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Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Fact Checking’

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Weekly Standard - By Mark Hemingway - Dec. 11 (Opinion) - If you’ve ever found yourself engaged in a futile, one-sided argument with a politician on your TV screen, you’re hardly alone in your frustration. However, if you’re inclined to jot down such intemperate outbursts, and have the chutzpah to charge people for your services—you might have what it takes to join the ranks of one of journalism’s most popular and elite new breeds. They call themselves “fact checkers,” and with the name comes a veneer of objectivity doubling as a license to go after any remark by a public figure they find disagreeable for any reason. Just look at the Associated Press to understand how the scheme works. The venerable wire service’s recent “fact check” of statements made at the November 12 GOP presidential candidates’ foreign policy debate was a doozy. Throwing no less than seven reporters at the effort, the piece came up with some unusual examples of what it means to correct verifiable truths.

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Party Line

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 11:13:52 -0700

Weekly Standard - By Charlotte Allen - Aug. 12 (Review) - Those liberal leanings distort the news in subtle but telling ways. Groseclose dissects a 2006 story in the Los Angeles Times that linked a record low number of black freshmen at UCLA to the passage 10 years earlier of Proposition 209, a ballot initiative that forbids public institutions from considering race in admissions and hiring. The reporter, Rebecca Trounson, had quoted six sources, not for factual information but for their opinions. Five of those sources expressed conventional left-of-center views, complaining, for example, that the campus was insufficiently “diverse” and accusing UCLA of practicing racism. Only one source, former University of California regent Ward Connerly, architect of Proposition 209, suggested that fewer black high school graduates might be academically competitive, or that some blacks might have chosen to attend historically black colleges instead of UCLA. Not only did Trounson not examine the tortuous routes that UCLA’s admissions committee (on which Groseclose served at the time) followed to get around Proposition 209 so as to maximize black enrollment, but she failed to report a record number of black transfer students to UCLA that fall so that the black student population actually increased slightly. She also failed to notice what might have been the real story: the huge increases in Asian enrollments at UCLA, to the point that white people, once the overwhelming majority, now constituted only about a third of the overall student population.

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Obama vs. Obama

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Weekly Standard - By Stephen F. Hayes - Jul. 11 (Opinion) - In a 75-minute meeting Sunday night, President Obama once again demanded that more than $1 trillion in tax increases be part of any deficit reduction package attached to a vote on the debt ceiling. In the session, Obama rejected a Republican proposal to seek $2.5 trillion in spending cuts and reforms, and insisted on higher taxes on businesses and wealthy individuals.

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General Reveals that Obama Ignored Military's Advice on Afghanistan

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Weekly Standard - By Stephen Hayes - Jun. 29 (News) - Lieutenant General John Allen told the Senate Armed Services Committee today that the Afghanistan decision President Obama announced last week was not among the range of options the military provided to the commander in chief. Allen’s testimony directly contradicts claims from senior Obama administration officials from a background briefing before the president’s announcement.

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Semper Fly

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Weekly Standard - By Matt Labash - Jun. 20 (News Report) - This is the curse of PTSD, he says. You can fix an amputee by giving him a prosthetic leg. It’s trying and tough. He has to learn to walk again. But “how do you get 33 Marine deaths out of your mind, the way they died, and your wounds, and combat, and seeing things you don’t see every day? We try to do our best to hide that. With the loss of a limb, you don’t. You get help. But what about the guy who is hanging by a thread all day long? He feels ashamed to bring it up. People are going to say, that’s a wound? Like, is that really a wound? . . . I live combat almost every day, because the same instincts that protected me are still more alive than ever. I can be in a grocery store and feel like I’m walking down the street in Fallujah. . . . You fight yourself, with mind distortions, paranoia, hypervigilance, depression, guilt. It’s so complex. And it’s your mind, so you can’t ever escape it. I can’t ever put a prosthetic on that.”

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The Coming Euro Crack-Up

Mon, 09 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Weekly Standard - By Irwin M. Stelzer - May. 09 (News Analysis) - The “European project” won’t go quietly into the night. But it just might go noisily into the ashcan of history if the Germans decide they cannot convert the Greeks into hard-working, tax-paying euro-citizens worthy of continuing handouts. Or, at minimum, we might end up with a euro-nord and euro-sud, as Martin Feldstein once suggested.

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If Our 'Food Stamp Recovery' Persists, Obama Will Lose Big

Fri, 06 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Weekly Standard - By Jay Cost - May. 06 (Opinion) - That is a personal reminder of a very serious, yet rarely discussed economic, social, and indeed political problem: the fact that better than one out of seven Americans today requires government help to put food on the table.

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You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Weekly Standard - By William Kristol - Mar. 29 (Opinion) - The president was unapologetic, freedom-agenda-embracing, and didn’t shrink from defending the use of force or from appealing to American values and interests. Furthermore, the president seems to understand we have to win in Libya. I think we will.

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Another Triumph for the Greens

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 10:40:34 -0800

Weekly Standard - By Jonathan V. Last - Jan. 26 (Opinion) - To go with toilets that don’t flush and light bulbs that don’t light, we now have dishwashers that don’t wash.

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Liu’s Nobel

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 18:28:18 -0800

Weekly Standard - By Ellen Bork - Dec. 14 (Editorial) - Nor is it surprising that no top U.N. official attended the event. Outrageous, yes. But not surprising. When Liu won the peace prize, a spokesman for U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed the secretary general’s hope that “any differences on this decision will not detract from advancement of the human rights agenda globally or the high prestige and inspirational power of the award.” Ban pointedly did not call for Liu’s release. Nor did Navi Pillay, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, attend the award ceremony. Pillay claimed that she was otherwise engaged with business in Geneva on December 10, international human rights day. The fact that the most significant gathering in support of human rights on December 10 was in Oslo, not Geneva, should be taken to heart.

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Euro Trashed

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 18:06:31 -0800

Weekly Standard - By Christopher Caldwell - Dec. 14 (News Analysis) - The euro deserves a lot of the blame. By tethering dynamic Ireland to interest rates more suitable to the sluggish economies of Central Europe, it sparked a housing boom more excessive than even that of the United States. Today, Ireland’s marriage to the euro deprives it of the main instrument—devaluation—that countries have traditionally used to export their way out of such financial messes. The economists who said that you cannot unite countries in a single currency unless you unite them under a single central government have been proved right.

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GOP's 2012 Field Isn't Where the Action Is

Sat, 27 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Weekly Standard - By Fred Barnes - Nov. 27 (News Analysis) - .Why do the potential Republican presidential candidates (with one exception) seem so old, dull, and uninteresting? There are a few simple answers. Most of the candidates are a generation older than most of the new Republican luminaries, compared with whom they are indeed duller and less interesting. At the moment they're not where the political action is either. They're not quite irrelevant, but close. Ask yourself these questions: Would it be more illuminating to talk to Mitt Romney, age 63, or Representative Paul Ryan, 40, about cutting spending and reforming entitlements? Would it be more interesting to chat with Haley Barbour, 63, or Bobby Jindal, 39, about maximizing the power of states? Would it be more stimulating to meet with Marco Rubio, 39, than with any of the presidential candidates?

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Some Implications

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 09:36:41 -0700

Weekly Standard - By William Kristol - Nov. 03 (Opinion) - Republicans have taken over the House, and by the largest margin they've had in over 60 years. With Democrats keeping control of the Senate, probably with a 52- or 53-seat majority, this means that the center of GOP gravity in Washington resides in the House.

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Morning Jay: Special “Ultimate Predictions” Edition!

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Weekly Standard - By Jay Cost - Nov. 02 (Opinion) - I have to say that I am of two minds about this midterm election. On the one hand, it is great to see the Republican party in resurgence. And not just in terms of raw politics: The Tea Party movement has given the GOP a sense of meaning and purpose in the domestic political debate that it has not really had since 1996 when Bill Clinton outfoxed the Republicans in the budget battle.

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Man Streaks in Front of Obama for $1 Million

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 08:43:41 -0700

Weekly Standard - By Daniel Halper - Oct. 11 (News) - If billionaire Alki David is an honest man, the man who streaked in front of Barack Obama at the president’s rally today in Philadelphia will be paid $1 million for his stunt. The man who performed today’s stunt, which captured the attention of the Drudge Report and an Associated Press photographer, is 24-year-old Juan James Rodriguez, THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned.

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Scoundrel Time

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Weekly Standard - By John Podhoretz - Jun. 10 (Review) - Remember when wacky codgers in movies used to sit in rocking chairs on porches dispensing cranky wisdom? Or how, on television, Uncle Joe would be “a-movin’ kinda slow at the junction—Petticoat Junction”? Uncle Joe was played by an actor named Edgar Buchanan, and when the show debuted in 1963, Edgar Buchanan was all of 60 years old. Sixty happens to be the age of the character played by Michael Douglas in the compelling new movie Solitary Man.

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Ride Along with Mitch

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Weekly Standard - By Andrew Ferguson - Jun. 10 (Special Report) - He treats waste in government as a moral offense. “Government isn’t a business, and it shouldn’t be run as a business,” he said. “But it can be more like business. It has a lot to learn from businessmen.” Government operates without the market pressures that produce efficiency and increase quality. The challenge for government leaders is to produce those pressures to economize internally, through an act of will. “Never take a dollar from a free citizen through the coercion of taxation without a very legitimate purpose,” he said in an interview last year. “We have a solemn duty to spend that dollar as carefully as possible, because when we took it we diminished that person’s freedom.” When you put it like that, overspending by government seems un-American. When Daniels took office, in 2004, the state faced a $200 million deficit and hadn’t balanced its budget in seven years. Four years later, all outstanding debts had been paid off; after four balanced budgets, the state was running a surplus of $1.3 billion, which has cushioned the blows from a steady decline in revenues caused by the recession. “That’s what saved us when the recession hit,” one official said. “If we didn’t have the cash reserves and the debts paid off, we would have been toast.” The state today is spending roughly the same amount that it was when Daniels took office, largely because he resisted the budget increases other states were indulging in the past decade.

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Chiefs of Navy, Army, Air Force, and Marines Oppose DADT Repeal

Wed, 26 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Weekly Standard - By John McCormack - May. 26 (News) - The heads of the Army, Marines, Air Force, and Navy oppose the current amendment to repeal "don't ask, don't tell." Senator John McCain's office just released letters from the chiefs of the armed services, as well as a statement from the senator urging Congress to let the military complete its study before taking legislative action.

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American Oligarchy

Tue, 04 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Weekly Standard - By Christopher Caldwell - May. 04 (Opinion) - Every time the president accuses Republicans of trying to “block progress” or of defying “common sense,” as he did that night, he is executing a dangerous tightrope walk. His party’s electoral fortunes depend on his making forceful calls for reform of our banking laws. His party’s fundraising fortunes depend on his ensuring that no serious reform—of the kind that endangers the big banks’ size and power—ever happens.

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In Denial

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:20:31 -0700

Weekly Standard - Mar. 18 -

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The Myth of the Anti-Muslim Backlash

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Weekly Standard - By Gary Bauer - Dec. 23 (Opinion) - The misplaced fear of igniting an anti-Muslim backlash is a consequence of the pervasive and stifling political correctness that surrounds Islam in the West. It prevents many of our journalistic and political elites from naming our enemy and compels them to accommodate radical Islam most readily in the very places it can cause the most damage--in our prisons, public schools, and military.

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Escalation: White House Tries to Exclude Fox From Press Pool Interview

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:23:44 -0700

Weekly Standard - Oct. 23 -

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Did they work?

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Weekly Standard - By Stephen F. Hayes - Aug. 25 (Opinion) - That question has been among the most hotly disputed issues at the center of the continuing controversy over the CIA’s interrogation of suspected terrorists. The report released Monday from the former CIA Inspector General John Helgerson should end the debate.

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Cheney Statement on CIA Documents/Investigation

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Weekly Standard - Aug. 25 (Not sure) - The documents released Monday clearly demonstrate that the individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda. This intelligence saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks. These

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Déjà Vu All Over Again in Afghanistan?

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Weekly Standard - By Frederick W. Kagan, Kimberly Kagan - Aug. 18 (Opinion) - Why is the Pentagon spokesman talking down an assessment by that commander that is underway and incomplete but clearly marks a critical inflection point in the war? Why does the Pentagon wish to "lower expectations just a bit about what it is that's coming" out of General McChrystal's assessment?

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