced out of CBS, thought it would be a good idea to disclose that CBS News President David Rhodes is the brother of Obama Equities Balancer Ben Rhodes. Her superiors told her not to make this very basic routine bit of journalistic hygiene, because it wasn't "relevant."

Note that David Rhodes was not the source of this decision; it was some unnamed manager.

[I]n a couple of stories when Ben RhodesÂ’ name appeared or began to surface a long time ago, I argued that we needed to disclose the relationship because thatÂ’s what we should to do. Not because thereÂ’s any guilt or guilt by association or that we had done anything wrong, but disclosure is your friend. It protects you. And as journalists, if we disclose that off the top of a story then people wonÂ’t look back later and say that we hid it. So I did argue the case and was told by a manager it was not necessary because it wasnÂ’t relevant. Which I disagreed with. In another case I wrote a story on the web and I did make the disclosure and Rhodes had no problem with it as far as I know, I didnÂ’t hear from him.

Retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert Lovell, who served as (and this is a mouthful) "Deputy Director for Intelligence and Knowledge Development Directorate for AFRICOM" at the time of the Benghazi attack, testified that the government knew almost immediately that there were no "spontaneously evolving protest/highly coordinated attacks," just hours after the attack.

W]hat we did know quite early on was that this was a hostile action,” he said in his prepared remarks. “This was no demonstration gone terribly awry.”

He was pressed on this point by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), who asked how quickly it became clear that Al Qaeda was involved.

“Very, very soon,” Lovell said. “When we were still in the very early, early hours of this activity.”

“Was it a video?” Chaffetz asked?

“No sir.”

Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) also asked Lovell when he heard of the notion that the attack was a response to a video. Lovell said he heard it only briefly, but not as a serious theory.

When Issa asked if he had heard of this idea before 3:15 a.m. on September 12, 2012, Lovell said it was well before that time, and that the theory was quickly debunked.

“I would have to say [we] probably dismissed that notion by then, by working with other sources,” Lovell said.

“As the highest ranking person working that moment, you dismissed the idea that this attack was in fact a demonstration that had went awry and it was based on a YouTube video out of Los Angeles,” Issa then stated.

“Yessir, short answer,” Lovell responded.

While the responsible intelligence and military officials (some of them on-the-ground in Benghazi) all said this was a coordinated military attack likely conducted by an Al Qaeda affiliate, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and their various partisan Advertising Executives 2500 miles away in Washington, DC, settled on the more politically convenient "YouTube Video Theory of the Crime," and overruled the people who actually knew what the hell they were talking about.

And then, for eighteen months, they lied about this, and claimed the YouTube Video Theory of the Crime actually came from intelligence and military analysts, rather than their own MiniTruth chop-shop.

Lowell also says the United States should have ordered an action to save the lives of the the Benghazi operatives, rather than spending so much time saving the political futures of Obama and Hillary.

(My words, not his.)

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