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‘m just a little shell-shocked here, so bear with me. I just can’t believe that MSNBC - MSNBC! - put together and aired this sympathetic and extremely positive little profile of Sarah Palin - Sarah Palin!!

[Can't load the clip; view it here]

I actually teared up a bit. Of course the hate-mongering maniacs of the Left saw it differently; check out this comment from the LAT’s Top of the Ticket blog item on the clip:

Sarah Palin is shameless, even dragging a young infant around as she campaigns, standing before crowds holding the child as if she were running for the new mother-of-god image, dragging a young daughter out on hockey rink ice in the midst of screaming and booing. While I’m making a leap here, let me tell you a person whose morals permit this behavior is not a person of vice-president caliber, let alone a potential president.

Sigh. Isn’t it weird that the same people that don’t recognize evil in the world can’t recognize the good in it either?

hat-tip: Jim

T

he radical left has found its answer to Rev. Wright’s ranting, anti-American, anti-Jew sermons, the sermons Obama listened to for twenty years, but denies ever hearing. (Did he sleep in the pews or did he lie?)

The morally trashed left lucked out because their video shows Sarah Palin being prayed for, so we know she was there; no question about it. And to the leftists, the prayer of the guest speaker at her former Wasilla Community Church, Kenyan pastor Thomas Muthee, sounds just as threatening as Wright’s sounded to us:

He wants grace and favor for Sarah Palin. He wants God’s presence felt in politics, in education, in government. He wants the 10 Commandments to be taught in school again, rather than Buddhism and Islam. The horror! He wants politicians who love God to be elected to office. The shame! He wants government officials, even presidents and Secretaries of State, to be believers. Secularist apostasy!

And he prays all this in the name of Jesus, as Palin’s pastors have their hands on her shoulders. It’s funky charismatic Christianity on display, ripe for hip, metro ridicule.

Here’s the long version of the prayer with the warm-up and handy subtexts decrying the foulness of it all:

And here’s a shorter version, which starts with the hands-on prayer, after the warm-up. It’s called “Sarah Palin, Thomas Muthee and witchcraft.”

What you’re seeing here may not happen in a Methodist or Episcopalian church every Sunday - heck, it doesn’t happen in most evangelical churches every Sunday. This was a visiting pastor from Kenya, where there is a very robust and charismatic Christianity, a type of Christianity lived by millions of Christians around the world, including our own charismatics, like my very good lifetime friend Peter.  Outside our Eurocentric, refined Christianity, the faith often takes on a more spirited application with prayers against evil spirits - because on the other side there are witch doctors and shamen who work to summon those spirits up.

One would think the rules of political correctness would protect these folks, representative as they are of an older society, more pure and primitive. Think again.

Muthee, at the end of his prayer, prays for protection for Sarah Palin against witchcraft. The actual words are garbled, but it immediately follows a prayer for protection from “the enemy,” Satan, so it is a biblical prayer of protection against those - the radical American Left comes to mind - who would work actively to stymie the work of God, whether it’s done in the name of Satan or enlightened secularism. But it’s that mention of witchcraft that gives the Left it’s hook.

You all remember Mark Morford, author of an entry in this year’s Most Ridiculous Story competition, Is Obama an Enlightened Being? In that story, Morford is very comfortable with tying spirituality to the president … as long as it’s his kind of spirituality.

Barack Obama isn’t really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway.

This is what I find myself offering up more and more in response to the whiners and the frowners and to those with broken or sadly dysfunctional karmic antennae - or no antennae at all - to all those who just don’t understand and maybe even actively recoil against all this chatter about Obama’s aura and feel and MLK/JFK-like vibe.

To them I say, all right, you want to know what it is? The appeal, the pull, the ethereal and magical thing that seems to enthrall millions of people from all over the world, that keeps opening up and firing into new channels of the culture normally completely unaffected by politics?

No, it’s not merely his youthful vigor, or handsomeness, or even inspiring rhetoric. It is not fresh ideas or cool charisma or the fact that a black president will be historic and revolutionary in about a thousand different ways. It is something more. …

Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare.

So it’s OK to have Lightworkers in politics, but it is definitely not OK to have God in politics. That’s Worford’s new beef, as expressed in his column yesterday, Witches Begone! Sarah Palin was de-witched by nutball pastor? What a shame.

Did you see the infamous grainy YouTube video? Did you read the disquieting little sidebar story about Muthee and his now-infamous witch huntin’ treks down to Kenya, like that time he stormed into a village and formed an angry mob to drive out an old woman by the name of “Mama Jane” who was supposedly causing illness and traffic accidents and really crappy Wi-Fi connections at the local Starbucks? Charming.

Have you read, furthermore, about Palin’s adorable Pentecostal church where Muthee preached, where they like to speak in tongues and lick the skins of serpents and watch NASCAR while shooting moose from the backs of animatronic dinosaurs adorned with “Jesus is My Co-Pilot” bumper stickers? (Note: possible slight exaggeration. But not by much.) It’s all sorts of Disney-on-acid fun. [Hey, Morford, just for fun, why do you try to write this kind of demeaning "possible slight exaggeration" about what goes on in your local mosque. C'mon, Morf! I dare you!]

As for Palin, turns out Muthee laid on some hands, delivered a garbled serpents n’ brimstone prayer designed not merely to help her leap from Mayor of Nowheresville to perky gubernatorial fireplug, only to later become, thanks to McCain’s appalling judgment, the most insulting caricature of female empowerment in modern history who, as the VP debate painfully revealed, still knows not a single substantive thing about American domestic or foreign policy, but also to protect her from that same silly/terrifying witchcraft I imagined in my youth.

This is what passes for witticism in San Francisco. Attack religion, unless it’s your hip, New Age religion. Attack any woman who strays from the narrow path of feminist orthodoxy, and do it all in a sneering tone that ridicules all the rest of America.

Morford’s a punk, a little man in a dirty city, easy to dismiss as meaningless. Then there’s Keith Olbermann, who views the video clip and pronounces, “This is starting to sound startling enough to be terrifying.” He also says of Muthee, “He makes Father Flannigan of Boy’s Town look like Jeremiah Wright.” Here’s the clip, which ridicules a lot of standard evangelical beliefs, and which Olbermann tries mightily to make Muthee into a modern-day Salem-creator and spiritual good buddy of Palin:

Mock, mock, mock. Maybe we Christians look silly when we pray against evil. But does Olbermann mock the death penalty foes when they’re praying outside the prison for God to stop the execution? Of course not! Those are his Christians, to be praised. Does he mock the anti-war Christians who pray at the munitions plants and Army induction centers? Of course not; they are above reproach.

But when the same belief in prayer is applied to a Republican, oh my! We see the vile hypocrisy of the American Left in all it’s glory.

By the way, even as Olbermann dresses it up, Muthee’s witch-hunting is hardly the stuff of Salem legend. He offered the spiritualist an out: leave town, or we’ll pray against you. She stayed. They prayed. Then the police - not the church - raided her shop and shot a snake - not her - and she left town.

Let us pray. God, save us from them and all they would do to our country.

Hat-tip: Marshall

T

he NY Times, in its frequent role of blind cheerleader to the left, called MSNBC’s radical swing into the depths of blatantly liberal broadcasting “bold,” and back when he decided to move Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews to MSNBC’s news chairs, MSNBC president Phil Griffin said “I see no problem” arising from his decision.

But the experiment is over, and it’s generating a lot of words this a.m., with a total of well over 50 news articles and blog posts already showing up at memeorandum.

Before this weekend’s shakeup, while he was still In Denver where Olbermann’s on-camera temper tantrums (here, here, here, here - a lot of tantrums!) attracted much attention, Griffin donned the blinders and told Politico:

“MSNBCdoes not have an ideology. We hire smart people who are passionate about their love of politics and love of news.”

He seems to have forgotten that according to one Phil Griffin [familiar name], MSNBC does have a powerful liberal bias. As he told the NYT last year:

Officials at MSNBC emphasize that they never set out to create a liberal version of Fox News.

“It happened naturally,” Phil Griffin, a senior vice president of NBC News who is the executive in charge of MSNBC, said Friday, referring specifically to the channel’s passion and point of view from 7 to 10 p.m. “There isn’t a dogma we’re putting through. There is a ‘Go for it.’” [...]

But now it has no ideology? Is it just dogma? Going for it? Whatever, we now understand that it was “squabbles” that led to the reassignment of Olbermann and Matthews … even though Matthews wasn’t squabbling.

Announcing the shift today, the NYTimes, bless ‘em, never really comes out and says Olbermann and Matthews are lefties, even though it had carried Griffin’s quote a year earlier. But the network’s media bias is as hard to ignore as GOP delegates chanting “NBC! NBC!” when Sarah Palin talked about media bias.

The question of bias, though, becomes moot when one looks at the convention ratings - and convention ratings are the holy grail of network competition. Despite the change - or more likely because of it - MSNBC remained a distant, distant third in cable convention viewership.

While the liberal swing has helped pick MSNBC’s ratings from the gutter to the curb, it is apparent that Griffin had misunderstood Fox’s formula for success. Fox has become adept at letting its guests broaden the debate and gives them plenty of time to be partisan spokespersons for their cause. The anchors perform the function of giving the guests plenty of line, then jerking them in when they’ve gone too far. The most  hardcore conservative of the hosts, Sean Hannity, is balanced by liberal goofball Alan Colmes.

At MSNBC, Olbermann particularly but Matthews too were running and running without with the line without any counterweight until today, when Griffin decided the “bold” experiment had to end.

Ironically, it ended on the day that former Air America host Rachel Maddow is handed an anchor chair by MSNBC. The station is not done being in the tank for Obama, and its effort to carve out a position as a left-wing network isn’t over. Griffin and company have merely decided that until the election is over, ranting Olbermann and leg-tingling Matthews aren’t going anywhere near an anchor chair.

Howard Kurtz has a thorough piece detailing the warfare between Fox News (Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly) and NBC (Jeff Zucker and Keith “Where are my viewers?” Olbermann). It’s nasty stuff, and a fine morning read if you’re interested in the intersection of news and egos.

There’s been a lot going on for a long time in this feud, but the element that’s elevated it to Kurtz-like levels is O’Reilly’s personal accusations against GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt — it’s the stuff of leads:

Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News star, is mounting an extraordinary televised assault on the chief executive of General Electric, calling him a “pinhead” and a “despicable human being” who bears responsibility for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq.

O’Reilly’s point is that GE, owner of NBC, continues to sell goods to Iran through foreign subsidiaries, getting around US restrictions. Iran, for its part, is unequivocally involved in the killing of US military personnel in Iraq.

All good fodder, for sure, but PR guy that I am, I’m just focusing on GE’s statements to Kurtz. Do they exonerate GE, or are they just spin? Here’s their basic line, courtesy of Kurtz:

Under growing criticism from the public and its own shareholders, GE announced in 2005 that it would accept no new business in Iran and would wind down existing contracts, which mostly involved sales of oil, gas and energy and health-care equipment. The remaining work, valued at less than $50 million, amounts to less than .01 percent of GE’s income, and the company says the final four contracts will expire within weeks.

Timeline: For a period of time prior to 2005, GE stockholders were protesting the company’s trade with Iran. 2005: GE announces it will stop doing business with Iran. 2008: GE is still doing business with Iran, albeit at a lower level.

Here’s another timeline. Date this one 1987:

In an effort to further isolate Iran, the Reagan Administration is moving toward more severe restrictions on trade with that country, State Department officials said today.

The impending crackdown was described as a reflection of the heightened tensions between the United States and Iran over the Persian Gulf. (NYT)

This news item wasn’t really news, since Iran was already a State Sponsor of Terrorism. Here’s State’s position:

Countries determined by the Secretary of State to have repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism are designated pursuant to three laws: section 6(j) of the Export Administration Act, section 40 of the Arms Export Control Act, and section 620A of the Foreign Assistance Act. Taken together, the four main categories of sanctions resulting from designation under these authorities include restrictions on U.S. foreign assistance; a ban on defense exports and sales; certain controls over exports of dual use items; and miscellaneous financial and other restrictions.

Designation under the above-referenced authorities also implicates other sanctions laws that penalize persons and countries engaging in certain trade with state sponsors. Currently there are five countries designated under these authorities: Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.

Iran was named a State Sponsor of Terrorism on January 19, 1984 — 21 years before GE shareholders pressured the American company to follow American laws, even in its European operations. GE was clearly aware that its sales to Iran would violate this law if they were made by American operations, so it purposefully did business with Iran through its European operations.

GE’s excuse flunks. We expect American global enterprises to be American first and global second — especially on issues like this.

Now let’s look at how GE deals with the charge that its business practices have led to the deaths of Americans. Here’s Kurtz again:

Last week, in an unrelated segment with CBS’s Kimberly Dozier about being injured in Iraq, O’Reilly used a graphic that combined GE’s logo with a photo of Ahmadinejad. The heading: “Business Partners.”

GE spokesman Gary Sheffer called O’Reilly’s remarks “offensive,” saying: “He has a right to his opinion, and we equally have a right to be appalled by it. We felt he crossed the line. . . . Nothing we supply, or any goods and services we have supplied to Iran, is in any way endangering U.S. troops.”

O’Reilly’s graphic was certainly over the top, as GE’s activities are certainly far below the attention of Mah- I’m in the -moud for peacock Ahmadinejad (rhymes with “I don’t think Jeff Immelt’s a cad”). But is O’Reilly’s message similarly over the top?

Sheffer’s denial is complete. Nothing now, nothing ever, supplied by GE has in any way endangered US troops. Additionally, Immelt had a statement issued last month that said sales of hospital equipment are allowed under a humanitarian program licensed by the U.S. government.

Earlier — in 2005 — Sheffer had this to say about GE sales to Iran:

“Senior management and the board decided in mid-December to discontinue taking new orders because of uncertain conditions relating to Iran.”

“Uncertain conditions” was disingenuous, since the reason for the cut-off was quite a certain condition: Shareholders were rebelling, casting a spotlight on sales GE would just as soon keep quiet.

And what of the non-medical sales? The energy and gas production equipment?

GE can hide behind humanitarianism in their hospital equipment sales (and I’m sure the equipment is sold at a strictly humanitarian price point), but no such cover is provided for energy production equipment. What were our primary targets in our air bombing campaign against Germany in WWII? Military installations, factories and oil refineries and storage facilities.

None of the weapons Iran manufactures for use against us in Iraq can be manufactured without energy. None can be transported to Iraq without energy. And for that reason, Sheffer’s blanket excuse is a moth-eaten heap of holes.

O’Reilly’s on a high horse and he’s using high octane rhetoric, but his position is more defensible than GE’s. Thomas Edison probably isn’t rolling over in is grave since he was a pretty unscrupulous businessman himself — and that just might be the problem with GE.

hat-tip: memeorandum

You’re a smart cookie; you’ll figure out what massive message gaffe Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) has made even before MSNBC reporter Dan Abrams points it out.

C’mon, Jack, this is Messaging for Dummies, here. If you’re going to say someone’s got bad breath, you’d better use Listerine before opening your yap.

But before we pile too much on Kingston, be sure not to miss Abrams’ great profession of patriotism when Kingston presses him on his own lapel flag-wearing habits:

I’ve worn one I think once in my life … for something.

Maybe for a few minutes after the 9/11 attacks, Dan, before America got safe again?

Hat-tip: TPM via the Token Dem

God protect us from idiot journalists …

… a big job, even for God.

In this MSNBC clip, David Schuster interrupts lib commentator Bill Press, who is talking about Chelsea Clinton’s campaigning, and says:

But doesn’t it seem like Chelsea is being pimped out in some kind of way?

Since when do the public airwaves deserve speech like this? Can’t Schuster say what’s on his mind — that the Clintons are exploiting their daughter — without bringing whoring into it?

Schuster subsequently apologized, in that smarmy, limited, disgusting new style of apology that’s becoming the national norm:

Some people have taken it literally. To the extent people feel I was being pejorative, I apologize for that.

What would be so hard about saying, “I’m sorry I used that word. It wasn’t appropriate, it was pejorative, and I apologize to Chelsea Clinton, the Clinton campaign and our viewers.” That’s an apology that’s worth uttering; Schuster’s actually makes matters worse.

That said, the Clinton campaign apparently is using Chelsea in unseemly ways — as Schuster explains before getting to his apology. He states that the Clinton’s are using her to call super-delegates, “the unseemly side of politics.”

And indeed it is. Words fail me … Exploitative? Manipulative? Unconscionable? Clintonesque? Yes, that’s it.

By happy coincidence, my Demotivator Calendar from Despair.com just happens to have as its February theme exactly the image and phrase that captures the Clintons:

As it says, it’s best to avoid standing directly between a competitive jerk and his goals … be the jerk a campaigning Clinton or a self-aggrandizing cable news reporter.

The secret’s out. MSNBC, we are told by its executives in a NYT article today, never sat around a conference room table with a dogma chip on their shoulders and decided it would be great to attack Bush and Cheney long enough and hard enough so that their lackluster techie news cable network would become America’s liberal TV network.

Officials at MSNBC emphasize that they never set out to create a liberal version of Fox News.

“It happened naturally,” Phil Griffin, a senior vice president of NBC News who is the executive in charge of MSNBC, said Friday, referring specifically to the channel’s passion and point of view from 7 to 10 p.m. “There isn’t a dogma we’re putting through. There is a ‘Go for it.’”

As well-spun as that sounds, there’s a modicum of truth to it, especially when you consider that Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham and John Gibson were all early MSNBC on-air newsfolk.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Clinton’s impeachment, as MSNBC suddenly began seeing surging viewership on a show hosted by an angry leftist by the name of Keith Olbermann. They liked the dough, and now it looks like the networks sole holdout against flaming liberalism, Tucker Carlson, is about to be shunted aside to make room for 9/11 nut and angry lesbian Rosie O’Donnell.

Giving O’Donnell airtime is a much more whacky proposition than putting Olbermann in front of a camera. He’s just a run of the mill, well vocalized lib. She’s a certifiable paranoid crazy.

So the co-owners of the network, GE and Microsoft, appear content that the child they birthed to appeal to geeks at the dawn of the Internet age has grown up to be a haven for rants against America and American values. That’s not exactly a conventional marketing scheme.

Should we buy Whirlpool instead of GE? Should we shun Windows and Vista (as if that’s possible, Apple fans notwithstanding)?

I say no, with one condition: If its owners talk as frankly about the network as the network’s hosts do. Here’s the not too cryptic Olbermann:

“If you go into a burger place, and you go in there for the fish, you might want the fish occasionally but it’s probably a mistake,” he said. “Could you be utterly different politically and succeed in this format? You’d basically be throwing your audience away.”

Burgers apparently being the food of the left and fish the food of the right. No MSNBC execs would talk for attribution to the Times about the network’s leftist leanings. Let them admit it openly, let the corporate owners say they’re pursuing the money that comes in from left field, and I’m ok with it.

If they pretend that they’re just another fair and balanced news outlet (get the hint, Fox?) then I’d be concerned about giving my money to corporate liars.

If you thought Keith Olbermann was particularly nasty in MSNBC’s analysis of Prez Bush’s Iraq speech last week … Oh, wait. No sane person was watching MSNBC. What am I thinking? … this may have been the reason:

MSNBC’s rising prime-time [?!] star Keith Olbermann was still hospitalized Monday after undergoing an emergency appendectomy Friday.

Mr. Olbermann’s appendix apparently ruptured Wednesday, but he wrote it off as a stomach ailment and soldiered on. Though still feeling ill, he nonetheless reported for work Thursday night, when he anchored MSNBC’s analysis of President Bush’s prime-time address on the war in Iraq.

It wasn’t until Friday afternoon that he decided it was time to seek medical attention, according to an MSNBC spokeswoman. …

Mr. Olbermann’s medical emergency benched him from NBC’s “Football Night in America” Sunday, but it’s hoped [by whom, pray tell?] he may be able to return to “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” some time this week. (TV Week)

Actually, astonishingly, MSNBC came in second to Fox on cable coverage of the event, topping CNN at least in the 25-54 age group. So the next time you hear a Lefty rag on and on about Fox, just mention to him/her that MSNBC does a great job of filling the biased-left slot on the cable bandwidth.