By Liz Blaine

While lurking the web I ran across a set of videos that fall into the “must view” category for conservatives this year. Recorded during Conservative New Media’s workshop the videos focus on tactics used by leftists and astroturfers during the 2008 primaries and election, and methods to defeat them.

The first 8 minutes of Part 1 provide historical background, but picking up thereafter you’ll find practical information on tactics taken straight out the Left’s playbook ranging from pulling down videos and astroturfing protests to death threats. If you’re interested in defeating the leftists on the net and at the polls then these videos are for you.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Exhausted after a full day of kayak fishing in the waters off Green Island in the Lower Laguna Madre, I plopped down on the floor and crossed my legs under the coffee table  in front of the TV.  I stared at the laptop for a moment, then opened it and pressed the “On” button.  Roused from hibernation, the laptop displayed what I had last seen – a reminder to watch “The People Speak” on The History Channel.

Ugh.

I had done a little research weeks ago on Howard Zinn and his pseudocumentary, so my expectations were rather low.  Still, tired though I was, I felt compelled to watch.

I was able to endure fifteen minutes.

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by Matthew Vadum

There’s something about Mao: the Obama administration just can’t get enough of its favorite mass murderer! It’s Mao mania at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue!

Glenn Beck revealed on his radio show today that President Obama’s car czar Ron Bloom is the second White House official in recent days to have been discovered to have a crush on Chairman Mao.

Beck played a clip of Bloom in which he said the following:

Generally speaking we get the joke. We know that the free market is nonsense. We know that the whole point is to game the system, to beat the market, or at least find someone who will pay you a lot of money because they’re convinced that there is a free lunch. We know this is largely about power, that it’s an adults only, no limit game. We kind of agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun. And we get it that if you want a friend, you should get a dog.

Here’s the video footage of Bloom’s statement:

It is unclear from Bloom’s statement if he idolizes Mao as his White House colleague Anita Dunn does, but obviously Mao is someone he respects enough to quote in a speech.

Dunn, who is President Obama’s White House communications director, backed away from her previous praise of Mao by claiming she was only joking when she called him “one of the two people that I turn to most.”

What is it with these people? Can’t they quote someone other than the Chinese Hitler?

by Matthew Vadum

Standup comedian Anita Dunn, who doubles as President Obama’s White House communications director, now claims she was only joking when praised Mao Zedong by calling him “one of the two people that I turn to most,” Glenn Beck revealed on his TV show today.

Hilarious! There have to be 70 million murdered Chinese rolling in the aisles! What a knee-slapper.

Beck revealed last week that Dunn idolizes Mao, the brutal Communist dictator of China responsible for the slaughter of tens of millions of innocent victims.

To recap, in a video from June, Dunn told high schoolers:

A lot of you have a great deal of ability. A lot of you work hard. Put them together and that answers the “why not” question. There is usually not a good reason. And then the third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers: Mao Zedong and Mother Teresa, not often coupled together, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is, you’re going to make choices. You’re going to challenge. You’re going to say why not. You’re going to figure out how to do things that have never been done before. But here’s the deal — these are your choices. They are no one else’s. In 1947, when Mao Zedong was being challenged within his own party on his plan to basically take China over, Chiang Kai Shek and the nationalist Chinese held the cities that had the army. They had the airport. They had everything on their side, and people said, “How can you win? How can you do this? How can you do this, against all the odds against you?” And Mao Zedong said, “You know, you fight your war, and I’ll fight mine.” And think about that for a second. You don’t have to accept the definition of how to do things, and you don’t have to follow other people’s choices and paths, OK? It is about your choices and your path. You fight your own war. You lay out your own path. You figure out what’s right for you. You don’t let external definitions define how good you are internally. You fight your war. You let them fight theirs. Everybody has their own path. And Mother Teresa, who, upon receiving a letter from a fairly affluent young person who asked her whether she could come over and help with that orphanage in Calcutta, responded very simply, “Go find your own Calcutta.” OK? Go find your own Calcutta. Fight your own path. Go find the thing that is unique to you. The challenge that is actually yours, not somebody else’s challenge. One of the things that we see the Obamas, both of them, Michelle and Barack, came out of backgrounds as community organizers, working.

If Dunn’s message was about the importance of perseverance and refusing to give up, she could easily have quoted a non-controversial figure such as Winston Churchill, Dale Carnegie, Franklin D. Roosevelt, or Thomas Edison, but she chose Mao, a homicidal maniac.

Remember that: she chose Mao as an example of someone whose ideas she elevates and exults.

But now Dunn says, “The use of the phrase ‘favorite political philosophers’ was intended as irony, but clearly the effort fell flat.”

Having studied English, this doesn’t quite make sense to me.

The following explanation roughly captures what I learned about irony in college:

The essential feature of irony is the indirect presentation of a contradiction between an action or expression and the context in which it occurs. In the figure of speech, emphasis is placed on the opposition between the literal and intended meaning of a statement; one thing is said and its opposite implied, as in the comment, “Beautiful weather, isn’t it?” made when it is raining or nasty. Ironic literature exploits, in addition to the rhetorical figure, such devices as character development, situation, and plot to stress the paradoxical nature of reality or the contrast between an ideal and actual condition, set of circumstances, etc., frequently in such a way as to stress the absurdity present in the contradiction between substance and form.

I didn’t pick up any irony in her comments, did you? And if she was being ironic as to her “favorite political philosophers,” the irony would also extend to Mother Teresa. She didn’t say anything about distancing herself from Mother Teresa, so this retroactive pronouncement of irony by Dunn is quite selective, isn’t it?

A parent of a high school student present in the audience at the speech by Dunn (who has been asked by the White House to lead the Obama administration’s war against Fox News) also didn’t think the supposed joke was funny. “There was no irony, no sense of humor,” he said. “Mao would have preferred to silence the opposition by a bullet to the head.”

If Dunn is a practitioner of irony, she should have her license revoked.

(The Obama as Mao poster graphic above is by Matt Holzmann. Videos will be added later tonight when they become available.)

by kathyshaidle

Good to know Attorney General Eric Holder has his priorities straight.

Last night, Sean Hannity of FOX News reported that a lengthy ethics investigation of former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson has been suddenly called off. Hannity cited an “anonymous source” who told reporters that the investigation “was killed in Washington.”

(Richardson, whom Hannity described as “a close ally of the Obama administration,” was up for the choice post of Commerce Secretary, until a federal grand jury began an investigation into a state contract awarded to one of Richardson’s major political donors.)

Instead, Holder has decided to focus his investigative powers elsewhere. As Joseph Klein wrote here August 25, Holder has appointed a “prosecutor to investigate alleged CIA interrogation abuses during the Bush administration. It is arguably one of the worst decisions to date of an already disastrous Obama administration. It chills effective intelligence-gathering as long as interrogators have to worry that everything they say and do may end up being used against them in a criminal trial.”

I feel safer already, don’t you?