The war they can't get right

I made the mistake of watching James David Robenalt's presentation on his new book The Harding Affair -- Love and Espionage During the Great War, carried on C-SPAN's Book TV, and it was problematic enough to prompt this post.

Now, for my sins, I am an obsessive student of the First World War. The gateway drug of the Second World War having become too mild for me, I moved onto the harder stuff. Garand M-1s wouldn't do it for me anymore, so I graduated to water-cooled Vickers-Maxim heavy machine guns. And it is the bane of anyone who knows anything at all about the First World War that it is very probably the war most freely pronounced-upon by people who are so far out of their depth on the subject, they wouldn't know a pikelhaube from a piccolo if they sat on one.

Unless the work is by the likes of Hew Strachan or Paul Johnson, or John Keegan or Victor Davis Hanson, it's a good policy to avoid 21st Century perspectives on the First World War. They're too often worse than useless. Your typical History Channel "In the Classrom" early-morning documentary which bears on the First World War will make some blithe assertion like that the generals thought trench warfare was a fine idea, and would make a great plan for winning the war. That's the kind of I-think-it-therefore-it-must-be-so-and-there's-no-need-of-checking-it that gets written up, passed through a layer or two of editors, and then passed off as a TV documentary on the First World War.

(That example is legitimate, by the way, though to save my life I couldn't think of the title of the thing. And in case you're wondering, the trenches were nowhere in the plans for the First World War; trench warfare was what happened when the lines stopped moving, and there was nowhere to hide from anti-personnel artillery shelling, long-range, high-powered rifle fire, and sweeping machine gun fire. The trenches weren't some general's idea for winning the war, they were a desperate resort to keep men alive. They weren't planned at all, they just happened when men were faced with the choice of digging a hole or not seeing the next sunrise.)

So I should have known better than to see what this James David Robenalt had to say on the subject. But I'm a sucker for C-SPAN's Book TV, so I watched a bit and promptly had my instincts confirmed by this novel piece of reasoning:

James David Robenalt: "When [then-President] Woodrow Wilson asked for
war, he says it's a war to make the world safe for democracy. And the
reason he says that is he believes democracies are inherently more stable
and less likely to go to war. [So far, so good.]

"[Then-Senator Warren G.] Harding disagrees. He thinks --
and how's this for a modern theme? -- he says, and you can find his
speech on the Senate floor, 'It's none of our business, to go tell somebody
else what government they should have. We should take care
of ourselves, and we really shouldn't be involved in regime change.'
[I take it that wasn't Harding's exact phraseology, which apparently
can be found somewhere on the Senate floor.]

"Now, who was right in that debate? History will tell
you. But I can tell you this: Russia became a democracy, for
about six months, and Wilson recognized them immediately, and he was
joyful. And six months later the Bolsheviks take over. [So
"Russia became a democracy", and the next thing you know, "the Bolsheviks take
over". And it's all the fault of that darn Wilson and his darn
democracy.] And you have Lenin and Stalin, and you know, what
happened in Russia.

"The Kaiser eventually abdicates. Germany becomes a democracy.
But they weren't ready for it. It was a weak democracy: the Weimar
Republic. Naziism comes about, Hitler comes about. [Another
straight line: "Germany becomes a democracy" then "Hitler comes about".]

"So it's a great debate about who was right in that debate about
regime-change. But it's a modern theme. I mean, it's the issue of
Iraq, revisited." [Just in case you hadn't worked out that he was talking about Iraq all along.]

So there you have it. The history of the 20th Century, according to James David Robenalt. Or, James David Robenalt's entry for most buffoonish argument ever made having to do with the First World War and its aftermath, being that it was democracy that gave us the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

According to this line of reasoning, Germany wasn't "ready for democracy" in 1919, though it demonstrably was ready for democracy in 1945, and if only we hadn't insisted on democracy for Germany 26 years "too soon", there'd have been no Hitler and no Second World War. Of course, several generations now, from the 1930s on, have blamed Hitler and the war on the less-than-total victory in the First World War, the ruinous, humiliating, and impossible reparations in the Treaty of Versailles, and the war costs and economic collapse. But James David Robenalt has a different idea: it was the democracy that did it.

And, according to this line, those Communists who'd been attempting revolution in Russia for decades before 1917 and finally had the complete societal collapse they needed to seize power, only managed it because Russia had "become a democracy" for "about six months" in 1917. I have to say, this Russia point looks to me like it goes beyond mere specious argument, to inventing an alternate history which may more conveniently be shoehorned into a potshot against the democracy project of the Iraq War. At what point in the First World War, and in what conceivable sense, did Russia "become a democracy"? That could only refer to what is called the Russian "Provisional Government" of 1917, but the the whole business was chaos from start to finish, the Provisional Government never did get around to holding the national elections which were its principal raison d'etre, and when finally those elections did come to pass, after the October Revolution, Lenin's Bolsheviks wound up the runners-up and without the electoral mandate or legislative votes for their Soviet totalitarianism, so Lenin dissolved the Constituent Assembly after all of one day, and the rest is history. 

And even if Russia had "become a democracy", the argument here goes that, if only the czar had stayed on and showed 'em who's the master, and Wilson hadn't got his "democracy", those Bolshies would never have gotten their little experiment off the ground. Just think, the Robenalt argument goes: no Soviet Union, no Stalin, no Cold War, if only Russia hadn't "become a democracy" for "about six months" in 1917.

Again, since just about the time of the Russian Revolution, it has been understood that the imposition of Communism in that country had everything to do with the mass national revulsion against the old system which had brought the nation to utter ruin, even unto starvation. The strain of the war brought things to breaking point, and the situation was seized on by the Communist faction called the Bolsheviks. And by "old system" I refer to the czarist regime of decades and centuries previous, not some half-imaginary six-month "democracy" in 1917.

I would dearly love to see Christopher Hitchens, who happens to be an authority also of the Bolshevik Revolution, take his rapier to that it-was-all-democracy's-fault line of historical argument.

Now I am no head-shrinker, but I don't think head-shrinking credentials are requisite in order to diagnose the condition of which that argument is a symptom. I'd reckon that it would never have occurred to James David Robenalt to argue that democracy caused the Soviet Empire and Third Reich, before the Iraq War. And I'd reckon that James David Robenalt altogether despises that war and the arguments for it -- particularly the argument that the democratizaion of Iraq sets the model for reform in the region which is our only hope for settling this business once and for all, and that democractization turns enemy to ally -- or if not an affirmative ally then at least a mostly-decent state not routinely invading some neighbor or gassing some unloved domestic minority or fostering hostile alliances or building up unconventional arsenals for the next big dust-up.

I'm just old enough, in fact, to remember a time when that kind or argument was much more likely to be found on the Left than on the Right. But then came 9/11, and the man whom history handed the decision of what was to be done about it happened to be George W. Bush. In what may be the sole deviation of President Bush from Candidate Bush, George W. Bush became arguably the greatest practicing believer in the democracy-makes-peace argument since 1919, and inarguably since 1945. I had my own Road-to-Damascus at about the same time, and became a zealous convert myself, at least for the duration of this war. And for a naive moment I assumed that the elite and the Left, if there's a distinction, would at the very least not oppose that democratization cause. But no. Because democratization necessarily meant war and occupation, and because it had become U.S. policy, and not only that but Bush Administration policy, the elite and the Left turned in one motion to positively demonizing democratization -- condemning it in such terms that anyone might have thought Bush wasn't trying to democratize Iraq but reinstitute slavery -- as if democratization were some grievous historic sin.

And after several years of that, the likes of James David Robenalt comes along and concocts the novel argument that Iraq-style democratization brought the Nazis in Germany and the Soviets in Russia, and all that followed. Funny that no-one thought to make that argument in the 90-odd years since the end of the First World War. And it's hardly as if the rise of Naziism and the rise of Bolshevism haven't been much speculated on in that time.

This book of James David Robenalt is supposed to be about a love affair involving Warren G. Harding, which ought to win some award for wringing 416 pages out of possibly the world's least-interesting historical love affair. But anti-Iraq-War-ism radicalizes, drives to extremes of argument, and infects even the driest historical romance. I won't pronounce on the rest of the book -- though I have to say I got a distinct whiff of German-sympathizing off this Robenalt -- because there's no way I'd look at 416 pages of this, much less pay to look at it.

Still more problems with the Canadian Press Washington bureau

The way Obama's Afghan policy is being reported, anyone might think this was September of 2008 rather than September '09, when Barack Obama was Candidate Obama rather than President Obama, and an observer and critic of U.S. war policy rather than the commander-in-chief who ordered it.

The Chronicle-Herald's top World News story for September 17 was from the Canadian Press Washington bureau and credulously headlined "Obama: U.S. needs clear strategy for Afghan mission."

Lee-Anne Goodman: "President Barack Obama said Thursday the U.S. has yet to decide on the best strategy for the ongoing conflict and won't send any more soldiers there until it does."

That is undoubtedly what Obama said in September. But he had said something else entirely just a month earlier, on August 17.

Obama, August 2009: "I announced a new, comprehensive strategy in March. ... This strategy acknowledges that military power alone will not win this war."

"Our new strategy has a clear mission and defined goals: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its extremist allies."

"In the months since, we have begun to put this comprehensive strategy into action."

So Obama announced a new Afghan War "strategy", ordered 21,000 new troops to Afghanistan in aid of that strategy, and things got worse than they've yet been. Obama then pretended the current failing strategy wasn't his and that he'd never order troops into battle without a proper plan, and hoped no-one would notice. And sure enough, no-one at the Canadian Press Washington bureau or The Chronicle-Herald did notice.

The Canadian Press Washington bureau repeated Obama's claims credulously, without so much as a hint that they were belied by Obama's own words of just weeks before, on that "new strategy" of his, with its "clear mission" and "defined goals", and which had been "put into action" "in the months since" March.

Obama, September 2009, quoted in the Canadian Press: "'We have lacked as clear of a strategy and a mission as is necessary in order to meet our overriding objective, which is to dismantle and disrupt and destroy al-Qaida,' Obama said."

"'There is no immediate decision pending on resources, because one of the things I'm absolutely clear about is you have to get the strategy right and then make determinations about resources,' he said.

'You don't make determinations about sending young men and women into battle without having absolute clarity about what the strategy is going to be.'"

And this was fully half a year after Obama had proclaimed, "Today, I am announcing a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. This marks the conclusion of a careful policy review that I ordered as soon as I took office."

Lee-Anne Goodman: "The original goal of the mission - to seek out and destroy the forces behind the 9-11 attacks eight years ago - is all but a distant memory, thanks in part to the absence of a clear course of action, Obama suggested."

If that's the case, then who, pray tell, may be responsible for this "absence of a clear course of action," considering again that Obama was only the month before championing his "clear mission" and "defined goals" which had been "put into action" "in the months since" March?

The Canadian Press Washington bureau worked in two references to Obama's popularity -- in Canada.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "a president who remains wildly popular in Canada" and "a president who enjoys unprecedented popularity in Canada."

No doubt. But then, Canadians don't live under Obama's administration and Congress, and don't get a vote on them. So two unquantified assertions of Obama's great popularity in Canada, and not one mention of his standing in the only country where that matters. (In case you're wondering, it's not good. The September Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found Obama falling to 41% job approval among independents.)

The people cannot afford a press whose object is to flatter Obama and taunt his opponents, oblivious to his actual policies and their actual consequences, happily obliging of his political tricks, and enabling him to say and do as he pleases without the fear of being called to account to keep him honest.

The press is now colluding with Obama in his shrugging off of responsibility for his very war policy, pretending with him that his policies aren't his if they aren't working, and allowing him a license and blamelessness.

When it comes to the current president of the United States and his Congressional supermajorities, The Chronicle-Herald and the Canadian Press aren't so much news outlets as a kind of support group for leftist elites -- an imaginary "world as it ought to be" according to leftist elites, where they play make-believe that the "good guys" can do no wrong and everything's OK.

Reality is at least beginning to intrude among some of the more serious on the Left. By September 22, the leftist Guardian newspaper in England was running an opinion piece headlined "Obama the impotent," and the leftist New Republic magazine in the States published an important piece titled "Job One: The only way Obama can pull his presidency back from the brink."

But reality was still safely at bay in The Chronicle-Herald and the Canadian Press. On that same day, the top of The Herald's World News read "Obama a talk show pro." Another dispatch of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, featuring a large color photo of Obama laughing it up with David Letterman. As even two of the most pro-Obama outlets in America and Britain were worrying aloud about Obama's collapse, The Herald and the CP were still running the most unserious, frivolous fluff as if the honeymoon had never ended, oblivious to the disaster gathering all around.

(The Canadian Press Washington bureau in that piece identified Fox News as "notoriously right-wing." Well, then, America must like its cable news "notoriously right-wing": As of September, Fox News was drawing nearly twice as many viewers as CNN and MSNBC combined. All 10 of the top 10 shows on cable news, and 13 of the top 15, were Fox News shows. Even FNC's 3 AM Eastern "Red Eye" drew more viewers than MSNBC's breakfast show. Fox News is "notorious" and "right-wing" to Canadian leftist elites; to the American people, it's the last outpost of the Fourth Estate in television news.)

Further down on that same September 22 World News page, The Herald did manage to scrutinize the president of the United States -- the last one -- and a now-canceled U.S. policy: "Study: CIA's harsh methods counterproductive," an Associated Press story on a "paper which scrutinizes the techniques used by the CIA under the Bush administration through the lens of neurobiology."

On or about that same day, the same Associated Press which came up with the "neurobiological study" story put up a couple pieces allowing some of the bad news reality into its Obama coverage -- "SPIN METER: $2 trillion in health savings? Where?" and "Tough political realities quiet youth 'Obamamania'" -- but for some reason those never made it into The Chronicle-Herald.

Not Herald News section material, really. There's scarcely any less news to be had on the Opinions page, and there's a sight more honesty there.

(Much more on the Canadian Press Washington bureau here, here, and here.)

Another problem with the Canadian Press Washington bureau

Here's the latest entry, reproduced in The Chronicle-Herald "World News" section under the subheadline, "Frank talk skewers town hall nonsense." Such is the license of a Herald "World News" editor, that they may insert their elite prejudices into the very newswire copy headlines.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "The ever-outspoken Barney Franks, the chairman of the House financial services committee, minced no words Tuesday night at a town hall meeting in Massachusetts when someone likened Obama’s health care plans to 'Nazi policy.'
'On what planet do you spend most of your time?' Franks replied to the woman as constituents cheered and applauded.
Franks assailed her for carrying a photograph of the president defaced to look like Adolf Hitler — the type of sign that’s been seen among Obama opponents since the so-called tea bag protests in April."

Might as well start with the name. It's "Frank", not "Franks".

"So-called tea bag protests." Yes, "so called" by leftists who hold the protestors in contempt. The protests are more officially called "tea parties", as in the Boston Tea Party protesting King George III's taxation. "Tea bag" refers to a pornographic leftist taunt against the protestors. And the tea parties started in February, not April, and for that matter they've never really let up yet.

And that gal at the townhall with the sacrilegious "defaced" Obama photo is known to have been from the LaRouche Youth. Even the Washington Post saw fit to report it. LaRouche-ites are avowedly not conservative, much less Republican. But the Canadian Press Washington bureau is evidently content to let its readers assume this was just another dastardly doing of those beastly Republicans.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "Franks’s 'mad as hell' moment, captured by CNN cameras, went viral on Wednesday, showing up on countless websites, blogs and Facebook walls and met largely with celebration."

No doubt that was cause for "celebration" among the CP Washington bureau's kind of people. A big committee chairman in a government with practically unchecked power, berating a law-abiding citizen who's completely shut out of power. Prop up the powerful, tear down the powerless. It's the Canadian Press way in the Age of Obama.

The Canadian Press Washington bureau is getting to be a regular watchdog against American citizens exercising their free speech to compare their government to Naziism, which in any event is one of the more hackneyed and less effective lines of argument in public affairs. But there was a time when the Fourth Estate was more wary of unchecked government than of law-abiding citizens saying their piece in the town squares and town halls.

The Senate Majority Leader has called the protestors "evil-mongers". The Speaker of the House claimed they were "carrying swastikas", then she and her House Majority Leader added that the protestors' actions were "simply un-American". An Arkansas Democrat Senator had already called the protestors "un-American", before recanting for fear of her political skin. And a Washington state Democrat Congressman accused the protestors of "brownshirt tactics".

It ought to be a little discomfiting to appreciate that those are the public pronouncements of people holding all the power, about people who are completely shut out of power. A Fourth Estate would be alarmed at such a prospect; it certainly wouldn't throw in with the government in lording over the people. But the Canadian Press Washington bureau finds "celebration" that the big-government bigwig has denounced the insufferable peasant, and put her right back down in her place.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "But there’s another potential option, something called budget reconciliation. That would allow Democrats to push the bill through with only 51 votes."

Quite right. Only, there is that niggling point that reconciliation is to be used for budgetary matters, not a governmentalization of American health-care opposed by majorities of the American people. From no less an authority than the inventor of the reconciliation mechanism, Sen. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia: "I oppose using the budget reconciliation process to pass health care reform and climate change legislation. ... As one of the authors of the reconciliation process, I can tell you that the ironclad parliamentary procedures it authorizes were never intended for this purpose."

Lee-Anne Goodman: "It could have been the Nazi comparisons. Perhaps it was recent remarks from top Republicans that they’d support no health care reform bill. Or it could just be spent reserves of patience following weeks of misinformation about death panels and health insurance for illegal aliens."

Take just that very last point. "Misinformation about ... health insurance for illegal aliens." When Obama and his lot talk about covering the "46 million uninsured" (or "as many as 50 million uninsured Americans," in the preferred formulation of the CP Washington bureau), they're necessarily including 9-10 million legal immigrants and illegal aliens who are counted in that figure. The National Institute for Health Care Management reckons that 5.6 million of the 46 million uninsured are illegal aliens. So insuring those "46 million uninsured" necessarily involves covering millions of illegal aliens included in the figure. It's no "misinformation"; it's Census Bureau statistics and NIHCM estimates.

And since that CP dispatch was published, it's come out that no less an authority than the Congressional Research Service has determined that "H.R. 3200 [the House health-care bill] does not contain any restrictions on noncitzens—whether legally or illegally present, or in the United States temporarily or permanently.”

Of course Obama and his party must claim their health-care "reform" won't cover illegal aliens -- they know even their own side would never swallow such a thing. But there was a time when those people who fancy themselves reporters would have had some skepticism and scrutiny for a president's political tricks and fibs, and not just credulously ape his self-serving rhetoric like some party-organ stenographers.

As for those "top Republicans" saying "they'd support no health care reform bill," that's a neat way of blaming the Democrat crack-up on a Republican minority so small it's in no position to influence much of anything, one way or another.

The Left lost any credibility in blaming Republicans for their failings as of June 30, 2009, when Democrats officially hit the magic 60-vote threshold in the Senate. If the Democrats -- by themselves, without a single Republican vote -- were agreed on this health-care "reform", it'd be passed already. They have the supermajorities in both houses of Congress to do anything they please -- short of overriding a presidential veto, amending the Constitution, or removing a president -- all by themselves, without a single Republican vote.

As of June 30, any Congressional obstruction of Obama's agenda must by definition be the result of balking by Democrats. To imply that Republicans are the obstructionists in this is purest partisan ax-grinding, dependent on ignorance of the numbers and workings of the United States Congress.

And those "top Republicans", whoever they are, are with the people. An August Rasmussen poll found 54% would prefer no health-care reform at all, to anything this president and Congress are likely to come up with. That number shot up to 66% among independent voters. But polls aren't making it into the dispatches of the CP Washington bureau like they used to, now that they've become relentlessly bad news for Obama and his project to "remake the nation."

The Canadian Press Washington bureau was happy to report after just a couple months of the Obama presidency that "Americans are still giving President Barack Obama high marks"; where are the CP Washington bureau dispatches on Obama's marks now that his job approval rating ranks "10th among the 12 post-World War II presidents at this point in their tenures"?

The CP Washington bureau has referred matter-of-factly to the Bush era as "eight years of unpopular Republican rule under President George W. Bush" -- undaunted by the facts that there had been "Republican rule" for just four of Bush's eight years, or that Bush was quite popular enough to be re-elected president and to see his party gain seats in a midterm election for only the third time in the century and a half since the Civil War.

Indeed, it was practically de rigeur in the dispatches of the CP Washington bureau to append any reference to President Bush with "wildly unpopular" or "one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history" -- undaunted by the facts that what was being referred to was not "U.S. history" so much as "polling history", or that even within the history of polling, Bush ranked overall 7th of the 11 presidents since the advent of the Gallup presidential job approval rating in the 1940s.

Well, that "unpopular" Bush was scoring higher job approval ratings than Obama at the same points in their presidencies by late July -- even before Bush's response to the 9/11 attacks had his approval rating hitting 90%. This latest CP Washington dispatch was published on August 20; on that day, Obama's job approval was just about 5 points lower than Bush's had been on the same date in 2001, in the average of all the polls at Real Clear Politics. And Bush had a contested election and a hostile press and popular culture working against him. As to Obama's Democratic supermajorities in Congress, the Real Clear Politics average had the Congressional job approval rating on August 20 at 30%. So when will we read in the Canadian Press about this "unpopular Democratic rule under President Barack Obama"?

And that's the real story in all this, whether the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress -- and the press that shelters and flatters them -- face up to it, or just carry on whistling past the graveyard. They've got their presidency and Congressional supermajorities still, but they've lost the people. All they've got are Democrats, and on a bad day they don't have all of those. The ground has shifted under their feet, and in record time. They've abused what the people granted them, and the people have turned. Now all that's left is a naked push to get their way until their hourglass runs out.

(Much more on the Canadian Press Washington bureau here and here.)

America's conservatism not melting for Obama

Conservative nation: Gallup polling as of August 2009 showed "self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals in all 50 states of the Union," by statistically-significant margins in all states but three. Graphic from Gallup.com.

America is a fundamentally conservative nation, and the most un-conservative of American presidents has thus far not shifted America's conservatism so much as reinforced it. President Obama has run up against D.H. Lawrence's observation on "the essential American soul": "It has never yet melted."

At the six-month mark of Obama's presidency, the USA Today/Gallup poll ranked his job approval rating "10th among the 12 post-World War II presidents at this point in their tenures."

By late July and early August, the average of all the current polling at Real Clear Politics showed Obama's job approval dipping into the 53rd percentile. Obama was down to his baseline of 53 per cent which had voted to make him president nine months earlier.

And it mostly gets worse from the job approval ratings. Disapproval of Obama on health-care hit 52 per cent in the August Quinnipiac poll, with 39 per cent approving.

Obama's $787 billion "stimulus" had become such an anathema by June that the Rasmussen poll found a plurality actually wanted the unspent provisions "canceled," 45-36 per cent. Only 34 per cent in the July Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll were calling the stimulus a "good idea."
Even after several days of press enthusing over Obama's "wildly popular" cash-for-clunkers handout, 54 per cent opposed extending the program in an August Rasmussen poll, with just 33 per cent in support. The press was apparently using some alternate definition of "popular."

And 65 per cent opposed Obama's intended closure of the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention camp in the June USA Today/Gallup poll, with only 18 per cent accepting Obama's claim that Guantanamo "has weakened American national security."

So far in this "Age of Obama," the Gallup poll has registered an upswing in even the more controversial conservatism in America. In March, Americans placed economic growth ahead of "environmental protection," 51-42 per cent: a reversal from 42-49 per cent in 2008 and the worst showing for environmentalism in the quarter-century of Gallup polling on the question.

In April, Gallup recorded a new low in support for a handgun ban: 29 per cent. Which is half the 60 per cent that favoured the ban when Gallup began polling the question -- in the late 1950s.

In May, Gallup found pro-lifers outnumbering pro-choicers 51-45 per cent: a reversal from 44-50 per cent in '08 and "the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995."

In June, Gallup's ideology survey showed conservatives unmoved, at 40 per cent "conservative" to 21 per cent "liberal." That breakdown was 40-19 per cent in 2004, when President Bush and Republican majorities in both houses of Congress were re-elected.

Then a July Gallup poll made it explicit: Americans reported becoming more conservative in their politics, 39-18 per cent. The nation is actually more conservative in Obama's first year than it was in Bush's last.

Then there are the unforgiving tendencies of American democracy. In the century and a half since the Civil War, the party holding the presidency has lost seats in every mid-term Congressional election but three.

In the past four decades, the very longest any party has held the White House and both houses of Congress is four years. By election day in November of next year, Democrats will have controlled both houses of Congress for four years and the White House for two.

Congress' job approval rating in the Real Clear Politics average recently went below 30 per cent. And the Rasmussen "who do you trust" survey which had Democrats leading Republicans on ten issues out of ten before the election, had been turned upside-down nine months later, with Republicans leading Democrats on eight issues out of ten.

So it's not the wildest guess that Republicans will gain in the midterm elections of November next year. Which doesn't necessarily mean they'll form majorities in one or both houses of Congress: the Democrat advantage in the 435-member House is 78 seats, and it typically takes more than a single election to dislodge so many incumbents. But Republicans should have a stronger hand after the midterms, and should be better able to tie Obama's hands in the second half of his presidency.

Obama and his Congress are up against a clock. They're unlikely to see such supermajorities past November of next year, and the closer to the fall of 2010 they come, the more fearful they'll have to be of pushing the trickier items on their agenda -- like legalizing 11 million illegal aliens while the unemployment rate is around 10 per cent and governments can't cover their liabilities as it is. Not to mention the unforeseeable events that distract and preoccupy a government, or blow it off its intended course altogether.

Polls are not static, of course, and neither are they elections. It's better to hold the power and lose the polls than vice-versa. But there has to be some significance in polling that's this soft, this soon.

Fraudulently campaigning on the likes of "a net spending cut," and proclaiming oneself the "change" when the system has crashed just a month and a half before election day, can go a long way to winning votes -- once. But it did nothing to alter the fact of America's conservatism. America is a fundamentally conservative nation that's got itself a radicalized leftist national government, and that discrepancy will have to be resolved somehow or other, sooner or later.

Andrew W. Smith, published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

More problems with the Canadian Press Washington bureau

A fellow could run out the best part of a day dissecting the dispatches of Lee-Anne Goodman, the one-woman Washington bureau of Canada's monopolistic newswire agency, but it doesn't pay, and one has to concentrate one's efforts on enterprises that do. So the May 29 dispatch -- headlined "U.S. racists direct hateful messages at Obama" or "Latest attack on Obama: personal ad calls for his assassination" -- will have to suffice.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "Keystone Progress exposed racist incidents at John McCain and Sarah Palin rallies in Pennsylvania last year, including one event in which someone called out, 'Kill him,' in reference to Obama. The situation doesn't seem to have progressed much since those rallies."

Ah, the ol' "kill him" Palin rally. It's been about seven months since I last saw that story, when it was exposed as a hoax. America is a serious nation, and it was only 28 years ago that a would-be assassin put a bullet into a president of the United States, so when someone publicly advocates assassinating a national leader in America, that's not some partisan talking point, it's grounds for a Secret Service investigation. And when the American press reported in October '08 that someone at a Sarah Palin rally had called for Barack Obama to be killed, the local field office of the Secret Service launched such an investigation.

From the yeoman report in the Northeastern Pennsylvania Times-Leader: "The agent in charge of the Secret Service field office in Scranton said allegations that someone yelled 'kill him' when presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s name was mentioned during Tuesday’s Sarah Palin rally are unfounded. ...

Agent Bill Slavoski said he was in the audience, along with an undisclosed
number of additional secret service agents and other law enforcement officers,
and not one heard the comment. 'I was baffled,' he said after reading the report
in Wednesday’s Times-Tribune.

He said the agency conducted an investigation Wednesday, after seeing the
story, and could not find one person to corroborate the allegation other than
Singleton [the local reporter who started the story]. ...

'We have yet to find someone to back up the story,' Slavoski said. 'We had
people all over and we have yet to find anyone who said they heard it.'"

The Canadian Press Washington bureau repeated a seven month old hoax as fact in the News sections of newspapers across Canada, in aid of the implication that McCain/Palin supporters and Obama opponents are inveterate, possibly murderous racists ("racist incidents at John McCain and Sarah Palin rallies ... including one event in which someone called out, 'Kill him' ... the situation doesn't seem to have progressed much since those rallies"). It's as I wrote before: This is the error of a person exposed only to information that comes with a Democratic National Committee seal at the top. The Canadian Press Washington bureau would be familiar with the charge against conservatives, but not the later acquittal.

More Lee-Anne Goodman: "The so-called 'teabagging' protests held across the U.S. last month, ostensibly to protest big government spending, were populated by several attendees waving signs with racist slogans, including a child in Denver who carried one that read: 'Obama-nomics: Monkey See, Monkey Do.'

Another sign in Chicago featured a photo of Adolf Hitler with Obama’s head super-imposed over the infamous dictator’s, and read: 'Barack Hussein Obama: The New Face of Hitler.' Another urged him to go 'back to Kenya.'

Such sentiments haven’t been exclusive to the odd face in the crowd, and are a far cry from the insults about George W. Bush’s intelligence that were routinely directed at the former president by his opponents."

Those would be the "tea parties", as in the "Boston Tea Party" in protest of King George III's taxation.
Those protests were held from one end of the country to the other and were remarkable if for no reason other than that conservatives are not the protesting kind. But when the Canadian Press Washington bureau here finds space for the tea parties, it's to report that they were only "ostensibly" about big government, but were in fact "populated" by racists. The Janine Garofalo line has been adopted by Canada's national newswire service. This is the extreme-left view that those regular American folks weren't legitimately protesting policies meant to "remake the nation" into something unrecognizable from what it's always been. No, this extreme-left view has it that those regular folks are nothing more or less than racists, so consumed by racial hatred that they turned out across the country for what may be America's first-ever national mass demonstration by conservatives. And the tea parties are referred to as the "teabagging protests", which is not the proper name but a pornographic leftist taunt.

As near as I can tell, the CP Washington bureau is claiming that beyond-the-pale attacks on Obama like the ones reported in the piece are something closer to commonplace than exceptional ("such sentiments haven’t been exclusive to the odd face in the crowd"), and that these attacks are considerably worse than anything Bush ever got from the other side, beyond the old "dumb Bush" jokes ("a far cry from the insults about George W. Bush’s intelligence").

So de rigeur was it to call Bush "Hitler", that after sometime in 2003 I took no notice of it. A Google search for "Bush Hitler" yields 1,130,000 matches, with helpful "image results". Indeed, Google returns 61,800 matches for "Bushitler", the neologism coined to more conveniently meld Bush with Hitler.

Bush was routinely characterized as a chimpanzee, as on the website "George W. Bush or Chimpanzee?", which offers Bush-or-Chimp T-shirts. Google returns 1,660,000 matches for "Bush chimp", including those handy "image results".
Bush is of course not black, but his two former secretaries of state are, and it was not unknown for leftists to trot out a race joke or insult against them:

• Before Colin Powell turned Obama-supporter, it was considered "authentic" in some quarters of the Left to call him an "Uncle Tom". As in the Daily Kos headline circa Bush's re-election campaign: "Uncle Tom Powell Stumps for Massah Bush".
• So respectable was it to call Condoleezza Rice a "skeeza", that even Barack Obama's pastor, the "Reverend" Wright, got into the act, as well as New Jersey's "Poet Laureate". (And yes, who knew New Jersey had a poet laureate?)
• A white leftist radio host in Wisconsin built on the "Uncle Tom" for Powell with an "Aunt Jemima" for Rice.
• Liberal editorial cartoonist Jeff Danziger portrayed Rice as the black maid from Gone With the Wind, saying "I knows all about aluminum tubes! I don't know nuthin' about aluminum tubes."

And there was Bush assassination talk even before Bush became president. A few of the more notorious examples:

• CBS's The Late Late Show With Craig Kilborn ran a photo of Bush with the words "Snipers Wanted" months before the 2000 election.
• Cafe Press sold T-shirts reading "For God's Sake...KILL BUSH - Save the United States and the Rest of the World".
• Columbia College in Chicago exhibited an art print meant to look like a sheet of U.S. stamps reading "Patriot Act" and depicting Bush with a gun to his head.
• The film Death of a President imagined a world in which President Bush had been shot and killed by an assassin.
• The premier publishing house Alfred Knopf published a novel by Nicholson Baker titled Checkpoint, about a plot to kill Bush out of rage over the Iraq War.
• Al Franken, the Democrat comic-turned-presumptive junior senator from Minnesota, joked about executing President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

I am nonplussed that anyone even casually acquainted with the previous eight years in American current events could overlook all the "Bush Hitler" and "Bush chimp" and "kill Bush" vitriol, claim instead that the Bush-haters restricted themselves to remarks about Bush's intelligence, and imagine that Obama has it much worse.

Again, the Canadian Press Washington bureau has reported on America for Canada's newspapers with exactly one side of the story; propping up the powerful, and persecuting the powerless, unapproved minority; presenting the beloved Left as blameless, while the detested conservative opposition is delegitimized and demonized. Fine. But I do wish the CP would run a disclaimer with those dispatches. Like "Opinion".
(Much more on this subject here.)

The problem with the Canadian Press Washington bureau

(Expanded from an addendum to an earlier post. This will be a long one. Update: Now even longer.)

I saw an outrage and I said my piece, on this obscure website. Whether anyone read it, and what reaction they had to it, was entirely up to them. I had my say, and anyone else could have theirs, and all was right with the world, so I thought.

But it seems Canada's monopolistic newswire agency was sicced on me, an Upper Canadian law firm called in, a boss at the newspaper I write for brought into it, and efforts made to purge my words from the public record. All to no avail, of course, but I don't much appreciate the sentiment. I will not back down from what I wrote; I will back it up, in detail. And I won't be cowed, least of all by Canadian bigwigs.


I'm a great believer in the idea of a Fourth Estate. What is the use of a free press, if it props up the powerful and tears down the powerless? The press turned from "speaking truth to power" -- which in practice meant that when a sparrow fell to the ground, they blamed Bush -- to being incapable of skepticism and scrutiny of Congressional supermajorities and an executive branch annexing ever-greater swaths of society, in what is the most powerful government on earth. And instead of questioning the powerful, they have been practically persecuting the powerless minority.

In the newspaper I read every day -- The Chronicle-Herald of Halifax, Nova Scotia -- the foremost exponent of all that was the one-woman Washington bureau of the one Canadian newswire service, Lee-Anne Goodman. I held my tongue for half a year. I hate naming names and hurting feelings, when I might make my point just as easily without being so personal. But then one week in May I read a hit-piece on Bristol Palin -- a powerless 18 year old girl -- by Lee-Ann Goodman, and I came to feel she had forfeited any courtesy of having her feelings spared.

I think Lee-Anne Goodman is a fine writer, and would make a cracking gossip columnist. Which is not some backhanded compliment: I've read too many gossip columns to be in a position to hold the profession in contempt. Or, if Lee-Anne Goodman's dispatches ran under the "Opinions" banner, I'd have little to say on this. I wish her all the best and would never dream of bringing trouble down on her head. But Lee-Anne Goodman has represented anyone who's caught her eye in any way she's pleased, and had her words reproduced in the newspapers of Canada, called The News. So some nobody called her out on some unread website. And what I wrote stands.

Following is a compilation of my notes of the past half year on what's wrong with the Washington bureau of the Canadian Press:
David Halton.
When I watched The National on CBC years ago, the senior Washington correspondent was a man called David Halton. I can't remember a time when David Halton didn't look old. David Halton had covered the serious goings-on of Ottawa, London, and Moscow before becoming the CBC's man in Washington. He'd got in the middle of wars and uprisings in the field. He knew American politics and government, and war and economics, backwards and forwards, upside-down and sideways. He gathered the facts as he found them, without regard to which party or politician was helped or hurt. And I expected nothing less for the elephant of Canada's elephant-mouse relationship, and the capital of the greatest nation the world has ever seen. That's looking long ago and far away today.

And that's not an indictment of Lee-Anne Goodman; it's an indictment of the Canadian Press.
Bias and bad reporting.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "It's certainly hard to imagine Bush, in fact, immediately after winning the contested 2000 election, reaching out to his rivals in the Democratic party or to liberals in general in an effort to end the petty partisanship that so often paralyzes Capitol Hill."

It happens that I was following American politics and government at the time in question, all the way back in 2000 and '01, and I seem to recall some "reaching out":

• Two weeks after Bush's inauguration, he invited "Democrat lion" Ted Kennedy and several others of the Kennedy clan to the White House to watch 13 Days, the movie on John Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis. One of the invitees had accused Bush of "stealing the election," and Ted Kennedy later accused Bush of "poisoning" Americans, among many other nefarious things. Then when Ted Kennedy was hospitalized in 2008, Bush called Kennedy's wife and told her to "take care of my friend."
• Even before Bush's inauguration, and a matter of days after the Supreme Court terminated the otherwise interminable Florida recount leaving him at long last as president-elect, Bush invited an assortment of Republicans and Democrats to Texas to discuss his No Child Left Behind Act, among them one of the more leftist congressmen and Democrats, George Miller. Miller would help shepherd the bill though the House and rewrite much of Bush's draft more to his liking. Miller later threatened to impeach Bush.
• Also before Bush's inauguration, he asked George McGovern -- 1972 Democrat presidential nominee and furthest-left major-party presidential candidate until that time -- to stay on as U.S. Representative to the UN Food and Agriculture Program. McGovern later urged Bush's impeachment.
• Within five months of Bush's inauguration, he appointed Norman Mineta -- Democrat Congressman and Clinton Commerce Secretary -- as Transportation Secretary. Mineta later endorsed Barack Obama in the Democrat primaries.

So Bush did reach out to Democrats, and look where it got him. Then as Bush walked out of the White House, Canadians read in their newspapers that he hadn't been the "reaching out" kind.

Lee-Anne Goodman (March 11, '09): "'It's really hard to argue that this isn't a fundamental transformation of our economy to look more like European-style socialism,' Pence concluded. If so, it’s a brand of socialism Americans are behind. Countless public opinion polls suggest that the majority of Americans support both additional stimulus spending as well as government intervention to save insolvent banks."

I picked up a bit of a bug for polls in "Social Sciences Statistics" class and follow American polling fairly closely, and I was aware of no torrent of polls in the days and weeks before the piece was published that showed Americans clamoring for more Obama boondoggles. Just the opposite, in fact:

• Rasmussen Reports Poll, released March 11, '09. "Just 27% of voters nationwide favor passage of a second economic stimulus package. The latest Rasmussen Reports nationwide telephone survey found that 55% are opposed and 19% are not sure."
• NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll, conducted February 26-March 1, '09. "Which of the following concerns you more -- that the federal government will spend too MUCH money to try to boost the economy and as a result will drive up the budget deficit, OR, that the federal government will spend too LITTLE money to try to boost the economy and as a result the recession will be longer?" "Spend too much": 61%; "Spend too little": 29%.
• USA Today/Gallup Poll, conducted February 20-22, '09. "Regardless of whether you favor or oppose the economic stimulus bill that Congress passed, do you think it would have been better for the government to spend more money to stimulate the economy, better for the government to spend less money, or is the amount of spending in the bill about right?" "Better to spend more": 14%; "Better to spend less": 41%.
• Ibid. "In thinking about the trade-offs between spending government money to improve the economy versus adding considerable amounts of money to the federal debt, which do you think is the greater risk: spending too little to improve the economy or adding too much to the federal debt?" "Spending too little": 37%; "Adding too much to debt": 59%.

So at least three major national polls predating the dispatch exactly contradict the reported presumption that "countless public opinion polls" -- not one of which was cited -- showed "the majority of Americans" calling for "additional stimulus spending". And this was a central point in the argument that if Obama is socialist, then Americans are all for socialism. That the report was making an argument at all should have got it booted from the News section.

From Lee-Anne Goodman's post-election coverage: "Some of those slated to be in attendance reportedly believe the Republican party's resounding defeat this election was due to its failure to embrace with enough vigour its socially conservative ideals. This despite a series of recent studies that suggest Americans are becoming more socially progressive and aren't concerned with issues like same-sex marriage and abortion."

You'd never know it from that report, but gay marriage bans were actually on the ballot on election day in three states -- two of which voted at the same time to make Barack Obama president -- and passed in all three. Which brings the total of states outlawing gay marriage to 30.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "On top of everything else, the president-elect must also begin extricating the United States from the unpopular war in Iraq."

Again, the U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement had been finalized already: The "extrication" of the United States from Iraq had not only begun, it had been agreed by both nations, in some detail.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "Obama was the first president in U.S. history to mention the word "Muslim" in an inaugural address, and he did it as his predecessor and the man despised by the Arab world, George W. Bush, looked on."

As a point of fact, Afghanistan is part of the Muslim world, but not the Arab world. The same for Pakistan, and Iran, and all but 20 percent of Islam globally. I'd guess the intent was to report that Bush was "despised" in those countries as well as all the rest, but by using "Arab world" as synonynmous with "Muslim world", they were left out.
And if was absolutely necessary to make a point about President Bush and Muslims in this Obama inauguration coverage, it might have been a more historically significant one, like: "the man who brought down two of the very worst regimes in half a century and made 50-60 million Muslims in two Muslim nations free citizens for the first time in their histories."

Indeed, if it had been up to Senator Obama, the 28 million Muslims of Iraq would have been abandoned in 2007 to their civil war and ethnic cleansing, their new democracy allowed to disintegrate, swaths of their country forfeited to Iran and al Qaeda, and the democratic reform of the Muslim world repudiated. But he mentioned "Muslim" in his inaugural address.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "Others argued that if Obama doesn’t strongly support a Palestinian state, he won’t enjoy any more successes in the Muslim world than Bush did."

But President Bush "strongly supported a Palestinian state". He broke with previous administrations in calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state as part of his "road map for peace", a year and a half into his presidency. He wanted this Palestinian state up and running by sometime in 2005.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "Among the measures Obama is looking at overturning is a proposal that cuts funding to women’s groups that counsel abortion in developing countries and reversing a ban on stem-cell research funding."

That "ban on stem-cell research funding" was nothing of the kind. Bush was the first president to devote federal funds to embryonic stem cell research, on embryos destroyed before his policy was instituted, and he funded research on stem cells from other than embryos which turned out to be more fruitful than anyone had reckoned on. The ban was limited to federal funding for embryonic stem cell research which destroyed new human embryos. And there was no prohibition against states and private entities funding embryo-destructive research to their hearts' content. Bush's executive order on stem cell research was more than seven years old by this point, and had been painstakingly explained by the president himself in his only primetime television address before the 9/11 attacks.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "Eight years of blunders by George W. Bush" and "eight years of unpopular Republican rule under President George W. Bush."

However did President Bush manage to get himself re-elected after his first four years, if his presidency was "eight years" of unbroken "blundering" and "unpopular rule"? Was it a very obscure point that Bush's approval rating hit a record 90% after the 9/11 attacks? Even a year and a half after 9/11, his approval was at 70%. His re-election was the first in four presidential cycles in which a candidate for president won an absolute majority of votes. And Bush is one of just three presidents since the Civil War to see their party gain Congressional seats in a midterm election, and the only Republican president ever to add seats in a midterm.

And as for those eight unbroken years of "Republican rule", Democrats controlled the Senate for four of Bush's eight years, and the House for two. There was "Republican rule" for just half of Bush's presidency; the other half was what is called in the United States "divided government".

These problematic points are of a kind. They're the errors of a person exposed only to information that comes with a Democratic National Committee seal at the top. They're errors from ideological certitude and partisan acrimony so deep, one cannot allow that there is any right in the other side, or any good in it, and can see no faults or failings in one's own beloved "good guys". It's fine for opinion journalism, but opinion journalism is what it is, and it belongs in the Opinions section with the rest of us ax-grinders.

Obama adulation.
In her coverage of Barack Obama, Lee-Anne Goodman has been indistinguishable from a wide-eyed Obama volunteer (with gratuitous slights against President Bush, plus one against Prime Minister Harper):
"A stern and steady Barack Obama addressed the nation" -- "a nation still basking in the glow of his victory."

"Roosevelt ruled with calm assurance" and "a presidential Obama sounded a similar tone."

"His professorial remarks about the economy were in striking contrast to the string of malapropisms and nervous chuckles that often characterized many of his predecessor’s appearances before the national media. George W. Bush stammered and stumbled his way through many of his news conferences."

"He added he was grateful that Bush, one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history, has invited Obama and his wife, Michelle, to the White House on Monday."

"The president-elect went off-topic only once, smiling broadly when asked about his children, Malia and Sasha, and their impending acquisition of a puppy — a promise he delivered in Tuesday’s soaring election-night acceptance speech."
"A friendly and relaxed Obama, flashing his trademark smile."
"The Lincoln symbolism is powerful. ... The man who came to be known as the Great Emancipator was also a lanky Illinois politician with a gift for oratory when he became president."

"The celebrations reflect a country that's been in the grips of Obama fever since he made history in November."

"The star who shone the brightest was the man who sang nary a note -- Barack Obama, who enthralled a crowd of 500,000 with a brief message of hope."

"Millions cheered the apparent arrival of a new age of political idealism."

"The new president took on the formidable task of undoing the damage of his predecessor’s administration."
"[Obama's Ottawa visit is] sure to be a trip that will make any other presidential visit in recent memory seem like an exercise in watching paint dry."
"Since his historic election, Obama has set aside partisanship and stressed his willingness to consult and work with people from both ends of the political spectrum. Harper's intense partisanship, on the other hand, has almost cost him his career."
"Few presidents in recent memory, in fact, have burst out of the starting gates with as much speed and vigour as Obama."
(Update: I neglected the best one. "Hot item on the hustings; physical charms, fetching policies - women say Obama's got it all", from just a couple weeks before election day. Applying the same principle to the wife, there was: "Trendsetting first lady; Vogue cover establishes her as style icon of modern day". And this, from long after the shine was off it: "Obama a talk show pro".)
That's not reporting, it's knickers-tossing. It's one thing to document quotations and so on showing enthusiasm for Barack Obama -- and Lee-Anne Goodman has done plenty of that, too -- but these are the words of the "reporter". There's a place for that sort of thing, and it's someplace other than the News sections.

Opinion journalism.
Lee-Anne Goodman is not a reporter so much as a species of opinion journalist. Which would be peachy, except that her dispatches are not presented as opinion journalism; they're the sole Washington coverage of a monopolistic national newswire service.
The dispatches of the Washington bureau of the Canadian Press are typically traceable to the Associated Press versions, scoops in American news and opinion outlets, public-domain facts and quotations, TV appearances by newsmakers, etc. I recognize the methods because it's the sort of thing I do -- in writing op-eds.
The AP is invariably the first to get a story up, and for reasons I've never fully accepted, it is considered perfectly fine for any news outlet having an arrangement with the AP to lift the AP's content, without attribution. If I tried that on even once, I'd be branded a "plagiarist" and would never work as a writer again.

So, the AP reports: "The plan would effectively end a feud between automakers and statehouses over emission standards." Then Lee-Anne Goodman for the CP reports: "Most importantly from a Canadian perspective, the plan effectively ends a feud between the Big Three automakers and state legislatures over emission standards as the car companies get the single national standard they've been seeking."

A good deal of these dispatches are Canadian-content reproductions of the AP reports. That's no indictment against Lee-Anne Goodman per se: It's the way things are done in the moribund 21st Century news business. But it's not original reporting.

The "Sarah Palin didn't know Africa was a continent" piece was a roundup of rumors in Newsweek, the LA Times, and The New York Times.

The "American reporters are so ignorant of Canada" piece was a rumination on the American coverage of Obama's Ottawa visit, in the AP, cable news, and blogs, plus a line from The Tonight Show. The "Dijongate" piece was a rumination on Sean Hannity's making sport of Barack Obama for wanting Dijon mustard on a cheeseburger, and some blogger's speculation that MSNBC had tried hiding the Dijon business from its viewers, plus excerpts from Obama's The Audacity of Hope.
(Update: I wrote that the Canadian Press Washington bureau found those couple conservatives making sport of Obama's choice of mustard, but what looks more likely is that some American news outlet did the finding, and that was what was found by the CP Washington bureau. The original report, or anyway one of them, may have been a Washington Post online item posted on the morning of May 7, '09 and headlined "Obama Burger Firestorm Still Raging". That WaPo online report made no claim that conservatives generally were preoccupied with Obama's mustard; that angle was more original to the CP Washington bureau. So, even less original reporting than first thought. And worse: one of those couple conservatives was misrepresented by the CP report, and called it "a new low" in bias.)

The Bristol Palin hit-piece was built on Palin's appearances on TV chat shows: "Palin made the rounds of the American talk-show circuit on Wednesday morning." The same for the "Cheney slags Powell" piece: "On Sunday, [Cheney] was back in the spotlight again, this time on CBS's 'Face The Nation,' but even veteran host Bob Schieffer was taken aback to hear Cheney slag Colin Powell."

That's all very well -- it's the kind of thing I do for my little op-eds -- but that's the point: It's op-ed writing, not original reporting.

From Lee-Anne Goodman's "Dijongate" story: "The United States is in the midst of a devastating recession, mired in two overseas wars and grappling with a swine flu outbreak, but conservative critics are assailing President Barack Obama on another pressing issue: his choice of burger topping."

That's the lead to an opinion piece -- an article that takes sides, makes an argument, repudiates one side and vindicates the other.

That piece was unworthy of the Canadian newswire daily dispatch from Washington, not least because it was untrue. I check the conservative clearing houses daily, and I had seen exactly one reference to L'Affaire Dijon that day, in one post of 25 on HotAir.com -- where the verdict was: "As for me, well, this is about as much of a non-story as it can get."

Amen. This was simply not something American conservatism was exercised about. America's conservatives are positively fit to be tied, about spending, and taxing, and terrorist detainees, and Iranian-North Korean nukes, and Afghan-Pakistan instability, and federal annexation of the private sector, and arbitrary federal suspension of contract law and bankruptcy law, and illegal aliens, and activist judges, and missile defense, and the F-22 program, etc., etc., etc. But Lee-Anne Goodman reported for Canada that America's conservatives weren't bothered about all that; it was Obama's fancy mustard that had them jumping up and down. It was an egregious misrepresentation. And it seems to have worked: Two weeks later The Chronicle-Herald was leading a Sunday editorial in defense of Michael Ignatieff with the Lee-Anne Goodman/CP angle on "Dijongate".

What possible purpose did that story serve? It was unnewsworthy and untrue, but it certainly made "Obama's conservative critics" look like fools, so my bet is that was the idea. But then, why did it run as the Canadian Press dispatch from Washington in the World News section of my newspaper?

There are terms for this: "opinion journalism", "op-eds", "columns" -- even "news columns", if you want a pretense of reporterly credibility about it. So let it be identified to the readers as opinion journalism. Presenting it in the newspapers of Canada as The News is a fraud and an abuse of the readers.

Gossip columnist.
Before the Washington job, this was more Lee-Anne Goodman's beat: "Reporters Victoria Ahearn and Lee-Anne Goodman discuss Pete Doherty's nose bleed." Somebody's got to do it. She was an entertainment reporter. No doubt that sort of thing gets the most readers. And there's nothing remotely wrong with it: I'd be quite keen to know about this Pete Doherty nosebleed myself. "Enquiring minds" and all that.

I'm given to know that Lee-Anne Goodman had done more before the Washington job than report on the likes of Pete Doherty's nosebleed. I never imagined or stated otherwise.

But it's no idle point. If the Canadian Press promoted its defense reporter to the Washington posting, one might reasonably expect to see dispatches on, say, missile defense -- Obama's cuts to missile defense, Obama's possible changes to the missile shield deployment in Eastern Europe, the effect on Obama's missile defense policy of the Iranian and North Korean ballistic missile test-launches, etc. And if a reporter is posted to Washington whose aptitudes and experience run more toward arts and entertainment and celebrity gossip, one might expect to see, say, scuttlebutt on the Palins. Less war and economics, more "dishing". The dilettante angle on Washington.
Like this late entry: "U.S. politicians embracing Twitter, sometimes with embarrassing results."
(Update: Some examples of how the Canadian Press Washington bureau has been turned into a gossip-shop: "Rekers latest anti-gay activist to be snared by gay sex scandal in U.S.", "Former Bush campaign chariman says he's gay", "Hole in one spotless image", on Tiger Woods' infidelity -- credit to The Chronicle-Herald for that corny headline.)
Or take Lee-Anne Goodman's "Cheney slags Powell" piece, which was as straight as they come from the CP Washington bureau. The Associated Press version made no such characterization, and in no objective sense had Dick Cheney done any "slagging". Cheney only said he took Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama as a sign he'd left the Republican Party, and that, "If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I'd go with Rush Limbaugh." After all, Limbaugh is an actual conservative, while Powell advocated for the furthest-left major-party presidential candidate in American history. "Cheney slag[s] Colin Powell" is the gossip columnist's angle and phraseology. And it was no throwaway line: it became the basis for the headline in The Chronicle-Herald.

Again, that's not an indictment of Lee-Anne Goodman so much as the Canadian Press. And now I come to my reason for taking this up in the first place.
Now, Sarah Palin ran for vice president; Joe Biden actually is vice president. Time was, the actual vice president of the United States would have gotten the scrutiny of the press, not the loser who returned to the ranch a world away from Washington. And this particular actual vice president happens to be a gaffe-factory and a boob. It's hardly as if Biden has kept a low profile, or sailed through his first four months as VP without missing a beat. But the actual vice president of the United States hasn't been the object of skepticism and scrutiny in the Washington dispatches of the Canadian Press; it's the Republican governor of Alaska -- and her family -- they've been onto.
The CP line is that Sarah Palin "has been touted as a future Republican presidential candidate." In another 3 or 7 or 11 years, Sarah Palin may be one of at least half a dozen Republicans running for the party's presidential nomination, so even her in-laws have been scrutinized, instead of those politicians who won actual elections and hold actual power in the here and now.

Two days after the presidential election, Lee-Anne Goodman recycled malicious rumors against Sarah Palin planted in the American press by anti-Palin political operatives. It was 650 words of purest gossip. The Herald promoted it on the front page.

The first line claimed, "Sarah Palin wasn't aware that Africa was a continent." That ought to have looked like a bridge too far even to the journalist class with their bottomless disdain for the capabilities of Sarah Palin, and in fact it turned out some of their credulous reporting on this was built on a hoax.

Then in the space of a few weeks in April and May, I counted three full-length dispatches on Sarah Palin and/or her family from Lee-Anne Goodman. They were as uniformly negative as the coverage of Obama was uniformly positive. In April, there was a story to do with some Palin nominee in Alaska who wasn't much enamored of homosexuality, which went into some detail on the "hillbilly" governor's "family and political theatrics that would do Jerry Springer proud," like "the arrest and indictment of her sister-in-law on break-and-enter charges" and "the sordid revelations of her daughter’s ex-boyfriend."

What tore it for me came in May. Lee-Anne Goodman devoted an entire article to Sarah Palin's 18 year old daughter, Bristol: "a decidedly curious poster girl for the cause of teenage abstinence." It was a hit-piece. A hit-piece on a powerless 18 year old girl. A girl was being ridiculed and sneered at for promoting abstinence after having a baby, in a Canadian Press dispatch from Washington on the World News page of my newspaper.
Lee-Anne Goodman lead with, "Do as she says, not as she does." There was even a gotcha quote from the girl's past: "Palin is encouraging adolescent girls to resist pre-marital sex entirely. This despite her remarks shortly after Tripp's birth that convincing teens to avoid having sex was 'not realistic at all.'"

I had never seen anything out of the CP Washington bureau along the lines of, "Obama's first full-year budget deficit, not counting bailouts, was three times the worst full-year deficit under Bush. This despite his remarks during the election campaign that 'what I've done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.'" A powerless teenager had been subjected to a level of skepticism and scrutiny from which the current president of the United States had been sheltered.
Bristol Palin's appearance on TV chat shows was not newsworthy in the first place; not for American newspapers and much less for Canadian ones. She holds no office, she's not seeking office, and she doesn't even talk politics. And I've never seen anything on the wires ridiculing the Clinton first daughter Chelsea -- even during the '08 presidential primaries when she was a grown woman actively campaigning for her mother and pointing at ambitions for national politics.

Lee-Anne Goodman has gone out of her way to run down Sarah Palin -- and her family. It's indulgent, it's gossipy, it's malicious, and it's a sick fixation. Lee-Anne Goodman does have plenty of company in that, among the political and journalist classes, but when the likes of Andrew Sullivan takes his hatchet to the Palins, it's not reprinted in newspapers across Canada under banners reading "News".

One more thing.
On the occasion of Obama's Ottawa visit, Lee-Anne Goodman took the American press to task for their ignorance of Canada. (I noted the piece mostly for the line, "The deliciously snarky Wonkette.com, the blog that dishes on D.C." There's a sentence that would never have been uttered by David Halton.) Fair enough, though those American journalists had the excuse that Canada wasn't their beat. But if insufficient knowledge of Canada among Americans gets Canadians exercised, then this is the sort of thing that does me, from Lee-Anne Goodman's post-election coverage: "Even in the Republican stronghold of Texas, people were basking in the post-election glow," which was demonstrated with a quote from a screenwriter in Austin.

This must be an obscure point among Canadians, but Austin is a notorious Democratic Party bastion. "Keep Austin Weird," as the bumper sticker says. And I'd guess "screenwriter" is a majority-Democrat profession. Show me a cattle-rancher "basking in the post-election glow" of Barack Obama, and I'd be impressed.

And another thing.
If Lee-Anne Goodman's dispatches came marked "opinion", my argument here would lose its thunder. But the Canadian Press insists on keeping up this pretense that they're just tellin' it like it is, and bristles at any suggestion to the contrary. Until the 20th Century, newspapers typically wore their prejudices on their sleeves. There's honesty in that, and square-dealing with the readers.
But until those pigs fly, and as long as I see these abuses, I intend to call them out. I won't take it down or take it back, and I won't be cowed.
(A second, shorter installment here.)

Torturing Churchill

Winston Churchill's old bones must be writhing in their tomb. The suicide-pact Left has appropriated Churchill in their cause for a Terrorists' Bill of Rights.

President Obama has cast himself as following in the footsteps of his antithesis Churchill. In the unwatched prime-time press conference on the occasion of his 100th day as president, Obama told this howler: "London was being bombed to smithereens and had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, 'We don't torture.'" Obama considers waterboarding to be torture, so we're left to suppose from this that waterboarding would have been too strong stuff for Churchill.

Can anyone who knows anything of Churchill seriously believe he would have had the slightest misgiving about dousing -- under supervision of a doctor -- three known terrorists, to make them talk and save innocent lives? Terrorists who want us all dead and burning in hell, who observe no law of war, and who target civilians primarily?

Churchill, the man who ordered area bombings of German population centers with incendiary explosives intended specifically to create sucking, all-consuming firestorms, for vengeance and the destruction of German national will?

Churchill, who was prepared to turn the English Channel into a lake of fire if the Germans crossed it? Churchill, who was prepared to meet the Germans with mustard gas if they set foot on the shores of England?

Churchill, who had 16 captured German spies hanged? Churchill, who opposed the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals and ordered his SAS to assassinate wanted German officers before the preening lawyers had them "arrested"?

Churchill's daughter said it: "He would have done anything to win the war, and I daresay he had to do some pretty rough things, but they didn't unman him."

The kookery seems to have originated with the hysterical blogger called Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan's blog on Palin family conspiracy theories was apparently read by the president of the United States, who really ought to have better things to do. President Obama then credulously shared his new Sullivan's Fairy Tale with the world in his 100th day celebratory prime-time presser, about the Blitz and the 200 detainees and Churchill's supposedly saying "we don't torture."

Only, it was more like 500 detainees, and nowhere in Churchill's millions of recorded words was any such sappiness ever expressed. Churchill was on record as opposing torture for British citizen convicts, but enemy spies in war were another matter. And of course, a lot hangs on what is meant by "torture": I daresay Churchill wouldn't have ordered roughness for its own sake; but if a captured enemy was outside the law of war and had valuable intelligence, it would not have been a good time for him.

Under Churchill, captured German spies and SS officers were beaten, starved, drugged, deprived of sleep, threatened with hanging, and forced to betray their homeland as double-agents.

The irony is that Barack Obama's Kenyan grandfather claimed to have been tortured by British forces during Churchill's second premiership. Hussein Onyango Obama was involved in the Kikuyu Central Association which sparked the Mau Mau Rebellion of the early 1950s. He was detained for two years and allegedly tortured for information on the rebellion.

Barack Obama's "Granny Sarah" Onyango claims British forces whipped Obama's grandfather "every morning and evening 'til he confessed," "squeeze[d] his testicles with parallel metallic rods," and "pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together with his head facing down."

The British certainly killed over 10,000 rebels, detained about 70,000, and had official sanction for rough treatment where warranted -- while Churchill was Prime Minister.

Anyone who throws around "war criminal" to describe President Bush or others in his administration would have also to brand Churchill a "war criminal," many times over. The same for Democrat Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. If you didn't like George W. Bush, you'd have hated Winston S. Churchill.

Churchill was an anachronistic, arch conservative, an Anglo-Saxon imperialist, a Zionist, the foremost advocate in the English-speaking world for the utility of force in international relations, and a brutal war-master. Churchill was also the greatest figure of the 20th Century.

If decadent, historically-illiterate leftists are going to fight for the rights of terrorists, to take up the cause of sparing terrorists from unpleasantness as a righteous moral crusade of our time, they have the luxury for now to be so suicidal. But let none of them claim Churchill as a champion of their cause. The historical revisionism of Churchill as some limp-wristed, weak-stomached, bleeding-heart coddler of the enemy in war is something like the vegetarian who imagines that dogs don't actually like meat.

Churchill gave as good as he got, and then some: "We will mete out to them the measure, and more than the measure, that they have meted out to us." And don't you forget it.

Obama's first 100 days and all the news that's fit to print

Will Rogers famously pleaded that all he knew was what he read in the papers. If all a person knew of Barack Obama's first 100 days as president was what he read of them in this newspaper, it would seem to be a very charmed young presidency.

Chronicle-Herald space was cleared recently for an urgent Associated Press dispatch from Washington, headlined "Obamas pick Portuguese water dog." Not original reporting, of course, but an AP rephrasing of a White House-arranged scoop in the Washington Post online.

That was followed by a crack Canadian Press report, drawn from such gumshoe news-gathering as reading the Huffington Post, on the "hillbilly" Republican governor of Alaska: Her "family and political theatrics that would do Jerry Springer proud," like "the arrest and indictment of her sister-in-law on break-and-enter charges" and "the sordid revelations of her daughter’s ex-boyfriend."

The Portuguese water dog and Alaskan "hillbillies" news beats apparently leave little time for anything remotely skeptical of the president of the United States. And they wonder why folks aren't buying the papers like they used to.

So here is a small selection of news on the most powerful man on earth which has been deemed by the gatekeepers to be unfit to print:

Obama spent considerably more on his first major bill alone than was spent on Iraq over six years -- $787 billion on the stimulus vs. $657 billion on Iraq.

Obama abandoned his campaign promise of "a net spending cut," his first full-year budget deficit -- not counting bailouts -- being three times the worst full-year deficit under President Bush.

Obama's objective in his first G-20 summit -- commitments to spending our way to prosperity with massive stimulus boondoggles across the G-20 -- was rejected out of hand.

Obama's objective in his first NATO summit -- commitments to combat troops for Afghanistan from "our European allies," which Obama and his party imagined were ready and willing to fight if only someone "enlightened" like him were running things -- was predictably refused, with some more European non-combat contingents offered as a token.

Obama's Defence Department announced cuts of $1.4 billion to missile defence, the day after North Korea test-fired its long-range, multi-stage ballistic missile.

Obama's economics were criticized by Warren Buffett, whose endorsement had been candidate Obama's highest economics credential.

Obama reversed the free trade Bush policy that had allowed about 100 Mexican tractor-trailers into the United States, which excuse the Mexican government immediately exploited to levy tariffs on 90 American goods amounting to $2.4 billion in U.S. exports.

Obama's "tax cuts for 95 percent" turned out to mean $13 a week from June-December, to be clawed back to $8 a week in January -- as compared with President Bush's 2008 tax rebates of $600-1200 plus $300 per child, which were notably scoffed at during the election campaign by Michelle Obama.

Obama's campaign promise of a $3,000-per-employee tax credit for businesses that hired new workers -- repeated ad nauseam for weeks before the election -- was discreetly retired even before inauguration day.

Obama abandoned his campaign promise that "lobbyists won't work in my White House," waiving his no-lobbyist executive order or conveniently redefining his appointees' past lobbying work to allow 30 lobbyists into his administration.

Obama abandoned his campaign promise to reform earmarks, signing the omnibus bill which contained 8,816 of them.

Obama took more money from AIG than any other politician in 2008 -- over $100,000 -- and signed into law the provision guaranteeing the AIG bonuses which later had him in front of the cameras "shaking with outrage" and siccing the pitchfork crowd on law-abiding citizens who had fulfilled their end of a contract and had their payment upheld by Obama's own legislation.

Why should these points, and many more like them, have to be made by some obscure contributor to The Herald's Opinions section?

Fox News Channel is the butt of jokes and the target of attacks like no other media outlet in the English-speaking world, not least by people who fancy themselves the guardians of a free press. But Fox News is today the lone television news service in the English-speaking world capable of serious skepticism and scrutiny of the sitting president and Congress of the United States.

Fox News is also the second most-watched channel in all American cable television. It long ago became by far the most-watched cable news channel; more Americans watched Fox News than CNN and MSNBC combined in every time slot from 6 AM to midnight in April. Now, while The New York Times is $1.3 billion in debt, Fox has expanded its operations with a business channel and a juggernaut internet presence.

There's a lesson there, though Fox News will be just as well pleased if the impeccably "mainstream" news business remains clueless about it.

The people need a Fourth Estate, not yet another adulator of Barack Obama, yet another smearer of Sarah Palin, yet another patrician editor to keep out anything disagreeable to progressive sensibilities, yet another laptop-and-latte journalism-schooler to spit on everything predating 1968. And they wonder why the news business has come on hard times.

Andrew W. Smith, Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

(The addendum to this post, on Lee-Anne Goodman and the Canadian Press, has been expanded into a fairly lengthy post of its own, here.)

Note: I've been given to understand the "Obamas pick Portuguese water dog" story came from the AP, not the CP, so I've amended the attribution, but the report was unmistakably attributed to the Canadian Press in Washington where I read and saved it, in The Chronicle-Herald online. All I know is what I read in the paper.

Note also that the point above on Obama's spending as compared against spending on Iraq has been amended, for counting too many hundreds of billions against Obama: Obama spent more on his stimulus alone than was spent on Iraq over six years, and I ought to have left it at that; it's quite bad enough.

Canada's war on Red Eye

When Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie, "Canadian Forces chief of land staff", testified to Parliament that the entire Canadian Forces "would need a year-long break from operations after the mission in Afghanistan winds down in 2011," Greg Gutfeld's reaction on Fox News' comedy Red Eye was, "The Canadian military wants to take a breather, to do some yoga, paint landscapes, run on the beach in gorgeous white capri pants."

That's funny stuff. And it's not hard to see the humor in a national military "taking a year off" -- or at least it's not hard if you have any conception of a vigorous national defense. And anyway, it was a one-liner in a one-off cable show at 3 AM Eastern; a secure, confident nation wouldn't take any notice of it.

But in the great Canadian tradition, a silly comedy segment at 3 in the morning on American cable TV became the subject of national outrage, condemnations and demands of apology from the Minister of Defence, front-page newswire stories, editorial cartoons, demands of retaliation, calls for censorship, and general smug, contemptuous America-bashing ("ignorant Americans", etc., etc.) -- the "we are all Canadians in the Age of Obama" having apparently worn off just two months in.

Gutfeld's first question, "Isn't this the perfect time to invade this ridiculous country? They have no army," ought to have been a clue to outraged Canadians that the whole thing was a laugh. But then, Canadian newspaper editorialists actually write earnest editorials accepting as fact that the United States is planning to annex Canadian water supplies, so maybe such an obvious joke was lost on them.

For the record, Red Eye is completely silly -- not serious news or commentary -- and Greg Gutfeld's Red Eye persona on political matters is a caricature of the "Ugly American". IT'S ALL A JOKE.

Gutfeld and most Americans, it is true, do not take Canada seriously as a power in the world or as a country with any national martial vigor. So if that is the Canadian complaint with this 3 AM Eastern cable show, at least it wouldn't be a mischaracterization of Red Eye and American opinion. And when the overwhelming majority of Canadians want to withdraw their couple thousand troops from Afghanistan before the war is won and blithely conclude "we can't win," and when Canada's opinion leaders deliver daily homilies on how Canada must reject such militarism and return to "peacekeeping", and when the Canadian Forces brass says the military needs a year off, and when the national armed forces excises the word "armed" from its very name -- then good luck defending Canada against the charge it's lost any vigorous martial impulse.

But if the issue is the troops themselves, neither Greg Gutfeld nor any American that I've ever heard would think to disparage the great courage and sacrifice of any soldiers fighting alongside their own. The individual Canadian soldiers who have served in Afghanistan are heroes all. They deserve all the honor of the American heroes fighting in the same valorous cause.

Those Canadian soldiers carry their weight and then some, but they are only a handful, and they are in the service of an elite and population that have absolutely no stomach for a fight, so when the chief of land staff of the Canadian Forces is actually reporting to the Canadian Parliament that the military needs a year off, that is a separate issue entirely from the honor of Afghanistan veterans, and eminently worthy of a joke.

To react to a segment on a show like Red Eye with such a national furor is humorless, petty, thin-skinned in the extreme, diminishing of the nation, not to mention clueless about the cause of the offense. It's all a joke, Canadians. Actual, original, politically-incorrect humor; not shrill Democrat Party talking points couched as comedy, like The Daily Show, and not strained-peas comedy for the arthritic set who take up the prime column space for a hero's wage in Canadian newspapers, like The Royal Canadian Air Farce.

The irony is that the reaction has actually affirmed the premise of the joke.

The unbecoming, pathetic, self-defeating Obama cult of personality

I always was an admirer of President Bush, but it never occurred to me to utter a sentiment like, "I pledge to be a servant to our president," as Demi Moore vowed to President Obama; or to glorify the man in idealized portrait posters, like the Soviet-style iconography of Barack Obama; or to appropriate Christ, like the mother of Denzel Washington on the occasion of Obama's inauguration: "He came to lead us to the original design of what we are supposed to do on this earth"; or to chant the leader's name in unison with masses of fellow-travellers, like the crowd on Parliament Hill for Obama's Ottawa visit chanted "O-ba-ma."

A hysterical cult of personality -- formerly a feature of totalitarian societies -- has attended the ascent of Obama. It is unbecoming of a democratic society, it is certainly pathetic, and it may even prove to be self-defeating.

Time was, corporations subscribed to the business sense neatly summed up by basketball player-turned-sportswear mogul, Michael Jordan: "Republicans buy sneakers too." But that was before the "Age of Obama."

Pepsi launched a campaign asking, "What would you say to the man who is about to refresh America?" sponsored one of the inaugural balls, and was on hand for the pre-inaugural festivites with Pepsi paraphenalia reading "Hope" and "Change." Not traditionally what folks have been looking for in a pop company.

CBS amended its famous eye logo to look like the logo of the Obama campaign, in promos for its "Yes We Can Monday" lineup. ShopNBC hawked a "CHANGE HOPE BELIEVE OBAMA" throw blanket, with jumbo jacquard portrait of the dear leader himself, for $47 -- MSRP $49.99.

And BeaverTails Canada Inc. made a household name of itself by adding a Nutella "O" to its signature Beaver Tail and calling it the "Obama Tail."

But the most disgusting specimens of Obama personality cultism have to be the performances in praise of Obama by children. There's the "Obama Kids" with "We're Gonna Change the World": "Obama's gonna change it. Obama's gonna lead 'em." Etc, etc.

And the "Obama Youth - Junior Fraternity Regiment," who performed a martial drill, in fatigues. They marched and chanted, "Alpha, Omega. Alpha, Omega," which typically refers to God. They then recited "Because of Obama" personal statements, and punctuated some choreography and Obama campaign sloganeering with shouts of "Yes We Can!" Finally they recited features of the Obama health-care plan, and closed with a shout of "O!"

Then there's the news. 2008 marked the very fag-end of the long process by which the post-Second World War professionally-impartial press finally became unabashed agents of the Democrat Party.

And nowhere moreso than in this country. The Canadian Press -- with only the most saccharine praise for Obama and only the shrillest scorn for Bush -- became indistinguishable from a wide-eyed Obama volunteer:

"The star who shone the brightest was the man who sang nary a note — Barack Obama, who enthralled a crowd of 500,000 with a brief message of hope."


"A stern and steady Barack Obama addressed the nation" -- "a nation still basking in the glow of his victory." "His professorial remarks about the economy were in striking contrast to the string of malapropisms and nervous chuckles that often characterized many of his predecessor's appearances." "Roosevelt ruled with calm assurance" and "a presidential Obama sounded a similar tone."

After "the dying days of George W. Bush’s wildly unpopular presidency" -- those "eight years of blunders by George W. Bush" and "eight years of unpopular Republican rule" (no explanation as to how a president supposed to be "blundering" and "unpopular" for eight full years managed to get himself re-elected after the first four) -- "the new president took on the formidable task of undoing the damage of his predecessor’s administration." And so on, ad nauseum, in every dispatch of the Obama news service of the Canadian Press.


There are a few Obama supporters who recognize that things have gotten a little out of hand, but they invariably hasten to add that Barack Obama himself has done his gosh-darndest to disabuse his followers of this notion he's a latter-day messiah. If so, he's done an entirely ineffectual job.

And where did all this begin if not with Obama himself? Adopting "Hope" as a campaign slogan. Or thundering down at the rapturous masses, on the subject of his own ascendancy, "I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when ... the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Or claiming a "righteous wind" for his campaign, which surely would never have been received quite so gleefully had it been claimed by a certain other president of the United States.

So, a president has become a celebrity and a fad, and those things have a way of looking very old once they're not quite so new. The press have become the boy who cried wolf, and no-one will believe they're just reporting the facts the next time. And impossible expectations have been raised, and it won't be so easy to plead for patience or ask forgiveness for failings when you've promised the moon and the stars.

Andrew W. Smith, Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia