History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Obama, Trapped In Carter Country

29 Comments

Some thoughts from Ed Driscoll on parallels between the two presidents. I found this part interesting:

Obama doesn’t like people. He likes himself.

He appears to have a long-standing pattern of disconnection from others. Where are the voices of those who grew up with him, went to school with him, worked with him? It is eerily quiet.

Naturally, there are those who disagree with the notion that our president is aloof.

Despite the narrative in Washington of Mr. Obama as a loner, his friends and aides say he likes people just fine. He looked positively ebullient when he worked the crowd at a hangar last Wednesday at Fort Bragg, N.C., reaching out to nearly every one of 3,000 troops returning from Iraq.

No surprises there. Obama knows how to work a crowd. Apparently, he is downright ebullient when doing so. But that is not the same thing as liking other human beings and connecting with them. Working the crowd is about his ego. And a photo op.

Obama holds himself apart.

Something about him is off kilter.

And lots of people know it.

Republicans and Democrats, alike.

It reminds me of the classic line by Linus from Peanuts: “I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand.”

Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Mullah Ron Paul

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Thoughts on the congressman’s defense of Iran, from Spengler.

And thoughts on Ron Paul’s real racism from Roger Simon:

Paul’s racial bias is more complex and intense than what has already been alleged of his attitudes towards blacks and Jews. He thinks even less of Muslims. He treats the Islamic world as if they do not have views of their own, their own ideology. In essence, he does not take them seriously as people and claims their actions are largely a result of American (and presumably Western) imperialistic behavior.

In other words, Muslims are children who could not possibly have the beliefs they do of their own accord and choose to act on those beliefs. They only do what they do because of us.

Besides being ethnocentric in the extreme, this negates many centuries of history — the majority of which took place before the U.S. even existed — and an entire, highly evolved system of religious, philosophical, and social thought. Whether Paul does this out of ignorance or arrogance I am not sure, but his disregard of Islam as something to be taken seriously in and of itself is particularly stunning when that ideology is close to the most antithetical imaginable to Paul’s self-proclaimed libertarianism.

Yes, by denigrating the Muslims’ moral agency, he dehumanizes them.

[Update a few minutes later]

I should note that denying moral agency to Muslims is something that the left has been doing ever since 911.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Repo Men

2 Comments

A depressing description of how Wall Street bought the Congress and the White House for pennies on the dollar:

…the real bonus turned out to be Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, who came up through the ranks as part of the bipartisan Robert Rubin–Hank Paulson–Citigroup–Goldman Sachs cabal. Geithner, a government-and-academe man from way back, never really worked on Wall Street, though he once was offered a gig as CEO of Citigroup, which apparently thought he did an outstanding job as chairman of the New York Fed, where one of his main tasks was regulating Citigroup — until it collapsed into the yawning suckhole of its own cavernous ineptitude, at which point Geithner’s main job became shoveling tens of billions of federal dollars into Citigroup, in an ingeniously structured investment that allowed the government to buy a 27 percent share in the bank, for which it paid more than the entire market value of the bank. If you can’t figure out why you’d pay 100-plus percent of a bank’s value for 27 percent of it, then you just don’t understand high finance or high politics.

It’s long, but read the whole thing.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!