Bring on Bloomberg!
David Weigel | December 31, 2007, 1:49pm
It's been a couple months since the last Bloomberg-for-President boomlet, and voila: First
David Broder's account of their grand meeting, now
this NYT report on the all-centrist, all-flakey alliance to put the mayor in the White House. Has-beens, ranging in vintage from the 80s to the
summer of this year, are meeting after the Iowa Caucus to give us the bounty of their wisdom.
Former Senator David L. Boren of Oklahoma, who organized the session with former Senator Sam Nunn, a Democrat of Georgia, suggested in an interview that if the prospective major party nominees failed within two months to formally embrace bipartisanship and address the fundamental challenges facing the nation, “I would be among those who would urge Mr. Bloomberg to very seriously consider running for president as an independent.”
...
Among the other participants invited to the session next Sunday and Monday is Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, who has said he would consider being Mr. Bloomberg’s running mate on an independent ticket.
Mr. Boren declined to say which candidate would be strongest, but suggested “some kind of combination of those three: Bloomberg-Hagel, Bloomberg-Nunn.” He said Mr. Bloomberg would “not have to spend a lot of time raising money and he would not have to make deals with special interest groups to raise money.”
Yes—
think of all the special interests Ron Paul's had to suck up to this year for his $30 million! It makes a
grown man cry.
Glenn Greenwald
slaps Bloomberg around* over at Salon.
Clearly, this is just exactly what our country desperately needs, what it is missing most -- a neoconservative, combat-avoiding, Bush-supporting, Middle-East-warmonger who sees U.S. and Israeli interests as indistinguishable and inextricably linked, with a fetish for ever-increasing government control and surveillance, and a background as a Wall St. billionaire. We just haven't had enough of those in our political culture. Our political system, more than anything, is missing the influence of people like that. That's why it's broken: not enough of those.
Obviously, derision is the proper response to the Bloomberg fantasy, but I confess I'm happy there's no people-powered groundswell of support for Bloomberg the way there was for Ross Perot. When Perot started exploring his run in 1992 he was something like a folk hero. He'd
tried to send Christmas packages to POWs in Vietnam and he'd hired mercenaries to free employees trapped in revolutionary Iran, an adventure immortalized in Ken Follett's 1983 book
On Wings of Eagles (and the TV movie that followed). The Perot surge was the result of a really rancid flavor of populism, from voters who wanted to close the borders, hike taxes, and scrap trade deals, and who believed a
pistol-packin' egomaniac was the man who'd lead them to the promised land. The Bloomberg movement is, by comparison, pretty pathetic and harmless.
Also, if it's not already on your blogroll, go and visit
Third Party Watch.
(Bonus fun from my Lexising: Peter Applebome's March 29 New York Times report on Perot's mounting bid includes this piece of expertise.
"Ross Perot is the untested wild man, and while that may be attractive here at the beginning, I'm not sure it will be attractive at the end," said Karl Rove, a Republican consultant and party loyalist in Austin. "What's his message? I'm the zillionaire that built his company on government contracts?"
What ever happened to that guy?)
*Not actually hard. He's really tiny.
UPDATE: Just for fun, I used the WSJ's electoral calculator and checked who would win the presidency if Bloomberg ran and spoiled the Democratic candidate in New York while the Democrat won the twin prizes of Ohio and Florida. The result:
Neu Mejican | December 31, 2007, 4:23pm | #
Here is text from the book I linked to earlier. Ask yourself if its all a coincidence.
____
Here is a condensation of Dr. William L. Pierce’s “Who Runs the Media” on the current state of American broadcasting.
Who Runs the Media?
by Dr. William L. Pierce
Continuing government deregulation of the telecommunications industry has resulted, not in the touted increased competition, but rather in an accelerating wave of corporate mergers and acquisitions that have produced a handful of multi-billion-dollar media conglomerates of concentrated Jewish power.
The largest media conglomerate today is Walt Disney Company, whose chairman and CEO, Michael Eisner, is a Jew. The Disney empire owns Walt Disney Television, Touchstone Television, Buena Vista Television, its own cable network with 14 million subscribers, and two video production companies.
As for feature films, the Walt Disney Picture Group, headed by Joe Roth (also a Jew), includes Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, and Caravan Pictures. Disney also owns Miramax Films, run by the Weinstein brothers, who have produced such ultra-raunchy movies such as The Crying Game, Priests and Kids.
In addition to TV and movies, the corporation owns Disneyland, Disney World, Epcot Center, Tokyo Disneyland, and Euro Disney.
In August 1995 Eisner acquired Capital Cities/ABC Inc., to create a media empire with annual sales of $16.5 billion. Capital Cities/ABC owns the ABC Television Network, which in turn owns ten TV stations outright in such big markets as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Houston. In addition, it has 225 affiliated stations in the United States and is part owner of several European TV companies.
ABC’s cable subsidiary, ESPN, is headed by president and CEO Steven Bornstein, who is a Jew. The corporation also has a controlling share of Lifetime Television and the Arts & Entertainment Network cable companies. ABC Radio Network owns 11 AM and ten FM stations, again in major cities such as New York, Washington, and Los Angeles, and has over 3,400 affiliates.
Although primarily a telecommunications company, Capital Cities/ABC earned over $1 billion in publishing in 1994. It owns seven daily newspapers, Fairchild Publications (Women’s Wear Daily), and the Diversified Publishing Group.
Time Warner Inc., is the second of the international media leviathans. The chairman of the board and CEO, Gerald M. Levin, is a Jew. Time Warner’s subsidiary HBO is the country’s largest pay-TV cable network.
Warner Music is by far the world’s largest record company, with 50 labels, the biggest of which is Warner Brothers Records, headed by Danny Goldberg. Stuart Hersh is president of Warnervision, Warner Music’s video production unit. Goldberg and Hersch are both Jews.
Warner Music was an early promoter of “gangsta rap.” Through its involvement with Interscope Records, it helped popularize a new genre whose graphic lyrics explicitly urge Blacks to commit acts of violence against Whites.
In addition to cable and music, TimeWarner is heavily involved in the production of feature films (Warner Brothers Studio) and publishing. Time Warner’s publishing division (editor-in-chief Norman Pearlstine, a Jew) is the largest magazine publisher in the country (Time, Sports Illustrated, People Magazine, Fortune).
Levin will again be the number-one media magnate when the planned deal with Turner Broadcasting System is completed. When Ted Turner, the Gentile media maverick, made a bid to buy CBS in 1985, there was a panic in media boardrooms across the nation. To block Turner’s bid CBS executives invited billionaire Jewish theater, hotel, insurance, and cigarette magnate Laurence Tisch to launch a “friendly” takeover of the company, and from 1986 till 1995 Tisch was the chairman and CEO of CBS, removing any threat of non-Jewish influence there. Subsequent efforts by Turner to acquire a major network have been obstructed by Levin’s Time Warner, which owns nearly 20 percent of CBS stock and has veto power over major deals.
If TBS merges with Time Warner, Levin will become Turner’s boss, and CNN, the only rival to the network news, will come under complete Jewish control.
Viacom Inc., headed by Sumner Redstone (born Murray Rothstein), is the third largest megamedia corporation in the country, with revenues of over $10 billion a year. Viacom, which produces and distributes TV programs for the three largest networks, owns 12 television stations and 12 radio stations. It produces feature films through Paramount Pictures, headed by Jewess Sherry Lansing.
Its publishing division includes Prentice Hall, Simon & Schuster, and Pocket Books. It distributes videos through over 4,000 Blockbuster Video stores. It is also involved in satellite broadcasting, theme parks, and video games.
Viacom’s chief claim to fame, however, is as the world’s largest provider of cable programming, through its Showtime, MTV, Nickelodeon, and other networks. Since 1989, MTV and Nickelodeon have acquired larger and larger shares of the juvenile television audience. Redstone, who actually owns 76 percent of the shares of Viacom ($3 billion), offers Beavis and Butthead as teen role models and is the largest single purveyor of race-mixing propaganda to White teenagers and sub-teens in America and Europe. MTV pumps its racially mixed rock and rap videos into 210 million homes in 71 countries and is the dominant cultural influence on White teenagers around the world.
Nickelodeon has by far the largest share of the four-to-11-year-old TV audience in America and also is expanding rapidly into Europe. Most of its shows do not yet display the blatant degeneracy that is MTV’s trademark, but Redstone is gradually nudging the fare presented to his kiddie viewers toward the same poison purveyed by MTV.
With the top three, and by far the largest, media conglomerates in the hands of Jews, it is difficult to believe that such an overwhelming degree of control came about without a deliberate, concerted effort on their part.
What about the other big media companies?
Number four on the list is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox Television Network and 20th Century Fox Films. Murdoch is a Gentile, but Peter Chernin, who heads Murdoch’s film studio and also oversees his TV production, is a Jew.
Number five is the Japanese Sony Corporation, whose U.S. subsidiary, Sony Corporation of America, is run by Michael Schulhof, a Jew. Alan J. Levine, another Jew, heads the Sony Pictures division.
Most of the television and movie production companies that are not owned by the largest corporations are also controlled by Jews. For example, New World Entertainment, proclaimed by one media analyst as “the premiere independent TV program producer in the United States,” is owned by Ronald Perelman, a Jew who also owns Revlon cosmetics.
The best known of the smaller media companies, DreamWorks SKG, is a strictly kosher affair. DreamWorks was formed in 1994 amid great media hype by recording industry mogul David Geffen, former Disney Pictures chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg and film director Steven Spielberg, all three of whom are Jews. The company produces movies, animated films, television programs, and recorded music. Considering the cash and connections that Geffen, Katzenberg, and Spielberg have, DreamWorks may soon be in the same league as the big three.
Two other large production companies, MCA and Universal Pictures, are both owned by Seagram Company, Ltd. The president and CEO of Seagram, the liquor giant, is Edgar Bronfman, Jr., who is also president of the World Jewish Congress.
It is well known that Jews have controlled the production and distribution of films since the inception of the movie industry in the early decades of this century. This is still the case today.
Films produced by just the five largest motion picture companies mentioned above - Disney, Warner Brothers, Sony, Paramount (Viacom), and Universal (Seagram) - accounted for 74 percent of the total box-office receipts for the year to date (August 1995).
As noted, ABC is part of Eisner’s Disney Company, and the executive producers of ABC’s news programs are all Jews: Victor S. Neufeld (20/20), Bob Reichbloom (Good Morning America), and Rick Kaplan (World News Tonight).
Westinghouse Electric Corporation recently purchased CBS. Nevertheless, the man appointed by Laurence Tisch, Eric Ober, remains president of CBS News, and Ober is a Jew.
At NBC, now owned by General Electric, NBC News president Andrew Lack is a Jew, as are executive producers Jeff Zucker (Today), Jeff Gralnick (NBC Nightly News), and Neal Shapiro (Dateline).1
The overwhelming Jewish control that Dr. Pierce writes about in television and movies is not a new phenomenon. It is not a short-term aberration in the entertainment and news industry. It has been prevalent for decades. Over time the names may change, but the heritage usually remains the same. If anything, the Jewish power in media continues to consolidate and grow. Jewish publications themselves often boast about their power for their own readers.
joe | December 31, 2007, 5:11pm | #
Brian,
First, Bush dealt directly with Ted Kennedy on NCLB, having him to the White House on several occasions and trumpeting his ability to reach an agreement with him. There was a huge press campaign built around that "odd couple" in 2001, have you forgotten?
NCLB would have been a move toward the center, or at least towards a bipartisan accommodation, if Bush had actually followed through on his promises to provide the funding the Democrats wanted. But he didn't, he got the conservative elements and then ignored his half of the bargain. Have you forgotten that, too?
Social Security Privatization was NOT the center, unless you think Grover Norquist and the Reason Institute are the center. Social Security Privatization was immensely unpopular among moderates and liberals alike, which is why it died a humiliating death despite the best efforts of the Beltway press to mau-mau the Democrats into supporting it. Its "centrism" can be judged by the fact that it went down in flames, despite the entire Republican Noise Machine being cranked up to push for it (have you forgotten that nationwide tour Bush carried out?), and by the fact that introducing that proposal was the beginning of George Bush's favorability rating's long slide into the 20s.
The immigration issue is the lone example of Bush trying to take a genuinely bipartisan tack. I agree, he genuinely tried to work across the aisle.
As for the war, wars typically unite the populace to a very high degree, at least at the beginning. Remember Congress singing "God Bless America?" Remember Bush's 90% favorability ratings? Destroying that bipartisan unity took a great deal of deliberate effort from Karl Rove's political shop. Do you really think they scheduled the vote for September of an election year because they wanted to work in a bipartisan manner with the opposition?
And have you forgotten how they used the (sadly) non-controversial Department of Homeland Defense-creating bill to create a wartime wedge issue by saying people who wanted employees to have collective bargaining rights "care more about unions than the safety of the American people?"
You need to forget a lot to postulate a bipartisan George Bush administration.
joe | December 31, 2007, 5:37pm | #
Uh, yeah, covering the Lewinsky scandal every single day on the news sure does show anti-Republican bias. Every single day,
If Jerry Falwell - who very rarely appears on TV - is so outside of mainstream conservative opinion, what was with all of those White House visits in the 80s?
BTW, here's what "working the ref" really means:
Rich Bond: “There is some strategy to it. I’m a coach
of kids’ basketball and Little League teams. If you watch any
great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs.’” Working
“the ref” means to raise a stink about every adverse call the
referee makes so that “Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on
the next one."
William Kristol: “I admit it. The liberal media
were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as
an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.”
Patrick Buchanan: “I’ve gotten balanced
coverage, and broad coverage–all we could have asked. For
heaven sakes, we kid about the ‘liberal media,’ but every
Republican on earth does that."
