October 2, 2012

BREITBART
Caddell: Mainstream Media 'Enemy' of American People
by Tony Lee
October 1, 2012

Pat Caddell, the former adviser to President Jimmy Carter, called the mainstream media  an “enemy of the American people” at an Accuracy in Media conference on September 21st. A video of Caddell’s remarks were posted this weekend and has since gone viral.

"The press’s job is to stand in the ramparts and protect the liberty and freedom of all of us from a government and from organized governmental power," Caddell proclaimed.
The critical passage of the speech reads:

When they desert those ramparts and decide that they will now become active participants, that their job is not simply to tell you who you may vote for, and who you may not, but, worse—and this is the danger of the last two weeks—what truth that you may know, as an American, and what truth you are not allowed to know, they have, then, made themselves a fundamental threat to the democracy, and, in my opinion, made themselves the enemy of the American people.

Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh praised Caddell’s elocution on Monday.
“Caddell’s right!,” he concluded. “You can't bring yourselves to report the truth about this until the story is over, when it no longer matters.  But for the five or six days that matter right after the story, you carry the regime's water.”

Caddell said Libya should have “should have been the equivalent, for Barack Obama, of George Bush’s ‘flying over Katrina’ moment. But nothing was said at all, and nothing will be said.”

He expounded further:

If a President of either party—I don’t care whether it was Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton or George Bush or Ronald Reagan or George H. W. Bush—had a terrorist incident, and got on an airplane after saying something, and flown off to a fundraiser in Las Vegas, they would have been crucified! 

Caddell said the mainstream media “crossed some lines” in their coverage of Libya, and it was a “frightening” thing to him.”

Caddell also accused the mainstream media of using polls they know are inaccurate as weapons against Republicans. He referenced polls whose samples predict Democrats will have a greater turnout in 2012 than in 2008 even as journalists write story after story about how nearly every part of the Obama coalition is less enthusiastic about him than they were in 2008.

“When I have polls that have the preference of Democrats over Republicans higher than it was in 2008, which was a peak Democratic year, I know I am dealing with a poll that shouldn’t be reported,” Caddell said. “And yet they are being done, and they are being done with that knowledge.”

In an optimistic turn, Caddell declared the rise of new media made it easier to fight back against the mainstream media, and the old argument of “you don’t get in a pissing match with someone who buys ink by the barrel” doesn’t apply in the new media era.

“There are too many outlets, too many ways to do it, and the country doesn’t have the confidence in the press that they once had,” Caddell said, referencing a recent Gallup poll that found 60% of Americans distrust the mainstream media.

Caddell emphasized that mainstream journalists have thin skins, and they “wilt” when challenged. That is why, he explained, “they need to be called out” and “their organizations need to be called out.”

“The fact is, if I were out there, if I were doing one of these campaigns, I wouldn’t let one of these guys by with anything,” Caddell said. “They have now made the decision they will control the political process.

"They are serving—with the hundreds of millions of dollars that the networks and these newspapers are, in effect, contributing—in-kind contributions to candidates in the Democratic Party. That’s the legal issue that I would have been exploring. I mean, I would begin to put the heat on.”

However, said, members of the Republican establishment do not say anything because “too many reporters, too many political people in the Republican party in this town want to maintain their relationships with the press.”

“The corruption in this town is so great. Everybody in Washington seems to almost be on the take—with the exception of everybody in this room, and the assistants here. Everybody’s on the take here, and everybody’s cutting up their stock,” Caddell lamented. “That’s why, what used to be one of the best and most important things for the press, which was the investigative journalism of corruption and money, the stealing of the taxpayers, the looting of the Treasury, isn’t an issue, and why no one speaks of it in this town.”

“I think we’re at the most dangerous time in our political history in terms of the balance of power in the role that the media plays in whether or not we maintain a free democracy or not,” Caddell said.

Read more: http://goo.gl/CSkVG

HOT AIR

CNN Hits Hard on Libya: The only conclusion is that the White House tried to cover something up

by Allapundit

October 1, 2012

You already knew that the White House had reason to believe that Benghazi was a bona fide terror attack within 24 hours of it happening, no matter what Susan Rice said four days later, but I want you to watch this for two reasons. One: After the post on media bias, let’s give credit where it’s due. CNN has followed this story, and on primetime shows like this one and Anderson Cooper’s too. Two: Per Eli Lake’s piece in Newsweek today, someone has started leaking preliminary intel assessments made by the CIA that pointed to a spontaneous attack. (I wrote about that here.) I think you’re going to hear more about that from the White House in the next days and weeks, e.g., “We were only telling you what the CIA told us.” Read Lake’s piece to see why that won’t wash, then watch this clip as CNN’s own foreign affairs correspondent reveals that her intel sources were pointing to a full-fledged attack on the consulate within the first 24 hours. Essentially, to believe that the White House had clean hands in this, you need to believe that the CIA is so inept that the media’s contacts in the intelligence community are more astute than the people advising the president. Nothing would surprise me at this point, but given O’s strong electoral incentives to downplay what happened, the cover-up theory seems more likely.

Exit question: Who made the decision to cherry-pick the intel in order to push the “spontaneous protest” theory? That’s the next blank in this story to be filled in.

Read more: http://goo.gl/WfNYt

TOWNHALL
Freedom or Ruin
by John Ransom
October 2, 2012

The choice that we face today is between freedoms on the one hand, and ruin on the other.

There has never been a generation in our history that has been given more than the generation which was born between 1945 and 1960.

They were given so much by their hard and hardy parents, who by fighting through a real economic depression and a great world war, helped bolster freedom for the free and bequeathed freedom to millions of others who lived in the twilight of tyranny.  

I call these sons and daughters of what we know as the Greatest Generation, the Entitlement Generation, these people born between 1945 and 1960.

Many of them literally do not know where they are going or even why, they just know that whatever they have, they deserve it. Whether they built it or not.

And unfortunately they are the ruling class today. They are squandering our birthright.

In the 1960s they told us all we had to do was tune in, turn on and drop out, do drugs and love each other and in foisting this false religion on others they decimated an entire generation.

In the 1980s they discovered Wall Street and gave us junk bonds, worthless paper backed by no credit whatsoever.  It was a kind of a dress rehearsal for what they did to the housing market in the last twenty years.

In the 1990s they gave us “feelings” with Jerry Springer, and Oprah and a president whose only restraint against the expression of his feeling was the clasp of the zipper on his pants. And several, great, big credit-enabled asset bubbles.  

This is the Entitlement Generation that now governs us.

And the choice they have given us is between freedom on the one hand and ruin on the other.

Read more: http://goo.gl/SvLKh