How the Obama administration undercut them.
They undercut most Bush foreign policy, whether good or bad.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Nervous Democrats
I suspect that Greg Sargent is a canary in the coal mine about the Hillary coronation.
[Update late morning]
Mollie Hemingway fisks Hillary’s press conference within an inch of its life.
[Update a few minutes later]
Am I the only one who thought it bizarre that she would have been using a decade-old machine for her server? She said that it had originally been installed during her husband’s administration, which means no later than 2000 (though it could have been earlier). That means it was probably a Pentium III or a K6-2 running at best about half a gigahertz, and it likely had at most 64 megabytes of RAM. If it was a Windows machine, it would have been running 98. Again, at best. If it had been installed earlier, it might be running 95, on an older, slower machine, with less memory. If it was running Linux (which it would have been if I were setting up a mail server), it would probably be better.
Fast forward to 2009. Now, for a few hundred bucks, you can buy a new machine, dual core at 2 GHz, with several gigabytes of RAM running Windows 7 (or Linux). Why would you be trusting your email to what was, at that point, an antique, not just in power, but in reliability?
I don’t believe her. I don’t understand the point of this particular absurd lie, though. She didn’t even have to say how she acquired it. She could have just said they purchased it from Dell. It’s not like we’re ever going to get our hands on it to verify that.
[Update a few minutes later]
Why the Clinton emails matter, politically.
[Late-afternoon update]
OK, now it’s a full-blown document destruction scandal.
They were doing the same thing all through the nineties. The only difference is that she blatantly admitted it in the press conference. She’s always gotten away with destroying evidence before, why wouldn’t she think it could go on forever?
[Friday-morning update]
Hillary’s favorability plummeting:
As her book tour showed, Hillary is a political mediocrity … at best. That’s why she lost the nomination in 2008 to a one-term Senate backbencher even with Bill trying to pull her across the finish line, and that’s when the Clintons were still culturally relevant. If a reasonably gifted Democrat challenged her, Hillary would likely lose the nomination again. If Democrats move forward with the coronation, those trend lines will have 20 months to develop into yet another electoral disaster for Hillary.
Yup.
Anthony Watts
Who knew he ran a “climate denying” web site?
Seriously, having Google decide what is “true” and false is a really bad idea. For instance, it would probably make it much more difficult to break through all the crap nutrition advice.
Hillary’s Careful Script
The world is failing to follow it:
The trouble for Clinton is that, despite all of her preparation, all of her coordination, the world is going off her script. And for a woman who thinks off-the-cuff speaking is switching from her prepared remarks to her prepared notecards, that’s a scary place.
That is surely why she set up her own private Internet server. Four times at the U.N., Clinton said she had created her “home-brew” e-mail system simply for “convenience.” “I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal e-mails instead of two,” she said. Never mind that it’s much easier to set up two e-mail systems on one device than it is to set up a whole dark server hidden from the government. And leave aside that a woman who travels with a very large entourage on non-commercial flights could probably manage two devices. I’m sure she’s right. She set up the server for convenience — but not the convenience of sparing her the load of an additional four-ounce phone. When you want to hide what you’re doing, a private server is definitely the way to go.
Hillary has only two comfort zones: deep in a bunker or high on a pedestal. Drag her out of the former or knock her off the latter and she’s at sea.
Read the whole thing. I haven’t take the time yet to go through the transcript and count the lies.
The Albedo Of The Earth
A potentially revolutionary paper:
The failure of models to reproduce this hemisphere synchronicity raises interesting implications regarding the fidelity of climate model-derived sensitivity to CO2.
That’s an understatement. I’d rephrase: current climate models are utter junk.
Sports Diets
“I ate 5000 calories of saturated fat per day, and this is what happened.”
Carb loading is a crock.
The Oklahoma Expulsion
What speech will justify expulsion next?
As disgusting as their video was, they should sue. This is a very bad precedent.
[Update in the afternoon]
More: “…as for the people in the comments who say that libertarians like me, Eugene Volokh, and FIRE shouldn’t be defending these students: If you only defend speech you agree with, you’re not a free speech advocate, you’re just a partisan hack.”
Yuppers. I hope they sue Boren’s ass off.
Hillary
“If I were a Democrat, I’d be very worried about 2016.”
If this is the best she has to offer, they should be. Because she imagines the traditional smoke and mirrors will work in the 21st century.
Censorship
Many people may find this disappointing. Indeed, punishing those who engage in offensive expression is perennially popular because it gives the impression that we’re “doing something” about the problem of racism, sexism and bigotry. In France, for instance, Holocaust denial has long been illegal, and just this year the country arrested more than 70 people for praising the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack. France has put real teeth into laws that punish offensive speech.
Yet according to the Anti-Defamation League, 37% of the French harbor anti-Semitic opinions. In the U.S. — which, thanks to the First Amendment, has never banned Holocaust denial or hateful speech — that number is 9%, among the lowest in the world. While this comparison can’t capture all the differences between the two nations, it strongly suggests that punishing expression is no real cure for bigotry, and refusing to punish hateful speech does not lead inevitably to its spread.
Censorship isn’t necessary for those who are confident in the truth of their views. It’s a signal of insecurity and displays a fear that if an idea is allowed to be expressed, people will find that idea too attractive to resist. Somehow, college administrators are convinced that if they don’t officially punish racism, their students will be drawn to it like moths to a flame. But there’s simply no reason to expect that. Given the history of campus activism in our nation from the civil rights movement onward, there are myriad reasons to expect the opposite.
The solution to bad speech is more speech. And, as Instapundit notes, it’s not surprising that a Democrat doesn’t understand (or care about) the Constitution.
Claire Berlinski
..is rebranding:
I felt rebranding was in order, though, for it struck me this morning that the photo you have been looking at was taken in 2008. It does not reflect the maturity, wisdom, and insight I have acquired since then.
Nor does it convey the deep and appropriate alarm I wish to suggest when discussing profoundly important geopolitical events such as the rise of ISIS, the return of Russian Imperialism, the criteria I will use to select my next Commander-in-Chief, and the incentives we are creating to rapid nuclear proliferation. Nor, above all, does it convey the most significant geopolitical event of my life: my catastrophic realization that I may have been wrong in my assessment of French demographic trends. So I believe this photo more accurately conveys “the deep and serious questions we must all ask ourselves.”
It also properly suggests that I am older and more knowing. Now, of course it would be beneath me to exploit, for political purposes, my opponents’ youth and inexperience. Nor is it my intention to do so. I am merely concerned about truth in advertising: I am 47 years old. Were you to consider a photo of me at age 39, is might mislead you. You would be ill-served by underestimating my wisdom and gravitas.
Moreover, it would be quite unfortunate were you to meet me in person and think, “But Claire looks older than her photo.” Clearly, it is much more important that you meet me and think, “Goodness. Claire looks even better than her photo.”
I’m sure she does.