…what accounts for Obama’s weird attraction for this “Muslim revivalism,” despite all its Medieval tenets and near-psychotic behaviors?
No, he is not a Muslim. I repeat NOT (just to be absolutely clear). Nor is the president a Christian, unless you count Reverend Wright as such, which is ridiculous (and we all know he’s under the bus anyway).
Obama is a postmodern agnostic par excellence. But like so many schooled in post-modernism and cultural relativism, he has an immediate and intense enmity for anything that smacks of imperialism — and an equally intense desire to be seen as supportive of (although certainly not to live like) the downtrodden of the Earth.
Which leads us back to Benghazi. You don’t have to be Muslim to love the Muslim Brotherhood or even, consciously or unconsciously, sympathize with the goals, if not the actions, of al-Qaeda. You just have to have been imbued with a blind hatred of imperialism. That’s all you need.
And as Dinesh D’Souza documented, he has that in abundance.
Obamacare, unlike Social Security, Medicare and Part D, wasn’t consistently supported in public opinion polls. Quite the contrary.
Please don’t pass this bill, the public pleaded, speaking in January 2010 through the unlikely medium of the voters of the commonwealth of Massachusetts when they elected Republican Scott Brown to the Senate as the 41st vote against Obamacare.
Democrats went ahead anyway, at the urging of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and with the approval of President Barack Obama. They made that decision knowing that, without a 60th vote in the Senate, the only legislative path forward was for the House to pass a bill identical to the one the Senate passed in December 2009.
No one had intended that to be the final version. Democrats expected to hold a conference committee to comb the glitches out of the Senate bill and the version House passed in November.
Voters had done all they could do to signal that they wanted not a Democratic version of Obamacare but a bipartisan compromise or no legislation at all. Obama and Pelosi ignored that demand.
The the ultimate peril of their power, one would hope.
One of the nastiest strawmen continually being flung is that libertarians are anarchists. No, the Occumorons are anarchists, and nihilists (or at least they look to them for their political tactics, even though they want the government around to give them stuff). Limited government, as the Founders laid it out, is not anarchy. In fact, you could almost say that a lawless government of men, like the current one, is more anarchical than one based on the Constitution and law.
There are some lessons to be learned here. We were just up there ourselves a couple weeks ago. People don’t realize how rugged it can get coming down from the high country into Yosemite Valley, even though most of the routes are pretty well known after many decades of hiking/climbing. Without modern tech (cell phones and helicopters), they might have died from exposure up there, even in the summer.
…are not normal people. And I don’t mean that in a good way. This is even more stupid than the brouhaha over the word “niggardly” in DC a few years ago.
Ignoring all of the Feminazi sociological issues, this would never happen to me, because of my acrophobia. No, I don’t lean against railings on high buildings. That’s one of the least likely ways for me to cease metabolizing.
…based on the actual evidence, Klein was foolish to say the “scandals are falling apart” in May, and it’s foolish to say it now. At the end of the day, I suspect that the recent disregard for the facts and the odd framing of the scandal is really about creating a “permission structure” — a phrase Klein is no doubt familiar with — for those on the left to help begin speaking of the scandal as if it’s not legitimate. In fairness, it’s not just Klein dismissing the scandal — here’s MSNBC’s Steve Benen, The New Republic, and CNN hitting the same theme. After all, the White House Press Secretary recently surprised observers declaring IRS a “phony scandal.” We journalists might be expected to be suspect of the White House’s motivations for dismissing the IRS scandal, but it seems some of us have received marching orders.
I think we’ve seen at least one of the marchers here.