What’s all this business about a new course in the Middle East? How’s that supposed to win elections? It’s free phones and other free stuff that matters. The rest is just for people who read newspapers and blogs where not a single independent voter can be found.

Anyway, it’s three days to the first debate in which everyone is predicting a loss for their own side. Exhibit A here. And Exhibit B here.

My guess, I will think Romney took him apart and Paul Krugman will think the same about Obama. I hope so anyway, at least the first part.

I have an article at Quadrant Online dealing with the media bias in the US. It brings together first Tim Groseclose’s video providing the evidence of media bias along with the Democrat, Pat Caddell, arguing that the bias now being shown is putting democracy itself in danger. The notion of a relatively objective press is in many ways a recent innovation and has become one that we have become used to. We are now instead in the process of getting used to the idea that the media is a grouper for the left and will lie and distort to whatever extent is necessary to get their people into office. Given how obvious that all is, they will not hold that position for long. The question of the moment is whether they can hold it long enough to sneak Obama back over the line in spite of his manifest and manifold failures.

The video of Tim Groseclose below (which I also cited in an earlier post) provides a short summary of the points he raised in his book, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Distorts the American Mind, which I reviewed for Quadrant last year.

What good it is to know all this I am not entirely sure, since it is now pretty obvious that the media is bothered not at all by being exposed by those on the right so long as it gets to pour its message into the broader public consciousness? There is always the hope that we can shame the media into better behaviour but since they don’t appear even to notice their own bias themselves that may not work. But if everyone on our side at least knows the score about the media, then that will be a start.

You may nevertheless find this noteworthy. As shown in the video and Tim’s book, if you are a typical Quadrant or Catallaxy reader of the non-troll variety you may be interested to learn from Groseclose that, were it not for the media bias, the overall view of the average voter would be similar to your own. Think how different politics would be then.

That the media is biased to the left is obvious without much need of proof. Nevertheless, if you are interested not just in the evidence but also in a measure of the tilt, Tim Groseclose provided it in his exceptionally interesting analysis of media bias published in 2011. I discussed his Left Turn: How Liberal Media Distorts the American Mind in a Quadrant review last year but he has now added a video presentation to highlight what is shown in more detail in the book. What good it is to know all this is a genuine question since it is now pretty obvious that the media cares not at all that it is exposed by those of us on the right so long as it gets to pour its message out into the public. But if you are a typical Quadrant reader, for example, it ought to be interest you to discover that were it not for the media bias that surrounds us all, the view of the average voter would be similar to your own.

The media as arbiter may well be disappearing right before our eyes. It is now, I think, becoming so well understood that what is said in most of the the press or on most of the electronic media is nothing other than attempts by those who write and present the stories to continue the narrative of left-of-centre parties. It is not a universal, but the discount factor is getting larger the more obvious the distortions and lies have become. We on the right have known this for a long long time. That independents are catching on may be the big change now going on.

The evidence is tentative but there has now been the absolute necessity for Obama to walk back his attempt to lay blame for the embassy attacks on some obscure youtube video that no one had ever seen. No matter how much the media attempted to tell the administration story, the evidence that these were barefaced lies only meant that the more the media tried to support Obama, the more it was the media who were seen as liars themselves and the less willing many more than before have become to take the media’s word for anything.

And now with Romney’s 47% moment that was unanimously described across the media as the end of the Romney campaign, there has been an uprising on the right side of politics to argue that we here do not accept the media’s verdict and that the only problem with what Romney said was that he doesn’t say it often enough.

If at some stage media criticism simply no longer contains the sting it once had, which has for so long been a poison for the Republican side of the debate, you may begin to hear Romney say in public the kinds of things he has up until now saved for behind closed doors. If we get to the point where the views and reports of the The New York Times, Washington Post, ABCBSNBC and the rest are largely ignored and Romney is able to speak above their heads we will be in a kind of world in which more conservative views are sought while the leftist media are recognised as the shills they are for a discredited administration whose time is up. The media, because it has become so extreme, may be taking itself out of the game.

This is a link to a video of Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the UN. This is a link to the full text.

And of this you may be sure. The Prime Minister of a country in which every Jewish citizen is related to someone who was murdered during the holocaust is to be taken seriously when he says he will not allow it to happen again.

[Via Powerline]

There does seem to be something going on here. The Washington Post’s fact checker in chief has for the second day in a row drawn attention to Obama White House lies, in this case in regard to the continuous denial that the attacks on the American embassies in Egypt and Libya were premeditated terrorist attacks rather than spontaneous demonstrations about some obscure film trailer shown on Youtube. He writes:

In any kind of confused overseas event, initial reports are often wrong. But the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were killed, including the ambassador, is a case study of how an administration can carefully keep the focus as long as possible on one storyline — and then turn on a dime when it is no longer tenable.

For political reasons, it certainly was in the White House’s interests to not portray the attack as a terrorist incident, especially one that took place on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Instead the administration kept the focus on what was ultimately a red herring — anger in the Arab world over anti-Muslim video posted on You Tube. With key phrases and message discipline, the administration was able to conflate an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Egypt — which apparently was prompted by the video — with the deadly assault in Benghazi.

Officials were also able to dismiss pointed questions by referring to an ongoing investigation.

Ultimately, when the head of the National Counterterrorism Center was asked pointblank on Capitol Hill whether it was a an act of terror — and he agreed — the administration talking points began to shift. (Tough news reporting — as well as statements by Libya’s president — also played a role.) Yet President Obama himself resisted using the ‘t’ word, even as late as Tuesday, while keeping the focus on the video in his speech to the U.N. General Assembly.

On Wednesday, however, White House spokesman Jay Carney acknowledged also that Obama himself believes the attack was terrorism — and so more than two weeks after the attack the Rubicon finally was crossed.

As a reader service, we have compiled a comprehensive timeline of administration statements, showing the evolution in talking points, with key phrases highlighted in bold. Many readers sent suggestions for this timeline, for which we are deeply grateful.

We will leave it to readers to reach their own conclusions on whether this is merely the result of the fog of war and diplomacy — or a deliberate effort to steer the storyline away from more politically damaging questions.

OK. Here’s this reader’s conclusion. They are shameless liars. I suspect there’s no one out there with a different conclusion.

This is what Obama said:

Over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90 percent of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren’t paid for, as a consequence of tax cuts that weren’t paid for, a prescription drug plan that was not paid for, and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Now we took some emergency actions, but that accounts for about 10 percent of this increase in the deficit, and we have actually seen the federal government grow at a slower pace than at any time since Dwight Eisenhower, in fact, substantially lower than the federal government grew under either Ronald Reagan or George Bush.

Taxes are lower on families than they’ve been probably in the last 50 years. So I haven’t raised taxes.

OK, so he lied and misstated the truth yet again. But on this occasion he has been taken up by The Washington Post fact checker in chief who has awarded Obama the coveted Four Pinocchios. When it comes to Obama, he could retire with the trophy, but for the WP to take this on, it is near on unprecedented, specially six weeks out from the election. There is some kind of signalling going on here, and who knows, they may even wish to be on the good side of the incoming president. Here is the summation but there is a lot more that comes before:

We are not trying to make excuses for the fiscal excesses of the Bush administration — and Congress — in the last decade. But at some point, a president has to take ownership of his own actions.

Obama certainly inherited an economic mess, and that accounts for a large part of the deficit. But Obama pushed for spending increases and tax cuts that also have contributed in important ways to the nation’s fiscal deterioration. He certainly could argue that these were necessary and important steps to take, but he can’t blithely suggest that 90 percent of the current deficit “is as a consequence” of his predecessor’s policies — and not his own.

As for the citing of the discredited MarketWatch column, we have repeatedly urged the administration to rely on estimates from official government agencies, such as the White House budget office. It is astonishing to see the president repeat this faulty claim once again, as if it were an established fact.

A critique of that same fact checker is also found here written by March Thiessen of the American Enterprise Institute. He had pointed out that Obama had not attended his intelligence meetings but was taken on by the fact checker in the days he worked only to defend Obama. Thiessen therefore responded with this as his conclusion.

Perhaps Obama does not feel he needs such daily interaction. But the fact that he has not been having it is indisputable. (Though, interestingly, since my columns appeared, Obama attended his PDB meeting seven days in a row for the first time in seven months. If live briefings are no better than paper briefings, why has Obama suddenly begun receiving briefings in-person?)

It is a fact that for eight years before Obama took office, there was a daily meeting to discuss the PDB. And it is a fact that, on taking office, Obama stopped holding the daily intelligence meeting on a daily basis. Kessler may not think that is important, and he is entitled to his own opinion — but not his own facts.

I give Four Pinocchios to the Fact Checker.

As they used to say in Roman times, who will check the checker?

Lee Harris wrote two of the best books on the death of the West to have been published this century, Civilization and its Enemies and The Suicide of Reason. But even though he wrote such books, this is what I now find out:

The voters who really matter are those who, like me, were willing to give Obama a chance the first time around, but who, after watching his performance over the last four years, are not at all sure that they are willing to give him another.

He voted for Obama in 2008! He won’t this time he says, but if even someone who understands what he was able to write so brilliantly about can have voted for Obama, then the present was always the train wreck about to happen that has finally happened. Didn’t he read his own books? Did he not understand what they said? Was he really that out of touch with everything known at the time about Obama’s past? It is an immense puzzle and that’s all there is to say.

But he does now seem to have found his balance and has written an article, Stop Apologizing for Our Liberties, that unfortunately still sees the Obama administration on our side of the fence but is nevertheless more in keeping with his books. This is the central point:

Since the commencement of the current crisis, the Obama administration has repeatedly explained to the offended followers of the Prophet that the U.S. government had nothing to do with making the obnoxious film that, via its posting on YouTube, has set off weeks of bloody riot all across the Muslim world. This, of course, is quite true, but beside the point. Those who think that the rioters are foolish to attack the U.S. government for a film made by a lone crackpot are underrating the rioters’ intelligence. They know the U.S. government didn’t make the movie. What enrages them is that the U.S. government allowed such a movie to be made in the first place, and, even worse, that the government didn’t do the proper thing after it discovered who was responsible for making the blasphemous film—namely, to behead the blasphemer, in accordance with Sharia law. No doubt there are some moderate Muslims who would have probably been content with a less drastic punishment, such as hanging, and even a few liberal ones who would have been satisfied with a long prison term. But, across the spectrum, Muslims are not upset because of what our government did, but what it failed to do—punish an individual for exercising his constitutionally protected right to free expression.

There is nothing more to explain. This is who we are and that is who they are. What a compromise here would be I cannot even begin to imagine.