Sheriff Andy In A Whole Heap Of Trouble

Turns out the folks in Mayberry aren't too keen on Andy Griffith's latest foray into politics. His favorability rating had dropped 25 points in North Carolina since his recent commercials pimping for Obamacare. What's all the more shocking is that PPP seems willing to poll just about anyone and anything.

Lisa Murkowski Can't Be Satisfied

(With apologies to Muddy Waters). Lisa Murkowski said this about the Senate race:

"But what I'm looking at is my state and the future of my state for my kids. So, I have not made that determination that I'm going to give up. I'm not a quitter, never have been. And I'm still in this game," Murkowski said.

She lost but says she's still in the game. There's something seriously wrong with a politician who can't accept defeat. Used to be, you went home or took a cabinet appointment, now you exhaust every possible electoral shenanigans available. Sad.

Twitter Use On The Rise For The Popinjay

Hey gang, I know blogging has been a little light recently and I hope to rectify that soon, but in this go-go culture I've decided to use Twitter more often to give my thoughts on this crazy ol' world. You can find me on Twitter at @PopinjayRose, or just check Cartman's thought balloon in the sidebar. Some tweets may be nonsensical as they're replies to Twitter friends, but for the most part you'll find my tweets worthwhile.

Enjoy!

Location:Cascade St,Las Vegas,United States

George Soros: Pure Evil

Roger L. Simon has an interesting writeup today on the Democrat Party's man behind the curtain, George Soros. I think the word "monster" is very, very apropos.

The Greatest Story In The History Of The World

Sometimes there are events that are just so perfect, they defy any kind of analysis: (Hat tip: Rush)

A 2009 Cadillac Escalade SUV belonging to Jesse Jackson was stolen and stripped of its wheels in Detroit last weekend while the civil rights leader was in town promoting green jobs.

That's 31 words, but it's worth 1,000.

Condi Rice Reveals Tension Of 9/11

In a Channel 4 documentary on 9/11, former NSA head Condi Rice tells the story of "ordering" President Bush to stay out of Washington:

"I said: 'You cannot come back here. The United States of America is under attack, you have to go to safety. We don't know what is going on here'.

"He said: 'I'm coming back'. I said: 'You can't'.

"I said to him in a raised voice, and I had never raised my voice to the president before, I said: 'You cannot come back here'. I hung up.

"The president was quite annoyed with me to say the least.

"I've known the president a long time and I knew that he wanted nothing more than to be there at the helm of the ship." 

One of my biggest annoyances with the Bush-bashers is the criticism of his actions immediately following 9/11: staying in the classroom to finish the reading of My Pet Goat and calmly letting people know what had happened and then exiting the room. If Bill Clinton or Barack Obama had done this, we'd still be singing their praises for their calm, cool leadership. Then they try to say he was afraid to come back to Washington, which obviously isn't true. You can disagree with a man political or philosophically, but when you make irrational charges, you've lost any respect you might have had coming.

Saturday Morning Music

Delaware Race Tears Right Blogosphere Apart

There's a race for the open Senate seat in Delaware vacated by Vice President Joe Biden. The GOP thinks they might be able to pick up the seat in the very blue-state, however, that has led to something of a dust-up within the ranks.

Longtime Delaware Congressman Mike Castle is running for the seat. He is a very liberal Republican. He has a challenger in political novice Christine O'Donnell who is more conservative and has earned the endorsement of Mark Levin.

The disagreement over whether to stick to principles and back O'Donnell or be pragmatic and back Castle has led to a split on the popular conservative blogs, with the likes of Ace of Spades saying the smart move is to back Castle, while Dan Riehl would (tentatively) back O'Donnell.

The argument has many variables. O'Donnell has made some strange moves, admitting she uses campaign fund to pay her rent, doing poorly in radio interviews and considering a third-party run if she loses the primary. Delaware is a very blue state and Castle seems the best chance for a Republican to win a Senate seat there, however, we had similar views about Massachusetts when Scott Brown was running. While he's not a solid conservative, he's hardly a RINO. Castle, however, is RINO through and through.

I admit, I've gone back and forth on this one and I'm still not entirely sure what the smart play is. One one hand, Castle would be more trouble than he's worth, but on the other hand, if he ends up the 51st Republican in the Senate, he may be worth the headaches.

The commenters at Hot Air have been burning up the keyboards on this issue tonight. Fortunately, this will all be over on September 14th when Delaware has its primary.

Manufacturing Consent Unbound!

Karl over at Patterico's Pontifications has taken Ace's reworking of Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent and given us a primer on how the Old Media and the New Media operate in the 21st Century. This one post is more valuable than an entire semester of journalism classes.

I usually treat the establishment’s media bias like the weather in Forks, WA — sought by vampires, simply endured by normal people. Nevertheless, I was recently tickled by Ace’s twist on Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent:

Suppose there are five possible plausible public reactions to an event or initiative. A, B, C, D, and E, ranging from rightist to leftist, and A and E representing the extremes.

Media debate tends to package C and D — C, a centrist reaction, and D, a left-center but still mainstream-ish reaction — as the only two possible reactions, and debates the issue without reference to A, B, and E, as if they don’t exist, or, if they do mention them, they are dismissed peremptorily as extremist and wack-a-doo and “not serious.”

Thus, at the end of the day, the public does get to “choose”… but only from the two options the media has pre-screened as permissible, C and D. Thus, consent of the governed has been “manufactured” — sure, the public chooses between C and D, but their choice was forced — as a magician forces a card on you — by a media that carefully insulated them from genuine consideration of A, B, and E.

However, the toxicity of the current political environment is better explained by the slow collapse of this model.

RTWT.

George W. Bush v. The Belgians

I may just have to pick up the Tony Blair memoirs this weekend and read it. Sounds like there's some damned interesting stuff within, like this delicious nugget found by Marc Thiessen:

George had arrived bang on time for this first discussion and had not fully said hello to all the participants. He didn’t know or recognize Guy, whose advice he listened to with considerable astonishment.

He turned to me and whispered, “Who is this guy?”

“He’s the prime minister of Belgium,” I said.

“Belgium?” George said, clearly aghast at the possible full extent of his stupidity. “Belgium’s not part of the G8.”

“No,” I said, “but he is the president of Europe.”

“You got Belgians running Europe?” He shook his head, now aghast at our stupidity.

Heh! Blair has also pointed out in his book that it's downright stupid to believe that George W. was and is stupid:

"No one stumbles into that job, and the history of American presidential campaigns is littered with the corpses of those who were supposed to be brilliant, but who nonetheless failed because brilliance is not enough," Politico quoted him, as writing in his memoir.

"To succeed in US politics, or that of the UK, you have to be more than clever. You have to be able to connect and you have to be able to articulate that connection in plain language," Blair writes.

"The plainness of the language then leads people to look past the brainpower involved. Reagan was clever. Thatcher was clever. And sometimes the very plainness touches something else: a simplicity that is the product of a decisive nature," he adds.