The Libyan embassy had repeatedly asked for additional security and were refused In fact, their security was reduced. “We couldn’t even keep what we had.”
Watching and listening to Romney now, who do you agree with more: Mitt Romney, or reporters sounding outraged at his criticisms of the Obama Administration?
Both the Obama Administration and their lapdog media surrogates seem far more interested in defeating Obama’s political opponent than America’s Jihadest enemies, or telling the American people the truth.
Take a gander at the latest ad from American’s for Prosperity:
Not only does it work for me, it has a subtle, minimalist brilliance that not only makes it stick in the mind, but makes it hard to fight. What are liberals going to say? “No, unemployment isn’t high?” “No, middle class families aren’t suffering?” “No, it’s all Bush’s fault?” “No, let’s keep doing the same thing?” The very lack of dialog all but eliminates attack vectors against it, and any attacks against it will only make more people watch it.
I got this via Ace of Spades who, strangely enough, doesn’t like it. A commentator suggests that it’s because it stresses feelings over facts. But if facts and figure by themselves swayed the majority of voters, Obama would never have been elected President, and would stand no chance now.
If you have liberal friends on Facebook, chances are that they’re not forwarding links that show how objectively great a job Obama is doing. No, what they’re doing is forwarding links designed inflame fellow liberals with what horrible people Republicans are by focusing on the stupid things said by a few Republican office-holders. (Todd Aiken before, Paul Broun this week.) It’s meant to distract from Obama’s manifest failures by making the opposition evil incarnate. Political ads play on emotions because playing on emotions works.
Which isn’t to say it’s the only advertising you should be doing. But as part of a larger advertising strategy I think this particular ad is very effective.
You know what they could do to make liberals really crawl of their skin? Do the exact same ad with a black family.
The Onion is merciless: “President Barack Obama’s 11-year-old daughter Sasha reportedly asked her father why he was ‘acting like such a goddamned pussy up there.’ ‘Daddy, how come you were being such a little bitch?'”
Uh:
Jon Stewart piles on:
How do you know Romney slaughtered Obama? Even Taiwanese animators celebrate the pummeling:
Larry Kudlow: “Mitt Romney politely cleaned Barack Obama’s clock tonight. A lethargic and at times tired looking President Obama was out-hustled, out-facted, out-energized, and out-informed by Former Governor Mitt Romney.”
And Jim Treacher has still more. “I’m glad the Greatest President Ever spent so much time stressing the importance of education, because he just got schooled.”
The Washington Postcalled Romney “well prepared and aggressive.”
I didn’t see the entirety of the debate, but in the parts I did see, Romney firmly trounced Obama. Romney looked sharp, engaged, lively and presidential. Obama looked like he was looking at his Blackberry when he wasn’t speaking.
Nor am I alone in my judgment, as even the Obama-friendly press and liberal pundits said Romney won (some in NSFW language):
John Hindraker: “It’s over. I’ve been watching presidential debates for quite a few years, but I have never seen one like this. It wasn’t a TKO, it was a knockout. Mitt Romney was in control from the beginning. He was the alpha male, while Barack Obama was weak, hesitant, stuttering, often apologetic. The visuals were great for Romney and awful for Obama. Obama looked small, tired, defeated after four years of failure, out of ammo.”
Jonah Goldberg: “I had a pretty good feeling about tonight’s debate. But I had no expectation that Romney would simply control the night the way he did. I don’t think Obama did terribly on the merits, even though he clearly lost by a wide margin on points. But you don’t really score a debate like this on points. Romney simply dominated and deflated Obama.”
Rich Lowry: “It was overwhelmingly Romney’s night. He was more confident, more energetic, and better informed than President Obama. He exposed the president’s shallowness and got under his skin.”
On Twitter, gay righty turned lefty Andrew Sullivan bluntly declared “this was a disaster for Obama.” Also: “How is Obama’s closing so fucking sad, confused, lame? He choked. He lost. He may even have lost election tonight.”
Hell, even CNN’s non-rightwing audience thought that Romney won the debate by a landslide of 67% to 25%.
Florida New York Times/Quinnipiac 2012 sample: 36% Democrat, 27% Republican, 33% Independent.
Each party’s share only shifts a few percentage points, but the overall split goes from D+3 to D+9.
One again, the New York Times thinks Republicans are too stupid to figure out the con. If they’re going to be that absurdly biased, why not just cut out the middleman and poll Obama for America staffers directly?
Remember: The business model of The New York Times is to envelop liberals in a soft, warm, comforting cocoon of reassurance that their ideas and leaders are popular. You saw this in 2010, when it dangerously blinded them to the coming Republican wave until too late. The same patterns is repeating itself this year.
Remember how how incredibly tight the 1980 election was? How Ronald Reagan managed to edge Jimmy Carter at the last minute despite losing Texas and New York?
Probably not, mainly because that didn’t happen. But as Jeffrey Lord’s story makes clear, that was the narrative the New York Times was pushing most of the fall, and they had “polls” to back it up.
In the pantheon of lies, damn lies, and statistics, polls aren’t even as valid as statistics. At this point, polls by the usual MSM suspects (NYT, PPP, CBS, MS/NBC, Time, Newsweek, NPR, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, just to name a few) aren’t designed to gauge the race, they’re designed to encourage Democrats and discourage Republicans. They are, as Lord notes and Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee admitted to Ed Rollins, offering up “in kind contributions” to the Democrats.
So let’s take a brief look at the many ways in which the MSM is distorting polls for the benefit of Obama and the Democrats.
Dick Morris (who knows a thing or two about polling) thinks the idea that an Obama victory is in the offing is bunk. “All of the polling out there uses some variant of the 2008 election turnout as its model for weighting respondents and this overstates the Democratic vote by a huge margin.” He also notes that even the skewed polls show Obama at less than 50%, and “the undecided vote always goes against the incumbent.”
By one analysis, pollsters are oversampling Democrats by an average of 6.1%.
Jay Cost notes that “polls that do a poor job of differentiating enthusiastic non-voters from enthusiastic voters are going to overestimate Obama’s margin.”
Every week you see the media going to bat for Obama, and every week we see more evidence of lack of enthusiasm on the part of Democrats compared to 2008. 2010 did happen, no matter how much the media would like to pretend it didn’t. The Tea Party hasn’t gone away, nor suddenly decided that they like Obama’s free-spending ways after all. The fundamentals of our ailing economy and staggering unemployment haven’t gone away either. And remember: Republicans now outnumber Democrats in party identification.
There’s a lot better chance that this election’s results will look like 1980 than that they will look like 2008.
Random swarm of interesting links for your amusement and edification:
Just in case you didn’t notice, in Obama’s interview with Univision (where he faced much tougher questions that from America’s lapdog media), Obama pretty much admitted that he failed, because “you can’t change Washington from the inside.” Really? I’m sure that platform would have gotten you a lot of votes in 2008.
This is the time of year when the political world is awash in polls. Some otherwise sensible Republicans take a look at those polls and go “Oh my God! Obama is up by 2! Or 5! He got a big convention bounce!”
I could wade into the murky swamps of different polling companies, different methodologies, different biases, the problem with cell phone vs. landline samples, partisan weighting screens, the comparison between citizens, registered voters and likely voters, or a dozen other variables. But I’m not going to.
Instead, one piece of advice, and one explanation.
The advice: Chill.
The explanation: Barack Obama was elected in 2008 with 52.9% of the popular vote to 45.7% for John McCain, the best popular vote margin of any Democratic Presidential contender since Lyndon Baines Johnson captured 61.1% of the vote in 1964. (People forget that Bill Clinton, for all his retrospective popularity, never broke 50% of the popular vote; Al Gore got 48.4% of the vote while losing in the electoral college in 2000.) Ignoring (for now) the electoral college and minor changes in the composition of voters, that means only 4% of the people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 need to switch their vote for Mitt Romney to win.
Do you think Obama might be 4% less popular than he was four years ago? Perhaps among those who have lost their jobs? There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that Obama is less popular than he was four years ago, his inability to fill campaign events the way he used to being one, and numerous elected Democrats in tough reelection fights avoiding the DNC being another. So who are you going to believe: MSM polls or your lying eyes?
The media is desperately trying to pretend that 2010 never happened, or that it was an aberration.
The polls are part of the media trying desperately to maintain what Instapundit Glenn Reynolds calls “preference falsification,” a willingness on the part of the political and media establishment to manufacture a false consensus that (in this case) liberal policies and politicians are popular. When it comes to the current election, the question might be most crassly boiled down to “Do you support Obama, or are you a racist?” In 2010 and now we’re finally seeing a “preference cascade” of people unwilling to buy that liberal narrative. The walls are finally coming down.
Which is not to say the election is in the bag for Romney. There’s still a lot of hard work to be done, and a lot of work to make sure Republicans and anti-Obama independents get to the polls, especially in swing states. But there’s no reason to get worked up over each and every little poll. Time is not on Obama’s side.
Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.
As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in The Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects.
