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Under the Hammer
September 27, 2012
Did the fact that Mitt Romney was secretly taped saying something that we all know to be true about how people are going to vote change your mind about whether or not to vote for him?
More importantly, were you planning on voting for Romney and now you are definitely going to vote for President Barack Hussein Obama based on one statement?
The vast majority of the voters in this country would answer no to both of those questions and polls back up that assessment. But you would never know that by watching the news or reading what is being written in the mainstream media.
The mainstream media hate Romney because it looks like he has a good chance of beating their man, President Obama. The media is overwhelming liberal, and I don't mean moderate. They are liberal and see everything through liberal lenses.
Former Public Editor for The New York Times Arthur Brisbane agrees, even though he waited until his final column to agree. It would appear he didn't want to get fired before his term was up, and The Times claims to be unbiased. In fact, the executive editor took issue with Brisbane's column.
Brisbane wrote, "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."
On Tuesday, Sept. 25, long after everyone knew that no mob attacked the consulate in Benghazi – because the White House is still talking about it – The New York Times (a formerly respectable newspaper) used "mob violence" and "anti American protests" to describe the events on Sept. 11 in Libya and Cairo.
Obama knew that it was not "mob violence" in Benghazi, and it was not "an anti-American protest" – unless you consider a terrorist attack an anti-American protest. So are we now to speak of the events of Sept. 11, 2001 as an "anti-American protest." When soldiers are killed in Afghanistan by an IED is that an "anti-American protest?"
Obama should not have been allowed by the media to get away with those remarks on Sept. 12, the day after the consulate in Benghazi was attacked by well-organized terrorists. But he certainly should not be allowed to continue that boldfaced lie. And if The New York Times was not full of toadies that operate as an arm of the Obama reelection campaign, rather than as a newspaper, it would not repeat such lies as if they were true.
It is sad for those of us in journalism to see a once great newspaper fall so low that you can no longer trust the articles to be honest. But the current New York Times is far too partisan to be concerned with truth.
It is difficult to exaggerate just how partisan the mainstream media are right now. They see the election slipping away from Obama and they still believe in "Hope" and "Change." It appears that the majority of the country has had enough of Hope and Change and Forward, but the mainstream media is going to be doing its utmost to get Obama reelected.
A misstatement by Romney results in a week or more of articles, but Obama and, even more so, Vice President Joe Biden can say any stupid thing they want and it may or may be mentioned by the press. But that is all it rates is a mention.
Obama has said that Austrians speak Austrian. There are 57 states. Medics in the navy are corpse men. And Hawaii, where he grew up and attended an exclusive private school, is in Asia. He gets a pass on all of those. Oddly calling Navy and Marine medics corpse men really seems to be the worst. He is their commander-in-chief.
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Romney supporters seem discouraged lately, while Romney doesn't seem to be the least bit discouraged. He seems buoyant and is working hard on his transition team, which seems like an odd thing for a man so far down in the polls to be doing five weeks before the election.
The difference in the candidate and his supporters may be attributable to the polling data that each is receiving. The presidential campaigns traditionally have excellent pollsters. It is one reason they at times seem to be flying off to campaign in some state where the national polls say they don't have a chance. One reason the campaign polls are far more accurate is modeling. If the sample used doesn't reflect the same percentages of Democrats, Republicans and Independents that will actually vote, it can be weighted to send any message the pollsters want.
The campaign pollsters know what those percentages will be and model their polls to meet the correct criteria. Some of the national polls have an entirely different agenda, which is revealed when you look at the data behind the polling.
According to people who claim to know such things, the most well-known polls are making a couple of major mistakes. The New York Times/CBS Poll oversampled Democrats by 10.7 percent and under sampled Independents by 11.2 percent according to unskewedpolls.com, a website that takes apart the polls and analyzes them based on projected modeling figures.
The obvious reason for The New York Times/CBS poll to be so far off in the percentage of Democrats and Independents is that is what was needed to put Obama ahead. The theory is that people want to vote for a winner. The polls, like the mainstream media, are heavily weighted in favor of the Democrats.
The percentages of Democrats and Republicans who will vote is a projection, but the pollsters know pretty accurately what they will be.
According to unskewedpolls.com, when you take the bias out of the polls and use models that reflect what the most likely voter turnout will be, then polls like The New York Times/CBS Poll that show Obama leading 49 percent to 46 percent actually show Romney leading 54 percent to 44 percent.
Along those same lines, Dick Morris, in a recent column, made a similar point from a different angle. Morris said that undecided voters at this point in the campaign have decided that they are not going to vote for the incumbent but haven't committed to voting for the challenger. He said that on Election Day the undecideds will vote overwhelmingly for Romney, so his recommendation was that you simply take the undecideds and add that percentage to Romney's percentage.
Morris also writes about the modeling like unskewedpolls.com. Morris notes that some polls that are not way out of whack are using the 2008 election as a model. In 2008 the Democrats had remarkable turnout and that is not expected to be repeated in 2012. Morris says that one of the reasons Rasmussen shows the race much closer than some of the other polls is that Rasmussen is using a model based on 2004 and 2008, which they say is much closer to the turnout that is expected.
A completely unscientific but relevant observation points to the same conclusion. A college professor told me that four years ago it seemed like every student on campus was wearing an Obama T-shirt, and this year they are hard to find.
Students voted in vast numbers for Obama four years ago and they just aren't supporting him the way they were. A lot of college students hope to get jobs when they graduate and they don't see the Obama economy as providing those jobs.
Obama is no longer the outsider that college students can identify with. He is "the man."
It really is too bad that the mainstream media are so partisan. Obama said that the most important lesson he has learned in his first term is "you can't change Washington from the inside." Obama is the president of the United States. He lives in the White House. He not only gets to hang out in the Oval Office but gets to bring his dog, Bo.
Obama is the ultimate insider. You can't get any more inside than the president. If what he has found is he can't fix Washington while being president, like he said, he shouldn't even vote for himself. So if you think that Washington needs to be fixed then you certainly should not vote for Obama because he knows he can't do it.
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The mainstream media got so hyped up because Romney made a statement about the apologetic statement the embassy in Cairo released both before and after the mob overran the embassy, that it ignored the statements that Obama made about the attack on the Benghazi compound which are less than true. Obama used the term "mob" when referring to the attackers and, as he knew and we now know, it was not a mob but an organized terrorist attack.
Obama also said that he found out about the attack on Tuesday "night." The attack began at about 4 p.m. Tuesday, Washington time. If Obama didn't find out that a US State Department compound had been attacked and an ambassador was killed or missing for four or five hours he should fire the upper echelon of the State Department, starting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. However, it is highly improbable that in this world of instant communication the first president to have his own BlackBerry would not know about an attack on the US within minutes.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a different era didn't have to wait four hours to be told about Pearl Harbor being attacked. President George Walker Bush was interrupted reading to students when the US was attacked on Sept. 11, 2011.
If the White House and the State Department were not expecting some attacks on the anniversary of 9/11 then they are not doing their jobs. But then Obama's chief advisor is Valerie Jarrett, who really doesn't have any experience with the State Department, foreign affairs or the federal government. She does, however, have a lot of experience with government corruption and shady real estate deals.
Romney was correct in his statement and Obama incorrect in his, but all the media can talk about is Romney's statement.
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One more question about the attacks.
A reporter for CNN was asking a top aide to Secretary of State Clinton – Philippe Reines – by email why random Libyans were wandering around the US consulate in Benghazi and why the State Department had not secured US property. And the response he got was to "F--- off."
What is incredible is The Washington Post defended Reines for being loyal to Clinton. Imagine if an aide to Rep. Paul Ryan responded to a reporter with an email like that. It would be the top story, and no one would be defending the aide.
The CNN reporter also used some foul language but nothing to that degree, and his questions were legitimate. He kept asking a very good question, one that has not been answered. Why was the site of the American compound in Benghazi not secured after the attack? Why was a CNN reporter allowed to wander around the site and find the diary of slain Ambassador Chris Stevens?
But for a highly placed official in the secretary of state's office to reply to a reporter with an answer like that should be news, and he should be fired because clearly he can't handle the pressure of dealing with the press. Reines is reportedly a Clinton groupie, so maybe she could hire him to work at her house, clean her windows and make her bed because it doesn't appear he is cut out for dealing with the press.