Why It's Hard to Trust Liberal Media

I don't like to accuse the media of being dishonest, but at least at MSNBC it's getting ever more difficult to avoid that conclusion. A few months ago they edited George Zimmerman's 911 call before he shot Trayvon Martin to make it sound as if Zimmerman was racially motivated when in fact the full audio provides a completely different picture than the MSNBC edit.

Now the same network has edited a portion of Mitt Romney's speech in Pennsylvania the other day to make it appear as if "the rich guy" is completely out of touch with common people, and then they laugh about it after they air it. Here's Andrea Mitchell doing her best to make Romney look like a buffoon:

The problem for MSNBC, however, is that someone recorded the whole speech on a cell phone, and it's obvious from the context that what Romney was doing was not expressing astonishment at WaWa's touch screen technology but rather making the point that private initiative is far more innovative and efficient than the ponderous bureaucracies spawned by government:

In her attempt to impugn Romney as someone who lives in a different world from the rest of us and thereby discredit him in the eyes of the average voter Andrea Mitchell only succeeded in shining a light on her own dismal professional ethics and/or competence.

This is the sort of thing that evidently passes for journalism at NBC.

Why Mr. Holder Must Go

Attorney General Eric Holder is scheduled to meet today with the House Oversight Committee to try to bamboozle them enough to avert a vote on a contempt of Congress citation tomorrow. How successful he'll be we should know by this evening, but I'm not optimistic that he'll be any more forthcoming today than he has been over the last 18 months of hearings on the ill-conceived Fast and Furious operation.

In any case, Clarice Feldman at American Thinker walks us through all the reasons for thinking that Eric Holder is either the the most incompetent or the most corrupt Attorney General in American history. Whichever of those two disjuncts you find most agreeable there's not much doubt that it's time Mr. Holder decided to "spend more time with his family" and the sooner the better.

Feldman's bill of particulars against Mr. Holder includes an examination of his shameless cover-up of the Fast and Furious shipwreck, the racial bias of the department he runs, and sundry other malfeasances and pecadilloes. Feldman writes:

Whether he resigns or is removed or spends the rest of this year responding to Congressional inquiries, Attorney General Holder has treated the Department of Justice as a partisan arm of the Obama Administration. Now and for the foreseeable future he is just another albatross around Obama's neck.

You can read the unpleasant details of Mr. Holder's tenure at the link.

Dawkins Shows His Sensitive Side

At Richard Dawkins' website there's a story about how a video on evolution shown to a middle school class caused a young girl to begin to cry. The video, she said, went against everything she believed. There was very little sympathy among Dawkins' epigones at the site for this distressed eighth grader, least of all from Dawkins himself who weighed in with this boast:

I too caused a girl to cry, for the same reason, when I made a cameo appearance in a classroom at a small university in America earlier this year. I felt remorseful at the time, but afterwards I thought about it and remorse turned to anger. Anger at the girl's stupid parents. Anger at the girl herself for being so weedy. What the hell did she think a university was for, if not to encourage her to think in new and unfamiliar ways, going beyond what she was exposed to when living with her ridiculous family? I didn't in any way insult the girl herself or say unpleasant things about her or her family. I didn't even tell her to grow up, although I should have. All I did was lay out the facts of evolution and the evidence for it, in unemotional, scientific terms. And that was enough to make the little fool cry.

The story above is about a school, not a university but, even so, what a pathetic little idiot. All remorse having left me, I now think the undergraduate I encountered thoroughly deserved her self-imposed distress, and it sounds to me as though the teacher in the present case was bending over backwards, further than she should, to be nice and accommodating.

I suppose calling a young girl whose worldview he was shattering a "fool" and a "pathetic little idiot" made Dawkins feel pretty macho. I wonder how macho he felt as he shrank from debating philosopher William Lane Craig last October on the existence of God. People like Dawkins feel tough making young coeds cry but cringe from facing someone who's not intimidated by his overblown reputation. It's the mark of a coward that he feels smug about devastating helpless victims but flees in fear from those he knows will make him look bad. It's the sort of person for whom the word "punk" is perhaps not too strong a descriptor.

Thanks to Evolution News and Views for the link.