Posts tagged: MSM (Mainstream Media)

Round Up: Osama bin Laden Dead

By , May 3, 2011 2:12 am

UPDATE: As with any big breaking news story, initial stories turn out to be false as details emerge. The death of Osama bin Laden is no different. It’s now being reported that Bin Laden wasn’t armed when he was killed and he didn’t use his wife as a human shield. This is the “new narrative” put out by the White House.

At this point, you probably know some of the facts about the raid that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. You probably know a U.S. Navy SEAL team conducted the operation at bin Laden’s compound near Pakistan’s military academy.

Because there’s a lot of information out there, here are some videos, news bites, and opinion pieces about bin Laden’s death that you may have missed.

First, President Obama’s speech on Sunday night announcing bin Laden had been killed:

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ABC News was able to go inside the compound where bin Laden and three others were killed, including one of his wives who was used as a human shield by the al-Qaeda leader during the firefight.

The National Journal goes inside the Navy SEALs to see how it worked with intelligence and other military agencies to succeed in the operation.

How was bin Laden positively identified? According to the Daily Telegraph, with the help of DNA from his dead sister’s brain.

BBC News has reaction from more than world 30 leaders.

Some people critical of the celebrations in reaction to bin Laden’s death. The Root’s Jenée Desmond-Harris writes, “Americans can do better than just jumping for joy.” While 9/11 widow Kristen Breitweiser writes in the Huffington Post, “today is not a day of celebration for me.”

How did you learn about bin Laden’s death? I was without a TV, but I had Twitter. “[It] was faster, more accurate, and more entertaining than any other news source out there,” wrote Matt Rosoff in Business Insider. I second that!

In what could be called a the biggest head-fake in history, (wait, it already was on Twitter), 24 hours before Obama’s announcement, “Saturday Night Live’s” Seth Meyers joked about bin Laden’s whereabouts at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates (who you can see in the audience) kept cool and revealed nothing. They laughed and they laughed…

Hat tip to mediabistro’s Newsfeed and The Daily Beast’s Cheat Sheet for pointing me in the right direction of some of these links.

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Herman Cain Says He’s A “Real Black Man,” Implies Obama Isn’t

By , April 4, 2011 6:30 pm

If you don’t know who Herman Cain is, the former head of Godfather’s Pizza who became a GOP hero after embarrassing then-president Clinton in a debate on healthcare, ran for U.S. Senator in Georgia in 2004, and is currently formerly a radio talk show host, might run for Republican presidential nomination.

And compared to Barack Obama, Cain thinks he is a “real black man.”

That’s what Cain said on Wednesday at a Tea Party function in Florida. The mainstream media is scared, according to Cain, that Sarah Palin or Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann would get the Republican nomination for president. Then he said, “[The mainstream media is] doubly scared that a real black man might run against Barack Obama.”

The passage begins about 2:37 in:

This takes Man Up to a different and interesting level. During the 2010 election, Man Up and its variations were used to demean candidates who were accused by their opponents as not having the “cajones” or “man-pants” to be strong and decisive leaders.

Politico reported that, according to Cain’s spokeswoman Ellen Carmichael, he wasn’t “challenging Obama’s racial origin.” She said, ”He was referring to himself in the first person…He was saying that there could be a general election with two black men.” Then why the emphasis on the word “real?” And why bring up race at all? In that one remark, Cain asserted his own black masculinity, while questioning Obama’s.

So, it begs the question: Is Cain a “real black man?” I don’t know, nor would I list qualities for one of any race. But a real man – and by that I mean a mature adult male – wouldn’t brag about how much of a “real man” he is.

See Also:
Man Up And Cry

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