I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time here, but you can still catch my random musings at Center Right Side, a blog I run– with my sister-in-law and father-in-law posting, as well.

I’ve really enjoyed the comments on my posts, too, even when you don’t agree with me! And I’ve been very grateful for the opportunity to post my thoughts on this well-read page.

And don’t forget….

Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

Narrator: 537,  the number of votes that changed the course of American history.

News announcer: Florida  is too close to call…

Narrator: The difference between what was and what could have been. So this year if you’re thinking that your vote doesn’t count, that it won’t matter…well, back then there were probably at least 537 people who felt the same way. Make your voice heard. Vote.

The president: I’m Barack Obama and I approved this message.

The Huffington Post reports that the president’s team is running this ad in swing states. The campaign, according to the article, is not worried about voter enthusiasm but decided to run the ad because…. Well, maybe because they’re  really what the president thinks Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is.

Coming on the heels of the “I finally have an agenda” move,  this latest message seems like one more desperate attempt to nudge tepid Dem voters, perhaps turned off by the president’s negative campaigning but leaning his way, to go ahead and hold their noses but still vote for Obama.

However, this ad is a double-edged sword. Just as it reminds Democrats of the 2000 vote-counting debacle in Florida, it also probably sends a shiver down Republican spines, too, prompting them to get out and cast their votes before ballot-counting nightmares recommence.

So my answer to the question posed at the outset of this piece: This ad is — a) an act of desperation and c) a public service announcement that will surely jazz up GOP sentiments, as well.

Libby Sternberg is a novelist. Find her books here. Follow her at Center Right Side blog.

So, I’ve got this friend, see? Okay, he’s not really a friend. He’s a member of the family, a cousin, okay? But God love him, he’s a great guy.  He’s a stand-up guy, he is. You need something, he’ll give it to you. He’d give you the shirt off his back, he would. He’s got energy up the wazoo, a real “can do” kind of fellow. And smarts? That guy should have been a whatchamacallit—you know, one of those prize winners, noble something or other.

Anyways, he’s  trying to line up some partnerships to get some business going here and there. He’s into this and that, see, and he’s always working on something.

And, because I’m something of a traveler myself, I start getting asked by folks about him. What kind of guy he is and whatnot. Is he as great as he thinks he is? Jeez, I can’t tell you the number of times I got that: That cousin of yours, he’s really stuck on hisself.

And I know he comes off that way to these folks but, c’mon, some of ‘em got a chip on their shoulders so big they can’t see sideways no more and think the world starts and ends at the tips of their noses. You know what I mean?

But I ain’t gonna knock that chip off. Not me. I want ‘em to like me, too, after all. So I nod my head and say, yeah, he’s got his flaws—we’ve all got ‘em, right, even you’se. And, yeah, he can be what you call “dismissive” and maybe “derisive” and even “dictatorial”—those “d” words spilled out of me so fast I thought maybe I shoulda been a poet—but we’re all human, you know what I mean?.

Well, I get home, thinking what a great thing I done for my cuz, and whatayaknow? He’s all in my face, saying, what the hell you think you’re doing for me, throwing me under the bus like that? You think I need that? You think that’s gonna help me out, going on some apology tour on my behalf when you know I’m not any of those things you said about me?

What apology tour, I throws back at him. I didn’t use no apology words.

So you know what he does? He takes his story to the local newspaper and tells this reporter all about it.

And, happy ending here—they backed me up. That ain’t no apology tour, they says. He didn’t use none of those words. For an apology tour, you have to say sorry and whatnot, things like that, see?

Maybe my cuz ain’t as smart as I thought he was.

____

The above is entirely and obviously fictional, because what reasonable person in the universe would not agree with the aggrieved cousin?

Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

But there was a flash of anger in Romney’s performance at the last of the three debates, and, appropriately, it was anger expressed on behalf of the American people. The contrast with the president couldn’t have been more striking. While Obama talked about “me, the nation” (hmm…where have we heard that before? ), Romney displayed control and humility, brushing past most of  Obama’s attacks as if to signal, “this isn’t about me personally.”

But Romney showed fire when he took the president to task for his “apology tour,” and in this instance, Romney spoke for many Americans, not just himself.

This was the only moment during the various debates that triggered a visceral reaction from me, and I suspect that’s true of many other like-minded folks who watched. After Romney mentioned the president’s “apology tour,” and the president described that as a “whopper” discredited by the media, Romney went on to explain:

Mr. President, the reason I called it an apology tour is because you went to the Middle East, you flew to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iraq.

By the way, you skipped Israel, our closest friend in the region, but you went to the other nations.

And by the way, they noticed that you skipped Israel.

And in those nations on Arabic TV, you said America had been dismissive and derisive. You said that on occasion America had dictated to other nations.

Mr. President, America has not dictated to other nations, we have freed other nations from dictators.

Bravo! Whatever our country’s flaws, we don’t need to have a president acting like a preening member of an over-rated country music group dissing us while abroad. Romney spoke for all of us in that clip, and he showed the right level of righteous indignation and anger on our behalf.

It was a knockout moment, but it occurred around the hour mark of a debate up against Monday Night Football and baseball on the schedule.

Here’s hoping the moment is replayed often.

Libby Sternberg is a novelist

Susan Rice’s Story

by Dr. Joseph Sternberg, Scientific Advisor to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, 1971-1974

Why was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice sent around to the Sunday talk shows to tell a (false) story?

Susan Rice has no responsibility for the protection of embassies, nor for U.S. policy towards Libya. She was not directly involved in the development of intelligence of events in Libya. But how did the events in Libya affect what she was responsible for at the UN? Why would the White House think that she was the right person to promote the story they were trying to sell?

President Obama has had two foreign affairs priorities. One was to defeat Al Qaeda. The second was to improve relations with the Muslim world, which has taken the form of developing close ties with the Muslim Brotherhood. Susan Rice is directly involved in the second of these objectives in her role as UN Ambassador.

The U.S. is working as a member of the UN Human Rights Council as its Muslim members seek to produce a statement that restricts speech critical of Islam. The U.S. should not be party to such activities as any such statement would be in violation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But it is an active participant.

An unstated conclusion following from Rice’s story was that if the video could have been repressed, there wouldn’t have been any demonstrations. So sending her out to the Sunday shows would makes sense for Obama as an attempt to advance this second objective, which was a logical outcome of his 2009 speech in Cairo. The offensive video story would also serve to divert attention from the fact that, contrary to what was claimed exhaustively at the Democratic Convention (Al Qaeda has been smashed), Al Qaeda is still a serious problem in the Middle East and North Africa.

Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman (the “Blind Sheikh” serving a life sentence for his role in the first World Trade Center bombing) also played a part in the Cairo Demonstration on Sept. 11. The first demand of President Morsi, upon taking office, was that the U.S. release the Sheikh from prison. I don’t know whether they are claiming he was unfairly convicted (in a NY trial—Attorney General Eric Holder, please note). At a minimum they are seeking his release on “humanitarian” grounds. It has been reported that a member of an Egyptian Jihadist group banned from entering the United Sates had been admitted to the White House on this issue. If Obama is reelected, who would like to take bets on whether the Sheikh would be released in furtherance of Obama’s second objective?

We don’t know what Susan Rice knew about the events in Libya. Since the State Department knew, you would think she would have given them a call before telling her story. So she was either lying or negligent. But we do know that her appearances were authorized by the White House.

This post is also featured at CenterRightSide blog.  

While everyone’s scoring the candidates’ performance, let’s score the questioners:

Mr. President, Governor Romney, as a 20-year-old college student, all I hear from professors, neighbors and others is that when I graduate, I will have little chance to get employment. What can you say to reassure me, but more importantly my parents, that I will be able to sufficiently support myself after I graduate?

Jobs and the economy–legitimate territory to explore. But the “what can you say to reassure me” presented no challenge to either candidate.  Grade: C

(To President Obama):Your energy secretary, Steven Chu, has now been on record three times stating it’s not policy of his department to help lower gas prices. Do you agree with Secretary Chu that this is not the job of the Energy Department?

I actually thought this was a pretty clever question, and I wondered if the questioner’s purpose was to dig deeper into energy policy and perhaps even more of Secretary Chu’s less-than-populist statements. But the problem here is that the town hall format didn’t allow the questioner to pursue what seemed like an unfinished thought. Too bad the moderator didn’t, either. Grade: B+

Governor Romney, you have stated that if you’re elected president, you would plan to reduce the tax rates for all the tax brackets and that you would work with the Congress to eliminate some deductions in order to make up for the loss in revenue. Concerning the — these various deductions, the mortgage deductions, the charitable deductions, the child tax credit and also the — oh, what’s that other credit? I forgot….Oh, I remember. The education credits, which are important to me, because I have children in college. What would be your position on those things, which are important to the middle class?

Not a bad question—filled with specific items. Good job! Grade: A+

In what new ways to you intend to rectify the inequalities in the workplace, specifically regarding females making only 72 percent of what their male counterparts earn?

Where to begin…I don’t dismiss women’s concerns about equal pay. Despite what the conservative blogosphere writes and says about women’s pay being more in line with men’s than liberals want us to believe, my guess is that there are still many women who suspect their male counterparts might be getting more than they are in the workplace for the same quality work. That said, the Lily Ledbetter Act was an unfair way to address possible unfairness. I wish Romney had turned this question to a direct discussion of that act, placing it in true fairness terms: Is it fair for CEO Mary to have to pay for the discrimination sins of CEO Max that she had nothing whatsoever to do with? In other words, the Ledbetter Act was about statutes of limitations. He should have used this silly question to illuminate and educate. Instead, we got “binders full of women,” which was an amusing gaffe framed in a good story about his proactive approach to hiring women. Grade for the question: C- for vagueness and because it was just a setup for a war on women discussion.

 Governor Romney, I am an undecided voter, because I’m disappointed with the lack of progress I’ve seen in the last four years. However, I do attribute much of America’s economic and international problems to the failings and missteps of the Bush administration. Since both you and President Bush are Republicans, I fear a return to the policies of those years should you win this election. What is the biggest difference between you and George W. Bush, and how do you differentiate yourself from George W. Bush?

At first, I groaned when I heard this question. As time went on (that is, as I listened to Romney’s answer), I thought it was fair and actually illuminating. What the questioner was really saying is: We’ve heard President Obama say you would take us back to the policies that got us into our current financial mess. Tell me how your policies differ from those of the Bush administration. This was a great opportunity for Romney, and I thought he did a decent job with his answer. Grade for the question: B+

Mr. President, I voted for you in 2008. What have you done or accomplished to earn my vote in 2012? I’m not that optimistic as I was in 2012. Most things I need for everyday living are very expensive.

Good question, simply put. The questioner is wondering what the president’s record is, something he seems to run away from more than on. The only problem with it is it’s vague enough to be a softball, and that’s exactly how the president played it, with the usual blather. A reporter asking this question might have included some statistics—such as the ones that Mitt Romney has been repeating—about unemployment, food stamp recipients, stagnant wages and the like. A for effort, but B- for wording.

Mr. Romney, what do you plan on doing with immigrants without their green cards that are currently living here as productive members of society?

Hmm…I wonder what the questioner herself thought should be done with these illegal immigrants? (Note she avoids using the adjective “illegal” but does use “productive” when describing this group.) Good subject matter—it allowed Romney to zing the president, using the Univision interview where he was asked why he’d done nothing on immigration reform. But bad form. The questioner was probably not that interested in hearing any answer other than: give them all green cards, of course! Grade: D

This question actually comes from a brain trust of my friends at Global Telecom Supply in Minneola yesterday….We were sitting around, talking about Libya, and we were reading and became aware of reports that the State Department refused extra security for our embassy in Benghazi, Libya, prior to the attacks that killed four Americans. Who was it that denied enhanced security and why?

This question has been discussed at great length elsewhere. I don’t have much to add to that discussion except to say that I think the questioner was on the right track, trying to determine what the real story was with this terrorist attack. But a more important focus should have been: why did the administration embrace and broadcast a false narrative for so long? Grade: C

President Obama, during the Democratic National Convention in 2008, you stated you wanted to keep AK-47s out of the hands of criminals. What has your administration done or planned to do to limit the availability of assault weapons?

Good grief, another loaded question (pun intended). I wish Romney had answered in this way: Since Iran is this close to getting a nuclear bomb, I suggest we increase our citizens’ access to all weapons.

I’m no Second Amendment purist. But gun control? When unemployment is at…well, you know the litany. Really? Grade: D-

The outsourcing of American jobs overseas has taken a toll on our economy. What plans do you have to put back and keep jobs here in the United States?

Direct and simple question, deals with trade issues and the economy but lacks specificity. It would have been better if the questioner could have pointed to specific trade bills or incentives for businesses to move or not move. Grade: B

I think this is a tough question. To each of you. What do you believe is the biggest misperception that the American people have about you as a man and a candidate? Using specific examples, can you take this opportunity to debunk that misperception and set us straight?

No, it wasn’t a tough question. But it was a nice smiley-face one. It did give Romney a chance to remind folks he doesn’t go around the country arbitrarily killing workers’ wives. Grade: C+

That’s my roundup of the questioners and how good or bad I thought their inquiries were. Please share your opinions with me.

And, for the love of God, let’s abandon this town hall format next election cycle!

Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

Three years ago this month, the picture above appeared in the media, accompanying an article about President Obama’s first trip to Dover Air Force Base as remains of soldiers killed in Afghanistan were returned to native soil. The story mentioned the president made the trip as he considered a new policy for the region. The New York Times swooned:

The trip was a symbolic one for Mr. Obama, given the gravity of his coming announcement of a new strategy for Afghanistan.

The  ban on pictures of the war dead had been lifted, and many conservatives viewed his visit to Dover that fall as politically motivated. After all, there was no policy reason for going. And if he wished to console family members, he could have done so without photographers present. Several families of deceased soldiers declined to have their loved ones’ remains photographed for the visit and subsequent story.

This is the same president whose team is now accusing Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney of politicizing the terrorist attack in Libya that killed an American ambassador and several other security and foreign service workers.

The sorrow experienced by family members of the deceased must be deep. The mother of a former Navy Seal killed in Benghazi has asked Romney to stop mentioning her son, a request he’s honored. She’s not a Romney supporter, and he did the right thing in dropping her brave son’s story from his campaign tales. Now, the ambassador’s father is also asking that his son’s death not to be politicized.

 “It would really be abhorrent to make this into a campaign issue,” Jan Stevens, 77, said in a telephone interview from his home in Loomis, California, as he prepares for a memorial service for his son next week.

Jan Stevens, the article notes, is a registered Democrat, and surely one can understand how it would be particularly painful to have his son’s death become part of a political discussion that could hurt the candidate of the party he favors. But are these family feelings now becoming part of political talking points?

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell included Ambassador Stevens’s father’s request when she interviewed Virginia Republican Governor Bob McDonnell on Monday about the upcoming presidential debate and Romney’s attacks on the president regarding the Benghazi fiasco:

Let me just ask you quickly about the mother of Glen Daugherty, the former SEAL that was killed, and the father of Ambassador Stevens speaking to Bloomberg News and both saying please do not politicize the deaths of our sons. Do you think it should be off limits for the campaigns?

Here’s the clip (usual warning: MSNBC embeds an ad in it first):

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Continuing with this theme, Obama campaign spokesman Robert Gibbs, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe today,  also noted Mr. Stevens’s request that his son’s death not be politicized.

The pain of the grieving families should not, of course, be dismissed. But neither should it be used as a political talking point by an administration unwilling to be completely forthcoming.

All of this led me to ponder: Will this be the president’s way of addressing the Benghazi issue during the debate? Will he try to shame Romney for allegedly politicizing the deaths of brave Americans? Will the president stoop so low as to hide behind the grief of deeply mourning parents?

If so, let’s hope the Romney team doesn’t flinch. Unlike the president’s visit to Dover three years ago this month, the discussion of the terrorist attack in Benghazi has legitimate implications for future policy—both military and diplomatic.

Broader still, it has implications for the president’s overall management style. Is he such a hands-off manager that he lets those pesky security types operate without his direct supervision or even knowledge of their activities, feeling comfortable enough to run off to a fundraiser the day after the murder of a US Ambassador?

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is now taking responsibility—to a degree—for the weak Benghazi security. The State Department, she says, is ultimately responsible for security matters at embassies and consulates, and it’s not an issue that rises to the level of the president or vice president’s attention. Of course, the Benghazi debacle isn’t just about security. Cleverly, her statement makes a pre-emptive strike against the “politicization” of the issue:

“I want to avoid some kind of political gotcha,” she added, noting that it is close to the election.

Sly wording, that. It makes those who ask questions appear as little more than craven opportunists.

The problem for the Obama team, however, is that politicians aren’t the only ones asking questions. Journalists are, too.

And some of those questions are actually about the president’s own possible politicization of the attack. Specifically, did he know it was not related to the offensive video about Mohammed when he sent UN Ambassador Susan Rice on multiple Sunday talk shows to say that it was? Did he and his team want the country to think that al Qaeda threats are in the “taken care of” column? Was he afraid that the truth would hurt his chances in November, tainting his team’s bumper-sticker claim that “Osama bin Laden is dead and GM is alive”?

As was demonstrated three years ago this month, the president isn’t above that kind of shameless politicization, even when families of those who’ve given their lives in service to their county are grieving.

Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

On the former question, a CNN poll showed viewers believe Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan won, 51-43, while a CBS poll reported the opposite with Democratic Vice President Joseph Biden the victor, 50-31.

On the latter question, it depends whom you ask. Passionate partisan Democrats loved Biden’s performance. Talking Points Memo’s Evan McMorris-Santoro says “there was much to love” about the vice-president’s performance. “Joe Biden kicked butt,” one Democrat was quoted as saying in an ABC story. And the folks at Daily Kos said…well, imagine unicorns and rainbows doing the Snoopy dance of happiness, pausing only long enough to stick their tongues out at Republicans. No need to actually go to their site.

They all thought Biden did what the president didn’t—aggressively counter his opponent. They viewed his interruptions and mugging as appropriate responses to someone they believed was being disingenuous at best. So the debate mattered a great deal to them, reenergizing the president’s worried base. The problem for Democrats: these are votes they had anyway.

Conservatives and dispassionate observers, however, were generally appalled by Biden’s behavior. I’m a professional writer, and it’s hard for me to capture in words how immature his facial expressions, gestures and interruptions made Biden look. Laughing during a discussion of nuclear war sums it all up, though. Who does that?

After the debate, Fox News’s Brit Hume and Greta Van Susteren both talked about how Biden’s laugh reflex is a nervous tic and how in his personal life the man is generous of spirit. Fair enough. But that attribute needs to be paired with a sober attitude toward serious subjects, or at least a respect for those who want to discuss them seriously. What Biden failed to realize was that those who take these issues seriously also included the audience. Laughing at Ryan was laughing at them, too. It was as if Biden were the annoying jokester who can’t resist making puns while you’re trying to listen to an interesting conversation or watch a dramatic movie. Shut up already, you feel like saying.

Candidates should be judged on the substance of their ideas on various issues, of course. But none of us has a crystal ball that tells us which issues will become priorities because of changing circumstances. So we also judge candidates on their personalities and characters, and what these say about their decision-making capabilities and inclinations. In that sense, style might tell us something: is this fellow a clear thinker, does this woman consider all points of view? Can I trust him or her?

Unfortunately for Biden, his snarky attitude made him seem at least unbelievable if not outright untrustworthy. Sure, he was able to use all the right jargon and toss around information. But in that sense, he was like the quirky guy everybody ignores when he goes on at great length, with Cheshire-cat grin and encyclopedic knowledge, about how the Red Sox will absolutely, positively—no doubt whatsoever, my good friend—win next year. We’ve all had our shoulders tapped by that fellow. We might find him amusing and once in a blue moon he might be right, but it’s a bit frightening imagining him a heartbeat away from…well, I always have trouble finishing that sentence.

But, back to actual substance and its interplay with style: Watching the first presidential debate, I thought one of Mitt Romney’s advantages was that he came off as trustworthy, with some enumerated ideas on issues, while the president seemed to be spewing a lot of blah-blah-blah, the usual talking points that come from a candidate’s mouth about fairness… moving forward…American people…what-a-mess-I-inherited, for the love of God.

Blah-blah-blah falls into two categories—the vague talking-points discussion mentioned above or a bunch of material (think quirky guy’s encyclopedic knowledge of Red Sox history) the interested but undecided voter hasn’t had a chance to study.

During the veep match-up, both candidates were throwing facts, figures, analysis, details around fast and furiously (although, ironically, the Fast and Furious scandal itself did not come up). When that happens, I believe undecided voters or nonpartisan voters (voters who switch “team” loyalties from year to year depending on the candidate) hear blah-blah-blah from both sides and end up favoring the candidate they believe they can trust.

Although I’ve expressed my dismay over the undecided voter—how can they be undecided at this point?—I do understand the befuddlement they must experience when confronted with a raft of material they’ve not been following but want to understand. They must feel they are coming up on a test for which they’ve not adequately studied. In a sense, all of us are in that “unprepared” state concerning all facets of foreign policy. We might be able to Google various government documents and studies concerning domestic issues, but we won’t see the classified intelligence briefings the candidates have seen.

That brings us back to trustworthiness.

A brief television news discussion recently centered on how voters have come to distrust campaign ads that feature the opponent saying something negative because voters now automatically assume that both sides take quotes out of context. Thus, a new positive Romney ad that featured the candidate alone talking about his ideas received good reviews from those on the TV show. Romney had already demonstrated in the first debate that he was likeable and confident. The ad helped reinforce that image. This discussion was on MSNBC.

Before the first presidential debate, voters probably had a vague idea that Romney was a rich guy who might not understand their problems well enough to look out for their interests. His debate performance showed a likable fellow who has positive ideas, and who also happens to be rich. But I don’t think Americans despise the rich as much as the president’s team would like them to.

Unfortunately for the president, he appeared unengaged and sometimes– because of the vagueness of his answers –uninformed. Unfortunately for Vice President Joe Biden, he appeared just…well, awfully odd.

The rest, to the undecided voter, is just a bunch of blah-blah-blah.

Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

This has lit up the left, who see themselves as the protectors of  women’s “lady parts” with their pro-choice stance on abortion, and who view Republicans as enemies of women, licking their chops at the opportunity to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Before things get too crazy—the vice-presidential debate is coming up, after all, and Paul Ryan is unabashedly pro-life—let’s not forget this: there’s only one candidate in the presidential race who believes that ladies, along with their lady parts, can be discarded with impunity, if they happen to be born as the result of a failed abortion. That is Barack Obama, the candidate who holds the most extreme positions on abortion in this campaign.

Let me repeat this, so journalists eager to report on all candidates’ abortion positions (not just Republicans’) can absorb it: when in the Illinois state legislature, Barack Obama would not support a law saving the lives of babies—real, live human beings, not “fetuses”—who happened to be born after failed abortions.

This places the president to the left of NARAL, the National Abortion Rights Action League. Here is their statement on so-called Born-Alive Acts from June 2001:

 “NARAL does not oppose passage of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. Last year’s committee and floor debate served to clarify the bill’s intent and assure us that it is not targeted at Roe v. Wade or a woman’s right to choose.”

The president’s defenders (and the president himself) claim that Obama didn’t support Born Alive legislation in Illinois because it was trying to undermine Roe v. Wade, and that he would have supported a bill similar to the federal one on this issue. An investigation by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, however, agreed with the National Right to Life Committee when it found that the president voted in committee against BAIF even though it was “nearly identical” to the federal bill:

We find that, as the NRLC said in a recent statement, Obama voted in committee against the 2003 state bill that was nearly identical to the federal act he says he would have supported. Both contained identical clauses saying that nothing in the bills could be construed to affect legal rights of an unborn fetus, according to an undisputed summary written immediately after the committee’s 2003 mark-up session.

It’s no wonder the president would want to gloss over or fudge this issue. Common sense tells us that if you were able to survey every single adult American on support or opposition to “Born Alive” bills, you’d probably find support in the super-majority range—certainly 60 percent, probably closer to 90. What reasonable, clear-thinking person could be for letting live infants die in trash bins?

But, as I’ve pointed out before, most Americans who identify with the pro-choice and pro-life positions are in agreement on many abortion specifics. Here’s a quick summary from a Gallup survey last year (click on chart to enlarge)

Of the nine points of agreement in that table, three could be considered solid pro-choice positions—keeping abortion legal under certain circumstances, such as rape or incest—while six of the positions line up with pro-life initiatives that pro-choice absolutists oppose. Pro-choice absolutists such as President Obama.

So even on these nine areas of agreement, most of the points are ones that pro-lifers such as Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan agree with, at least one Joe Biden supports (in 1999, he voted to ban partial birth abortion), while the president, whose administration recently promulgated regulations forcing all health insurers to cover birth control and abortifacients, regardless of conscience issues, is the extremist.

You could summarize the Gallup results by saying that America wants abortion to remain legal, but is not opposed to reasonable restrictions to keep it “rare.”

Speaking of that word, “rare,” scant attention was given to the fact that it disappeared from the Democratic platform’s plank on abortion, while much fuss was made over the Republican platform’s purist pro-life approach, which has remained virtually unchanged for years.

When the economy is in shambles and the Middle East in flames, it’s easy to get frustrated with discussions of abortion, especially when it is unlikely, as Romney said, that legislation will come before him, if he were president, on this topic. But to those who have strong beliefs on abortion and a woman’s access to it, that issue is paramount, above what happens in the world or to our economy.

I don’t dismiss that passion—it’s a serious subject, one dealing with fundamental issues of life and liberty. I especially respect pro-lifers, whose viewpoints are often misrepresented as out of the mainstream (despite the areas of consensus found in the Gallup poll) and whose advocates are often ridiculed as religious zealots who all approve of violence to abortion providers (cue Law & Order music).

So, go ahead, talk about abortion, write about it, ask candidates about it. But on this topic, be clear: someone who will not stand up for live baby girls about to be tossed on the trash heap is no true champion of girls, women, ladies or any of their “parts.”

Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

Then it was on to a guilty pleasure, Upstairs, Downstairs, the first episode of the new season of this old chestnut, a story of the servants and masters of 165 Eaton Place, a London townhome. The latest version is set on the eve of World War II, and although it features some stodgy storytelling and limited sets and casts (crowd scenes are always shot close-in, probably to conceal the low numbers of extras), I can’t resist.  Both shows appear on PBS.

Compared to other dramatic series I’ve followed in the past few years, though, I would have to rank these two offerings well below ones such as HBO’s Rome, AMC’s Mad Men, HBO’s medieval fantasy Game of Thrones, and even A&E’s late 1990s Horatio Hornblower series in depth of storytelling, acting, and overall design.

And therein lies a dirty little secret: commercial television has been outpacing PBS in quality dramatic offerings for a long time.

It’s an illusion that the public network sits at the head of the artistic kingdom. In fact, they only occupied that spot for a very brief moment. If you review Emmy winners for dramatic series over the past 50 years, PBS only won four, all in the 1970s, for programs such as the old Upstairs, Downstairs, (three wins) and Elizabeth R. They were nominated for other shows during that decade—the Forsyte Saga, the Six Wives of Henry VIII, the First Churchills—but those nominations faded in the following decades as broadcast networks and then cable channels began offering more intriguing fare. PBS’s British import Downton Abbey broke a long dry spell for the network, managing to snag a best dramatic series nomination but not a win this year. (The network picked up many other nominations but in acting, editing, writing and other categories.)

This might come as a surprise to many people, especially baby boomers, who tend to think of PBS as the standout in artsy, and occasionally artistic, serious dramatic presentations.

Public broadcasting has lost its grip on the claim to singular documentary excellence, as well. Ken Burns’s Civil War series was a masterpiece, but his subsequent entries haven’t been nearly as interesting. I remember watching the one on jazz and thinking to myself: how many times am I going to hear that so-and-so was the greatest jazz trumpeter/singer/pianist/sax player ever? When will someone explain that jazz, like most popular music, relies on a very simple chord progression used over and over?

Burns’s take on America and World War II? Not nearly as compelling to this viewer as the History Channel’s World War II in HD, which offered similar first-person testimonials but paired them with never-before-seen footage and without the not-so-subtle subtext on race and class in Burns’s presentation. The History Channel also re-aired HBO’s excellent adaptation of Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers. In fact, History, Discovery, and even the Weather Channel offer documentary programming that, while not always rising to the production values of some PBS offerings, presents scientific and historical information in attractive ways.

As to the various “great performances” PBS offers, opera from the Met is now available in movie theaters. What about Antiques Roadshow? History offers Pawn Stars and American Pickers. How about America’s Test Kitchen? Food Network offers…everything.

As for news programming, the question for conservatives always has been: why should you be allowed to use power (tax dollars) to retain power? PBS news programming skews left. PBS has brought us Bill Moyers and Charlie Rose, after all, and the smugly titled Need to Know—just look at its web page to get a taste of the viewpoint. Public dollars advance these viewpoints. No liberal would tolerate public funding going to a Charles Krauthammer or Bill O’Reilly program.

Children’s programming, of course, shines on PBS. But its Sesame Street is so successful it’s hard to imagine it not finding itself at the center of a bidding war should it be offered to commercial networks.

Speaking of commercial, the two programs mentioned at the outset of this post played without commercial interruptions, but at the end of Midwife, I sat through a parade of sponsor announcements that only the most sycophantic PBS courtier would claim were not advertisements. There was a spot about upcoming events at a college in the region, one on Viking River Cruises and even a tastefully fashionable few moments from Ralph Lauren.

Most of these sponsors avoid crossing the line into commercial advertisements by simply composing their messages in third-person (Viking Cruises are great) rather than second (You know ya wanna…go on a Viking Cruise). While sponsors can use web addresses and other enticements, they usually can’t promote a specific price or a “call to action” (the buy-me message).

When Exxon Mobile underwrote PBS’s Masterpiece Theater years ago, CBS reported the sponsorship cost around “$7 to 8 million annually.” That’s roughly the cost of two or three Superbowl ads. The difference is the Superbowl ad money would have been taxable once added to the network’s revenue stream.

The left has gleefully latched on to the “Romney Wants to Kill Big Bird” meme to denounce Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s announcement that PBS would be on the chopping block as he looked for ways to cut spending.

But Romney and conservatives don’t want to kill Big Bird. They want him to be the goose that lays the golden tax-generating egg. He’s a “one percenter,” if you look at all the merchandising revenue he and Sesame Street generate. Why shouldn’t he pay his fair share, to use the president’s terminology?

Why shouldn’t all the PBS-generated advertising sponsorship revenue be considered taxable income?

PBS used to be a big fish in a small pond. Now, the pond is an ocean, and there are bigger, brighter, more beautiful marine animals with it in the pool. It’s time to get rid of the myth that PBS is the model for artistic and documentary programming. It’s time to stop its tax subsidies. And maybe, at some point, it will even be time to suggest it swim with the commercial big boys, producing tax revenue instead of living off it.

Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

I’ve already stated my abhorrence for this format. Who is genuinely undecided at this stage of the campaign? I can only imagine it’s the uninformed or those leaning in one direction who might need some shoring up. Saturday Night Live satirized them hilariously here (be warned: ad precedes clip, but it’s still worth the watch):

Letting uninformed voters question the candidates is akin to a science teacher letting only the inattentive students in a class ask questions of Stephen Hawking during a visit to campus. Why should they be rewarded for their inattention? In such a case, it would be better for Mr. Hawking to question the slackers, probing the depth of their lack of knowledge and suggesting areas for improvement.

Come to think of it, perhaps that would be a better format for the Town Hall debate, too—the candidates get to question the participants, helping educate them on the role of government, what various programs can and can’t do, the federal budget, the Constitution, why we’re involved in different areas of the world. That might be something worth watching.

To be charitable, one can assume that many undecided voters simply have been busy with their own lives, neither news junkies nor obsessed with politics in general. Therefore, their focus will be on real, everyday problems that many Americans also face.

But just because these folks are undecided or don’t identify with a particular party (partisan),  doesn’t necessarily mean they’re non-ideological. If pressed, they might be able to give you a general sense of what they think government should be doing in their own lives. In that case, what you have is an undecided leaner, someone who leans toward or away from a particular theory of government. And if they haven’t given a lot of thought to the role of government in their lives, there’s a better chance they lean left than right. It’s a multi-step process to get from “I want such-and-such in my life” to “but the government shouldn’t have to give it to me.” It probably takes more than the allotted debate time to be convinced of that philosophy or to reason that out.

The question remains: why do these folks get access to the president of the United States and his challenger on one of the rare occasions we get to see the candidates together?

I can understand the impulse behind the crafting of the town hall format. So-called “everyday Americans” are more likely to bring general macro policy discussions down to the micro level. But surely there are ways to probe the candidates’ stances on issues at that level other than subjecting them—and those of us who have done our homework, studied and paid attention—to questions from folks who might not know their own minds, let alone the pressing policies of the day.

Libby Sternberg is a novelist

****The TOWN HALL FORMAT!****

Am I the only one who loathes this kind of discussion arrangement? The Commission on Presidential Debates describes the setup thus:

The second presidential debate will take the form of a town meeting, in which citizens will ask questions of the candidates on foreign and domestic issues. Candidates each will have two minutes to respond, and an additional minute for the moderator to facilitate a discussion. The town meeting participants will be undecided voters selected by the Gallup Organization.

Let’s unpack this, shall we? “Undecided voters selected by the Gallup Organization”—that phrase is fraught with peril. Any time I’ve watched a town hall debate with participants chosen in this way, it seems to me most of the “undecideds” skewed left. Who, by October 16, will be sincerely undecided? My guess is a bunch of that crowd will be disillusioned former Obama supporters who might not be looking for information so much as rationales for not abandoning their guy.

Tip for the Romney camp: Prepare as if the entire audience will be from a 2008 Obama rally.

Another word or two about these so-called undecideds—by October 16, the truly undecided might also be the woefully uninformed. This can lead to simplistic and even silly questions, questions that ramble endlessly, taking up precious time before getting to a point, or even the completely irrelevant “boxers vs. briefs” inquiries.

The format and moderator (in this case, CNN’s Candy Crowley) can help avoid these possibilities. For example, if questions are written down rather than spoken by the audience, the moderator can get to the point surely and swiftly, not allowing a questioner to filibuster debate time away. And, a moderator can also take a muddled question and turn it into something substantive. Will that happen?

Tip for the Romney campaign: If the moderator doesn’t do that job, make sure you do. Don’t be afraid to say, “If I understand you correctly, I think you want to know….” Take the question in the policy direction that is most meaningful for the larger audience.

Finally, the president will surely be more prepared than he was on October 3, and he’s likely to be more aggressive toward Romney, maybe even using a few lines from his post-Denver campaign rallies in which he joked that some other Mitt Romney showed up at the debate. It’s hard to imagine the Romney camp isn’t prepared for that sort of attack, though—Romney seemed prepared for it on October 3.

I’d love to see Romney turn such accusations back onto the president. When Obama is before a friendly audience, he acts as though someone else has been president for the past four years and he’s running against that phantom leader. Post-debate, the president talked to a crowd of supporters about holding Romney accountable—as if Romney had been the one in the Oval Office. This is an implicit admission that the president can’t tout his own record, which is strewn with economic failures. At some point, Romney might want to say this outright—that the president acts as if he’s the challenger running against a sitting president. With all due respect, Mr. Obama, you are the sitting president. You have a record of your own you should be held accountable for, and that’s what this election is really about. Did you fulfill your promises, did you lead the country down the right path, or are things still bad and getting worse?

Although this next debate format makes me nervous for Romney, there are some problems the president will have trouble overcoming. One is the “are you better off” question which, even if not posed, will underlie much of the discussion.

The other problem is the president’s personality. While some pundits suggest that he fears looking like the “angry black man” and thus reins in any indignation, I don’t think that’s the reason for his style challenge at all. When the president gets irritated, he often looks peevish, arrogant and disconnected. Chances are he wants to avoid that optic, partially on display during the first debate, at all costs. It’s hard to change that kind of ingrained personality “tic” in just a few weeks.

Mitt Romney, on the other hand, has a great advantage in just being himself. As he demonstrated on October 3, probably for the first time for millions of viewers, he’s a pretty likable guy.

____

Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

So said Georgetown University Sociology Professor Michael Eric Dyson on MSNBC’s NOW with Alex Wagner. My rough transcription of his words follows:

“Obama has just been subjected to the Fox News treatment of angry black man again. Lest we forget this, lest we pretend this doesn’t make a difference, the specter hanging over him is: I can’t come off as too vigorous because then it looks like I’m being an angry black man…”

In the clip below, this part of the discussion occurs around the 11:37 mark. As usual, fair warning: MSNBC often embeds an ad before their clips.

The “Fox News treatment” probably refers to the recent airing on Sean Hannity’s program of an old tape in which the president spoke to an African-American audience in what most consider to be racially divisive tones.

Meanwhile, as National Review’s Jonah Goldberg noted, Current TV’s Al Gore has his own theory for Obama’s less-than-stellar evening, which, not surprisingly, is related to the atmosphere: it was the high altitude that affected the president:

The excuse with the most ring of truthiness to it, though, came from The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, interviewed on Good Morning America. Newsbusters has the story here, but below is the money quote from Stewart (thanks to NB for the transcript). Maybe, uh, the president’s not as smart as we thought:

STEWART: It wasn’t so much his the body language as the mouth language that he was using. The pauses in between. You know, I used to think the pauses, he was just trying to think of smaller words for the little brains to figure out what he was saying. This time, I really think the pauses were just, ‘I like food.’ You know, I think he was just thinking, ‘my children are nice.’ It didn’t seem present in the same way.

Whether Stewart was joking or not, I have to agree with him. For years, media personalities have treated us to rapturous praise for the president’s intellect, his wonkiness. But as I watched the debate, I kept thinking of how each of the president’s responses probably sounded like so much “blah blah blah” to the average viewer–boring stuff.

Then it hit me–maybe a lot of people conflate “boring” with “smart.” Maybe they think, “well, because he’s boring me with all those rambling, professorial answers, he must be professorial himself. He must be more intelligent than I am.”

So, here’s a lesson for that crowd: boring doesn’t always equal smart. Sometimes it just signifies…boring.

Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

But the Obama campaign might want to pin some blame on the media in general for giving the president such an easy ride over the past four years. The president was completely unprepared for substantive push-back and thus ended up looking like the proverbial deer in the headlights during the many moments where Romney challenged the president’s assumptions.

On MSNBC the morning after, New York magazine’s John Heilemann, however, provided this excuse for Obama’s bad night: the president, having to handle the burdens of the office, didn’t have time to prepare adequately. But isn’t being president enough preparation? Incumbents have the advantage of living deep inside the issues being discussed. They shouldn’t have to study as hard as the challenger—they’ve participated in the policy battles under discussion.

But often, the president looked and sounded as if he didn’t really know what he was talking about or how to adequately answer Romney’s points. When Romney started discussing the flaws of Dodd-Frank legislation, for example, the president looked adrift and unsure, as if he didn’t really know the specific details Romney was mentioning and therefore couldn’t weigh in for fear of showing his ignorance. This prompted one member of my household to say: Romney should ask Obama if he’s actually read the bill.

Certainly, his debate performance indicated there was a good chance he’d not done so. He was without rhetorical weaponry. He had nothing to fight back with because it appeared he really didn’t know as much as Romney did about the issue at hand. This happened on more than one occasion, leading me to wonder what the heck the president was scribbling all those times he kept looking down and taking notes as if earnestly looking busy would demonstrate his command of the subjects.

On the few issues where he seemed comfortable with details, he played defense. In particular, on health care, Romney put the president in the position of spending precious time talking about how terrific the health care panels would be—not something Obama’s team has wanted to focus on, as a Wall Street Journal editorial noted:

In particular he put Mr. Obama on the defensive about the so-called Independent Payment Advisory Board, the 15-member “expert” and unelected commission that will tell doctors how to practice and seniors the treatments they are allowed to receive. The President struggled to stick to his own talking points, perhaps because the damaging details speak for themselves.

Again and again, Romney brought up details of various issues that seemed to leave the president befuddled, unable to adequately respond for fear of saying something uninformed. The president was virtually silent when Romney mentioned green energy company failures (and those companies’ connections to Obama donors), oil company tax deductions’ impact on small companies, and the lack of bipartisan support for Obamacare.

The president only had talking points, or the spin he might have read in liberal-leaning publications or heard on liberal-sympathetic TV. So he could try to talk about the importance of regulating financial institutions only in clichéd terms, but he gave no indication he really knew what was in that Dodd-Frank bill to begin with.

That leads me back to my earlier point: one of the reasons the president wasn’t prepared was because he’s not really faced an adversarial press. The media hasn’t been interested in the administration’s flaws, failures or even outright scandals. Dodd-Frank? Great idea! Green energy investments gone bad? Ho-hum. Unemployment still high? Bush’s fault. Border agents killed because of botched gun-running scheme? Republicans playing gotcha politics. Terrorist attacks on anniversary of 9/11? Anti-Muslim film made them  do it! Afghanistan policy in shambles? Where’s that country again?

If the president has been reading and viewing the news, he’s probably been under the impression his ideas are winning and he’s made some stumbles, faced some “bumps in the road,” but nothing more. He hasn’t had to defend his positions or analyze his failures.

So here’s a question for the next debate moderator to ask: What magazines and newspapers do you read, what news do you listen to, Mr. President? If the answer is the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, NPR, the Washington Post or any other so-called mainstream news outlet, you know why the president is so uninformed.

—-

Libby Sternberg is a novelist

During last night’s Massachusetts Senate debate, host David Gregory of NBC asked Republican incumbent Scott Brown and Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren who was their model Supreme Court justice.

As soon as I heard the question, I thought to myself: what the what the? What possible purpose does this question serve except as a trap for one of the candidates to say something that could be used against him or her?

And that’s precisely what happened. Sen. Scott Brown’s first impulse was to point to Antonin Scalia, but some negative crowd reaction alerted him to the misstep. Scalia is often seen as the court’s most conservative member, and Brown is running in a blue, blue state emphasizing his own moderation and independence. Scalia is usually viewed as the enemy of all that is good and holy to the blue crowd (translation: he doesn’t like Roe v. Wade so much). Brown went on to list some other justices he admires, including Sonia Sotomayor, appointed by President Obama, but the stories after the debate gasped out the shocking—shocking!—news: Republican Senator Likes Conservative Justice!  Pass the smelling salts.

When the question came, though, I mentally shouted: you can’t answer, you can’t answer because you don’t know, and it’s okay not to know!

Think about it: Brown has been immersed in the business of the legislative branch of government. The chance he’s spent his time poring through SCOTUS rulings is slim. He probably knows the opinions but not who wrote what about them. That’s normal. He wasn’t hired by the people of Massachusetts to be a Supreme Court expert. There are people who make a living out of the sort of thing. Say, law professors. More on that in a bit.

So the correct answer by Brown should have been something along these lines: My main business has been representing the good people of Massachusetts in the legislative branch. I think they’d prefer I spend my time analyzing bills—which I meticulously pay attention to—rather than analyzing every court ruling and who wrote the majority opinion, who wrote the concurrences and who wrote the dissents. So I respectfully decline to answer a question that I and many other elected officials would not be able to answer with any real expertise. That is Professor Warren’s area, and I’m sure she’d be more than happy to give you a scholarly analysis of SCOTUS rulings from her favorite justice.

Meanwhile, let’s take a look at Warren’s answer. One would have expected she would have had the time to study SCOTUS opinions. One might, in fact, assume she is paid to do that sort of thing as a law professor.

With no hesitation, she chose “Elena Kagan”  as her model Supreme Court justice.

Kagan has only been on the bench two terms. Prior to that, she wasn’t a judge. Warren’s main knowledge of Kagan would be from her days on the faculty of Harvard.  Another shocking—shocking—revelation: Candidate Admires Former Colleague.

Warren’s answer might have been swift and smug sure but couldn’t have been based on much actual Supreme Court opinion analysis. Warren’s answer was safe in Massachusetts, though, and Brown’s was risky.

That brings me back to my original point: some debate questions are just dumb. It’s okay not to answer them. I hope Mitt Romney remembers that on Wednesday.

Libby Sternberg is a novelist

Here’s the back story: MSNBC ran a clip of a Romney-Ryan event in which Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney supposedly instructed the crowd to chant “Romney-Ryan.” (Jazz Shaw has the clip here in a post about how too much was made of the whole incident.)

MSNBC’s piece, introduced by co-host Mika Brzezinski, was tied to a narrative about how vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan is more popular than Romney himself, and that the crowd was chanting Ryan’s name when Romney instructed them to add his own. Subtitles on the MSNBC screen indicated the chant was “Ryan!” at first. But subsequent pieces have pretty convincingly pointed out that those subtitles were a stretch; the chant sounded like “Romney, Romney” to many observers, when the candidate urged the crowd to include “Ryan” to it. At best, the chant was murky.

And that leads to the controversy. Some suggest MSNBC deliberately edited the tape to make it appear as if Romney had to plead for inclusion in the chant. But that’s not the problem, folks. The problem is that MSNBC leaped to an interpretation of an audio to portray Romney as awkwardly beseeching the crowd to pay attention to him, too. They used that interpretation in introducing the tape. And they included subtitles on the screen that fit that interpretation.

Put me in the category of folks who don’t think MSNBC deliberately edited the tape itself but, rather, offered a false interpretation of the whole event to portray Romney as bumbling and unpopular with his own crowd.

So, this brings us to today. After a weekend of Tweets mocking Joe Scarborough’s reaction to the clip when it was shown (a double face-palm, accompanied by a murmured “Sweet Jesus” and followed by a condescending declaration about what a great guy Romney is in so many ways except as a politician), Scarborough felt the need to defend himself. My quotes below are from memory. I’ve not yet reviewed the transcript of this morning’s show.

On this a.m.’s show, Scarborough claims his reaction when the clip was shown was due to the fact that Mitt Romney sometimes looks “goofy”  and that those who suggest MSNBC edited the tape to “throw the election” to Obama should stop eating “Cheetos” and get “out of the basement.”

Nice straw man arguments there, Joe, but they don’t wash. You were being criticized by many respected writers who happen to write for blogs, some of which are associated with well-known magazines. Hardly the demeaning Cheetos-eating basement dwellers picture you paint (perhaps if they were Starbucks-sipping bloggers, you’d give them more respect?). Second, you claim this morning that the story was about Romney looking “goofy,” and that was why you had the reaction you did. If candidates acting goofy was criteria for news, MSNBC would be running wall-to-wall clips of Joe Biden.

No, the premise of the clip, as demonstrated by Brzezinski’s intro and the subtitles on the screen, was that Romney was being overshadowed by his running-mate and was reduced to asking a crowd to include his name in their cheerleading. That narrative proved to be false. A simple apology for that false interpretation would have sufficed.

Finally, in addressing his audience about this controversy, Scarborough boasted that some folks had threatened to boycott his show in the past and it only led to better ratings. He then urged viewers who didn’t like him to go ahead and boycott him.

Good advice, Joe. Maybe lots of those basement-dwellers and their families will start taking it.

Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

I’ve not done an empirical study of news articles past and present, but it seems to me that one didn’t have to search as hard for news of Afghanistan and Iraq when George W. Bush was president. Why did these operations cease being as newsworthy once he was followed by Barack Obama? It’s hard not to suspect that once casualties couldn’t be laid at Dubya’s feet, media didn’t find such news … as newsworthy. (Neither, it seems, does the anti-war crowd, which has faded into the background despite the fact that President Obama has continued many policies they opposed.)

The lack of regular Afghanistan coverage isn’t the only thing missing from most news coverage today, while other stories receive attention for days on end (and by “days,” I mean round-the-clock coverage followed by more of the same). Watching the news (MSNBC) recently, I was confronted with the most pressing problem our country faced at this moment, surely shaking the citizenry to its core: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s alleged comments suggesting that 47 percent of folks don’t pay taxes and thus won’t vote for him. Even the president himself was so distracted by this earth-shattering statement that he couldn’t remember the exact number for the national debt when asked about it on an appearance on the David Letterman show.

Meanwhile…the Mideast was in flames, our Afghanistan policy was crumbling, Israel trembled at the possibility of a nuclear Iran, the U.S. Department of Justice was using a left-wing group to spin the news and the unemployment rate was abysmal along with most other financial indicators. Oh, and one more not-so-small thing: the president’s party, as demonstrated during its convention, seemed to be shifting ever leftward toward an anti-Israel, atheistic, aggressively pro-abortion platform.

Yet most in the media greeted those stories with a yawn. Does anyone doubt similar stories would be covered with gleeful alacrity if a Republican were in the White House?

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not looking at these stories as bits of “gotcha” politics. They’re news, by any definition of that word. They’re important. They tell us something about the current administration’s approach to policy. Americans should know about them in order to make informed decisions. Even Obama supporters might want to know them to try to push the administration in different directions.

In their defense, the news media’s unrelenting interest in political  horse race stories is somewhat understandable during a presidential campaign. But why then did so many of them all but ignore a major political debate within the Democratic party? The very fact that the Democratic platform removed references to God and Jerusalem and making abortion “rare” should have received some discussion prior to its leap to center stage during the Democratic convention. Instead, it was brushed under the rug, especially after a hastily arranged vote to reinsert at least God and Jerusalem references into the document. That vote, too, should have been bigger news when it was clear that the convention chairman overrode the will of the attendees.

Nope, just more of the same “not really a story worth covering” from mainstream journos. Any story that might reflect negatively on the president and his party seems to be falling into the “not really news” category these days, bringing to mind a piece sharply satirizing the media’s slavering attitude toward Barack Obama from several years ago on the satiric site, The Onion: Media Having Trouble Finding Right Angle on Obama Double Homicide.

Conservatives are used to media bias, used to hearing excuses made for “out of context” gaffes by Democrats and the collective gasps of horror at similar stumbles by Republicans. We’re used to the stories of Democratic errors being turned into Mean-Republicans-Point-Out-Democratic Mistakes headlines. But ignoring real news literally blowing up in reporters’ faces seems to me a new low and probably accounts for why fewer and fewer people subscribe to mainstream newspapers or rely on broadcast news.

It’s pretty simple, really: when you cease delivering the product promised—real news—customers go elsewhere.

Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

Some thoughts on foreign policy from Dr. Joseph Sternberg, Scientific Advisor to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, 1971-1974

Obama’s foreign policy has been a failure. It is up to Romney to propose policy changes.

Obama’s failures:

1. At the close of the Bush presidency, the U.S. was clearly unpopular in the Muslim world. President Obama announced a new policy of friendship and understanding in his speech in Cairo. Polls today show that Muslims are more anti U.S. than ever.

2. With great fanfare, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reset the button with Russia. The first product of this new relationship was revising the plans for European ballistic missile defense. The Russians claimed that the proposed system threatened their ability to destroy other nations. I have had personal involvement in the ballistic missile defense area for many years. My last involvement after I retired was as a member of a Committee set up to review the technical adequacy of the Army’s program and to contribute to the technical solutions. The Russians’ claim is absurd. We have told the Russians that the proposed system is not a threat to their offensive capability. The Russians are competent in ballistic missile defense and know this themselves. But they press on. Obama was caught explaining that after the election he would have more flexibility. This is a scandal. The stated objective of the Russians is to increase their influence in the countries that used to be dominated by the Soviet Union and to decrease the influence of the West. We have undercut Poland in our anxiety to satisfy the Russians. And now it is reported from Russia that an effort by Russian President Vladimir Putin to recalibrate his relationship with the U.S. is underway. Perhaps a new reset ceremony.

3. A new hand was offered to Iran. We have been careful not to provide support for democratic elements in Iran. We continue to participate in talks that have no result. Iran has plunged ahead with its nuclear weapons program and has repeatedly vowed to destroy Israel.

4. The Obama administration was not the first to attempt to improve relations with Syria. But it was the first to publicly call Syrian President Bashar al-Assad a reformer. Poor judgment by Clinton, to say the least.

Now, failures are to be expected. Obama, based on his world view, believed that these initiatives would be successful. He cannot be criticized for trying, but he most certainly should be criticized for his false assumptions and persistence in continuing his failed policies.

What policies should Romney propose?

1. First of all, he should emphasize that costly military activities in recent years have shown that the U.S. is not antagonistic to Islam. In Bosnia, Muslims were protected from Christians. The U.S. entered Afghanistan to drive out Al Qaeda. The current Muslim government is supported by the U.S. Iraq has a Muslim government.

2. The U.S. will not water down the free speech amendment in its Constitution no matter how many times the Muslims riot. The U.S. will not sign any UN statement affecting free speech and will ignore any such UN statement that might appear.

3. The U.S. government will neither approve nor disapprove of videos, cartoons, etc. that are considered offensive by religious groups. We will not apologize for them. It is not the function of the U.S. government to criticize or apologize for expressions of free speech. Clinton, just the other day, addressed the Pakistanis, imploring them to understand that the U.S. government had nothing to do with the anti-Muslim video. How strange. The rioting mobs are not rioting because the U.S. government was involved in the production of the video. They have rioted because the U.S. did not suppress the video and imprison or execute those who made it. Her speech was a clear sign of weakness with a smell of panic involved. It is no surprise that some Pakistani cleric issued a fatwa to kill the maker of the film.

4. We don’t appreciate being threatened with attack by Iran if Israel should carry out an attack against Iran. We don’t control Israel. The Iranians should understand that if they attack U.S. forces under such circumstances, the U.S. response will not just be defensive. We will destroy all of the Iranian oil and gas facilities along the Persian Gulf in addition to keeping the Straits of Hormuz open.

5. Obama’s promise, accidentally overheard, that after the election he can be more flexible on European missile defense is a scandal, as noted above. He clearly believes that if we did what the Russians want, there would be a loud outcry in the U.S. So wait until he is reelected when he can sell out U.S. interests and allies. At the least this shows that Obama is fundamentally dishonest.

6. The Administration has obviously been toying with the idea of releasing the blind sheik, Abdel-Rahman, now in prison for his role in the first World Trade Center bombing. This would be taken by Islamists as an admission of the lack of impartiality of U.S. courts. How ironic. Attorney General Eric Holder has pushed to try other terrorists in U.S. courts. Does he or does he not believe in the validity of trying terrorists in U.S. courts? Obama tries to avoid this question by deciding which reputed terrorists are to be killed instead of tried in court.

7. Appeasement did not persuade Hitler to give up his ambitions. Similarly appeasement will not deter the Islamists from their objective of violently spreading Islam in Europe and the U.S. Appeasement is always taken as a sign of weakness and only encourages the aggressor. It is the path to war, not peace, as Neville Chamberlain believed.

I’m not familiar with NECN (New England Cable News) or the host of this show, Jim Braude, but he does a masterful job of grilling both guests. But Eno won the day, not allowing the silly controversy over Brown supporters and staff members using the tomahawk chop to mock Warren’s claims of Native American lineage to muddy the waters. “We wouldn’t be having this discussion,” said Eno, if Elizabeth Warren hadn’t claimed this heritage and possibly used it (maybe even illegally, Eno suggests) to get ahead.  It’s worth the nearly seven-minutes to watch:

Brooks described what Romney said at a fundraiser thus:

Forty-seven percent of the country, he said, are people “who are dependent upon government, who believe they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to take care of them, who believe they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”

And then the columnist went on to defend those 47 percenters and to suggest that “Romney doesn’t know much about the culture of America.”

This article prompted conservative writer Michelle Malkin to enter the sitcom analogy fray with her own piece about the New York Times columnist himself. Titled “Eddie Haskell Brooks,” her commentary criticizes Brooks for “sucking up to empty suit Barack Obama (and) mocking grass-roots conservatives as ‘teens’”:

New York Times columnist David Brooks is the Eddie Haskell of the Fourth Estate. Like the two-faced sycophant in “Leave It to Beaver,” Brooks indulges in excessive politeness while currying favor with political authority. He prides himself on an oily semblance of maturity and rational discourse.

So, Romney is Howell from Gilligan’s Island and Brooks is Haskell from Leave It to Beaver.

Maybe Malkin has a point. Brooks’s Thurston Howell reference is a simplistic and obvious analogy, something that you might expect from an apple-polishing Haskell.

But…a more nuanced and sophisticated view of this election through the metaphorical lens of situation comedy would suggest that (wait for it)…. Green Acres is the place to be.

Yes, this election is really about Oliver Wendell and Lisa Douglas, two people whose life experiences and outlook put them far away from the everyday concerns and routines of their fellow Hooterville citizens.

But in this campaign, President Obama is the naïve and out-of-touch Oliver, filled with grandiose ideas about chucking the materialistic life and relating to his new salt-of-the-earth neighbors, setting up what he hopes is a rural utopia for himself and his bride.

And Mitt Romney is the equally out-of-touch Lisa, who is far more comfortable in the rarefied air of her fellow elites but, despite her background and personal preferences, manages to relate to her new world and actually get things done.

Consider, for example, the episode in which a local organization, C.R.U.B.T.R.F.F., is sponsoring a rummage sale. While Oliver is completely ignorant of the event, Lisa already knows about C.R.U.B.T.R.F.F. and its sister organization. She’s in touch while he’s not. She’s often far more sympathetic to the locals, and they to her, as well. You might go so far as to say she understands that C.R.U.B.T.R.F.F. did build that–the rummage sale, that is.

Neither Lisa nor Oliver has a background that relates to the “hayseeds” in Hooterville. But neither do the current candidates. President Obama’s history includes globetrotting, an Ivy League education, community organizing and a leap into political life. How many average Janes and Joes have had similar experiences? Like Oliver Douglas, Obama has a vision for a better future that is largely based on unrealistic and wrongheaded ideas.

Mitt Romney, on the other hand, had privileges and opportunities—and wealth—equally removed from those experienced by average Americans. He shares a Harvard background with the president, and he went on to his own higher-level “community organizing”—in the sense that he worked with an investment firm that helped start businesses and with the grand community of the Olympics when mismanagement and corruption threatened it. Few can claim a brotherhood with that background. Like Lisa Douglas, however, Romney knows how to make things work, even if he is more comfortable hobnobbing with the country club crowd.

The important question Americans face in November is this one: which out-of-touch Douglas—Oliver or Lisa—do they want running Hooterville?  For that answer, we’ll have to … stay tuned.

And now, since you probably have the theme song running through your head already, here it is in all its splendor:

Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

Who’s the desperate candidate here?

In Reasonable Land, the desperate candidate would appear to be the one who feels the need to spend valuable resources essentially saying, “I am not a crook” for 30 precious seconds of air time.

But we now live in Bizarro World, where up is down and right is left and desperation is in the eye of the liberal beholder.

Such was the case on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program when Politico’s Executive Editor Jim VandeHei came on to discuss the latest ad news in the Elizabeth Warren/Scott Brown race for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts.

To set up the interview, co-host Willie Geist played the two ads the candidates are running. Here they are, if you haven’t seen them (AllahPundit had them on the home page, too.)

After playing the ads (the Brown one followed by the Warren defense), Geist asked VandeHei why the issue of Elizabeth Warren’s ancestry is back. Below is my transcription of the response:

VANDEHEI: Well because Scott Brown brought it up at the very top of the last debate that they had. And I think the reason that he did bring it up is you have to pull back the lens on what’s happened in politics since the Democratic convention, the surge that you see for Barack Obama, and people feeling the country’s going in the right direction, and Democrats unifying–they’ve seen the exact same thing take place in Massachusetts, in Wisconsin, in some of these other senate candidates where the numbers have been going down for the Republican candidate. So Scott Brown, who has pretty good favorable ratings in the state but he’s running in a very Democratic state, knows that he’s down right now and he has to do something to rattle Warren, he has to do something to shake up this race. So he went after her hard on that. Clearly it must have been effective, it rattled her, she had to respond to it in her own ad. It’s kind of hard to believe this would be the make-or-break issue in the most competitive senate race we have in the country this year, but clearly he thinks it’s something that could change it.

Geist then cited polls that showed the race tight, with either candidate ahead, depending on the poll. He then asked MSNBC contributor and Massachusetts native Mike Barnicle his opinion.

BARNICLE: As Jim pointed out, the president is going to crush Governor Romney in Governor Romney’s home state. It’s going to be by 25 to 30 points. That’s an enormous hill for Scott Brown to climb. He raises a point of vulnerability with Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy, the Native American claim, back and forth he’s been going on about this. The danger for Scott Brown is he has a very high favorability factor in this state. But he’s changing his personality now in the minds of a lot of voters to attack Elizabeth Warren on this, and it’s going to be interesting how it plays out. I think it’s jump ball right now.

I don’t take issue with the discussion of the tightness of the race, the blueness of the state, the advantage the Democrat has when an incumbent Democratic president is also on the ticket. That’s all legitimate fodder for a political discussion. But the majority of the exchange seemed to focus on the desperation of Republican Scott Brown for raising the issue of whether Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren knowingly claimed dubious Native American heritage to advance her career. Shouldn’t there have been equal time at least given to the fact that Warren felt the need to use time and money to rebut that claim?

Usually, candidates like to spend their ad money on messages that promote their agendas. If they do address an issue their opponent has raised, they try to do it in a way that still pushes their agenda or significantly dings their opponent. (The Romney “America Deserves Better” ad is a great example of this type of messaging—it uses the president’s attacks on Romney to plant two questions: is the president credible, and, doesn’t America deserve more than what he has to offer? The ad brilliantly turns the president’s attacks into an attack on the president.)

But when a candidate uses virtually all of her 30-second spot to say “I’m not guilty, really, I’m not, it’s my parents’ fault,” that has a very strong odor of desperation to it, regardless if the initial attack was wise, legitimate or even necessary.

Whatever the reasoning behind Scott Brown’s decision to go after Elizabeth Warren’s claims of Native American heritage, the result is now a big payoff—Warren used campaign money and time to defend herself, with a tepid splash at Brown at the very end that probably just amplified an image of weakness.

As to why Scott Brown would take this supposedly risky path, here’s my take: the conservative blogosphere has been afire with the Elizabeth Warren Native American story since it first broke. Did she or didn’t she use “family lore” to claim a heritage that could have given her an advantage over other job candidates? That’s a legitimate question for a candidate who’s running on the idea that she can do more for the average Massachusetts voter than that other fellow can. Average middle-class voters probably don’t look kindly on folks who elbow their way to the front of the line.

But how widespread was this story in the mainstream press? How did the Boston Globe or other Massachusetts news outlets cover it? Did they cover it much at all? It’s quite possible that it hasn’t received enough attention for Massachusetts voters to know about it much at all. Scott Brown raising it in the debate and following up with it in an ad might be the first time some voters have heard of it. If so, that’s not an act of desperation. That’s a courageous call—getting the word out on a topic the mainstream press might have ignored but that voters might find important.

Below is the Morning Joe segment mentioned above. As usual, be warned: MSNBC sometimes embeds ads at the beginning of their clips.

Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

Roberts introduced the segment by noting that when President Obama goes to New York this week to address the United Nations, he hasn’t scheduled any meetings with foreign leaders. Roberts also pointed out that other presidents did meet with foreign leaders even during election seasons and the president has found time to schedule a visit to the daytime talk show The View.

“Do you think politically that’s a mistake?” Roberts then asked Rubin.

What followed reminded me of a tap dance where Rubin struggled mightily to say something to put the president’s action—or lack of it—in a favorable light:

RUBIN: Well, the president has put forward a pretty compelling case for his stewardship on foreign policy and I think he’s going to run on that. In terms of foreign policy decision-making, there are many ways in which leaders in the modern era can talk to each other. I think that one-on-one meetings are often the best, but there are other ways. He clearly set his priorities. Governor Romney has used that as a way to attack him, and he’s suffering that critique. Frankly, I don’t think the number of meetings you have at the UN is going to be a decisive factor. The voters will make, you know, decisions based on an overall record, not this kind of, you know, one-upsmanship.

Roberts, to his credit, was undaunted. He mentioned the various crises in the Middle East, and again brought up the president’s planned visit to the TV show The View.

ROBERTS: If the president doesn’t take these one-on-one meetings but then will make time to do basically a campaign stop for this pretaped interview on their sofa, doesn’t that set him up for these vulnerable jabs from the right?

As an aside, one would think it would make the president vulnerable to jabs from curious journalists, but we live in the age of incurious reporters when it comes to actions by a liberal president.

Rubin had to know he would lose all credibility as an analyst if he didn’t state the obvious—that the country’s foreign policy might benefit from these meetings:

RUBIN: You know I come from the foreign policy community. I’ve been in sessions where the president’s schedule is being decided. And guys like me would make the case that this is a unique opportunity to get a lot of business done, whether it’s (Egypt’s President) Morsi, whether it’s shoring up the coalition on Iran, Israel, whoever. And we would make that argument. So, you know, as a foreign policy professional, I certainly would prefer to see the president having more meetings, rather than less, no matter who the president is because I think that America’s president has a strong influence on the world’s events, and the more he’s getting that message across both publicly and privately, the better off we are. But they obviously made a different judgment.

Then followed a question from Roberts suggesting that perhaps the president’s strategy is to “do no harm” during this campaign season, the implication being that the president is, at least in part, avoiding harming his campaign.

RUBIN: I think you’ve probably hit the nail on the head that the overall approach in these months before the election is do no harm, is get through this period of time and then, you know, there’s time in a second term to do the business of the United States. But again as a foreign policy professional, I’d prefer the campaign didn’t interfere. Obviously it has.

And with that, Mr. Rubin was out of his misery; the interview was over.

Watch for yourself (beware: MSNBC often embeds ads at the outset of clips):

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Though Rumi is no American cheerleader in the piece, he urges Muslims to look at their own actions before pointing the finger of blame at others for their troubles. One section dealing with so-called anti-Islam works:

Salman Rushdie’s book — Satanic Verses — sparked global outrage in the late 1980s and since then, we have increasing polarisation between those who view freedom of expression as an absolute value, and extremists within Muslims who think violence is the only way to ‘save’ Islam from such attacks. Millions of Muslims are trapped between the two ends of this hate-spectrum. Despite the offence caused by such provocation, they will not resort to violence or support wanton destruction of life and property. But are these voices represented and articulated through credible leadership? The answer is no…

Rumi takes some (to me) gratuitous swipes against America’s drone and missile attacks as well as the Palestinian situation, but then he does go on to say:

The ‘victimhood’ of Muslims is also quasi-mythical. The anti-imperial rants against the US and the West often ignore that there is little resistance to the imperialists within Islam. The imperialists within (monarchs, clerics and plunderers who exploit, suppress dissent and kill without a conscience) are within the reach of Muslims. The battle ‘within’ Islam — for reformation, ijtehad and liberation from patriarchal, violence-preaching clerics — is a far more serious one.

And finally, he concludes with:

There is much that the Muslims need to introspect about before they take bombs and bullets to express their anger on cases of persecution and blasphemy.

It might just help if they were to focus on knowledge, organised political and economic resistance, reforming their societies and reining in the clerics who have no place in Islam to begin with. More importantly, before crying hoarse about the way the world is treating them, how about allowing Muslim women their due rights, enabling non-Muslim fellow citizens to receive the entitlements they deserve; and turning towards inquiry and reason?

It was refreshing to read Rumi’s piece, even if I disagreed with parts of it. But what was even more heartening were the 65 comments, or rather, one in particular. Comments ranged from the thoughtful to the argumentative to the extremist, with more than one commenter discussing Muslim violence against other Muslims.

Pasted below, however, is the comment that stood out to me. When I read it, I thought to myself: why isn’t our State Department articulating these thoughts instead of apologizing for obscure films? Why isn’t our president standing up for an American principle in this way? Why is it appearing in a comments section by an anonymous poster? I reproduce it with typos that appeared in the original:

1. Just as Muslims believe that Quran is revealed by God, Americans believe that freedom of expression is an inalienable riht that flows to them from God and hence cannot be legislatd by a human.
2. Freedom of worship (which also includes freedom to not worship) is seen as a subset of freedom of expression. It is thus unsurprising that in countries which includes most Muslim majority countries where freedom of expression is not absolute, the freedom of worship for people not of majority faith is also severely abridged.
3. Freedom of expression is tested only during times of conflict. IT is not much of a freedom to say ” I love my mother and gaajar ka halwa”. USA does not prevent people from creating videos that offend Christians either. Please google ‘stand up comedians atheist’ and see what you come up with.
4. Freedom of expression is an empowering tool that allowed ordinary Americans to fight powerful clergy whose oppression they escaped (refer Pilgrim Fathers). Today too it has allowed gay right activists to stand up to priests who totally are against homosexuality because it is against what is stated in Bible. The opposition to gays is high among right wing Christians and this also is a huge politicial issue – yet no one has been able to muzzle the rights of gays BECAUSE of freedom of expression.
5. You have a right to be offended. You do not however have a right to ‘never be offended’. Thus a video that offends you does not violate your right.
6. Finally while you have not mentioned it, someone is sure to bring up holocaust denial laws as one form of abridgment to freedom of expression. They should be aware that there are NO holocaust denial laws in USA.

Libby Sternberg is a novelist

AFSA Statement on the Tragic Deaths of American Diplomatic Personnel in Libya

We are deeply saddened and mourn the tragic loss of Ambassador Chris Stevens, Foreign Service Information Management Specialist Sean Smith, and their colleagues in the outrageous and cowardly attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. We extend our heartfelt condolences and sympathy to the families and loved ones of those killed. Their service and example are an inspiration to us all.

The violent attack on U.S. diplomatic compounds once again underscores the dangers that American diplomats face in service to our country.

AFSA deplores attacks and use of violence against diplomats and diplomatic missions. We oppose intentional efforts to offend religious feelings. We firmly believe in diplomacy and commitment to sustained dialogue to resolve differences of whatever sort and for better mutual understanding among peoples of differing faiths, ideologies and cultures.

AFSA is the professional association of American foreign service employees, representing active and retired workers from the U.S. Department of State.  While it’s certainly understandable that the beginning of their statement focuses on their sadness and condolences for the loss of colleagues, it isn’t until sentence five of the seven-sentence declaration that they get around to condemning the use of violence. And even then, they follow this  with their opposition to “efforts to offend religious feelings.” (Note: an earlier version of the statement on AFSA’s website included “strong” opposition to “any and all intentional efforts to offend and hurt the religious feelings of anyone, anywhere.”)

If AFSA opposes efforts to hurt anyone’s religious feelings, surely they must have been lobbying the NEA to rescind artist Andres Serrano’s grants after he photographed a crucifix in urine in 1987. Or issuing statements against the anti-Jewish art exhibit in Iran in 2006. Or the mocking Book of Mormon musical on Broadway. Or the recent awarding of the Venice Film Festival Prize to a film about  a devout Catholic woman who uses a crucifix to pleasure herself.

But, of course, AFSA hasn’t raised a ruckus about these religiously offensive works of “art.” AFSA’s commitment to religious sensibilities has a whiff of insincerity to it, due to its lack of specificity. AFSA seems to be opposed to offending Muslim religious feelings, not all religious feelings (perhaps this is why they modified the statement?).  From a purely practical standpoint, it’s easy to understand why: almost any time Islam is treated with the same mockery, lampooning, or jest that other religions in America are, Islamic extremists kill people.

Several American foreign service officers and servicemen were just killed. These people died in service to their country, whose principles include freedom of expression. That’s not just freedom of inoffensive expression.  It’s freedom of expression for the gentle and the rude, kind and the cruel, the lofty and the silly. Why is AFSA not making that point, and better yet, explaining why freedom of expression is important, even worth dying for? Those brave Americans’ lives are surely worth a line directed at our adversaries about our core values. Instead, AFSA included a knuckle-rapping aimed at the filmmakers of the controversial (and barely known) anti-Muslim flick that might or might not have been the trigger for the violence.

There is a “teachable moment” in these ghastly events, one you would hope that an American foreign service organization, whose members are tasked with presenting America’s face to the world, would embrace: good men died in service to a country that values free speech.

No matter how offensive the anti-Muslim film in question was, it doesn’t justify the response of the thugs who killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and other staff.

Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

First up was a discussion of the horrible events in Benghazi where violent Islamists killed the ambassador and several other American staff in reaction to the release of a film critical of Muslims and Mohammed. The film is being promoted by Pastor Terry Jones, the Florida minister who drew attention and notoriety with his burning of the Koran.

Mike Barnacle, regular MSNBC contributor, denounced the killings the pastor. Yes, the pastor. He’s the one who stirs things up, setting the stage for violent acts. Barnacle said:

“It might be time for the department of justice to start viewing his role as an accessory before or after the fact…”

To which advertising executive and Morning Joe guest Donny Deutsch agreed:

“I was thinking the same thing, yeah.”

This was preceded by a brief discussion of how “technology”—that is, the ability for anyone to put videos ,such as the controversial one promoted by Pastor Jones, up on YouTube—is a “co-conspirator” in acts of violence such as these.

Say what you will about Pastor Jones—in my opinion, he’s no deep thinker, to put it charitably—but in America, he has the “right to be wrong.” That’s what the First Amendment is all about. Shouldn’t these talk show conversationalists be able to spare a few seconds to discuss that, instead of letting killers off the hook for actually killing people?

But, wait, there’s more. Later in the broadcast, Andrea Mitchell was interviewed about the kerfuffle between the White House and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over whether Netanyahu was or was not snubbed by President Obama during the prime minister’s visit to the U.S.

Mitchell covered this with a “comme ci, comme ca” attitude—the White House says they did talk to Netanyahu about a visit, so who’s she to believe?

And then, after reporting on Netanyahu’s strong words about Israel’s posture toward Iran:

“Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel.”

Mitchell went on to say:

“There is a continuing disagreement between Israel and the United States, at least between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the White House, over how to handle Iran. There is disagreement, I should point out, within Israel itself. So they are not speaking with one voice. But at least as far as the prime minister is concerned, the United States has not been tough enough….”

“They are not speaking with one voice?” “There is disagreement within Israel itself?”

Memo to Andrea Mitchell: When someone holds the title of prime minister, he speaks for his country, even when there is disagreement in the country. Would Mitchell report on something President Obama says with the caveat that there’s disagreement in the U.S. and therefore the country is not “speaking with one voice” despite the president’s statements?

When I heard Mitchell make these inane observations, I thought: who fed her that line—that the prime minister of Israel isn’t legitimately speaking about Israel’s policy? Did she get that from the White House? From J Street talking points? Or in her heart of hearts does she not want to believe that Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s legitimate leader right now?

Below are the full segments from which both of these incidents were culled. Watch at your peril—drivel abounds before you get to the relevant segments, and ads usually precede the clips.

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Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

“I don’t think it’s liberal bias in the media that says this story is pretty much done, because they fixed it.”

So said Time magazine’s Mark Halperin on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program about reinstating the word “God” and support for Jerusalem as the capital of Israel back into the Democratic platform at the DNC convention Wednesday night.

If anything proves liberal media bias, however, it was Mr. Halperin’s ridiculous statement. Of course the platform kerfuffle is still news; its story has yet to be completely told. Even Mr. Halperin himself admitted that he’s “still not entirely clear” on how the deletions in the Democratic platform were made initially. Maybe a real journalist would be curious enough to pursue this story, but Mr. Halperin obviously doesn’t think it is a story at all anymore, now that the language on God and Jerusalem were reinserted.

Does anyone doubt that this controversy would have been a lead story had it occurred at the GOP convention, eclipsing marquee speakers, no matter how good they were?

The only reason it’s not news anymore to someone like Mr. Halperin is because he doesn’t want it to be—it embarrasses the Democrats. If that’s not media bias, what is?

Think about it—what exactly is news? The convention speakers are scripted and programmed—journos know what will happen, even if they don’t have the transcript of the speech in front of them beforehand. The bulk of the stories could have been written before the actual speeches: Ann Romney humanizes husband, Bill Clinton wows crowd.

The vote on the DNC platform changes was unscripted, though, with no clear indication of the outcome. If you caught it live, as I did, it was riveting. DNC Convention Chair and Mayor of Los Angeles Antonio Villaraigosa presented the new language (with a reference to “God” and support for Jerusalem as Israel’s capital) to the delegates, then asked for the Yeas and Nays. The first voice vote was unclear. Looking confused, he asked for a do-over. The second voice vote sounded as if the Nays had it. Yet he asked for another voice vote. The third one sounded as if the Nays definitely had it. And then he declared…the Yeas the winner, to strong boos from the losing voters. Normally, an ambiguous voice vote outcome is followed by a roll call vote. Why didn’t the DNC convention chair call for one? Why did he ignore the outcome of the vote?

Why is that alone not news–DNC Convention Chair Steamrolls Platform Vote.

This is, in fact, a perfect example of the old news definition cliché. Speeches are dog-bites-man, routine and predictable. The platform vote was man-bites-dog, something new, different and unpredictable.

There were several “man bites dog” moments in the platform controversy, starting with the elimination of the word “God” and the shift in policy position on Jerusalem and Israel in the first place. That alone would have been worth a discussion or two by the talking heads on the convention coverage panels. Yet Mr. Halperin was phenomenally uncurious, considering the whole issue unnewsworthy because “they fixed it.”

Yes, they did “fix” it, if you view the vote. And one would think that even the greenest of rookie journalists would be able to identify vote-fixing as a news story. Not Mr. Halperin, however.

Here’s the clip of the vote itself that Mr. Halperin doesn’t deem a story any longer because the platform was fixed:

Here’s Mark Halperin’s remarks (be warned: MSNBC usually embeds an ad at the outset of their clips):

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—
Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

The moment occurred after former Florida Governor Jeb Bush spoke at the Republican National Convention Thursday night. When cameras shifted back to the MSNBC panel, Matthews began praising Jeb Bush and what he’s done for education in the Sunshine State, calling it an “amazing challenge.” Granted, Matthews had to throw in a jab at Jeb’s sibling, George W., saying that Jeb is “not like his brother; he’s humble,” but then the liberal talk show host went on to admit that how liberals deal with the teachers union is “a problem.”

 CHRIS MATTHEWS: It’s (education) the one thing the two parties could agree on in principle. How we deal with the teachers union is a problem. Especially a problem for the Democratic party. I live in Washington, DC. I have to say, Randi Weingarten has not done a great job for our city. We’ve lost the best superintendent we ever had in education and the school teachers have to explain that.

Matthews was probably referring to former DC Superintendent Michelle Rhee, a passionate education reformer and voucher advocate, who resigned as DC education chief after a new mayor was elected in 2010. Randi Weingarten is the president of the American Federation of Teachers, a sister union to the NEA.

After Matthews’s surprising support of school choice and reforms embraced by Republicans, his colleague Ed Schultz began talking about GOP cuts to education, especially teachers’ pay and benefits. But Matthews responded to him the same way he responds to conservatives with whom he disagrees: with dogged persistence.

ED SCHULTZ: Attacking teachers is the philosophy of how to make things better in America when it comes to the Republicans.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Ed, nobody attacked teachers. No one attacked teachers…Who attacked teachers? Who did that? Jeb Bush, if you listened, just came out for higher pay for teachers.

Then, the Rev. Al Sharpton chimed in to decry “those who want to privatize education for personal gain but who are not concerned about the students…some who have taken it way over the line to privatization and union busting…”  Still, Matthews would have none of that cliched opposition to school choice and vouchers.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: There are a lot of people out there who live in tough neighborhoods, mothers especially, who will jump at any chance for an opportunity scholarship, any chance for a better education for their children…

And then Matthews offered the best argument for school choice and how to improve schools while improving the lives of poor children:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: The way you do that is through opportunity and competition, not by stifling the hopes of kids in terrible neighborhoods.

Sharpton then tried talking about the kids left behind, saying that it’s only a “certain pool” of students who get to choose:

AL SHARPTON: That is saying we’re going to take some tokens and not deal with the real education problem.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: I don’t think you’d call a kid who applied for a scholarship a token. I’d call that a merit, a kid who won a merit, an opportunity for better education.

Matthews would not back down from his position, even though no other liberal on the panel agreed with him. He concluded with these strong words:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: I’m not with the teachers union on this. I have to say, this is one time I break with labor, Ed, and with you. I’m sorry.

Say what you will about Matthews on other issues, he stuck with principle on this, even when his colleagues were clearly, strongly aligned against him.

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 Kessler resurrects the “it was only a grammatical error” excuse to bash the GOP for using the president’s “you didn’t build that” line as a mantra during their convention.

Kessler’s August 29 column asks: “Can an entire convention be built around a grammatical error?”

The “grammatical error,” Kessler contends, is the misinterpretation of “that” in the president’s remarks last month in Virginia. To review, this is what the president said (emphasis is Kessler’s—just skip if you’re tired of reading it):

“There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.”

Kessler then writes:

The key question is whether “that” refers to “roads and bridges” — as the Obama campaign contends — or to a business. Yes, it’s a bit of a judgment call, but the clincher for us was Obama’s concluding line: “The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.”

Obama appears to be making the unremarkable point that companies and entrepreneurs often benefit in some way from taxpayer support for roads, education and so forth. In other words, he is trying to make the case for higher taxes, and for why he believes the rich should pay more, which as we noted is part of a long Democratic tradition.

Pay attention, Mr. Kessler, while I explain what you are missing: Republicans get the “grammatical error” point. You miss the broader one. The important part of the president’s speech wasn’t the tiny little “that” and what it referred to. It was the cavalier dismissal of what’s involved in the achievement of goals. It was his sneering at smarts and hard work—despite his tepid qualifier about “individual initiative”—that gave the “you didn’t built that” line context, regardless what he meant by “that” in that particular line.

Besides, in a technical sense, business people did build “that,” even if the president was referring to roads and schools. After all, their tax dollars paid for those things, as well.

Mr. Kessler seems to be missing the context of the Republican theme. Speaker after speaker has acknowledged that successful people have help along the way—from family, friends, even the government. But successful people achieve their goals because they work hard and are willing to take risks. Even if government helps them, they’re still the ones whose savings, income, futures are on the line. As New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez said, when talking about her parents’ building a security firm:

…sure, there was help along the way. But my parents took the risk. They stood up. And you better believe they built it.

The president seemed to jeer at that risk-taking with his comments preceding the infamous line with its ambiguous “that.” The president wasn’t celebrating success with his remarks. He was denigrating it. And when Republicans counter with “Yes, you did build that,” they are referring to the risk and persistence that business owners shoulder when trying to achieve their goals. They’re not ignoring other factors in success, but they’re giving credit where credit is due: with the risk-taker.

Another president celebrated this kind of perseverance using different words but similar thoughts—

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race

Republican President Calvin Coolidge said those words. Note the difference in tone and meaning, Mr. Kessler, and maybe you’ll understand the difference between Coolidge’s celebration of hard work and risk-taking and Obama’s scoffing at all “that.”

_______

Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

Links from this article:

Fact checking the GOP’s opening night

Transcript of New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez’s speech at RNC

An abbreviated video clip is below (the full segment was so awful that you could sense the other guests cringing).

Someone has to do it, so I’ll start:

The Top Ten responses

Reince Priebus should have offered to Chris Matthews when he accused the GOP of playing the “race card”:

10. I’m sorry…your name again is…?

9. Security! This fellow says he has a show but nobody here has ever heard of it!

8. I think that tingle has moved up to your brain, Chris.

7. No decaf in the green room again, eh?

6. Curses, foiled again.

5. Yes, Chris, after the vice president caught us trying to re-enslave African-Americans with banking de-regulation, we thought we needed to move on to something subtler. Bwoo-hah-ha!

4. The Village Idiot Convention called. They’re missing one.

3. Are there questions in your diatribe or am I supposed to just listen and nod my head slavishly? Oops, caught me again…playing the “race card.”

2. Three words: anger management therapy.

And…the Number One Response

Reince Priebus should have offered to Chris Matthews when he accused the GOP of playing the “race card”:

1. I assume your bosses, desperate to try to grow your measly audience, have given you this morning guest slot to attract viewers to your little-watched afternoon show.  But I won’t play punching bag to your rhetorical bullying, Mr. Matthews, in their attempt to save your neck. When they finally give up on you, I’ve heard Al Gore is hiring.

Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

You might find this hard to understand, given the often careless reporting on the topic. Pro-life rallies are regularly ignored while any proposed abortion restriction, no matter how small, is often reported on as if it were an aberration. This gives the false impression that the majority of Americans are pro-choice absolutists.  No, that would be some prominent Democrats, certainly progressives.

While the 2012 Democratic platform isn’t yet finalized, the 2008 one opposed “any and all efforts” to “undermine” Roe v. Wade. Translation: opposition to waiting periods, partial-birth abortion restrictions, parental notification laws and more.

The president himself, in fact, holds perhaps the most extreme pro-choice absolutist position. As a state senator, he opposed a “Born Alive” bill that would have spared the lives of babies who survived botched abortions.

The Republicans, of course, are regularly demonized (no exaggeration if you check out Facebook posts from pro-choice supporters) for their pro-life absolutist positions that include no abortion exceptions for victims of rape.

These party positions, by the way, have been relatively unchanged for many years now (except, as Jeff Jacoby points out, Democrats have started deleting from their abortion plank the desire that abortion be “rare”). And, as stated above, they do not represent where most Americans are on the topic.

The good news for the pro-choice absolutists is that America is with them on keeping abortion legal, if not under all circumstances. According to a Gallup May 2012 survey, 52 percent of respondents hold that position, while on the fringes, 20 percent think it should be illegal under any circumstance and 25 percent favor the opposite view: legal under all circumstances.

But Americans who identify themselves as pro-choice and pro-life find many aspects of abortion policy on which they agree, once again bursting the myth that America is an either/or country on this topic. According to a Gallup study a year ago:

Self-described “pro-choice” and “pro-life” Americans agree about nine major areas of abortion policy, while disagreeing on eight others. Among the areas of consensus, in which a majority of both groups hold the same opinion, especially large percentages are in favor of requiring informed consent for women (86% of pro-choice adults and 87% who are pro-life) and making abortion illegal in the third trimester (79% and 94%).

Here’s the Gallup chart on the August 2011 survey (click on table to enlarge):

Despite these areas of agreement among Americans, Democrats appear to be readying a pro-choice rally of sorts, with absolutist abortion rights supporters from NARAL and Planned Parenthood, as well as free-contraception advocate Sandra Fluke, on their convention speaking roster.

Will this be effective? Some women might be persuaded that the GOP represents the party with little sympathy for women’s issues (thanks, Todd Akin) and thus some votes could be lost that might otherwise have gone to the Romney-Ryan ticket.

But, as has been pointed out numerous times by other pundits, abortion policy shows up very low on lists of issues of importance to voters this year, if it shows up at all. Democrats could once again send a message that they’re the party ignoring the larger universal challenges of high unemployment and a slow economy in favor of spending a lot of time on an issue where only around 20 percent of Americans share their absolutist views.

Missouri Republican senatorial nominee Todd Akin surely handed Democrats a golden opportunity to pound the GOP on women’s issues, especially abortion policy, this fall. But that opportunity isn’t without risks that Team Romney will just as surely exploit, as evidenced by the ticket’s handling of the “Mediscare” issue.

When Romney chose Paul Ryan as his running mate, many Democrats seemed absolutely gleeful, eager to remind the country that Ryan was the architect of Medicare reform that would push granny over the cliff. The Romney/Ryan team skillfully turned that issue back on the Democrats, pointing out the president’s own Medicare-changing program, now incorporated into unpopular ObamaCare. The issue was neutralized as a risk for Romney/Ryan and is looking more and more like a winner.

The same could happen with abortion. If Democrats seek to exploit the issue, Team Romney can point out the president’s own extreme positions and actions on this topic (see the Born Alive Act link above), at the very least neutralizing the issue as a negative for Romney/Ryan, at best showcasing Democrats’ desire to avoid the big challenges confronting the country while satisfying special interest extremes within their party.

Libby Sternberg is a novelist

 Linda: I think if anyone ever tried to rape me, I’d pretend to go along with it and then in the middle pick up the nearest heavy object and let him have it. Unless, of course, I was enjoying it.

Allan: They say it’s the secret desire of every woman.

Linda: Well I guess it depends on who does the raping.

Allan; Well, look, why dwell on morbid things? Odds are you’ll never get raped.

Linda: Not with my luck.

That was from Woody Allen’s 1972 comedy Play It Again, Sam. Linda was portrayed by Diane Keaton and Allan by…Allen. Woody, that is.

Today that scene is cringe-inducing. Back then, the ideas it communicated were acceptable. Rape wasn’t viewed as an assault but rather as just another form of sex, and since sex is pleasurable…well, you finish it. I can’t.

The world has changed since Woody and Diane had that pretend conversation 40 years ago. Rape is now correctly viewed as an act of violence, a violation. It has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with power, degradation, humiliation, control.

Feminists were right to champion this shift in understanding, but it was slow to take hold in some quarters. Viewers were reminded recently of Texas Republican gubernatorial candidate Clayton Williams’s 1990 comments about rape (if it’s inevitable, one should just “relax and enjoy it”) by MSNBC’s Alex Wagner, as she tried to demonstrate a pattern of obtuseness in GOP candidates leading up to remarks by Missouri’s Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, Todd Akin.

Akin, as everyone not living in a cave now knows, said that women who are raped have some special power to prevent becoming pregnant. This has become slangily known as the Magic Uteri theory of conception, one that was used in centuries past to determine if a woman’s claim of rape was “legitimate.”

The outrage that was visited upon Akin was well-deserved. His remarks paint a picture of a man whose thinking on an important woman’s issue hasn’t evolved much beyond the nineteenth century.

The issue in question is rape, by the way, not abortion. Akin likes to portray himself as something of a martyr for the pro-life cause. He does that cause, though, a disservice by cowardly trying to hide behind it. Abortion policy has nothing whatsoever to do with his perverse thinking on rape.

But Democrats will probably try to make that link at their convention, trotting out abortion rights activists and free contraception advocates to lecture the world about how they are defenders of women in a great conservative war on same.

Ironically, this will be a convention where one of the marquee speakers is a man actually accused of rape by at least one woman and the subject of impeachment for lying under oath about another sexual liaison that would have cost many other executives their jobs.

Yes, I’m talking about former President Bill Clinton.  As Mark Levin so articulately and passionately pointed out, how can the Democrats even pretend to care about the issue of rape when they yawned at rape accusations against one of their own stars?

Although Clinton was never criminally charged with rape, he was found guilty of lying under oath about an affair that would have gotten other business managers fired—he was a powerful executive, after all, engaging in a sexual relationship with a powerless underling, an intern. For this he was ultimately disbarred.

His behavior and attitudes toward women in his personal life show little evidence of respect for the XX chromosome crowd. Yet feminists gave his behavior a wink and a nod, some female pols admitting they wouldn’t want him around their daughters, but he was a good leader nonetheless.

Why did he get a pass for his abhorrent behavior? He might not have held Magic Uteri beliefs, but he certainly held the beliefs about uteri that got him a magic pass from the pro-choice lobby.

Like most people, I’m in no mood to relitigate L’Affaires Clinton. One hopes he has atoned and been forgiven by those he wronged and by his God.

But spare me the holier-than-thou show, Democrats, at your convention. You don’t really care about women if you’re not willing to stare down one of your own when he mistreats women.

When Republicans saw a man with antique misogynistic views about rape, they did the right thing. They spoke out against him vigorously and repeatedly. They still do.

But heaven help the gals who are actually assaulted, mistreated or abused by Democratic men. Their liberal sisterhood and the Democratic party abandon them.

Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

Over at the Daily Kos website, Kos himself has weighed in today with  a post titled: “Beating Todd Akin, but not beating him too hard.” The gist of the piece is that Democrats have to walk a fine line with Akin, allowing him to fail, but not too quickly:

Democrats are about to walk a tightrope in Missouri: They want to take advantage of Todd Akin’s pile of steaming fail to save the Senate’s most endangered incumbent in Sen. Claire McCaskill. On the other hand, if Akin’s numbers fall too far too quickly, the chances that he bails and allows Republicans to replace him with a Not-Akin increases.

Their strategy, says Kos, should be to hold off on the hard hits until after it’s clear Akin will not give up. Then:

So if Democrats soft-pedal it for the next month, they could continue to play rope-a-dope with Akin, and then hit him hard as soon as the hard deadline passes.

The “hard deadline” is September 25. Will Akin realize who the “dope” is in this “rope-a-dope” strategy?

—-

Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

Akin seems to think that he should soldier on because the Republican voters of Missouri chose him above the other primary candidates to carry the GOP banner against Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill. On ABC’s Good Morning America, Akin said:

“The people of Missouri chose me to be their candidate. And I don’t believe it’s right for party bosses to decide to override those voters.”

The “party bosses” comment is risible. As Ed has pointed out on this blog, those calling for Akin to drop out of the race include a list of conservatives who’ve long argued for purer conservative stances than those espoused by party elders in the past. They’re not RINOS, in other words.

But Akin’s initial statement is just as off base—about being chosen by Missouri voters. That implies a groundswell of support, and the truth is at odds with that implication. Yes, he became the nominee, but he hardly has a mandate to lead the conservative charge in the Show-Me State.

Let’s examine the facts:

Six out of ten people actually voted against Todd Akin in the Missouri U.S. Senatorial primary. His primary opponents, John Brunner and Sarah Steelman, each pulled in around 30 percent of the vote to Akin’s 36 percent. Because the state doesn’t use run-off elections for winners with less than 50 percent of the vote, we’ll never know if Akin would have survived a head-to-head challenge.

However, a poll taken before the August 7 Missouri primary offers some interesting insights into Missouri Republicans’ preferences. According to a Mason-Dixon poll conducted July 23-25,  400 “likely Republican primary voters” responded this way to the question: If the Republican primary election for Missouri’s U.S. Senate seat were held today, which one of the following candidates would get your vote:

John Brunner: 33 percent

Sarah Steelman: 27 percent

Todd Akin: 17 percent

When these top three candidates were placed in the poll head-to-head with incumbent Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, the results were just as telling:

John Brunner: 52 percent

Claire McCaskill: 41 percent

Sarah Steelman: 49 percent

Claire McCaskill: 41 percent

Todd Akin: 49 percent

Claire McCaskill: 44 percent

Note which of those three match-ups fares the poorest. Yes, it’s the one with the self-proclaimed Republican Messiah in it, Todd Akin.

And, to make matters worse, Akin loses to McCaskill among women, in the Mason-Dixon poll, while Brunner and Steelman beat McCaskill in that subset. Wonder how the women’s vote will swing today in Missouri?

Of course, new polls show…Akin’s lost ground since the Mason-Dixon pre-primary survey.  An August 20 PPP poll showed he was pulling 44 percent of voters’ support to McCaskill’s 43 percent. So, while she’s holding about steady, he is sinking, even before the true effect of his ridiculous comments have had a chance to resonate.

Whatever Akin thinks party bosses want, it’s not clear at all that Missouri voters want him.

___

Libby Sternberg is  a novelist.

Please step down as the Republican U.S. Senate Candidate in Missouri.

You might think it presumptuous of me to make this request. I’m not a Missouri voter, after all. But I am a conservative woman. And what you said about rape reveals not just muddled thinking but deep ignorance on many levels. You don’t help conservative women, sir, with such thinking. You hurt us.

As a conservative woman, I’ve fought against the phony “war on women” charges from the left. I’ve defended Sarah Palin, even when some conservative men hemmed and hawed about whether she was really qualified while giving a nod and a wink to lesser pols, who happened to be men.

I’ve defended pro-life positions even though I don’t agree with them on every single abortion policy. I’ve defended the Catholic Church’s stance on the HHS contraception coverage mandate, even though I don’t agree with the Church’s teachings on that issue.

And I’ve done all this as part of the sisterhood of conservative women, who often–I venture to say–feel alone in the battle, unable to count on liberal feminists to champion our right to be heard if we’re not conforming with their reproductive policy stances.

With your statements, you’ve made our battle harder. We can defend conservative issues even if we don’t agree with every policy point, but we can’t defend a conservative man who is so profoundly ignorant of the impact of rape and even the simple biology of conception!

What you said was more than just a verbal stumble. It was indicative of deeper misunderstandings of what women face.

Your Twitter feed suggests you will fight on because we need a “conservative Senate.” Yes, we do, Mr. Akin. Conservative women know this, as well. And we know that you’re not the man to help us get there. Don’t confuse perseverance with egotism. If you truly support conservative values, admit you made a terrible mistake that can’t be shrugged off and step aside for a better candidate. You only received a plurality of the vote in the primary. Surely Missouri Republicans will admire you for the honorable act of withdrawing from the race, and one day, when you are wiser, you can try again.

Sincerely,

Libby Sternberg

That’s a scurrilous charge, isn’t it? Democrats would protest that their opposition to Voter ID laws is motivated not by base intentions but by the noble desire to ensure that certain populations not be denied access to the vote.

Why should we believe them? Many of them certainly don’t believe that Republicans who support Voter ID laws are anything but malevolently motivated. To the folks at places like Moveon.org, Voter ID laws are but one part of a massive racist voter suppression scheme perpetrated by evil conservatives, funded by the evilest of them all, the Koch Brothers.

So, the next time the hard left and their willing sheep start bleating about “voter suppression,” why shouldn’t those on the right start talking about liberals’ desire to block Voter ID initiatives because liberals really just want to make it easier to “steal elections”?

Maybe one of the reasons liberals would rather discuss alleged motivations instead of the actual policy is because Voter ID programs are supported by a vast majority of Americans. According to a July Washington Post poll nearly three-quarters of respondents believe one should have to show ID to vote.

With poll numbers like those, of course Voter ID opponents would rather make this a debate about “suppression” and “racism.” Nobody likes a racist, after all, so they easily win that fake argument, while they lose the one on the policy itself.

Some reasonable observations, however, explain the strong support for Voter ID:

Most Americans understand that when you engage in serious activities, you are required to show proof that you are who you say you are.

Your bank, for example, might ask for ID even when you’re making a deposit into your own account.

Unions  ask for proof of union membership before allowing members to vote.

And government offices (even ones fighting Voter ID laws in the courts) ask for ID before allowing just anyone to come on the premises.

Americans confront on a daily basis the need for proof of ID, and they understand why it’s important.

They also know how little is required of them when they walk into a polling place. In most places, they’re just asked to give their name.

Surely it has crossed their minds how easy it would be for a less-than-altruistic individual to abuse that level of public trust. They don’t need to watch James O’Keefe videos to understand this on a visceral level. They know, perhaps also on a gut level, how easy it is for people caught up in the passion of the moment—zealously supporting a candidate, for example—to rationalize away bad behavior in service of a perceived “common good.”

And one doesn’t have to be a news junkie to realize that some elections are close, and that sometimes recounts take months with the result being less than satisfactory for one side or the other.

In short, Americans know that how clean an election is just might tilt the outcome.

But opponents of these laws say Voter ID is a solution in search of a problem, since voter fraud is so low in the U.S.

Voter fraud is real, and it can swing a close election in some districts. What might not be so real, however, is the alleged disenfranchisement of voters due to Voter ID laws.

Recently, Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Judge Simpson refused to grant an injunction to plaintiffs seeking to block Pennsylvania’s new Voter ID law. In his ruling, Judge Simpson wrote that he didn’t find credible the studies of a university professor testifying for the plaintiffs, due to “oversampling; post-stratification weighting…and overarching design for ‘eligible’ voters as opposed to ‘registered’ voters.” Judge Simpson also “had doubts about the survey execution: response rate; and timing.”  The judge specifically “rejected Petitioners attempts to inflate the numbers (percent of registered voters without ID).”

Before opponents dismiss Judge Simpson as a partisan, it should be noted that he also blocked Republicans’ attempts to thwart ACORN voter registration work back in 2008.

Most Americans won’t read Judge Simpson’s ruling, but they don’t need to in order to understand these common sense ideas:

• It’s important to show proof of identity for serious transactions.
• Close elections in the past demonstrate how important it is to ensure clean elections, and
• Sometimes well-intentioned partisans might cross the line because of their zeal.

Voter ID opponents can continue to question supporters’ motives, but that tactic does nothing to advance the legitimate discussion of ways to ensure clean elections. So the next time Voter ID debates turn to talk of voter suppression, ask why opponents are so disinterested in clean elections. If motivation is the topic and not the policy itself, such a question is fair game.

____

Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

In the video, two GenXers reveal to you with cheerful sincerity the GOP’s three-pronged strategy to get Mitt Romney elected president, and, as you can well imagine, it’s all part of a dire “racist” plot funded by the Koch Brothers. I exaggerate….but nowhere near as much as the video does.

If you can stand to watch it, it’s below, but here’s a summary of their major “prongs:”

Prong 1:

The GOP has been sabotaging our economy and then blaming Obama for it. One of the ways they’re doing this is by “starving states” of money. “It’s all about defeating Obama,” you see, and the strategy is “working” because the “latest polls indicate more Americans actually blame Obama for the struggling economy.”  Not George Bush, not Wall Street, not banks, not Congress, but poor, power-lacking President Obama.

This is real tinfoil hat territory—believing that any party, on the left, right, in the middle or on Mars, would adopt a risky strategy of sinking the national economy because they know—insert Snidely Whiplash laughter here—the people will blame, not them, but the “other guy,” their adversary!

That’s real power, if you can pull it off, especially when you’re not actually in power, as the Republicans weren’t at the outset of the Obama term.

Congress’s approval ratings are regularly in the basement, too, yet somehow, miraculously, amazingly, stunningly, Congressional Republicans figured out how to shift blame for the economic situation away from their dastardly deeds onto…the leader of our country. You know, the one who promised to fix things when he took office. The one whose party held the White House, the Senate and the House for two whole years.

Man, but those Republicans are sneaky. Apparently, they were able to “fight every reform” of the president’s. I can only assume they did this by drugging congressional Democrats who, as pointed out above, controlled Congress for the first two years of the president’s term.

 Prong 2:

The Koch Brothers.  ’Nuff said.

Well, I do have to go on… did you know that “outside groups” have already spent “seven times” as much to defeat Obama as similar groups supporting Obama? And all this money means “misleading information” is “pummeling voters” in swing states. No, I’m not talking about mainstream news, which regularly tilts left. I’m talking paid advertisements that promote scurrilous ideas, such as accusing the nominee  of being responsible for a steelworker’s wife’s death.

Oh, wait, sorry. Wrong misinformation and wrong candidate. That ad, of course, is one on the president’s side, which he has not yet criticized.

Prong 3:

A “racist strategy” to suppress votes. That is, voter ID programs and projects that clean up voter rolls so that, well, only real voters vote.

Among their evidence?  Pennsylvania Republican state majority leader Mike Turzai said that passing the state’s Voter ID law would “allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” Of course, he couldn’t possibly have meant that by limiting the chance of voter fraud, the Republican presidential nominee now has a fair chance to win instead of having the election taken from him in tight districts. No, that interpretation isn’t dramatic or sinister enough. This is part of the GOP’s secret strategy to win the White House, after all. Except, of course, that Turzai made his Biden-like remarks at a public meeting, so it’s not really “secret.”

To recap, from this video we are to believe the following:

• The GOP is so clever that it could engineer a plan to sink the economy and then, Svengali-like, get the American public to place blame for this, not on low-approval Congress but on well-liked President Obama.
• And the way they do this is by getting lots of money from the Koch Brothers and their allies to pummel mesmerized voters with misinformation (that somehow counters the vast liberal bent of most mainstream news sources).
• But those who manage to escape these mass hypnosis sessions can’t vote because of racist Voter ID laws.

I have an idea, let’s flip this so it works for Democrats. Then, the three-pronged strategy might be:

• Pretend that you really have no power to get anything done that people actually like when your party holds the White House, the Senate and the House.
• Demonize your adversary’s donors when your fecklessness results in usual Democratic donors running for the tall grass.
• Oppose Voter ID and other clean-vote initiatives.

Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

For years now, people have been accepting or making excuses for Vice President Joe Biden, calling his Tourette’s-like blurts as “gaffes” and not, perhaps a symptom of something more serious—an addled mind.

I’m not talking about “addled” in a clinical sense, but merely in the “is he a clear thinker” way. Since his selection as the vice-presidential candidate in 2008, Biden has exhibited over and over again he is easily confused. On occasion, he’s provided a window into his deeper musings that presents a picture of a man with unattractive opinions of various ethnic groups, hardly the type of thinker one would want leading a diverse and melting-pot nation, let alone meeting with foreign dignitaries.

Yet his stumbles are accepted as part of who he is and how he “communicates,” not as a sign of a problem. “Nothing to see here, move along” seems to be the attitude ever since his ’08 selection.

In their defense, the media, especially the punditocracy, was distracted four years ago by that other “unqualified” vice presidential candidate, and thus unable to give Biden thorough scrutiny. You remember —the pretty gal who was portrayed as an empty-headed simpleton who needed to be quizzed on her reading choices by celebrity news anchors.

Yes, I’m being sarcastic. It always burned me how then-Sen. Joe Biden could get away with goof after goof while Sarah Palin’s critics gasped collectively at the slightest fumble. This treatment went well beyond a simple double standard—after all, more should have been expected of Biden, with all his years of experience. Yet all those “enlightened” feminist-supporting commentators howled like wolves at the moon whenever Sarah Palin uttered something they deemed a blunder, and they gave Biden a pass on misstep after misstep. He was the “good ole boy,” and she was the…she…a conservative “she,” to boot.

Maybe they were just waiting to bestow their approval on a female “articulate and bright” enough for the job. Oh, wait, that’s akin to what then-Sen. Joseph Biden said of Barack Obama’s candidacy for president back in 2007: Obama was the “first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.”

Aw, but that’s just good ole Joe. It’s “who he is, how he talks…and we all get that.” Right? He’s just a challenge to manage, “a blunt candidate in an era where unscripted moments go viral in an instant,” says  the Los Angeles Times.

No, LAT writers, “blunt” implies a politician who is willing to utter truths instead of euphemisms. Blunt is New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who is courageously willing to speak truth to union power.

Joe Biden isn’t “blunt.” He’s “undisciplined.”

American Crossroads, the anti-Obama PAC headed by Karl Rove, has a new ad up, at least on the web, that provides a hit parade of Biden gaffes. It’s meant to be funny, but I think it’s frightening.

It’s scary to think that Barack Obama thought this man was qualified in 2008 to be vice president. Now that we’ve been exposed to more of Biden’s “unscripted” outbursts, shouldn’t people be seriously discussing if he should stay in his position?

I usually think it when violence erupts abroad, particularly in the Middle East, and I see a clip of the Arizona Senator on the news urging support or encouragement of some revolutionary movement.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting the current White House has handled the country’s position or messaging with any aplomb during rebellious unrest overseas. I’d even agree with Sen. McCain that the administration’s approach has often seemed “feckless.” I’m just not convinced I would have preferred a 180-degree alternative—the use of blood or treasure in a “multilateral military force,” even if such proposals are coupled with “no U.S. boots on the ground” promises.

As much as I admire Sen. McCain and am grateful for his immense sacrifices for this country, I am uncomfortable with what seems to me to be a reflexively quick trigger finger. He has suffered firsthand the horror of war, so one can’t accuse him of being a “chicken-hawk.” But a strong hawk he is, and many conservatives are wary of using too much muscle, even while supporting a more muscular foreign policy.

So, in a strange way, Barack Obama’s presidency has saved us from what might have been too many foreign entanglements, too many “adventures” overseas. For this, I’m glad, even if the result was accomplished through stumbling, rather than with purpose and direction.

But what would a “President McCain” have been like on the domestic front as the recession worsened? Sen. McCain has a reputation as a moderate, and if you look at his Club for Growth rankings, you see a picture of a man who became more fiscally conservative and limited government-conscious in the past few years, perhaps reacting against the excesses of the current administration. Those years, of course, coincide with the growth of the Tea Party, which itself sprung up in reaction to the overreach of big government—specifically to reckless spending and ObamaCare.

Without the Tea Party, would a President McCain have been a true limited-government fiscal conservative? Or would he have been a moderate pragmatist, leading us just far enough out of the ditch to keep us rolling until we got ever closer to the cliff of financial ruin?

His practical approach is one shared somewhat by Mitt Romney, someone who many conservatives didn’t like at first (myself included) because Romney had compromised so much when working with Democrats in Massachusetts. He’d come up with his own “RomneyCare” program there, after all, as a response to calls for health care reform. He was about as far from a Tea Party conservative as you could get without becoming the next token Republican on MSNBC.

If Romney had been the nominee in 2008 and won the presidency then, does anyone doubt he’d have governed with his pragmatic, risk-averse managerial competence? And would it have resulted in righting the ship of state, deck chairs all neatly arranged, just enough to keep us going as we headed toward that ice block off the coast of Newfoundland?

That Mitt Romney, however, is not the one who confronts us today. The environment has changed. Today, risk-averse leadership is out of fashion; bold fiscal conservatism is the new pragmatism.

Republican Governor Chris Christie has become popular within the GOP and his own fractious state of New Jersey because he’s not been shy about talking about fiscal imperatives and hard truths. Republican Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin took on the perilous task of standing up to public sector employee unions and won—both in the policy and political arenas.

These governors are matched by Republican officials across the country who’ve come to office supported by Tea Party politics—not the politics of racism, as the left would have you believe, but, rather, the politics of racing away from financial disaster.

The battle against the Democrats’ radical liberal agenda has produced a revolution that has allowed Mitt Romney to step into a role he’s been comfortable with in the business world—that of a real leader. His new “board of directors,” America itself, is made up of fiscal conservatives. He’s chosen one of them as his running mate.

Barack Obama is looking more and more like a “placeholder” president, a role he knew how to play well after voting “present” so many times in his legislative past. Just as with Jimmy Carter, President Obama held the post as the country caught its breath after contentious years of internal and external conflict. (Apologies to George Bush, but he allowed himself to become a divisive figure by not adequately addressing his many critics.)

And now, just as it was at the end of the Carter term, the country seems ready to embrace real leadership, by politicians unafraid to tell the truth about the mess we’re in. The era of empty rhetoric is over. I’m hoping Romney becomes more and more Reagan-like as the days progress.

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Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

Am I the only one who thinks this has to be one of the stupidest ads ever made? It is — pardon the pun – so over the top that only the lowest of low-information voters would be swayed by it. It almost looks like a parody of a campaign ad.

I’m sure the too-cool-for-school crowd that came up with this spot probably thinks “yes, that’s what we want–a parody that invites the viewer into the deeper truth that all satire conveys.” The problem with that approach? The parody is of its makers. This is precisely the kind of exaggeration that leaves most people shaking their heads, thinking, “another political liar trying to tell me what’s what.” (In fact, the premise of the ad was dubbed the 2011 “Lie of the Year” by PolitiFact.)

Revamping the ad and running it in swing states is a boon for the Romney-Ryan ticket. It just reinforces their “Obama lacks credibility” message, nicely done in this ad:

Of course, the above ad was put together in response to that ridiculous “Romney killed my wife” spot put together by Priorities USA, a blow so low that even The Onion jumped on it with ghoulish humor.

Now, with the granny-over-the-cliff ad running alongside the Romney-causes-cancer message, Romney and Republicans have a terrific opportunity to hammer the lack-of-credibility theme.

“Doesn’t America deserve better than a president who will do or say anything to stay in power?” is a tag line that will resonate far beyond the issue it originally confronted.

So my reaction to the re-release of granny-over-the-cliff is this: Huzzah! Keep up the scurrilous attacks, Team Obama and your compadres. Go as low as you can. Hand Romney one more opportunity to attack your credibility so that when you actually get around to talking about policy (if you ever do), voters will be primed to be skeptical.

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Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

In this piece, the paper’s opinionaters are so distraught over the selection of Ryan for vice presidential candidate that they are forced to side with Catholic bishops who’ve objected to the Ryan budget. (NYT ♥Catholic bishops—when did this happen?) And, of course, while the Times’s editorialists worry about the underprivileged under Scrooge Ryan, they tsk-tsk over the bounty he will provide for the wealthy:

All of this will be accompanied, of course, by even greater tax giveaways to the rich, and extravagant benefits to powerful military contractors. Business leaders will be granted their wish for severely diminished watchdogs over the environment, mine safety and food quality.

“Tax giveaways?” For the love of God, can we please get rid of dishonest euphemisms like this? A tax break just lets you keep more of your own money. It doesn’t take money from some unsuspecting naïf and hand it out to a wealthy fat cat in a cutaway and top hat. You might not like that fat cat having so much money, but guess what? It’s not your money, and it’s not your judgment to make. Stop thinking of the economy like it’s a Monopoly game, for crying out loud. Can’t we at least expect that level of sophistication from the “paper of record?”

But, wait, there’s more. The Times ends their wail with:

Mr. Romney had already praised the Ryan budget as “excellent work,” but until Saturday the deliberate ambiguity of his own plans gave him a little room for distance, an opportunity to sketch out a more humane vision of government’s role. By putting Mr. Ryan’s callousness on his ticket, he may have lost that chance.

A “more humane vision of government’s role”?  “Mr. Ryan’s callousness?”

That’s in the eye of the beholder, NYT. From a conservative’s vantage point – even from some liberals’ view – it’s the height of callousness to ignore the fiscal challenges our country faces. And it’s grossly inhumane to continue funding programs that do not open the door to opportunity but instead stymie initiative and self-respect. And…asking other people to fund these ineffective programs is not compassion, unless you’re using a relativist definition that takes into consideration how self-righteous the “takers” feel when purloining neighbors’ cash for their “good deeds.”

This compassion/humane argument always steams me. It’s as if liberals like those at the New York Times are rock solid sure that their approach confirms how compassionate they are, and anyone who disagrees and wants to try other ways to help those in need…is just a scurrilous scumbag who wants to reap profits instead of helping people. Nice caricature. Makes disagreements so much easier when you can smugly assume the mantle of virtue while portraying your adversaries as heartless profiteers.

Whenever I’m confronted with this kind of reasoning, I end up thinking of …drivers who annoy me by waving on left-turners while backing up traffic.

You know the type. You’re sitting in a long line at a light, and someone up ahead gets the notion to “help” an oncoming left-turner by stopping and waving them through the intersection, even when doing so might create a hazard for the turner.

The waver has no idea who is more deserving of moving forward. For all he knows, the line of cars behind him might contain a mother rushing a sick child to the doctor, or a father hurrying to see his daughter in a school play or even a spouse hoping to make it to the airport before her loved one flies off for a deployment…and the left-turner could be a drug dealer on his way to his latest score. No, all that matters to the waver is how good he feels about himself for doing something “nice” for someone else.

That’s what these noxious editorialists are like. They assume because they think the action is humane and compassionate, it must be—after all, they’re thinking of it! And they’re good people! Break out the champagne! Who cares whether the policies they advocate actually work to bring people out of poverty into opportunity? What really matters is how good these do-gooders feel about themselves.

That’s a “cramped vision,” if ever there was one.