While none of this implicates Perdue at this time, the investigation apparently is zeroing in on someone inside her campaign, which could prove quite damaging when she’s up for election next year, assuming we still have them at that time. To no surprise, other North Carolina Democrats could soon be lining up to face Perdue in a primary.
Meanwhile, pathetic defenses of her that she was just kidding around have been shown to be nonsense.
And Iowahawk has been unrelenting in the mockery:
#BevPerdueSurefireOneLiners “What this country needs is a huge mass grave for counterrevolutionaries. [chirp chirp] I mean, NOT!”
#BevPerdueSurefireOneLiners “Don’t you just want to torture my opponent with battery electrodes? No? Um, I was only joking. Ha ha! Ha.”
#BevPerdueSurefireOneLiners “What North Carolina needs is concentration camps. Who’s with me?”
#BevPerdueSurefireOneLiners “I once shot a dissident in my pajamas. What he was doing in my pajamas, I’ll never know.”
To which I add: #BevPerdueSurefireOneLiners “Hey, those eggs we need for the omelettes aren’t going to break themselves.”
…in the Supreme Court. The issue here isn’t constitutionality per se, but severability. As it says, the Department of Justice (particularly one as corrupt and incompetent as this one) has its work cut out.
Thoughts on Barack Obama’s delusions about himself:
I have written before about Obama’s deep, almost desperate, need to portray himself as the opposite of what he is, to conceive of himself in a way that is at odds with reality. We have seen it in all sorts of areas, including claiming himself to be a voice of civility, portraying himself as a champion of bi-partisanship, lecturing others about profligate spending, and saying he is the only responsible “adult” in Washington. Now we see this habit in a new arena – this time, the president as Obama the Stoic, a man so committed to “pressing on” for the cause of social justice he just doesn’t have time to feel sorry for himself. Indeed, he has now decided to sermonize to others not to complain, not to grumble, and to “stop crying.”
This is akin to John Edwards hosting a weekend seminar on the importance of marital fidelity.
The question is: does he believe it himself, or is he just trying to fool us? Either way it is, as he says, disquieting.
Obama’s reelection has been in doubt since his first election:
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: yes, Obama beat McCain in 2008. Which is to say, Obama beat a Republican candidate who was too tired to fight, too slow to realize that his signature issue (national security) was temporarily downgraded, and too inflexible to switch gears away from the campaign that McCain expected to run against Hillary Clinton; and Obama did this in the atmosphere of a sudden collapse in the economy, at the worst possible moment for the GOP. Congratulations. Huzzah. Feel the magic – but since then? Well, let’s just say that the magic had a very, very short half-life…
It never existed, for me. Many others have seen through the charade as well, now.
The slovenliness of our language, George Orwell wrote, makes it easier to have foolish thoughts, and while Mr. Friedman’s language has been tidied up a bit, the thinking remains what it has always been. The authors call themselves “frustrated optimists.” Their frustration is owing to the depredations of the last decade, which they call (Mr. Mandelbaum nods) the Terrible Twos. But self-contradiction is also part of the Friedman brand. In many other passages, the authors specifically trace the American slide to the end of the Cold War—though still elsewhere they remark that the 1990s were “positive for America.” It doesn’t help their argument, such as it is, that the evidence of decline they cite—crumbling infrastructure, a failing public-education system—predates both 2001 and 1989 by a long stretch. Our potholes and schools have been favorites of declinists for generations.
If the authors’ frustration is unoriginal and ill-defined, their optimism is terrifying. America will rebound—we will become the us that we used to be again, you might say and Mr. Friedman does—when we regain our ability to do “big things” through “collective action.” Collective action is a phrase that means “the federal government.” Among the big things that we will do are rework American industry, through regulation and taxation, to drastically cut carbon emissions. Another one of our big things is a big increase in the gasoline tax. We will also impose on us a new big carbon tax. We will use revenues to create a “clean energy” industry with millions of “green jobs” like the ones that were eliminated earlier this month at Solyndra. Readers will wonder, like the early environmentalist Tonto, “What do you mean ‘we,’ kemo sabe?”