When your own uncles don’t support you:
Just 25 percent of the country supports the president’s plans, and if you polled the president’s own family, it’s not obvious he’d do any better.
Even they are seeing through the fraud.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
So Mary Mapes Was A Liar?
I won’t say that Ra
Mapes had information prior to the airing of the September 8 [2004] Segment that President Bush, while in the TexANG [Texas Air National Guard] did volunteer for service in Vietnam but was turned down in favor of more experienced pilots. For example, a flight instructor who served in the TexANG with Lieutenant Bush advised Mapes in 1999 that Lieutenant Bush “did want to go to Vietnam but others went first.” Similarly, several others advised Mapes in 1999, and again in 2004 before September 8, that Lieutenant Bush had volunteered to go to Vietnam but did not have enough flight hours to qualify.
But that didn’t fit the narrative, so it had to be tossed out. And of course, they will still be heralded as brave martyrs, in their brave attempts to speak truth to the power of the Evil Rovian Right-Wing propaganda machine, and there will continue to be insufficient curiosity among their former colleagues to exhume the matter any further.
And there is, of course, nothing to logically preclude us from believing that she remains a moron as well as a deceptive slanderer. In fact, the evidence for both is pretty compelling.
The Non-Glamour
…of Ted Kennedy. Some thoughts on how his fate may become President Obama’s.
A Tale Of Two Communists
I remain astounded by the continuing naivety and self delusion of so many that Barack Obama is a “moderate” and “non-ideological.”
[Early afternoon update]
A Marxist spirit pervades the White House.
Obama is not a pragmatist, as he insisted, nor even a liberal, as charged.
Rather, he is a statist. The president believes that a select group of affluent, highly educated technocrats — cosmopolitan, noble-minded, and properly progressive — supported by a phalanx of whiz-kids fresh out of blue-chip universities with little or no experience in the marketplace, can direct our lives far better than we can ourselves. By “better” I do not mean in a fashion that, measured by disinterested criteria, makes us necessarily wealthier, happier, more productive, or freer.
Instead, “better” means “fairer,” or more “equal.” We may “make” different amounts of money, but we will end up with more or less similar net incomes. We may know friendly doctors, be aware of the latest procedures, and have the capital to buy blue-chip health insurance, but no matter. Now we will all alike queue up with our government-issued insurance cards to wait our turn at the ubiquitous corner clinic.
None of this equality-of-results thinking is new.
When radical leaders over the last 2,500 years have sought to enforce equality of results, their prescriptions were usually predictable: redistribution of property; cancellation of debts; incentives to bring out the vote and increase political participation among the poor; stigmatizing of the wealthy, whether through the extreme measure of ostracism or the more mundane forced liturgies; use of the court system to even the playing field by targeting the more prominent citizens; radical growth in government and government employment; the use of state employees as defenders of the egalitarian faith; bread-and-circus entitlements; inflation of the currency and greater national debt to lessen the power of accumulated capital; and radical sloganeering about reactionary enemies of the new state.
The modern versions of much of the above already seem to be guiding the Obama administration — evident each time we hear of another proposal to make it easier to renounce personal debt; federal action to curtail property or water rights; efforts to make voter registration and vote casting easier; radically higher taxes on the top 5 percent; takeover of private business; expansion of the federal government and an increase in government employees; or massive inflationary borrowing. The current class-warfare “them/us” rhetoric was predictable.
It was entirely predictable, to anyone not mesmerized last year by “hope” and “change” and how cool it would be to vote for the black guy.
[Update]
The Obama civilian troops were trained by Bill Ayers:
When I write about Bill Ayers, I am often greeted with the retort that the focus on one kooky professor is a waste of time, that we have bigger problems.
But were it not for the “Destructive Generation” instantiating themselves in our schools, the election of Barack Obama would not have been possible. Had we had a generation who understood history, we would have had voters who understood the vacuity of his rhetoric and the implications of “spreading the wealth.” They would have understood how his writings on Saul Alinsky displayed his propensity for stirring up racial animus, demonizing the opposition, and threatening executives with “pitchfork” mobs (that he would rouse up). We would have seen how his teaching a course on “critical race theory” would naturally lead to a nomination of a Supreme Court justice who sees herself as a “wise Latina woman” who can “empathize.”
They would have seen that Obama’s alliance with Bill Ayers, who has been working on behalf of “education” in Venezuela, would lead to a cozy meeting with Hugo Chavez. While Venezuelans protest against a government takeover of the schools, we allow Bill Ayers to spread his poison to future teachers while paying him an annual salary of $126,000.
Like South American dictators who promise peasants a few hectares through redistribution, Obama promises such things as “free” medical care, education, and new cars to his followers. Like Chavez, he appeals to the peasants — literally the illegal ones streaming into the country, promising rights of citizenship.
The historian Richard Pipes notes that the Russian revolution succeeded in large part because of the uneducated peasants. And in this country, the early communists targeted immigrants who spoke no English and were unacquainted with American values.
Today’s communists, like Bill Ayers, work in our schools aiming to keep American students in the same level of ignorance and tribalism as the peasants of Russia and South America.
As that report famously said almost three decades ago, if a foreign power had imposed this educational system on our nation, we would rightly consider it an act of war. And in a sense, that’s what happened. The Soviet Union collapsed, but its toxin lives on in our society and politics.
If You Call Someone A Koolaid Drinker
…you’re a racist. Just in case you thought that the Urban Dictionary should have any credibility. This is really astonishingly stupid.
Political Censorship
…at Flickr.
Who asked to take this down, and who decided? Flickr has a right to censor its own site, if it wishes, but we have a right to know that’s what they’re doing, and not let them hide behind the skirts of DMCA.
[Thursday afternoon update]
Per a comment, I worded that badly. I don’t mean that we literally have a right. I simply meant that if they expect us to use their service, there should be more transparency in their policies.
The Dog That Didn’t Bark
Anyone see something missing in this message from the administrator?
Lori and I are meeting on a regular basis with our NASA senior leadership to develop our strategy for the future once the final report is released. Additional details on the process will be shared as they become available. In the meantime, staying focused on our current missions is critical. Let’s safety fly out the shuttle manifest and complete the construction and build out of the International Space Station (ISS). Let’s continue our robust exploration of Mars through our robotic rovers and other vehicles yet to be launched. Let’s continue our superb execution of the missions of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) as we gather more data to support future human exploration of the moon. Let’s vigorously pursue the critical missions designed to enable us to gain the essential knowledge of Earth’s environment – our atmosphere, our oceans, our weather – that will enable our policy makers to make wise, informed decisions on climate change and other threats to our environment.
There seems to be one “current mission” not mentioned. It starts with a “C.” And ends in “onstellation.” At least as far as the administrator is concerned, Ares would seem to be dead.
The Obama Torture Regime
Details here. I’m sure that the howls from the left will start any minute.
[Crickets chirping]
It Makes Them Nuts
…that Cheney was right:
There is a principled human-rights position on all this. You can say: “No one wants to see bad things happen to people, but I honestly believe abusive tactics are so corrosive of our society’s principles that it would be better for 10,000 Americans to be killed in a terrorist attack than for us to prevent the attack by subjecting a morally culpable terrorist to non-lethal forms of coercion that cause no lasting physical or mental harm.”
That would be the honest argument, but it is not going to persuade many people. Thus the continued pretense, against all evidence and logic, that the tactics don’t work. Fewer and fewer people are fooled.
No, this administration and its enablers (including some in my comments section) is having trouble continuing to fool us on many fronts.
[Update a few minutes later]
Thoughts on “the Narrative,” and the lies of both commission and omission of the leftist media.
[Update another few minutes later]
Fouad Ajami — Obama’s summer of discontent:
A political class, and a media elite, that glamorized the protest against the Iraq war, that branded the Bush presidency as a reign of usurpation, now wishes to be done with the tumult of political debate. President Barack Obama himself, the community organizer par excellence, is full of lament that the “loudest voices” are running away with the national debate. Liberalism in righteous opposition, liberalism in power: The rules have changed.
It was true to script, and to necessity, that Mr. Obama would try to push through his sweeping program—the change in the health-care system, a huge budget deficit, the stimulus package, the takeover of the automotive industry—in record time. He and his handlers must have feared that the spell would soon be broken, that the coalition that carried Mr. Obama to power was destined to come apart, that a country anxious and frightened in the fall of 2008 could recover its poise and self-confidence. Historically, this republic, unlike the Old World and the command economies of the Third World, had trusted the society rather than the state. In a perilous moment, that balance had shifted, and Mr. Obama was the beneficiary of that shift.
So our new president wanted a fundamental overhaul of the health-care system—17% of our GDP—without a serious debate, and without “loud voices.” It is akin to government by emergency decrees. How dare those townhallers (the voters) heckle Arlen Specter! Americans eager to rein in this runaway populism were now guilty of lèse-majesté by talking back to the political class.
We were led to this summer of discontent by the very nature of the coalition that brought Mr. Obama, and the political class around him, to power, and by the circumstances of his victory. The man was elected amid economic distress. Faith in the country’s institutions, perhaps in the free-enterprise system itself, had given way. Mr. Obama had ridden that distress. His politics of charisma was reminiscent of the Third World. A leader steps forth, better yet someone with no discernible trail, someone hard to pin down to a specific political program, and the crowd could read into him what it wished, what it needed.
I think the spell is finally breaking. The polls would certainly indicate it. And without his charisma, he is truly an empty suit.
Read the whole thing.
A Message To Republicans
It’s the personal liberty, stupid. If they could stop being the Stupid Party, they could really clean up next year, but that’s a big “if.”