Cocky, Condescending Journalists Declared ObamaCare Would Be Upheld, Maybe by a 8-1 Vote
[Newsbusters.org]
By Scott Whitlock | June 27, 2012 | 22:48
Although no one knows how the Supreme Court will rule, Thursday, on ObamaCare, journalists over the past few months have dismissed and derided the concept that the President’s signature legislation could be declared unconstitutional. CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin predicted an eight-to-one vote upholding the law. Former New York Times Court reporter Linda Greenhouse said that Americans who think the law is unconstitutional are “wrong.”
Appearing on the March 23 Situation Room, Toobin hyped, “I actually think that Chief Justice Roberts and perhaps even Justice Scalia and Justice Alito might join Justice Kennedy in upholding the law.” He added, “In striking this law down, it would really be a big change in constitutional law, and I’m not sure this court is ready to do it.”
On March 19, Toobin appeared on Starting Point and rejected the anti-ObamaCare argument as “weak”:
ANCHOR SOLEDAD O’BRIEN: So the bottom line is, is making people buy health insurance a legitimate use of the power of Congress?
JEFFREY TOOBIN: Correct, and the challengers in these laws have said, ‘No, this is not something Congress can do.’ What I wrote in The New Yorker this week, what I think is that basically that is a really weak argument, in that the United States Congress has been regulating health care for years, has been involved in this market for years, and this is a perfectly ordinary use of Congress’s power.
(Once he heard oral arguments, Toobin reversed himself. The journalist declared the Obama position a “train wreck” and suggested it would be shot down.)
Soledad O’Brien critic of Joel Pollak’s criticism of Derrick Bell’s Critical Race Theory
[RedState.com]
Friday, March 9th at 5:00PM EST
Background: Soledad O’Brien managed to look like an utter idiot on CNN on Thursday when Breitbart.com’s Joel Pollak casually eviscerated her over the concept of critical race theory (CRT).
(pause)
OK, deeper background: CRT is more or less identity politics run through an academic gobbledygook filter; some of its adherents have made some somewhat… incautious comments about white supremacy and the sham nature of the American civil rights movement. This all matters because Breitbart.com’s got footage of Barack Obama as a college student introducing Derrick Bell (H/T: Ann Althouse) – a man who once argued that American whites would happily sell American blacks to space aliens if offered enough in exchange*. Admittedly, we all do stupid things in college – and if the media had brought up Obama’s collegiate antics in 2008 (or 2004) it’s fair to say that it only might have caused, to use a term from my kids’ favorite show, ‘confusion and delay’ for the Obama campaign. Neither of those should have been a consideration for the media when it came to doing their jobs – but, hey, we all know that these people think that ‘doing their jobs’ means ‘keeping conservatives out of office.’
At any rate: O’Brien got humiliated, a bit (one rumor is that she was fed the answer, but I suspect that Breitbart.com is right and O’Brien’s just a fan of Bell’s)- and then people started mucking about with the Wikipedia entry on CRT, apparently to make its definition match O’Brien’s. An examination of the entry’s Talk page indicates that there was what those folks calls an ‘edit war’… and the fact that there’s specialized jargon describing the situation tells you a lot, right there.
CWNews Posted Comments