David Forsmark
David Forsmark is the owner and president of Winning Strategies, a full service political consulting firm in Michigan. David has been a regular columnist for Frontpage Magazine since 2006. For 20 years before that, he wrote book, movie and concert reviews as a stringer for the Flint Journal, a midsize daily newspaper.
MSNBC has decided that the John Boehner quote below is the political blunder of the year, and Rachel Maddow loves to throw it into nearly every show.
JOHN BOEHNER: “In the last two years, under President Obama, the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs, if some of those jobs are lost, so be it. We’re broke.”
Her smug, simplistic refrain is always along the lines of, “the Republicans say they are about jobs and here is John Boehner talking about cutting jobs.”
MADDOW: Mr. Speaker was responding to reports that his party‘s economic plan would cost hundreds of thousands of American jobs. His response was -
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) BOEHNER: So be it. (END VIDEO CLIP)
MADDOW: Ow.
What she and her network cronies leave out here– and what they don’t get when it comes to Wisconsin– is that Americans who work in the private sector are the employers of those who work in the public sector. And like any employer, they only want as many employees as it takes to get the job done. Having too many does not help your economy, it drags it down. read more…
When the lamestream media blindly runs phoney talking points by Media Matters, we call them out. Now, we reluctantly have to do it with Fox News and Newsbusters.
On Friday I challenged Newsbusters for running an out of context clip worthy of Alan Grayson to charge that Prime Time CBS Drama ‘The Good Wife’ Impugns Tea Party as ‘Racist Organization’. At the time, I was hoping that Bret Baker was operating on incomplete information, and would make things right.
By Friday afternoon, the estimable Megyn Kelly was hosting debates on Fox with two people who had never seen the show (3 including her) based on this false charge. Ironically, Megyn made the very point left out of the clip when she said all parties, including the Democrats had racists in them!
But despite being shown the whole context of the clip, Baker is unrepentant. He even ignored comments posted on his blog by one of the co-writers of the episode in question! Here’s a great quote from writer Robert King (more later in this post):
ROBERT KING, WRITER FOR THE GOOD WIFE: A character in the episode (in fact, an opposition lawyer and a bad guy) impugned the Tea Party, and he did it for a reason (defending a cop-killer) that was clearly unsympathetic. In fact, the Tea Party was strongly defended by the sympathetic characters on the show. This was in a section of the episode you didn’t include (except in an edited transcript).
To say “The Good Wife impugns the Tea Party as ‘a Racist Organization’” is logically similar to saying “The Gospels impugn Jesus for being a Deceiver” because those words are actually in the gospels; they just happen to be in the Pharisees’ mouth. read more…
From Marlowe to Mitch: 18 Fictional Heroes On the Right Side from the Literary World, Part 1
Throughout the history of popular fiction, the New York Times Book Review and the literati have done their best to focus public attention on writers of the Left but readers have confounded them by tending to choose heroes with a more traditional, pro-American outlook and a decidedly un-nuanced view of good guys and bad guys.
So while Fletcher Knebel was cranking out critically acclaimed hardcover political thrillers like Seven Days in May from the Left, he and his ilk were being vastly outsold by paperback writers like Donald Hamilton, Mikey Spillane, Edward S. Aarons and other pulp paperback writers who featured he-man heroes. read more…
From Marlowe to Mitch: 18 Fictional Heroes On the Right Side from America’s Literary World, Part 1
Throughout the history of popular fiction, the New York Times Book Review and the literati have done their best to focus public attention on writers of the Left but readers have confounded them by tending to choose heroes with a more traditional, pro-American outlook and a decidedly un-nuanced view of good guys and bad guys.
So while Fletcher Knebel was cranking out critically acclaimed hardcover political thrillers like Seven Days in May from the Left, he and his ilk were being vastly outsold by paperback writers like Donald Hamilton, Mikey Spillane, Edward S. Aarons and other pulp paperback writers who featured he-man heroes. read more…
Try to imagine a Law and Order episode where a gun-loving, Sarah Palin supporter is revealed to be a Tea Party member on the stand, in a trial where a radical Left attorney is using a charge of racial bias to sue the police for wrongful prosecution.
What are the odds that character would be the most heroic recurring character on Law and Order?
Exactly.
But that’s still not good enough for Newsbusters, which slammed the excellent CBS drama The Good Wife, for even allowing the antagonist on the show to make the charge– even though it was effectively shown to be false!
In an article entitled, “Prime Time CBS Drama ‘The Good Wife’ Impugns Tea Party as ‘Racist Organization,” the usually reliable Bret Baker “impugns” the show’s writers– and his charge is false.
It’s not even a close call, or open to interpretation. The charge is flat out false. read more…
No one will be surprised to learn I didn’t think much of Chris Matthews’s “Hardball Special: Bill Clinton, President of the Word” or to hear me use terms like “love letter” or “worshipful promo” — or be shocked when I wonder if Barack Obama is jealous of where Chris’s next “thrill” is coming from.
But Matthews embarrassed more than just himself on Presidents Day and earned more than just the scorn of the conservative blogosphere and columnists. The mainstream media, which has spent most of its time finding bias where none exists at Fox News and ignoring the blatant shilling at MNSBC, blushed at Matthews’s gushing and uncritical look at the second President in out history to be impeached.
HANK STUEVER, WASHINGTON POST TV CRITIC: Valentine’s Day was a week ago, but MSNBC’s Chris Matthews has belatedly gifted a particular former president with a mash note… For much of the hour, you’ll wonder if you’re watching one of Robert Smigel’s old “X-Presidents” cartoon parodies for “Saturday Night Live.”
Over at the HuffPo, home of nightly Hardball guest Howard Fineman, a very funny feature satirized Matthews by printing promotional posters for the special if it had been aired on other cable networks, and they opened the page with this statement:
HUFFINGTON POST: Even die-hard Bill Clinton fans had to have been a little creeped out by Chris Matthews’ overly-fawning docu-special…
Monica Lewinsky would likely have given viewers a more realistic look at Bill Clinton—and probably would have mentioned Hillary more.
Chris needs to check and see what’s running down the leg of his blue suit after this. read more…
The only reason anybody even knows who Chris Matthews is today, is that his show, Hardball, became appointment viewing during the Clinton/Lewinski scandal. Matthews was interesting because he was a voice from the Left who was willing to speak the truth and pierce the spin and dissembling of the Clintonistas.
How times have changed. Now, with a “Special Hardball Documetary: Bill Clinton, President of the Wolrd” (no, I’m not kidding) Matthews atones for his previous attempt at independent thinking.
Eager to erase his non-orthodox past (which even earned him a stint guest hosting for Rush Limbaugh) Matthews gushes that the impeached President is more popular than Winston Churchill (in Matthew’s poll of 1.)
Here’s what he said on Morning Joe in the day leading up to the unveiling of his fanboy hour:
CHRIS MATTHEWS: “You know, Churchill’s huge in this country and he’s 70-30 back in England, and Nixon is probably 20-80 here, but in France he’s about 60-40. You know, he’s 100-0 around the world, Bill Clinton…”
I guess they left Sudanese pharmaceutical manufacturers out of that poll, whose numbers Matthews obviously pulled out of his… whatever. read more…
Weapon of Mis-Instruction: 60s Radical “Historian” Justifies Giving Stalin the A-Bomb
Herbert Aptheker,Communist Theoretician,Tom Hayden, A.J.Muste, Chairman of the Committee for Nonviolent Action and Staughton Lynd on their propaganda mission to Hanoi
It was a blast from the past this week, as mostly forgotten one-time Life cover boy, radical historian and Yale Professor turned community organizer Staughton Lynd surfaced to add… nothing, to the subject of the Rosenbergs and the atomic bomb spy plot.
His article in the Marxist rag, Monthly Review (who knew that still existed, either) was ironically titled, “Is There Anything More to Say about the Rosenberg Case?”
I’m willing to say there might be—but Lynd sure didn’t prove it.
But he did find some novel ways to say nothing new about the case while exposing the moral idiocy of the hard Left, proposing that:
- Stalin getting the bomb helped keep the peace
- Rosenberg was guilty but was unfairly convicted
- And worst of all, it’s good for anti-communists that Rosenberg has been proven guilty. read more…
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the ABC mega-hit The Bachelor decided that having physically beautiful women cater to the whim of a smug man for weeks on end in a competition to become his… whatever… wasn’t degrading enough.
Monday night, three of them were challenged to pose topless—and the two who did, survived for the next round.
The only element missing from the old slave market is the use of force and shackles not of the women’s own making—of course the difference between slaves and sex workers is precisely that element. read more…
This week, while Chris Matthews constantly shouted that the Republican Party was cracking up because of the Tea Party and Glenn Beck and moving to be dominated by “extremists,” the most prominent voice for moderate Democrats, the Democrat Leadership Council, officially closed its doors.
But the DLC has been dead for years. One of the nails in its coffin was the fact that Al Gore, the international voice for environmentalist socialism was one of its most prominent graduates.
At the peak of his popularity as a Green rock star and Oscar-winning propagandist, Gore founded Current TV, a cable channel. So far, he has been able to attract a whopping 23,000 viewers. Now he’s sure that Keith Olbermann- whose name identity among the general population is about .0005% of Gore’s, but whose cable audience was about 80 times his, can save his cable venture.
This week Al Gore showed just how reasonable and moderate he is by making hatemonger Keith Olbermann the “news” voice of his struggling cable outfit, Current TV:
AL GORE “Keith Olbermann is a gifted thinker, an amazing talent and a powerful communicator…”
How moderate. How mainstream. How thoughtful. Here are some prime examples of Al Gore’s “gifted thinker.”
OLBERMANN: …but to elect a group of unqualified, unstable individuals who will do what they are told, in exchange for money and power, and march this nation as far backward as they can get, backward to Jim Crow, or backward to the breadlines of the ‘30s, or backward to hanging union organizers, or backward to the trusts and the Robber Barons.
Result: the Tea Party. Vote backward, vote Tea Party. And if you are somehow indifferent to what is planned for next Tuesday, it is nothing short of an attempt to use Democracy to end this Democracy, to buy America wholesale and pave over the freedoms and the care we take of one another, which have combined to keep us the envy of the world.
Or how about his perverse glee in bringing up a teenager’s past sex life?
OLBERMANN ON BRISTOL PALIN APPEARING IN AN ABSTINENCE PSA: SHE’S the Candies’ spokesperson for abstinence? She and her SON? Because it‘s got to work THIS time?
Even before Tuscon, Keith was still dragging out this old slander of Rush Limbaugh that even his new boss’s former boss backed away from at the time…
OLBERMANN: Specifically Rush Limbaugh`s hate radio, which encouraged people as he encouraged people today to view the child molester, David Koresh, and the Branch Davidians somehow as innocent victims of what he called an invasion by U.S. military tanks. This is an exact parallel to the paranoia that Limbaugh stokes daily among those who feel themselves invaded by the U.S. government today. Limbaugh claimed others would have blood on their hands in the event of future right-wing terrorism.
Frankly, Rush, you have that blood on your hands now and you have had it for 15 years.
Or maybe Al Gore, who on his bus tour to inauguration in 1992, had to ask who a bust of Ben Franklin was supposed to be…
would be okay with Keith saying that liking George Washington makes you a racist.
OLBERMANN: Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on this Presidents’ Day celebrating George Washington, and the Founding Fathers he represents and Abraham Lincoln, and the Emancipation he represents.Not very many of the founding fathers were evolved enough to believe that black people were actually people. The Founding Fathers thought they were and fought hard to make sure they would always remain slaves.
Keith Olbermann announced this week he left the ratings cellar of MSNBC to join Al Gore’s Current TV, a network that would have to dig upward through many layers of strata to reach MSNBC’s basement. This is not a lateral move, this is a Meltdown.
How bad are the ratings at Current?
- I can’t find a cable company that allows local DMAs to sell commercials into it, due to lack of demand.
- I am paid to watch cable news, and I wasn’t sure I had Current TV in my cable package.
- Current TV does not have a hi-definition channel, or at least Comcast doesn’t carry it.
- The average prime time audience on Current is less than 1/3 my local news station’s 6:00 broadcast in the nation’s 69th largest market
- The prime time audience on Current is 1.5% of Olbermann’s former audience– which was already dwarfed by Bill O’Reilly’s.
Talk about digging your way out of a hole. read more…
In 1955, satirist Leonard Wibberly wrote a sendup of American foreign aid called, The Mouse that Roared, in which a microscopic, medieval and poverty stricken country, the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, invades the United States in order to be defeated and rebuilt like Germany and Japan. In 1959, it was released as a pretty good adaptation starring Peter Sellers.
This week, Chris Matthews declared war on Glen Beck, undoubtedly hoping Beck would respond and millions of people who don’t know Chris Matthews exists would become aware of his TV show, Hardball.
Among the ironic comments included a shot from Chris that Beck’s ratings were down a third… in other words, (if true) Beck has lost from his audience about 3 times the number of Harball’s total audience.
This would leave Beck with an audience a mere 6 times that of Matthews– about the same as ever, since Matthews suffered a drop of about a quarter, himself!
So Mathews has spent the week calling Beck a lunatic, hoping to provoke a fight that would put him on the map.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: “Does anybody check this guy’s copy over there? Is FOX saying that they believe this stuff, this argument, the latest, that we should arm up personally, build our bunkers and vote against Democrats or any Republican that doesn’t side with Beck and Bachmann and the rest of this band of looney tunes?“
