BUT FIRST A LITTLE NEWS
I have been asked to run the Freedom Center's blog
"The Point" at
Front Page Magazine. You can see the latest stories from "The Point" to the right of you. Hopefully you'll click on some of them for a closer look.
"The Point" will be something like the roundups, but it will have more of a point to it and there will be plenty of overlaps. And Be'ezrat Hashem it will be a way of getting some of the materials you see here out to a larger audience. If you have any suggestions for the future of the Roundup or the Point, the comments are open.
For by Thee I run upon a troop; and by my God do I scale a wall. (
Psalms 18:30)
THE MACHINE
The most impressive thing about RNC 2012 was the smoothness of the entire thing. If the 2008 RNC stumbled, but ran on enthusiasm, the 2012 edition was a polished frictionless machine, except for one awkward moment with Eastwood, and even that seemed geared to give the critics something petty to pick apart that would not reflect badly on Mitt Romney and the Republican Party.
Mitt Romney is a machine politician, but not a politician of the political machine. He appears to excel at building a smoothly running machine around him. It's not high praise and yet it's not counter to the impression that he gives. It reflects his message that he takes charge and builds things that work.
Behind all the speeches and showpieces, RNC 2012 is a reflection of Romney's whole campaign, it is the precisely calculated work of people who know what they are doing, who don't always get it right, but have ability, ambition and even some guts.
Romney's people went into this understanding that Obama and his allies would run on destroying him as a man, on making him into an ugly caricature, a running joke, a bad human being. And they worked to make that pitch as hard as possible to sell. They knew that the Democrats would focus on the white female vote, so they beat them to it. It's not a new game, Reagan played it too, but it's gone up to a new level.
Some wanted this event to hit Obama much harder. But it hit him hard enough. What it really did was make Romney much harder to hit. Romney's people understand that common sense is on their side and that their mission is to de-fang the negative attacks from the media that will make people feel bad or guilty about following their common sense. And they did a pretty good job of that tonight.
And the guts kicked in when they picked their battles. It would have made sense for Romney to dodge Bain and for Ryan to avoid Medicare, instead they turned around, picked up both issues and ran on them, and rammed them back into Obama's teeth. It's gutsy, but there's also a common sense element to it. If you're going to get attacked remorselessly on an issue, then you might as well own the issue and use it to send a message to your opponent that the attacks will hurt him as much as you.
That's what RNC 2012 did.
Romney ran in the primaries as the most electable candidate, not by virtue of any special ability, but on determination and competence. RNC 2012 reflected that. It's the work of people who are determined to win and who play hard. That may not be enough, but it's a harder run for his money than Obama got last time around.
LEGITIMATE RAPE
Brought to you by Michael Moore, George Galloway, Naomi Wolf and the President of Ecuador.
Michael Moore, discussing the case where Assange raped a sleeping woman, told the BBC that the assault was only a “so-called crime” and suggested that it “wouldn’t actually be a crime if it was committed in Britain.” Moore has shown his faith in Assange’s legitimate rape by donating $20,000 to Assange’s defense fund.
Keith Olbermann went even further than Moore, retweeting a link from Bianca Jagger to an article written by a neo-Nazi Holocaust denier that named Assange’s victims and accused them of working for the CIA. UK Left-wing activist Craig Murray named one of the victims, prefacing his statement by saying, “Let us look at the conduct of these women.”
George Galloway, who became a hero to the American left for his defense of Saddam Hussein, said that even if the two women were telling the truth, the only thing that Assange was really guilty of was “bad sexual etiquette.” Galloway is currently a part-time Muslim and it is hard to say whether his notion that rape is just “bad sexual etiquette” is rooted in him being a bad human being or in the pages of the Koran.
from my
Front Page column,
"The Left's Version of Legitimate Rape"
A RATINGS ADVISORY
Ignore the news stories unfavorably comparing the current RNC ratings to previous conventions. It's one of those true but false stories. You might as well compare the number of listeners to a radio address from today and 1956. If you watched any part of the convention online,
you already know why those numbers don't hold up.
Of the most-watched television events, almost all of them took place before the dominance of the internet. No Super Bowl that took place since the mid '90′s has scored anywhere near the same ratings.
Compare Super Bowl XLII in 2008 at 48.66 million with Super Bowl XlVI with 50.15 million in 1983. You can see the same difference with television finales. The newer a broadcast is, the lower its ratings are by comparison. This doesn’t mean that it’s unpopular, it just means that the way we watch things has changed.
But the media will dishonestly try to squeeze every ounce of negativity out of every story.
HURRICANE CHICAGO
Ten people were wounded in shootings across Chicago last night. Twenty-eight more have been wounded. Over the weekend, 9 people were killed in Chicago and 37 were wounded.
More Americans were shot this weekend in Chicago than in Afghanistan. That makes Obama’s hometown an official war zone. Hurricane Isaac has not killed any Americans. The same can’t be said for Hurricane Chicago
...
from Celebrating While Black People Are Dying
