Couldn’t Help But Notice (080907)

General who? Apparently General Petraeus has been catching flak for having the nerve to go on Hugh Hewitt’s show in mid-July (transcript here). This makes Petraeus a political hack, doncha know.

Petraeus appeared Tuesday on the radio show of Alan Colmes, the liberal half of Hannity & Colmes (Hewitt has a reader’s transcription of the interview here).

Hewitt asks, “The folks who slandered the general for appearing on my show will now be writing what?” This would include faux “conservative” Andrew Sullivan and Salon blogger and erstwhile sock-puppeteer Glenn Greenwald.

The answer appears to be, “Not much, Hugh.” I didn’t find anything to link to at either place. Bluey at RedState elaborates on Greenwald.

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John Kerry, almost president, post-Vietnam history re-writer, and now confirmed useful idiot.

Gateway Pundit makes a convincing case that Soviet propagandists supplied Kerry with his raw rhetorical material: “…. what Kerry said in his 1971 Senate testimony was almost exactly like the disinformation line that the Soviets were sowing worldwide.”

The lesson, applied to today, from the highest-ranking intelligence official ever to have defected from the Soviet bloc — “The left is abetting America’s enemies with its intemperate attacks on President Bush.”

Further application to today, and something that will never happen: If the left really wants the war in Iraq to end, it ought to try shutting up for about 6 months. Oh, but that would mean a higher chance of it ending favorably. Can’t have that.

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Even with the Minneapolis bridge story getting the nation’s attention, Katie Couric’s CBS Evening News continued to crater, falling to 5.7 million total viewers, with only 1.7 million in the 25-54 demo. Total viewership for all three evening news shows, which fell below 20 million four weeks ago, is barely above that mark.

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Speaking of CBS, I “see BS” here in the wrap to this USA Today story last week on the growth of interest in business news:

“I’m not sure that Murdoch is looking at The Wall Street Journal newspaper as a big moneymaker as much as it is a legitimizer for him,” (Flatiron Communications’ Peter) Himler says. “He comes out of the tabloid world. … The big question (with Fox Business Network) is whether it’s going to be business news or business views.”

Uh huh. As if the guy who finally brought “fair and balanced” to television news over 10 year ago needs “legitimization.”

Going back to Paragraphs 8 and 9 of the same story, you see why Fox Business Network may, and hopefully will, do for business news what it’s done for general news:

The surge of interest in business news comes just a few years after a spectacular fall from grace. Business TV ratings, print circulation and ad sales for both plummeted after the Internet bubble popped in 2000 and the economy fell into recession.

The field also suffered from consumer disillusionment when it became all too clear that all too few reporters asked tough questions that might have exposed corporate scandals that disintegrated highflying companies including Enron, WorldCom and Adelphia Communications.

This happened because the business media at the time were cheerleading the Clintonian Golden Age and ignoring the warning signs — “little” things like totally unproven companies carrying billion-dollar valuations and ludicrously high P/E ratios at established companies. A little “fair and balanced” at that time would have been quite useful.