How it evolved?
Note that just because something is natural doesn’t make it moral.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Is There Enough Makeup In The World?
I thought it was a gag (in multiple senses of the word) when I heard that Annette Bening was going to play Helen Thomas in a movie. But it’s twue, it’s twue.
On the other hand, it’s probably a lot easier to make Annette Bening look like Helen Thomas than vicey versy.
[Via Driscoll]
Rezko Is Singing
Is Obama sweating?
Probably not. Whatever happens won’t happen until after the election, and at that point, he’ll be untouchable, with the Dems in control of both houses. This is part of the point that I was making in my PJM piece yesterday. Because the media is covering for him, we’re about to unwittingly (at least to much of the electorate–much of the rest, sadly, doesn’t care) put another crooked but charismatic politician in the White House, just as we did in 1992.
And it goes without saying, of course, that if this were the Republican candidate, it would be headline news every day for the next three weeks. But it’s not.
The Coming Thugocracy
If the potential economic disaster of a Democrat regime doesn’t concern you, consider the implications for free speech.
As Mark Steyn comments, don’t be surprised to see an effort to establish “human rights” commissions, a la Canada.
The Enigma Continues
Part of the Kennedy myth that propelled him into the White House was that he wrote a Pulitzer-winning book. Only many years later was it revealed that the actual author, or at least ghost writer, was Ted Sorenson.
Well, now we have an interesting question.
Who wrote Dreams of My Father?
A 1990 New York Times profile on Obama’s election as Harvard’s first black president caught the eye of agent Jane Dystel. She persuaded Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster, to authorize a roughly $125,000 advance for Obama’s proposed memoir.
With advance in hand, Obama repaired to Chicago where he dithered. At one point, in order to finish without interruption, he and wife Michelle decamped to Bali. Obama was supposed to have finished the book within a year. Bali or not, advance or no, he could not. He was surely in way over his head.
According to a surprisingly harsh 2006 article by liberal publisher Peter Osnos, which detailed the “ruthlessness” of Obama’s literary ascent, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract. Dystel did not give up. She solicited Times Book, the division of Random House at which Osnos was publisher. He met with Obama, took his word that he could finish the book, and authorized a new advance of $40,000.
Then suddenly, somehow, the muse descended on Obama and transformed him from a struggling, unschooled amateur, with no paper trail beyond an unremarkable legal note and a poem about fig-stomping apes, into a literary superstar.
…In 1997, Obama was an obscure state senator, a lawyer, and a law school instructor with one book under his belt that had debuted two years earlier to little acclaim and lesser sales. In terms of identity, he had more in common with mayor Sawyer than poet Brooks. The “writer” identification seems forced and purposefully so, a signal perhaps to those in the know of a persona in the making that Ayers had himself helped forge.
None of this, of course, proves Ayers’ authorship conclusively, but the evidence makes him a much more likely candidate than Obama to have written the best parts of Dreams.
The Obama camp could put all such speculation to rest by producing some intermediary sign of impending greatness — a school paper, an article, a notebook, his Columbia thesis, his LSAT scores — but Obama guards these more zealously than Saddam did his nuclear secrets. And I suspect, at the end of the day, we will pay an equally high price for Obama’s concealment as Saddam’s.
An interesting, and very plausible thesis. Much more so, in fact, than the official story. And if true, one more bit of evidence that Bill Ayers was more, much more, than “a guy in his neighborhood.” It is also one more bit of continually accumulating evidence that Barack Obama is a fraud.
And as Andy McCarthy notes, given that Chris Buckley’s insouciance about an Obama presidency is predicated on the intellectual brilliance evidenced by his books, he might want to reconsider, if his books are in fact those of someone else.
And no, don’t expect the press to cover this.
Concerned About An Obama Victory
Ilya Somin explains. I share them.
Needless to say, there is much dissension (from many who think themselves libertarians) in comments.
[Saturday morning update]
Well, IBD certainly thinks that the prospect of an Obama presidency has the market spooked.
What is that agenda? It starts with a tax system right out of Marx: A massive redistribution of income — from each according to his ability, to each according to his need — all in the name of “neighborliness,” “patriotism,” “fairness” and “justice.”
It continues with a call for a new world order that turns its back on free trade, has no problem with government controlling the means of production, imposes global taxes to support continents where our interests are negligible, signs on to climate treaties that will sap billions more in U.S. productivity and wealth, and institutes an authoritarian health care system that will strip Americans’ freedoms and run up costs.
All the while, it ensures that nothing — absolutely nothing — will be done to secure a sufficient, terror-proof supply of our economic lifeblood — oil — a resource we’ll need much more of in the years ahead.
The businesses that create jobs and generate wealth are already discounting the future based on what they know about Obama’s plans to raise income, capital gains, dividend and payroll taxes, and his various other economy-crippling policies. Which helps explain why world stock markets have been so topsy-turvy.
But don’t take our word for it. One hundred economists, five Nobel winners among them, have signed a letter noting just that:
“The prospect of such tax-rate increases in 2010 is already a drag on the economy,” they wrote, noting that the potential of higher taxes in the next year or two is reducing hiring and investment.
It was “misguided tax hikes and protectionism, enacted when the U.S. economy was weak in the early 1930s,” the economists remind us, that “greatly increased the severity of the Great Depression.”
We can’t afford to repeat these grave errors.
Yet much of the electorate is determined to vote for the candidate most likely to make them. If he wins, what we consider to be a crisis in today’s economy will be a routine affair in tomorrow’s.
Someone needs to run some ads showing the similarities between Obama’s proposed economic policy and that of Herbert Hoover.
A Shorter Christopher Buckley
Via Mark Steyn:
If we view Obama’s past political alliances as mere cynical manipulation to advance his career and if we view his election policy proposals as just pandering to the electorate, then we can feel good about voting for him for President because of, ah , oh yes, his character.
The mental contortions one must put oneself through in order to justify voting for Barack Obama are truly amazing. It must be quite painful.
[Early evening update]
Jonah Goldberg expands:
Christopher invokes Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous line that FDR had a “first-class temperament” and so too Obama. Indeed, he suggests that Obama is a man of great character because he’s a man of great temperament. Conceding for the sake of argument that Obama’s temperament is first rate, are the two really the same thing? I don’t think so (indeed, that would be a hard case to make about FDR himself, who could be deceitful, vindictive, petty — even to his own son — and adulterous. And let us note that Holmes himself was not a man many of us should be invoking as an authority on political virtue or general decency).
The story Christopher tells of McCain’s great character has no real analogue in Obama. He may be in private a deeply honorable man, but his public record is one of accommodation, shortcuts, dishonest equivocations, serious leftwing sympathies and fellow-traveling with some awful people. Obama, let us recall, threw his own grandmother under the rhetorical bus in order to defend his relationship with Jeremiah Wright. That he sounded dignified doing it does not confer dignity on the act itself or the man behind it. That is surely not all there is to say about Obama, many of his friends and fans speak very well of him. But the scales Christopher uses to weigh one man against the other seem awfully rigged to me.
Everything in Barack Obama’s public life (other than his campaign speeches and publications) indicate that he’s a dedicated leftist (or else a very cynical man with no principles whatsoever). John McCain is, at worst, ideologically confused.
Did The Chinese Fake Their EVA?
I don’t know, and haven’t watched the video myself, but some Chinese bloggers think so:
Two seconds into the video from CCTV, bubble-like objects rose from the hatch as it sprung open. At 5 min 49 second, a bubble attached to the astronaut’s helmet. At 6 min 42 seconds, bubbles swiftly came out of the cabin. On the left corner of the video, bubbles gushed out at an angle at 7 min 17 seconds into the video.
A blogger, who is a physicist, commented in a Chinese Epoch Times article that, assuming the operation was conducted in the water, the bubbles rose faster than they would have if the water was not propelled using a wave-blower. Wave blowers are commonly used in underwater space-training exercises to simulate the weightlessness of space.
It wouldn’t shock me.
I Agree With The WSJ
Chris Dodd should be the one on the stand, under oath.
The Enigma Of Obama
I have a piece today at Pajamas media, on the lies and spin of the Obama campaign, and his enablers in the media.
[Update late morning]
I should note, of course (though shouldn’t it go without saying?) that because I wrote this piece, like Roger Simon, I am a racist.
[Afternoon update]
I have to confess that I’m perplexed by the foolish comments that I, or John McCain, should be “going after” Walter Annenberg, or the Annenberg Foundation, or “charging them” with…something. What does that mean?
There is nothing illegal about funding leftist activities with philanthropy. I don’t even think that it should be. But I do think that the voters are entitled to know when one of their presidential candidates is involved with it. If Walter Annenberg were running for president, and doing the same things that Barack Obama is, and has done, I’d be saying exactly the same things about him. But he’s not.