ROSCOE’S Weak-end Review

Plame: Outrageous media hypocrisy

Did you hear about Hardball’s Chris Matthews being confronted over his sudden attack of shyness in the Valerie Plame story? His only defense was that the story has suddenly become “too complicated.” Yeah, now that the story no longer makes Karl Rove and others in the Bush administration look bad. Now it’s a non-story.

What hypocrisy—especially since the mainstream mediocracy couldn’t get enough of this lame story before. It’s probably too much to expect an outright apology from the mainstream mediocracy Bush bashers, but you’d think they could at least follow up their own hysterical inaccuracies and rush to judgment with the truth, now that it’s come out. But no-o-o-o. And Matthews is not the only culprit.

Matthew Sheffield managed to corner Matthews at a party and put him on the spot. As Sheffield observed:

Since the revelation that Richard Armitage, a former high-ranking official in the State Department, was the source of the much-ballyhooed Valerie Plame "leak," many in the media have refused to touch the story with a ten-foot pole. This was quite a turnaround since before the Armitage involvement was known, many journalists believed the CIA leak story was one worth pursuing on a daily basis. Some even believed it could bring down the Bush White House, or at least end the careers of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney.

You can read Sheffield’s account of his delightful needling of Matthews at News Busters. But there needs to be one heck of a lot more of this. Our side is just too darned nice. Imagine if the shoe had been on the other foot. Or imagine if Sandy “What National Security Documents in My Pants?” Burglar had been a Bush operative rather than a Clintonista. We’d still be hearing the media wails about it instead of the cricket chirping we have now.

Some of that is our fault: We let them get away with it. We need to quit doing that.



America-hating as mental illness

We gave our Canadian cousins a piece of our mind (that we could ill afford to lose) here yesterday over their knee-jerk anti-Americanism. Then today we find one of their own rebuking her fellow countrymen over the same thing. In “The Sickness of Anti-Americanism” at FrontPageMag, Jamie Glazov takes strong exception to a Canadian bloke named Mark Kingwell and his America-bashing.

One small sampling of her withering chide, which places America-bashing in a larger historical context:

This psychic illness is founded on Canada’s desperate desire to be “different” than the Americans -- a result of Canada being built on the “counter-revolution.” When the British colonies revolted against their masters in 1776, Canadians became the first anti-Americans. Canada is based on anti-Americanism. Without anti-Americanism -- as one author has quipped -- Canada would cease to exist.

While Kingwell conspicuously avoids the issue of how bearing the mark of “moral courage” translated into many Canadian nationalists engaging in Gulag denial during the Cold War, the historical record stands firmly in place: the Soviet regime was an expansionist and totalitarian regime that exterminated millions of its own people. Consequently, as the de-classified documents from the Soviet archives now prove, the Canadian nationalists who demonized the United States, and exonerated the Soviet Union, in the Cold War, for the sake of anti-Americanism, were completely wrong.

So there!