In yet his latest screed about how the "Good Guys" (reporters) are losing the Media Wars to the "Bad Guys" (everyone else), and that's so horrible boo-hoo-fucking-hoo, the moron writes:

A reader logging on as KellyB last week posted a comment on a Politico.com story covering the funeral of former White House spokesman Tony Snow: "Rest in peace, Tony. You were a kind, decent soul on this earth for too short a time. May God always watch over your family." But KellyB couldn't resist amending the gracious condolence with this: "Politico.com—The Official Water Carrier of Barack H. Obama's Campaign."

How cordial. After a decade of waiting for the first "Internet election," it's finally here, and we're adrift from all the old-media moorings.

First of all, it's not uncordial at all. It's criticism. The press reserves the right to criticize and examine everyone for improper motives and a lack of ethics, but when others attempt to do the same to them, O! the caterwauling.

It's just so unfair.

In one breath they're clapping themselves on the back as the "Fourth Estate," the institution that actually guarantees the democracy the Constitution promises, and in the next breath they take umbrage that their institution is actually subject to public scrutiny, comment, and critique. I'm sorry-- if your little guild is as important as you say, are you claiming it's the one important institution in the country -- one which has, in de Toqueville's phrasing, a quasi-governmental function -- that is above criticism?

But of course Alter is even stupider than that. Because, of course, that closing KellyB "amends" her comment with is a sig line. Which is just a quotation one enters in one's user profile, and which then is added automatically to each and every comment one posts. KellyB didn't "amend' her comment-- she amended her user profile, possibly months ago, and now that sigline just automatically shows up in everything she writes.

The line between her comment (#4) and the last line should have been a tip off.

Perhaps Jonathan Alter ought to spend less time taking umbrage at the decline and fall of the mainstream media and consider instead the reasons for it. Such things as gross incompetence and/or dishonesty, such as we see here, where Alter either doesn't know the first thing about the medium he presumes to criticize, or does know about it, but chooses to hide this from a public that largely doesn't, relying on the public's ignorance to aid him in his point.

Or perhaps the unrelenting bias that's always on display -- no matter how many vicious statements liberals might make in reaction to Tony Snow's death, of course it's a conservative that is chided for "amending" a condolence with an out-of-place political message.

49% of the public believes the Dying Media is in the tank for Obama. Does Alter believe all 150 million Americans that statistic represents are stupid? Well, he probably does.

And that's the problem right there. He just can't concede that maybe they have something of a point. That might involve self-examination and self-criticism, and the Dying Media is far too emotionally invested in the notion of their own virtue and hypercompetency to indulge in such unproductive thoughts.

Blogging and the alternative media generally would shrivel up and die if there were a professional alternative that delivered the news without bias or the chronic arrogant ignorance of the media. The problem is that the media stubbornly resists cleaning up its own partisan bad behavior -- alienating half of their possible customers, because pleasing themselves and "doing Good" is more important that providing the public with objective information -- and thus creates the need for an amateur counter-weight to their hyperpartisan excesses. (Even the professional outfits which are closer to the political center of the nation -- FoxNews, the New York Sun, the Boston Herald, etc. -- are a sort of alternative media themselves, and tend to be tabloid or incomplete rather than "prestige media.")

So, Jonathan Alter bashes a conservative gratuitously, ignores all the viciousness of the left which would have better served his point, and either ignorantly or dishonestly commits an obvious error of fact, all in his lede paragraph.

And still he's scratching his head: Why am I held in such contempt? Why does no one give a shit about what I write anymore?

I guess we're all too dumb, Jonathan. We're dumb, we have short attention spans, we can't handle nuance or depth.

You keep telling yourself that, Squirt.

Posted by: Ace at 12:09 PM | Comments (61)
Post contains 765 words, total size 5 kb.

Apparently the Obamassiah's visit to Afghanistan is paying dividends after all.

I have to admit I'm not totally up on the Tailban depth chart at the moment but the Brits seem pretty excited about this.

A senior Taliban commander in southern Afghanistan surrendered to Pakistani authorities and British forces killed another leader, dealing a "shattering blow" to the militant group's leadership, the British army said on Tuesday.

Mullah Rahim, the top commander for southern Helmand province, gave himself up after British forces had killed two other Taliban leaders in little over three weeks.

Hours after his surrender, another senior Taliban commander, Abdul Rasaq, also known as "Mullah Sheikh," was killed in a British missile strike 15 km (9 miles) north of the town of Musa Qala in Helmand on Monday morning, the British army said in a statement. Three other insurgents also died.

Rasaq headed Taliban actions around Musa Qala and was active in the insurgency for a number of years, it said.

"The Taliban's senior leadership structure has suffered a shattering blow," British army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Robin Matthews said in the statement.

Let's hope this is as big as the Brit say it is. Regardless, it sounds like they are getting good intel on the leadership and you can never go wrong killing or capturing the enemy.

Posted by: DrewM at 11:56 AM | Comments (28)
Post contains 249 words, total size 2 kb.

Allah wonders if that's even logistically possible. I don't know logistics, but I can't really think of a good reason why it only takes six months to build up forces from nothing and yet two years to evacuate.

But impossible or not, I like it. Because it underscores an important point: The swiftest "exit strategy" turns out to have been simple military victory.

If we'd followed Obama's strategy, we'd be withdrawing troops brigade by brigade, harried and attacked and killed all the way home, with Iraq degenerating further into chaos and causing, necessarily, delays in withdrawals. It would be the US Embassy in Vietnam evacuation in slow motion, and in a much bigger scale, and of course even bloodier.

Winning the war, it turns out, not only results in the complete defeat of Al Qaeda in Iraq and the creation of a fledgling democracy with a chance of success (and that's all one can really offer a nation-- a chance), but it actually reduces US casualties and gets our boys home faster than a withdrawal-while-being-fired-upon would.

Obama's plan, as it turns out, would have resulted in higher casualties, and a slower redeployment, than winning the war.

So: What advantage did it have? For the hard-left, losing the war would have been an advantage in and of itself, and a crucial one. But I don't believe the Obamachrist is quite honest enough to say that.

Posted by: Ace at 11:10 AM | Comments (25)
Post contains 262 words, total size 2 kb.

Three unwise men.

Posted by: Ace at 11:01 AM | Comments (36)
Post contains 7 words, total size 1 kb.

Just looking to cut the video now, but it doesn't look like it's gone up quite yet.

McCain has to do this, and stop mincing words. It's tough stuff, but the harshness of the statement is mitigated by the fact that it's unquestionably true.

I (of course) would like to see him go farther -- and note that Obama's hard-left constituency is determined to lose a war that could (easily at this point) be won, just as vengeance against Bush and all the conservatives they've argued with since 2003, and of course to chasten the US so that it never fights a war again.

And then make the point: If Barack Obama can't stand up to his own donors and supporters and worshippers, how exactly can we trust him to stand up to Ahmadinejad?

Posted by: Ace at 10:02 AM | Comments (42)
Post contains 182 words, total size 1 kb.

Obama has a dove. Jesus doesn't.

Via RightWing Sparkle, with the details. (It's a Palestinian artist in Ramallah.)

Jesus is Love; but Obama is Love... with Results.

PS, Obama took the American flag off his jet, replacing it, inevitably, with an Obama symbol.

Time for a Cool Facts About Barack Obama?

Posted by: Ace at 09:46 AM | Comments (78)
Post contains 67 words, total size 1 kb.

Filling three hours of air time is serious responsibility that not everyone is ready for.

"In 99% of the cases, it's a brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out. That's what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they're silent?" Savage said last week in remarks that lit up the Internet over the weekend.

"They don't have a father around to tell them, 'Don't act like a moron. You'll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz.'"

It should be noted that "Don't act like a moron" has been found to have no therapeutic value even when said to actual certified morons.

Posted by: Ace at 08:19 AM | Comments (136)
Post contains 130 words, total size 1 kb.

Heh.

John McCain's old friend Chris Matthews gets a lot of screen time. more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:03 AM | Comments (30)
Post contains 43 words, total size 1 kb.

Two sources, says he, as per journalists' requirement rule-of-thumb sometime aspiration.

Thanks to SteveR.

Posted by: Ace at 07:45 AM | Comments (35)
Post contains 38 words, total size 1 kb.

Christian Bale arrested in London, after his mother and sister file an assault charge against him.

The articles are careful about not saying the charge concerns him slapping around his mother and/or sister, but I'm not sure why they'd be filing the charges if he hit someone else.

Whoops: This BBC article makes it clear the assault charges do in fact concern him hitting his "family members." Allegedly, of course.

Posted by: Ace at 07:31 AM | Comments (33)
Post contains 74 words, total size 1 kb.