Joe Klein Desperate to Change Debate From Obama’s Foreign Policy Failures

-By Warner Todd Huston

As our embassies burn and our foreign officers are being murdered overseas, TIME Magazine’s Joe Klein is desperate to change the current narrative of Obama’s major failures in the Middle East. So, in his latest piece, Klein wants to go back to talking about Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts healthcare policies.

Who can blame Klein for trying this? After all, from the Obama-loving media’s perspective talking about Mitt Romney’s garbled healthcare positions is a better plan than talking about Obama telling Egypt they aren’t our ally, Obama skipping all his intelligence briefings so he can go golfing and attend fundraisers, and his administration’s utter failure to detect the coordinated attacks that were perpetrated against our embassies and foreign service personnel in the Middle East on Sept. 11 and 12.

But what makes Klein’s “The Mitt Mirage” so laughable is his blindly partisan assertions that the Democrat national convention was “extremely successful.” This is a silly claim that even many of his own compadres in the Old Media establishment can’t force themselves to say.
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Joe Klein Desperate to Change Debate From Obama’s Foreign Policy Failures”


Fareed Zakaria Explains Himself

-By Warner Todd Huston

Now that his plagiarism tribulations are over, TIME and CNN correspondent Fareed Zakaria has made a few new promises in order to prevent such a mess in the future, the chief of which is he’ll scale back some of his workload.

One of the accusations that was made against Zakaria was that he must have been employing interns to actually write his vast volume of works. It was said that Zakaria must have merely affixed his name to the work of underlings and published them as his own. He must have a ghostwriter and this was the main cause of the plagiarism. But Zakaria refutes that charge.

Zakaria says that he has never had an assistant write a column in 25 years and he’d only begun using a research assistant in the last year. No, the original plagiarism — that of lifting a whole segment of Jill Lepore’s work from an April issue of The New Yorker — was, indeed, his own mistake.

The mistake, he said, occurred when he confused the notes he had taken about Ms. Lepore’s article — he said he often writes his research in longhand — with notes taken from “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America,” by Adam Winkler (W.W. Norton, 2011), a copy of which was on his desk at his CNN office.

To prevent such “confusion” in the future, Zakaria promises to reduce his arduous schedule a bit, saying: “Other things will have to go away. There’s got to be some stripping down.”
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Fareed Zakaria Explains Himself”


Zak is Back! TIME & CNN Reinstate Fareed Zakaria

-By Warner Todd Huston

Both TIME magazine and CNN have finished their internal review of Fareed Zakaria and have come to the conclusion that his plagiarism was an “isolated incident.” Hence, the Zak is back!

TIME announced that Zakaria’s obvious — and admitted — plagiarism was an “isolated incident” and that Zakaria did not mean to do the deed. It was an “unintentional error,” magazine execs decided.

“We look forward to having Fareed’s thoughtful and important voice back in the magazine with his next column in the issue that comes out on September 7,” Time said in a statement.

As for CNN, the news cabler concluded that they saw nothing that “merited continuing” Zakaria’s suspension.

“Zakaria has apologized for a journalistic lapse. CNN and Zakaria will work together to strengthen further the procedures for his show and blog,” CNN said. It said Zakaria’s public affairs program “GPS” will return on August 26.

So, all has been forgiven. Fareed Zakaria has escaped any prolonged or permanent damage to his career, unless you think plagiarism is a hanging offense unlikeTIME and CNN do.
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Zak is Back! TIME & CNN Reinstate Fareed Zakaria”


Raging Debate: Fareed Zakaria Is Innocent of Plagiaism… Or IS He?

-By Warner Todd Huston

Last week, CNN and TIME Magazine correspondent Fareed Zakaria got in hot water for plagiarism by lifting a few paragraphs from another writer for one of his articles. Now the debate rages aout whether Zakaria is guilty or not despite his admission of guilt in the original instance (he officially apologized for the theft).

A second charge of plagiarism has been lodged against Zakaria this week, a charge that has tongues wagging and the pro-Zaks coming out in full force to defend their man.

Zakaria himself complained to the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi that it has become open season on one Fareed Zakaria. “People are piling on with every grudge or vendetta. The charge is totally bogus,” he said.
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Raging Debate: Fareed Zakaria Is Innocent of Plagiaism… Or IS He?”


So, What DOES It Take to Get Fired By CNN, Fareed Zakaria?

-By Warner Todd Huston

Just before Mitt Romney’s pick of Wisc. Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate, CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria got himself in a spot o’ trouble when it was discovered that he had plagiarized a piece he wrote for TIME magazine. He also posted the same plagiarism at CNN.

As Friday wore on, CNN and TIME both went from “no comment” to suspending Zakaria, a journalist praised for his perspective on foreign policy. But why was he not fired outright? What does it take to get fired in the lefty media?

In any case, as we await Zakaria’s final journalistic fate this is a good time to remind readers of just how far left Zakaria is. As a journalist he’s always been a reliable left-winger and he is most especially known for his anti-Jewish sentiment.

Here are just a few examples of his bias:
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So, What DOES It Take to Get Fired By CNN, Fareed Zakaria?”


Even TIME Says Mayors Emanuel and Menino Wronging Chick-Fil-A

-By Warner Todd Huston

It’s a “First Amendment buzzsaw,” that the mayors of Chicago and Boston have walked into over misuse of their powers in denying Chick-Fil-A the right to open and operate their fast food stores in the two cities. This is from TIME, yet. And if even TIME realizes that the Democrats are misusing their powers, well, let’s just say it’s a major violation of Chick-Fil-A’s free speech plain and simple.

For TIME, Michael Scherer goes over the whole series of events that led up to the two mayors — Rahm Emanuel of Chicago and Thomas Menino of Boston — imagining they have the power to deny Chick-Fil-A a right to operate merely because committed Christians run the company. Scherer’s analysis is that this mistaken belief in their powers puts the mayors in “tricky legal waters.”
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Even TIME Says Mayors Emanuel and Menino Wronging Chick-Fil-A”


Time Blames Obama AND The Media for Ground Zero Mosque Flip Flop

-By Warner Todd Huston

Writing for Time Magazine, Michael Scherer has one of the most schizophrenic pieces of political analysis I’ve seen for quite a while. In his piece, Scherer can’t quite seem to figure out exactly whom he thinks is to blame for Obama’s failed message on the Ground Zero mosque. Is it Obama’s fault for poor messaging? Or is it the media’s fault for having the temerity to ask the president a question? Scherer whipsaws from one to the other, but a closer examination cannot help but put all blame squarely on the president.

Firstly, Scherer seems to congratulate the president on the timing “perfectly scripted from a communications perspective” of his original GZ mosque message. It was released on Friday evening, that “weekly news cycle’s black hole,” when many news organizations might either miss the thing, or not continue the story on Monday when the workweek begins anew.

This congratulations, though, is a hollow accolade. The fact is, as event Scherer points out, Obama tried his best to hide his position on the mosque by attempting to put the news out when he felt no one was looking. This attempt at misdirection is hardly something for which to congratulate the president.
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Time Blames Obama AND The Media for Ground Zero Mosque Flip Flop”


Top Ten most Left-Biased American Journalists – #2: Joe Klein, Time Magazine

-By Warner Todd Huston

Second place looms large and it is quite an honorable — or maybe onerous — award on our top ten most left-biased working American journalists list. Amusingly our number two guy even graduated from a school that foretold his future work. From the bowels of New York’s exclusive Hackley School comes our number two most left-biased journo, Time Magazine’s Joe Klein.

Klein is another one of those far left writers that imagines himself to be unconventional in his politics when the truth is he is a left-winger all the way down the line without a scoshe of non-conventional thinking.

For instance, in his book ,The Natural, of his politics Klein wrote, “… the conventions of journalism prevent me from fitting too neatly into one political niche (although as a columnist for the New Yorker and Newsweek my predilections are obvious).” Far from not “fitting too neatly” into the left’s “niche” that niche fits him like a glove. For the better part of thirty years, Klein has been revealing his ill-fitting niche to the reading public and we couldn’t be more grateful for his niche-like, nichieness.
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Top Ten most Left-Biased American Journalists – #2: Joe Klein, Time Magazine


Time Magazine: Hummer, Model T Some of ‘Worst Cars of All Time’

-By Warner Todd Huston

When you are asked what is the “worst car of all time,” what first runs through your head? The Le Car, the Corvair, maybe the Edsel? Cars that had horrible sales records, bad safety or engineering records or were just all around failures? Aren’t these the sort of cars that first runs through your head? Doesn’t worst equal failure or unsafe?

Well apparently a common, sensible thought like that doesn’t run through the heads of the folks at Time Magazine when arranging the list of the “50 Worst Cars of All Time.” Time has its own special criteria to determine what a “worst” car is and it isn’t just sales or safety records like one would expect.

Oh, Time did have the Edsel, the Corvair, and the AMC Pacer on its list. Certainly failed vehicles, for sure. Time even had an amusing vehicle invention from 1899 where a fake horses head was attached to the front of an auto so as not to scare the other horses on the road. Fail, big time.

But there was one aspect that Time included in its criteria for determining what was a “worst car” that wouldn’t occur to a sensible person. Oddly, it seems that modern, leftist politics was one of Time’s rules of thumb. That’s right, Time decided that its own leftist politics was a proper reason to proclaim that a car belongs in the “worst” category.
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Time Magazine: Hummer, Model T Some of ‘Worst Cars of All Time’”


My First Piece at BigJournalism.com is Up!

-By Warner Todd Huston

I didn’t want to make any announcements ahead of time… you know, just in case they ultimately decided I wasn’t going to really become part of the team… but about a month ago I was contacted by Andrew Breitbart’s newest web venture BigJournalism.com to become one of their contributors.

Well, late last night they published my first offering: Time Magazine: Conflating Big Spending With ‘Moderate’

BigJournalism.com is starting of pretty strong and I expect it to become just as popular as his other main site BigGovernment.com, to which I have also contributed a half dozen or so pieces.

Mr. Breitbart has quite an empire on the web. I hope his work lasts or a long, long time.

I also included the new piece here on Publius to add to my own archive. See it below.


Time: Conflating Big Spending With ‘Moderate’

-By Warner Todd Huston

One of the tricks that the Old Media consistently uses to paint conservatives as walking on the dark side is to call Republicans who lean left “moderates,” while those who lean to the right are “right wing” or “hardcore” Republicans. This media-speak reserves the harsher words for conservatives and makes anyone on the right seem like an extremist, yet paints the center-left as being on the side of the angels.

It’s a subtle flavoring of rhetoric that leads the reader to a prearranged conclusion as opposed to a reporting of the facts. A recent Time Magazine article by Tim Padgett on the Republican primary Senate campaign between Florida’s Charlie Crist and former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio is a perfect example of this.

To Time the primary fight between Rubio and Crist is apparently one of light versus dark, the evil extremist “right wing” siding with Rubio against the nice, “inclusive” moderates supporting Crist. But with this characterization, Time is misrepresenting the political battle between Rubio and Crist. Unfortunately for Time’s agenda, the argument in Florida between Rubio and Crist has little to do with moderates, inclusion, or big tent politics but has everything to do with economics. Rubio is a fiscal conservative while Crist, the incumbent governor, has been a profligate spender.
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Time: Conflating Big Spending With ‘Moderate’”


Time Blames Calif. Budget Mess on… Low Taxes?

-By Warner Todd Huston

For Time Magazine, Kevin O’Leary has decided that he’s figured out why California is in such a budget mess. Is it because the state indulges over generous social programs, or always has some of the highest taxes in the nation, or because the denizens of its capitol in Sacramento are paragons of waste, fraud and theft? Nope. It’s because California has Proposition 13, a measure that prevents state government from too easily raising taxes. Yep, O’Leary thinks California is in a mess because it doesn’t have high enough taxes. And it’s all Reagan’s fault.

With some of the highest taxes in America, California is a hard place to make a living. According to the Tax Foundation, on average it takes a citizen 110 working days to earn enough money to pay his yearly tax bill. That is the fourth worst in the country. California consistently ranks in or near the top 10 worst states for its tax burdens from property taxes, to corporate taxes, to individual taxes and fees of all sorts. So, how can O’Leary imagine that taxes aren’t high enough in California?

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Time Blames Calif. Budget Mess on… Low Taxes?”


Time Tries to Turn Obama Into Cute, Cuddly Muppet

-By Warner Todd Huston

You want a blatant example of the Old Media’s over-the-top, gobsmacked love affair with Obama? Well, one would be hard pressed not to see Time Magazine’s latest piece by Nancy Gibbs as a perfect example of the media ignoring all ills and of projecting only what is wonderful onto the dearly beloved as this piece represents. The lionization of Obama is bad enough, but the selective memory of the writer is even more appalling.

Writer Gibbs begins her column trying to “place” Barack Obama in a “cultural map.” Most famous people are remembered for a certain place that formed their inner core, of course, and Gibbs tries to pinpoint that place for several presidents including Obama. She pegs Ronald Reagan to Hollywood, Clinton to Hot Springs and W. to Texas. But where does she place Obama?

But first, the other presidents are “placed” and Gibbs says that is fairly easy to do.

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Time Tries to Turn Obama Into Cute, Cuddly Muppet”


Time’s Joe Klein Says People in Wheelchairs Can’t ‘See’ the World?

-By Warner Todd Huston

On May 20, Politico had an interesting little treatment of columnist Charles Krauthammer crowning him as the most important conservative columnist of the day. A brief overview of his life and his emergence as the most reliable voice against Obamaism served as the main subject for the piece, but a few quotes on Mr. Krauthammer made by other columnists added a sense of how respected Krauthammer is to scribe Ben Smith’s piece. All the quotes were complimentary but shockingly, in one of those quotes, lefty Time columnist Joe Klein seemed to hint that a person in a wheelchair was incapable of really understanding enough of the world to make for a worthy columnist.

For those unaware, Charles Krauthammer has been confined to a wheelchair for several decades after he was injured in a swimming accident as a young man.

Can you imagine? In this day and age, saying that a person in a wheelchair is incapable of really understanding the world because they can’t easily get out there themselves because of their disability? And, how does a lefty columnist get away with saying this? Will no one scold Klein for his conceit that because he has two working legs that this fact somehow automatically makes him better qualified to opine as a columnist than a wheelchair bound Krauthammer?

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Time’s Joe Klein Says People in Wheelchairs Can’t ‘See’ the World?”


Time Gets Taken By Fake McCain Adviser Unmasked Months Ago

-By Warner Todd Huston

Recently I have been messing around with Twitter, the social media site of the day (shameless plug: see me as warnerthuston on Twitter). So, checking out some of the Old Media to see what they were saying about Twitter, I ran across Time Magazine’s attempt to seem cool with the Twitterers, er Twitterists, er Twits, er whatever they are called. Time was following some “Tweets From a Washington Dinner” and I found something amusing there. Time, you see, added the Tweet from a guy claiming to be a John McCain adviser that was outed as a fraud months ago; Martin Eisenstadt.

You will recall that this fake Martin Eisenstadt was the same nonexistent fellow that fooled the media for weeks into thinking he was part of the McCain campaign for president. This Martin Eisenstadt even pretended to be a “Senior Fellow of the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy.” But it was finally revealed that this Martin Eisenstadt was really a liberal named Eitan Gorlin. But it didn’t come to light before he was quoted by several Old Media news outlets as a legitimate McCain adviser.

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Time Gets Taken By Fake McCain Adviser Unmasked Months Ago”

Time Takes Swipe at Joe The Plumber (Now Joe The Reporter)

-By Warner Todd Huston

Time magazine got a twofer on a recent screed headlined “Is Israel Losing the Media War in Gaza?.” Not only did Time use its article to take a few swipes at Samuel Joe Wurzelbacher (known as Joe the Plumber) but it also took the opportunity to once again blame the Jews for everything going on in Gaza.

Naturally, Time’s description of Joe the Plumber was more a cut at him than an accurate picture. Not only that, but Time seemed to have somehow forgotten that Barack Obama made Joe famous, not John McCain!

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Does Time Mag Think Politics is Unnatural?

-By Warner Todd Huston

Apparently, Time Magazine doesn’t think that politics is a proper subject for social-networking sites such as FaceBook. In fact, one almost gets the feeling that Time thinks the Internet would be wholly free of passion and even vitriol were it not for politics making its evil presence known in cyberspace. And whose fault is all this vitriol? Why it’s the Jews, of course.

At the very least, Time is seen lamenting that politics has become such a lively part of the World Wide Web. In a recent article titled “Facebook Users Go to War over Gaza,” Time seems to say that social networking sites on the Internet were free of vitriol until politics and the war in Gaza came around.

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Time’s Halperin Scolds Press for ‘Extreme Pro-Obama Bias’

-By Warner Todd Huston

The Politico reported on November 22 that Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin scolded the media for it’s sycophantic treatment of Barack Obama during this election cycle calling the favorable treatment “the most disgusting failure” of the press he’s seen for years. “It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage,” Halperin said at a Politico/USC conference held on Friday.

It’s all pretty amusing, though, to see Mark Helprin complain that his fellow journalists didn’t do a good job reporting on Obama’s record because back in March, NewsBusters reported on how Halperin himself was claiming that Obama represented a “centrist” politician despite the fact that Obama has the most liberal voting record in the Senate! What happened to being tough on The One then?

Halperin cited two specific instances of pro-Obama media bias seen in The New York Times.

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