Berkowitz, in analyzing what he calls the “new progressives,” helps explain one of the distinguishing features of the Obama presidency: its disdain for the people’s preferences and the lengths to which Mr. Obama goes to disguise his elitism and contempt for the views of the public.
For bad op-eds, it's tough to beat the New York Times' Friedman, whose columns are hot, flat, and crowded with mixed metaphors, famous name-droppings, and juvenile political ideas.
During last summer's "Did you plug the hole yet, daddy" frenzy over the BP oil spill, Friedman urged President Obama to "think like a kid." "Daddy, why can't you even mention the words 'carbon tax'?" the 57-year-old columnist wailed.
The burden of freedom arises from the possibility that what we do might actually matter. That were a weight far greater to lay on a child than the sheer awe-inspiring size of the physical cosmos.
But however well or badly we handle our guns, woe will befall he who thinks he can conquer America. 500 years ago, Machiavelli compared ancient Persia with then-modern France. Persia was highly centralized, so the emperor was firmly in control of all parts of his realm, and could muster enormous numbers of men to any part of the country. But if you could defeat that army and the central authority that raised it, then you would almost immediately control the whole nation, as Alexander showed. Medieval France, on the other hand, was very decentralized, with petty dukes controlling small centers of power throughout the country. Because of this, the king of France had only marginal control over vast swaths of his country , but no invader could stand a chance at conquering France because of all the small bands of local opposition
Whether you're a recently displaced 23-term committee chairman or a formerly smug unemployed staffer with $180,000 of Georgetown student loans, it's important not to give in to despair. Psychological studies tell us a lost re-election campaign is the single most stressful event in the life of a congressional incumbent, even topping the indictment of a campaign contributor or an appearance at an unscripted town hall meeting. Also, a ballot box layoff is, next to death, the second-leading cause of leaving Congress. The good news is that there are positive, proactive steps you can take to reduce stress and smooth your transition to your new life in the great unknown outside I-95.
And that's where this brochure comes in. At Iowahawk Congressional Outplacement Services our primary goal is to orient, retrain, and mainstream former employees of Capitol Hill for productive careers outside Washington. While we can't get you back your seniority, your perks, or your mahogany-paneled office in the Dirksen Building, we can give you the tools you'll need after your ignominious rejection by those bastard ingrates you'll soon be living among. Follow this step-by-step guide and you'll be back on your feet in no time! Probably.
Christmas has been a contentious holiday at least since then. St. Francis introduced the manger scene hoping that it would draw attention away from gift giving and secular celebrations to the religious meaning of the season. This does not seem to have worked very well; the last time I checked, the score at the mall seemed to be Santa Claus ten million, St. Francis zip.
I will stop referring to it as ObamaCare when we stop calling them the Bush tax cuts for the rich. It is an effective shorthand for a law that is otherwise unwieldy to describe.
"Nearly halfway through Mr. Obama’s term, the dearth of business and Wall Street types in his administration rankles many executives, if only as a proxy for their unhappiness with his policies and occasional antibusiness political speech. And the White House has struggled to find such a person to fill the one spot about to open in Mr. Obama’s inner circle, the director of the National Economic Council, the job being vacated this month by Lawrence H. Summers."
"So what happens if the mandate is gone? Well, then Congress must either repeal the law or come up with another way to balance the books, and Obama must go along. And what if they can’t get this done? Things are not exactly going well on the taxation front, are they? So what if they don’t pass it.
Oh, and what if the entire health insurance industry implodes? Will the Democrats hope to argue that this proves that we need a public option?
And could that have been the idea all along?
"We have lowered the marginal rates on high incomes four times since the inception of the income tax — in the 1920s, the 1960s, the 1980s, and the 2000s. In each case, the result was a much more prosperous national economy, lower unemployment, and higher tax revenues for the government. If you do A (lower marginal rates) four times, and four times, despite differing economic circumstances, B (increased prosperity) happens, a rational person might conclude, at least tentatively, that B is the result of A. Not liberals.
As I said, high tax rates on the rich is a religious principle with the left. If the poor have to suffer because of it, so be it."
"Next to the bureaucrats and the White House, the real winners are the climate change skeptics. If you think that climate change is a myth or a naturally occurring phenomenon, Cancun helped you out. The UN process of endlessly negotiating a treaty which will either be so weak it is pointless or so controversial the US Senate will never ratify it (and will quite possibly be both) consumes time, money, energy and political capital that would otherwise go towards green efforts that might actually accomplish something.The “success” of Cancun is a best case scenario from the skeptic’s point of view. The cost of funding endless UN gabfests in exotic tourist locations (next up: South Africa in 2012) is trivial compared to the cost of any serious efforts to deal with carbon emissions on the scale current scientific theory suggests would be needed. Bureaucrats will dance, journalists will spin and carbon will spew, and the greens will be unable to escape this dysfunctional UN process for years and maybe decades to come. More, the fact that axis of ankle-biter countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia use these conferences to flaunt their anti-American credentials — and seek to maximize their influence by threatening to veto the proceedings — ensures that both this process and anything it produces will be unpopular in the US. The more that the radical anti-American gasbags get mixed up in this process, the easier it will be to find 34 senators ready to kill a climate treaty. If you are a climate skeptic, a global warming hand-off to the UN is the best thing since the Hummer.
No sane green would want this result, but the greens have run up against a force stronger than climate change, more insidious than the desertification of the Sahel, more inexorable than the rising of the seas: the bureaucratic instinct for process. Processes and institutions once initiated cannot be allowed to die."
"...this is a human tragedy that has already been left to fester far too long. That Palestinian leaders have held the refugees hostage to their maximalist demands for over six decades shows just how little they really care about their own people. And for all its fine talk of human rights, the “enlightened West” is evidently no better."
"Remember one thing: If you want to be energy independent ... and Democrats intend to achieve that within 10 years ... and if you want to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and therefore ... um ... improve our national security situation, you can't do it if you're a Republican because you are too wedded to the oil companies.
We have two oilmen in the White House.... The logical ... follow-up from that is $3-a-gallon gasoline. There is no accident. It is a cause and effect.... a cause and effect."
I like the original Times headline:
Liu Nobel Is Awarded to Empty Chair
That is in keeping with last year's decision to award the Peace Prize to an empty suit.
"So now, with the help of the new Republican House majority and a working center-right majority in the Senate, Congress may be able to push the administration in a more positive direction. 'Engagement' per se is not bad, as long as while engaging we do more than utter sweet words and appease adversaries. The president is on the defensive at home; now is precisely the time for him, and America, to go on the offense internationally. Russia is the perfect place to start."
"Within 12 hours of a British judge’s decision to deny Mr. Assange bail in a Swedish extradition case, attacks on the Web sites of WikiLeaks’s “enemies,” as defined by the organization’s impassioned supporters around the world, caused several corporate Web sites to become inaccessible or slow down markedly on Wednesday."
The sheer incompetence of the Obama White House is quite a thing to behold. The president appears to have cut a deal with Republicans on taxes without consulting his party in advance. Then the president held a news conference yesterday in which he not only attacked Republicans (nothing unusual there) but also lectured and lashed out at Democrats for their “sanctimonious” outrage.
The fury of Democrats is nearly off the scales, threatening passage of the bill. And the New York Times is now writing about a possible primary challenge to Obama.
It may be that Obama’s decision to cut a deal with Republicans on tax cuts is similar to George H.W. Bush’s decision to cut a deal with Democrats on tax increases. This may end up being Barack Obama’s “Read My Lips” moment.
"Let's be honest here: a lot of being president is the aura of authority and the projection of strength and competence. Right now, does anyone on either end of the political spectrum think he's demonstrating those traits? Well, Dowd and Rubin sure don't, and that covers a pretty vast swatch of political territory."
"It’s amusing, in a bitterly ironic way, to see people who make their living off of the space created by the First Amendment demand government intervene to stop speech. It’s even more ironic considering that Al Sharpton paid no price at all for his part in the Tawana Brawley hoax, in which Sharpton falsely accused an assistant district attorney of being one of the supposed rapists in a series of allegations found utterly false by a grand jury. Steve Pagones won a $65,000 judgment against Sharpton for false and defamatory statements, which Sharpton’s supporters paid instead. If anyone has grounds to be censored for utterly irresponsible and false speech, it would be Sharpton, not Limbaugh — and yet Sharpton has his own radio show and regularly appears on MSNBC."
"'In a surprising setback, the nation's unemployment rate climbed to 9.8 percent in November, a seven-month high, as hiring slowed across the economy,' the Associated Press reports. Another surprising setback! It's almost enough to make you nostalgic for the summer of recovery.
...The "progressives" who dominate the Democratic caucus believe in punishing the prosperous. The ugly face of such class warfare is on display in a new MoveOn.org ad pleading with President Obama to "stay strong" and raise taxes. That attitude will be even more prevalent in next year's much smaller Democratic caucus: Of the 20 Dems who dissented from the tax-hike vote, 9 will not be returning to Congress, having either retired or lost their re-elections bids."
"The actual effect of WikiLeaks is likely to be profound and precisely the opposite of what it supposedly sets out to achieve. Far from making for a more open world, it could make for a much more closed one. Secrecy, or rather the possibility of secrecy, is not the enemy but the precondition of frankness. WikiLeaks will sow distrust and fear, indeed paranoia; people will be increasingly unwilling to express themselves openly in case what they say is taken down by their interlocutor and used in evidence against them, not necessarily by the interlocutor himself. This could happen not in the official sphere alone, but also in the private sphere, which it works to destroy. An Iron Curtain could descend, not just on Eastern Europe, but over the whole world. A reign of assumed virtue would be imposed, in which people would say only what they do not think and think only what they do not say."
"Old laws predicated on human nature cannot so easily be discarded — even by utopians who think they have the power to cool the planet and stop the rising seas. Borrowed money really has to be paid back. Governments cannot operate without confidentiality. Nations perish if they cannot protect themselves from existential threats. Watching a therapeutic Barack Obama grow up and learn these tragic lessons is as enlightening as it is sometimes scary."
"If, as Bolton describes, the perception of Obama is now one of weakness, how does the administration get back on track? 'Once you are perceived as not being up to the job, and we're at that point, only performance can get it back.' But Bolton cautions that no one should wish for a crisis for Obama to prove his mettle -- and he adds that, given Obama's past performance, he's not optimistic about how the president would perform in such a crisis."
Progressives hope that the federal government will raise revenue mainly, if not exclusively, by levying taxes on wealthy Americans. But a comparison of France and the United States suggests that raising tax revenue will ultimately involve increasing tax rates on the poor much more than they would be increased on the wealthy.
"What is driving away value in government is the bloating of government itself. The cumulative weight of all those wonderful programs, all of which the politicians touted as absolutely necessary, is now crushing itself to death, like an 800 pound obese man on a bed suffocating under his own weight. Feeding him won’t help. Things have reached the point when growth causes as much damage as it purports to help. All government expansion is now budgetary fratricide."
"Berlusconi likes girls.
Sarkozy likes himself.
Angela Merkel is boring.
David Cameron is more boring.
Hillary thinks Cristina needs a shrink.
Benjamin Netanyahu can’t stand Ehud Olmert.
Al Qaeda hates America.
Yemen’s president hates Al Qaeda
Ahmadinejad is Hitler
North Korea likes Iran.
Saudi Arabia hates Iran
Julian Assange is Dennis Kucinich.
PFC Manning will never see the sun again.
America needs a new president."
"It’s no small thing to note that in an age when both threats and conciliations get us nowhere, a public embrace of our foundational ideals still sends a potent message. We talk about extending an outstretched hand to theocrats and the theocrats laugh. We talk about crippling sanctions and they laugh harder. To others, we offer aid in exchange for promises of an anti-terrorism crackdown; they collect and then ignore us. For others, we strain our alliances and make demands on our friends; we end up stymied. Still, to others we offer obsequious compromises and fresh starts; they smile kindly and make their own plans. But we now know the one time in recent memory we had a regime “scared to death” was when it thought we’d mention the sanctity of human rights. Doubtless, this lesson in the fusion of ideals and interests will be lost on the great non-ideological, pragmatic leaders of our time."
"What is not in doubt is an old rule: Give a bureaucrat a big stick and a big budget, allow said bureaucrat to trade in the limitless currency of human anxiety, and the masses will soon be intimidated by the Department of Fear. "
"Progressivism is a faith-based program. The progressives' agenda for improving everyone else varies but invariably involves the cult of expertise - an unflagging faith in the application of science to social reform. Progressivism's itch to perfect people by perfecting the social environment can produce an interesting phenomenon - the Pecksniffian progressive."
"The Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share the work and produce equally.
That's why they nearly all starved."
"It’s a lame-duck session. Time is running out. Unemployment is high, the economy is dangerously weak, and, with five weeks to go, no one knows what tax they’ll be paying on everything from income to dividends to death when the current rates expire Jan. 1. And what is the president demanding that Congress pass as “a top priority”? To what did he devote his latest weekly radio address? Ratification of his New START treaty.
...Iran’s Islamic Republic lives to bring down the Great Satan. North Korea, nuclear-armed and in a succession crisis, has just shelled South Korean territory for the first time since the Korean armistice. Obama peddling New START is the guy looking for his wallet under the lamppost because that’s where the light is good — even though he lost the wallet on the other side of town."
"We need gravitas, because gravitas has worked so well so far."
"“I was diagnosed with a New York accent,” Mr. Ramos said."
"The rest of the Times’s editorial is just as unconvincing — it consists primarily of hyping this modest treaty out of all recognition by claiming that it’s “central to this country’s national security” and that “the stakes couldn’t be higher.” Actually, as I argued yesterday, the stakes are pretty low — which is why I don’t think it will do any harm for the GOP to pass the treaty in return for Obama’s commitment to modernize our nuclear arsenal. But the bullying tone of the Times’s editorial is the sort of thing that is likely to drive Republicans into the anti-ratification camp."
"The midterm elections are over, and the results can be summed up in one word: change. The Obama agenda has been rejected, as has government-run health care. Also turned back was any effort to fundamentally transform the United States. Americans witnessed a total rejection of fiscal recklessness and sent a clear message to Washington: handle our finances just like everyday Americans handle their own finances. Also big losers on November 2 were big government and the divisive two Americas approach — haves vs. have-nots, rich vs. poor, white vs. black. The American voter reminded the White House and the Democratic Party that we are all Americans."
The problem is that the CIA’s motive is just one factor in a multi-factor balancing test that was designed to address the behavior of police officers in their dealings with criminal suspects.The President is pleased because he knew all along that this would be the outcome (I mean I did, how about you?) This way he can slobber up to the Muslim population (again) and tell them how much he loves them.....The judge probably issued a correct ruling, by the way, under the law he had to apply. The part that leaves me howling in outrage is not so much that he suppressed the evidence. It’s that Obama should have known he would — and that there was a perfectly legal alternative to federal court for this terrorist.
And that is the true outrage of what happened today. The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that the military commissions established under Bush were constitutional. Those commissions were the obvious venue for trying Ghailani. But that wasn’t good enough for Barack Obama. He had to try this guy in a civilian court designed to handle completely different situations.
Oh, by the way — did you hear Obama’s reaction to today’s verdicts?
He’s pleased.
"unlike other soft and furry animals, nutria is being rebranded as a socially acceptable and environmentally friendly alternative way to wear fur. The effort culminates this Sunday, when Ms. Melancon and about 20 designers take part in a “righteous fur” fashion show at the House of Yes, an art space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn."
"In a sentence I didn’t expect to type any time soon, good for these New Jersey politicians.
"That President Obama would be out of his depth, that the resurgent Democrats would overplay their hand, that stale liberal pieties would not translate into effective policy at home or abroad and that contractors would not be surveying Mount Rushmore during Obama’s first term always seemed more likely than not. In some ways the administration disappointed even my meager hopes: turning the stimulus plan over to a poorly-led, pork-craving Congress to design was an unforced error that not even a rookie should have made. In other important respects, however, my slender hopes were fulfilled and a little more. On the whole and with some slips here and there, President Obama has handled the wars and the struggle against terror responsibly; he has not been ensorcelled by the Europeans into overestimating their world role and he has gotten the big picture in Asia largely right.
Given all this, the Republican victory in the midterms is a well-earned comeuppance and a healthy corrective; it is only too bad that voters have to reward one undeserving party in order to administer richly merited punishment to the other, but that is an inherent limitation of our two party system."
"Barack Obama and Eric Holder have done their best to turn the Department of Justice, America's premier law enforcement agency, into an arm of the Democratic Party. Their crudeness in doing so is perhaps not unintentional, but may rather be intended to serve as a warning to anyone who might be thinking of opposing their left-wing agenda."
"But this is government we're talking about. A program or product doesn't need to be effective, it only needs to have a good lobby. And the naked-scanner lobby is small but well-connected."
A few weeks ago, we learned that the Obama administration granted get-out-of-ObamaCare waivers to 30 big-time employers. Now we find out that the number of organizations and businesses that have broken free of the job killing policy is at 111 and growing. The president who came to office proudly signing executive orders condemning his predecessor’s policies is now quietly signing hall passes exempting Americans from his own.
...Those who were initially afraid of Obama’s power and his ideological designs now have a new concern of equal importance: his powerlessness. Recently, Walter Russell Mead wrote at his American Interest blog, “No president in my lifetime has fallen from heaven to earth as rapidly as President Obama.” If he keeps falling, he takes us with him. Waivers are a start, but the enormous work of reversal and restoration has not yet properly begun. We’d all do well to hope for a little of that early executive determination and sense of purpose.
"Old Democrat promise: Everyone gets to keep their health insurance.
New Democrat promise: You can keep your health insurance…if you BEG hard enough for an Obamacare waiver.
Yep: The only way for hundreds of thousands of workers to keep their health insurance is to exempt them from the government-imposed “fix.”
"Why has Barack Obama failed so spectacularly? Is he too dogmatically liberal or too pragmatic? Is he a socialist, or an anticolonialist, or a philosopher-president? Or is it possible that Obama’s failures stem from something simpler: vanity. Politicians as a class are particularly susceptible to mirror-gazing. But Obama’s vanity is overwhelming. It defines him, his politics, and his presidency."
"The president criticizes the Jewish state in a Muslim state that bans Israelis."
"As the United States moves to expand access to health care, dialysis offers potent lessons. Its story expresses the fears of both ends of the ideological spectrum about what can happen when the doors to care are thrown wide open: neither government controls nor market forces have kept costs from ballooning or ensured the highest-quality care. Almost every key assumption about how the program would unfold has proved wrong."
"In sum, Fair Game unfairly distorts what Libby did. Fact is, Libby was acquitted of the only charges that involved him leaking to reporters, and his conviction for lying to Russert to cover up crimes he didn’t commit makes no sense. The defense’s efforts to rebut the prosecution claim that he lied about his conversation with Russert were crippled by the judge’s rulings. The missing testimony, including expert testimony by memory scientists — something the jury said they wanted to hear — could well have changed Libby’s fate.
It’s time to get the facts right about the Plame affair. Fair Game perpetuates the myths about it and confirms what so many believe, but which just ain’t so. It’s Exhibit No. l for the proposition that allegations live on while the truth dies, buried on page A18."
"Foreign leaders couldn’t seem to get enough of President Obama when he arrived on the world stage two years ago. They brought copies of his memoir to global conferences seeking his autograph. They angled for handshakes and “bilats” — diplomatic jargon for a one-on-one meeting, or bilateral. They maneuvered to get next to him in photo opportunities.
Now the glow has worn off. So when the heads of state convened this week for the Group of 20 conference — a gathering marked by disputes over currency and global trade imbalances between the United States and its allies — wrapped up here on Friday, they were not shy about putting Mr. Obama on the defensive."
"What’s the difference between California voters and the passengers on the Titanic?
The passengers on the Titanic didn’t vote to hit the iceberg.
"Now, there are many places where the government ought to be: between a citizen and a mugger, between the polluter and the sky, between us all and al-Qaida. But the space between a diner's hand and a diner's mouth is not one of them."
"All I can say to Democrats is “Yes! Please make her the botoxed face of your party!”
"In one of life’s more pungent ironies, the moment when you feel old enough to offer sage advice to the younger generation is the one when a young person will tell you, to your face, that you are too old to understand his life."Sounds almost like a Bill Cosby line...
"It is amazing the ingenuity Democrats invest in concocting explanations of voter behavior that erase what voters always care about, and this year more than ever - ideas. This election was a nationwide recoil against Barack Obama's idea of unlimited government."
"After watching President Obama’s press conference, Democrats who are still left standing must have been mortified. The depth of his self-delusion was stunning."
"Ad nauseum, as the cocooned, politically correct, metropolitan environment that the Times and its core readers inhabit means that they’re endlessly shocked — and by just about everything and everyone that exists in the land that they grudgingly acknowledge exists between the runways of JFK and LAX to boot.
No wonder they hate you so — look at all the damage you’ve caused their nervous system!"
I totally understand how people can dislike Feingold for being a tax-and-spend liberal. I totally understand why people can dislike him for his cooperation with McCain to violate the First Amendment by suppressing political speech. But, to paraphrase Homer Simpson, I like my beer cold, my Tivo loud, and my Democrats FLAMING. Democrats ought to distinguish themselves from Republicans by supporting the rights of the accused, opposing military adventurism, and resisting the encroachment of the post-9/11 security state. If they don’t, they are just shitty second-rate Republicans with less of a pretense of fiscal responsibility. In sharp contrast to most Democrats — who have pretty much uselessly pandered to “tough on crime” rhetoric for a generation, rolled over on war issues, and trampled each other to look Tougher On Terrorism — Feingold actually stood up for (non-First-Amendment) civil liberties. It’s a shame that he loses while faux-Democrats like Boxer remain.
"Salman Rushdie: “I’ve always liked Stewart and Colbert but what on earth was Cat Yusuf Stevens Islam doing on that stage? If he’s a ‘good Muslim’ like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar then I’m the Great Pumpkin. Happy Halloween.”
"My prediction is that we have a devastating victory tomorrow; that Palin runs for the nomination; that she wins it; and that she loses to Obama in 2012."
"While the reputation of George Bush is snapping back, Barack Obama grows smaller by the minute."
"What history shows us is that a liberal, blame-America-first Democratic President, urged on by a liberal, blame-America-first Democratic Congress, is a prescription for political self-destruction. Leave Democrats to their own devices, and they will screw themselves politically, just when they are at the height of power...."
"Let me get this straight. Our Secretary of State has wished the president of a regime that kidnapped American citizens a happy birthday, asked him nicely to give them back, and thinks Twitter is the appropriate medium for this communication? Could this all be true"
"Want to get corporate money out of politics? Want to erode the power of the Chamber of Commerce? Take away one of their primary motives to get involved."
"'You don't want to use that phrase, dude,' Stewart recommended with a laugh.How Presidential.
Dude. The indignity of a comedy show host calling the commander in chief 'dude' pretty well captured the moment for Obama. He was making this first-ever appearance by a president on the Daily Show as part of a long-shot effort to rekindle the spirit of '08. In the Daily Show, Obama had a friendly host and an even friendlier crowd.
"Obama hasn't visited Ohio as often as he golfs. But he's been there enough to know that the continuing high unemployment rate (10%) in the crucial battleground state is helping to...."
“It would be a very strong impact to one of the most open questions in fundamental physics,” he said. “It would be the first proof that space-time, the fabric of the universe, is quantized.”
"Even more important is the political reality that, as New York union leader Victor Gotbaum said in 1975, “We have the ability, in a sense, to elect our own boss.”
The anomalies don’t end there. Public employees’ union dues and contributions to union PACs come directly from taxpayers. So if you live in a state or city with strong public-employee unions, you are paying a tax that goes to elect Democratic candidates (plus, perhaps, a few malleable Republicans).
The problem is that, as Roosevelt understood, public-employee unions’ interests are directly the opposite of those of taxpayers. Public-employee unions want government to be more expensive and government employees to be less accountable."
"It would be an astonishing lapse if a man who promised to roll back nuclear proliferation watched proliferation develop in one of the least stable parts of the world, a place where the United States has only been able to maintain even a modicum of stability by a massive projection of its own forces. The region is of prime interest to the entire world for its energy resources. If it becomes nuclearized, it will be the one thing for which Barack Obama would always be remembered by history, and he would be remembered by history as a failure."
"But money? That’s a dog-ate-my-homework excuse that is convincing no one but those doing the spinning (and maybe not even them).
...Indeed. And the real danger for the Democrats is that they will fall in love with their own explanation and avoid taking the steps necessary to align themselves with public opinion."
"Joel M. Cohen, a partner at the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, recently wrote that there had been a “shift in insider-trading jurisprudence away from its roots in deterring and punishing those who abuse special relationships at the expense of shareholders and into a murkier area where the S.E.C. is policing general financial unfairness that has traditionally been considered beyond its authority to regulate.”The perfect analogy for what is taking place in the government's ever expanding mission creep to make the world safe from "everything:...
In other words, the S.E.C. is no longer just making sure that employees are not abusing their position and breaching their fiduciary duty; it is focused on making sure the markets “feel” fair.
"As Nancy Pelosi put it at a $50,000-a-couple fund-raiser, “Everything was going great and all of a sudden secret money from God knows where — because they won’t disclose it — is pouring in.”
"And, without serious course correction, America is doomed. It starts with the money. For dominant powers, it always does – from the Roman Empire to the British Empire. “Declinism” is in the air these days, but for us full-time apocalyptics we’re already well past that stage. In the space of one generation, a nation of savers became the world’s largest debtors, and a nation of makers and doers became a cheap service economy. Everything that can be outsourced has been – manufacturing to by no means friendly nations overseas; and much of what’s left in agriculture and construction to the armies of the “undocumented”. At the lower end, Americans are educated at a higher cost per capita than any nation except Luxembourg in order to do minimal-skill checkout-line jobs about to be rendered obsolete by technology. At the upper end, America’s elite goes to school till early middle age in order to be credentialed for pseudo-employment as $350 grand-a-year diversity consultants (Michelle Obama) or in one of the many other phony-baloney makework schemes deriving from government micro-regulation of virtually every aspect of endeavor.
"Poor Michelle: She can’t even order a simple burger without being criticized.
"....what was unmasked during the last week was the extent to which modern liberalism (at least as embodied by NPR) is antithetical to classical liberalism, which celebrated open-mindedness, a diversity of thought and opinion, and the spirited exchange of ideas. The depth of intolerance at National Public Radio is so deep that even a liberal like Juan Williams was thrown to the curb. His sin is not only that he didn’t parrot the Party Line closely enough; it was also that he didn’t parrot the Party Line at the appropriate Party Outlets."
"No conservatives are trying to prevent people from appearing on NPR, but liberal interest groups and their media outlets are trying to prevent people from appearing on Fox News."
"Witness the policies that Democrats have inflicted on their core constituencies, resulting in vile schools, lawless slums, economic stagnation, and social immobility. Democrats will do anything to make sure that Democratic voters stay helpless and hopeless enough to vote for Democrats."
"I suspect that if he’d said the same thing to Charlie Rose, rather than on the O’Reilly Factor, he’d still have his radio job."Yet another "Putney Swope" moment!
"Stalin was, without a doubt, one of the two or three greatest, most destructive figures of the twentieth century. Mao might have been responsible for more deaths, and Hitler is in his league, but Stalin did more than any other person to make the twentieth century the darkest, bloodiest and most tyrannical era in the blood-drenched annals of our race.Read it all.....
...Such a career must be studied, remembered, and can never be forgotten; equally, the monstrous social system that he brought to world power deserves a museum and an archival center where the whole ghastly story can be told. There’s no reason that Gori (a modest provincial town in central Georgia with few other claims to fame) shouldn’t host it. The Stalin Museum that currently exists, while it is a must-see for anybody visiting Georgia, isn’t up to the job. With one foot in the old-Soviet celebration of the great proletarian hero and another in a cautious, Khrushchevian reassessment, the museum doesn’t do justice to its real subject: the Great Darkness of the twentieth century and the man who did so much to shape it."
Have you always had conservative views?
To be honest, I never paid attention to what the hell was going on. My always voting Democrat was the result of that.
What are your feelings about the online reactions? Many people seem upset or outraged.
I'm stunned that so many people who call themselves liberal yet are completely intolerant. I thought liberals loved everyone: the poor, the immigrant, the gays, the handicapped, the minorities, dogs, cats, all eye colors, all hair colors! Peace, love, bull! Curious they have no tolerance whatsoever for anyone who doesn't think exactly as they do. You disagree and you're immediately called a fool, a Nazi, a racist. That's pretty f'd up!! I would never judge someone based on their political views. Their honesty, integrity, kindness to others, generosity? Yes. Politics? No!
"Communism is not the only force that haunts Georgia. Ethnic nationalism, religious conflict, resource wars: in a very small space Georgia is one of those unlucky countries that have it all.
"Japan used to be so flashy and upbeat, but now everyone must live in a dark and subdued way,” said Masato, 49, who asked that his full name not be used because he still cannot repay the $110,000 that he owes on the mortgage.
Few nations in recent history have seen such a striking reversal of economic fortune as Japan. The original Asian success story, Japan rode one of the great speculative stock and property bubbles of all time in the 1980s to become the first Asian country to challenge the long dominance of the West."
"It is a variation on that very old political theme: Bush made me do it. This despite the fact that in early 2003, Congress had been warned by the director of the federal office responsible for overseeing Fannie and Freddie, Armando Falcon, who said “in a 118-page report of the companies’ potential for a catastrophic failure that could jeopardize the economy.” This was followed by efforts by the Bush administration to rein in Fannie and Freddy somewhat via new Treasury rules.
But Frank and other Democrats still opposed tighter regulation, Frank most notably in his public statements saying there was nothing wrong with Fannie and Freddie. He and other House Democrats also sent a letter to President George W. Bush in June 2004, saying the proposed crackdown could “weaken affordable housing performance . . . by emphasizing only safety and soundness.’’
"D.C. runs over black schoolkids. “Michelle Rhee—the tough broad who spent nearly four years as D.C. schools chancellor in a pitched battle against the corruption-plagued, incompetence-ridden Washington teachers union to reform a rotten public school system—was forced out today by mayor-elect Vincent Gray in what surely must be seen as a kind of triumph for the union and a potential tragedy for the city’s underprivileged, mostly-black schoolchildren.” Meanwhile, the Obamas are “tucking their own cute kids safely away in private schools.” Read the whole thing.
Officials from cities like New York should run, not walk, to grab her. “DC’s loss could be New York’s gain, and it behooves city Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to scoop her up before she departs for another system.”
"Every day, the citizens of the Jewish homeland defend themselves against armies of terrorists whose maps spell out the goal they have in mind: a Middle East without Israel. In Europe, Jewish populations increasingly find themselves targeted by people who share that goal. And in the United States, I fear that our foreign policy sometimes emboldens these extremists.
...The world of 2010 is not the world of the 1930s. The threats Jews face today are different. But these threats are real. These threats are soaked in an ugly language familiar to anyone old enough to remember World War II. And these threats cannot be addressed until we see them for what they are: part of an ongoing war against the Jews."
“Are we sure Obama’s not trying to help the GOP take back the House?”
"Yet Obama and the Democrats, in thrall to the teachers’ unions, steadfastly resist proposals to give parents more control over their children’s education. Washington, D.C., has a public-school system that, despite spending more per child than almost any other system in the nation, still has a dropout rate of more than 50 percent. Yet one of the first actions of the president and congressional Democrats was to kill the Opportunity Scholarship Program, which offered vouchers to permit poor children to opt out of the city’s rotten public schools."
"But the very pleasing moment of anticipation casts a shadow, because I can’t accept the bounty of an extra seat without remembering why it’s empty, without wondering if its emptiness isn’t something quite sad. And quite dangerous, also, if left unexamined. Posters in the train, the station, the subway warn: if you see something, say something.Oh, the whining..... let's see what happens if you put a blackhat Hasid on a train full of Africana Americans. Whom do you think would wind-up with the empty seat next to him?
"You can imagine the Syrians’ frustration, having to fund Hezbollah when the money could be spent on wind turbines.Idiots....
"Unfortunately, there is no adult supervision of the Obama foreign policy."
"My own life philosophy is one I call Blithe Nihilism. I believe there is no point to life, but I try not to let the belief bother me. Blithe Nihilism has its roots in the grand English anti-intellectual tradition — in the conviction that life is to be got on with and not thought about too much.
Once in a while — after some string of personal disasters, or in a random melancholy mood, or when reading some bloke’s 1,905-page suicide note — once in a while the defenses crack and you find yourself looking down into the pit. When that happens, you need to have some habitual remedy close at hand.
"No, I cannot quite believe how quietly and without audit America’s moneyed and cognitive elites became such hectoring populists — with the constant assumption they could still live, school, work, and marry largely among like kind — oh so distant from the objects of their concern.
"Ah the cutesy nickname. Friedman has been working this for years. I’m not sure if he stole the shtick from Maureen Dowd or the other way around but it’s annoying. Liberals, especially the ones working at and/or who read the NY Times, are forever going on about how much smarter and more nuanced they are than say the average rube who watches Fox News. Yet they seem to need a spoon full of childish phrasing to help them swallow their supposedly big ideas.
"One may satirize, criticize, and even demonize Christians and Jews. Such speech remains protected by America’s Constitution. But when it comes to Islam and the sensibilities of overly sensitive Muslims, constitutional protections are no longer to be taken seriously. To even discuss these matters, as I am now doing, risks — nay, ensures — being castigated as an Islamophobe.
"-- Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu: 'I agree with President Ahmadinejad.'Read it all. Apparently, our resident genius ain't so bright after all....
"A sharply escalated campaign of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan is aimed in part at al-Qaeda units suspected of planning terrorist attacks on targets in Europe, a threat that U.S. officials described as “credible but not specific” enough to allow authorities to anticipate precisely where or when a strike might occur.
"Bob Woodward is a lot more confident than I am that washing an administration’s dirty linen in the middle of an ongoing war can help us to win or support the troops, but it obviously works for him. I may be old fashioned about this; , but wartime presidents deserve to have their policy advice, and their reactions to it, kept confidential. We should judge President Obama’s policy in Afghanistan by the consequences. The President should have either kept Mr. Woodward out of the White House or gotten him to agree to delay publication until after the 2012 election.Obviously, the President figured that the long-time liberal Woodward would merely bow to his greatness and deliver a glowing critique. If all the other news outlets kowtow, why wouldn't this one?
"What seems to have flummoxed the left is that the Beck rally demonstrated that the populist anti-Obama faction in the country (some might use the mundane phrase “majority”) isn’t composed of wackos. They actually understand better than elites that the economic problems are in large part a function of a collapse in values. Obama likes to rail against Wall Street. Well, that’s a location. The ralliers want to talk about what went wrong with the people who populate business and government. They would say we have lost touch with essential values — thrift, persistence, responsibility, modesty, and, yes, faith in something beyond self and self-indulgence. As Brooks put it, “Every society has to engird capitalism in a restraining value system, or else it turns nihilistic and out of control.”
The chattering class should stop chattering long enough to listen to what citizens are saying. Not only is it quite reasonable; it is profound."
"In short: liberals don’t hate America, they simply hate Americans, especially when they won’t go along with such obviously good things such as President Obama’s healthcare law, “economic stimulus” spending, nationalizing student loans, unilaterally disarming American nuclear weapons, or raising taxes in an anemic economy. Having fully embraced the notion that Judeo-Greco-Roman society has engaged in systematic “cultural imperialism,” the modern Left has embraced what might be termed “cultural inferiorism” as a means to atone."
"Yet as their financial prospects darken, students’ educational costs are exploding. Like the health care system, the educational system is being overwhelmed by rising costs and rising demand. And as misguided government policies contributed to the real estate bubble by artificially inflating demand, government programs are burdening students with unpayable loans and contributing to relentless and unsustainable inflation in school costs."
"Even in defeat, the greens can’t get it right. The greens didn’t fail because they were too loyal to their ideals; they failed because lost touch with the core impetus and values of the environmental movement. Bambi wasn’t crushed by Godzilla; Bambi turned into Godzilla, and the same kind of public skepticism and populism that once fueled environmentalism have turned against it."
"In a country where you have to provide a valid ID to drive, fly or even enjoy a beer, it’s astounding that in most states you are not required to do the same to vote. Evidence like this shows that this failure of the system will continue to be exploited in the interests of those who stand to benefit."
"When, pray tell, will Time magazine devote an issue to its, and this administration’s, intolerance of the American people?
"A very old insight has to be relearned many times—that one cannot act politically without getting one’s hands dirty, often enough with blood. There are no reliable criteria to fall back upon in attempting the moral calculus of alternative courses of action—general principles, to be sure, as in the various versions of just war theory—but the principles are usually hard to apply to the empirical realities. Perhaps the only sure recommendation is to be humble in making the moral assessments that, inevitably, one should make."
"Have any other U.S. presidents ever appeared in tabloids? Did the New York Times do stories about it when those presidents’ approval ratings fell?
The NYT then cites a poll saying that 18 percent of Americans think Obama’s a Muslim. Which is ridiculous, because we all know he spent 20 years in a church where he didn’t hear a single thing the preacher said.
"Whichever way it works out, one side or another will overattribute the 2012 economy to Obama and the Democrats. The fact is, the president can't do much more than tinker around the edges of a $14 trillion economy--for which we can humbly thank God every day. If presidents really did have the kind of power over the economy that their friends or enemies try to claim, the world would be a much more terrifying place."
"But really, this is precisely what we should expect if we elect someone whose executive skills are negligible and whose views come straight out of the Ivy League left. Next time, maybe voters should pay more attention to the experience and values of the person they are electing to lead the Free World.
"What President Obama achieved in endorsing the mosque’s construction is to change what it is all about. Prior to his endorsement the mosque controversy might have been about religion or the culture wars. It might even have been about the War on Terror. What the President’s words have done — apart from making it all about him — is transform it into a referendum on whether a country can long rely on a elite that doesn’t even remotely “get it” the way they do.
If I’ve had a ballot
And I had a box
And I had just one thing to pull so you’d understand
I’d remember the burnings; I’d remember the blastings
I’d remember the tears among my brothers and my sisters
All over this land
"When one discusses the Constitution on college campuses, students and even professors will object that without a “living Constitution,” blacks would still be slaves and women wouldn’t be allowed to vote. Nonsense. Those indispensable changes to the Constitution came not from judges reading new rights into the document but from Americans lawfully amending it.
From birthright citizenship and gay marriage to flag-burning and gun rights, I trust the American people to change the Constitution when necessary (after lengthy debate) more than I trust five out of nine unelected justices with lifetime tenure, hiding behind closed doors and away from TV cameras.
What are the opponents of “tinkering” afraid of? I suspect sullying the genius of the Founders takes a distant backseat to their real fear: losing a fair fight.
"What if, back in 1943, an organization leaked the names of the members of the French Resistance? They would be seen as evil – and the good guys would take care of them."
"All in all, if I had to sum up Spencer “Attackerman” Hackerman, I’d suggest he’s not quite the Superman able to hurl his political opposition through a plate-glass window with a single keystroke he played on JournoList and in email. Instead, he appears to be a not yet fully human man-child, clinging to an insular womb of his own design for fear of being bitch-slapped by college girls and ignored or rejected by the more mature and intelligent human beings able to survive out here in the real world where the rest of us live."
"It's unfortunate that so many people confuse the right to do something — which I presume here — and whether it's a good idea to do it. Many — perhaps most — of the bad things people do are not illegal. You can say someone has a legal right to do something — and even enthusiastically support that right — and still tell them that what they are doing is horribly wrong.
"As the government takes over more of the health care system, expect to see more calls for more government “nudges” to help us eat healthier in order to save the government money. It’s worth remembering that like everything else government does, the government’s dietary recommendations are susceptible to all sorts of pressures and influences, which may or may not have anything to do with nutritional science
"Pity the good people of Chicago. The thugs give them dead bodies, the governor gives them commissions.
"“We shouldn’t be campaigning all the time,” President Obama said on “The View,” during an interview that looked and sounded a lot like a campaign appearance.
"A month after the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Joseph P. Kennedy, the American ambassador in London and father of a future president, expressed grave doubts about “this war for idealism” against Hitler.
"Missing in all of these well-written essays is global context. Where do the Taliban get their money, ideology and support? Will it be as important were the infrastructure that supported it neutralized? What is the role of Pakistan? Of the Global Jihad? The nine essays are a little like monographs about taking Guadalcanal without describing why anyone should bother to expend blood and treasure in such a godforsaken place. It is possible that the context has been omitted not because the contributors to the New Republic special are stupid or ignorant; they certainly are not: but possibly because a consensus has silently emerged which regards the War on Terror in the same way as the Cold War. In some unspoken way that only professional pundits can unconsciously absorb it has by assent become regarded as a decades long campaign to outlast an enemy Who Shall Not Be Named. So strategy is assumed. Only tactics are important. If this interpretation is correct, maybe the stasis we observe is the result of being trapped within historical adolescence. In this metaphor Obama can aspire at best to be the Harry Truman and at worst the Jimmy Carter of the new Cold War. But he cannot even conceive of himself as being the new Ronald Reagan because the time for Ronald Reagans is not yet come.
"You know when a politician starts a sentence with “frankly,” he’s about to lie to your face.
"What’s also disturbing for me about the Journolist is the fact that so many of its members have Jewish names. You’ll notice my careful phrasing there. I don’t know if they’re actually Jewish or not. I don’t know if those who are Jewish actually practice the religion. And of those who practice the religion, I don’t know whether they practice the religion in a way that has traditional religious resonance, or is just the Jewish liberal bow to Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, and the Sabbath candles. As to the latter group, assuming it existed on the Journolist, it’s easy to claim religion when you just go through the rituals. It’s a little harder when you try to align your Torah with the Democratic handbook and the Alinsky rules for living.
"Goebbels couldn’t have put it better."
"Gee, Joan, can you tell me what's so heroic about telling a room full of young black minds not even out in the world, yet - that if they ever embrace political, or socio-economic ideas that don't jibe with your hero's, the one elevated in a room before them, that they will be denounced as race-traitors?
"Some voting rights are more important than others, it seems."
"There are so many apologies needed. Shirley Sherrod is the least of them.
"I was waiting to name my blog until the White House came up with a new name for the Conflict Formerly Known As The Global War On Terror (COFKATGWOT); I’ve pretty much given up on that now. We are fighting an anonymous war with unspecified goals against Those Who Cannot Be Named and that’s the way it will stay for a while.
But just because our civilian leadership cannot settle on a name for the high stakes conflict now being fought on six continents plus cyberspace by the largest and most powerful military and intelligence forces in the history of the world against an unspecified constellation of people and organizations seeking to destroy American power and western civilization for reasons that cannot be described in polite company is no reason for me to have an anonymous blog.
"Academics within the tenure system are probably more careful about weeding out heresy, because they'll be stuck with it if it manages to sneak in. Tenure can easily be used to entrench the ideological or scholarly commitments of a department's powerful members, reducing diversity rather than enhancing it."
"“Rev. Wright is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”
"This is a dumb strategy, but the people who have come up with it, and who persist in it after a year of epochal political collapse and historic levels of fiasco and humiliation continue to believe with a serenity I can admire if I can’t quite respect that they are smarter, more virtuous and altogether more worthy than the rest of the world — and that they and they alone know how the world must be run.
The strategic incompetence exhibited by the climate movement and its congressional allies is something that students everywhere need to study — and especially those who hope someday to help build a better world or fight for social change. This is how you fail, kids: Advance half baked policy ideas by hyping the science to create a global panic; when that fails, fall back on shady little dodges that don’t fool anybody — all the while telling anybody and everybody that you are the smartest, most virtuous person in the room.
"Whether it is Pawlenty or some other candidate who captures the nomination, it may be high time to hire someone who’s run something, turned a profit, maintained a payroll, balanced a budget, or hired and fired people. There is something terribly adolescent about Obama — an infatuation with himself and with pretty words, a lack of decisiveness, an inability to make tough choices, and an unwillingness to take responsibility for his own actions. By 2012, the country may be ready — desperate, even — for a grown-up executive.
"We get, and deserve, the tyranny we tolerate. We get it because we teach officious government officials that regulating our life is their birthright. More frighteningly, we get it because we teach our children that the role of the government is to regulate our life — thus dashing their chances to be free people.
"So, we have a Justice Department that drops a case it already won against New Black Panthers who are on tape intimidating voters in blatant violation of federal law, but that sues a sovereign state for enacting a statute in support of immigration enforcement practices that have already been upheld by two of the nation’s highest courts. Perfect.
There is no “right” to something someone else has to provide or pay for. That’s an entitlement.
My god, if there's a more perfect metaphor for the modern progressive movement, I've never seen it.
A simple way to think about the Democratic Party is, you're the human being, they're the tapeworm. Yet they claim a weird sort of parasite's moral superiority over you: if you point out that they have their hand in your pocket, you're a "smartass." The Democratic Party needs to be torn, root and branch, from our public life.
I believe that the upcoming election is the most important election in decades, and that its effects will be felt for decades to come. What's at stake are the very principles of this nation. Surely that's clear enough? Clearly I believe that those who voted in this government were mistaken. I want those people back on our side.
Listen up, you punked, chumped boobs: We looked at Obama not through your rose colored hallucinations, but through the cold, clear spectacles of reality. None of what he’s done since has surprised us one bit. In fact, many of us, myself included, predicted it even before his coronation by people like you. Yes, it’s nice that after a year and a half of horrible examples, the truth about him is finally beginning to penetrate your skulls. But why, for the love of god, couldn’t you see it at the beginning, when it was no less obvious, but your understanding of it might have done some good?
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, one of the most bizarre things ever said by any president.
All she wanted was a chance to do what Nicholas Kristof takes for granted—to live her own life. What difference would saying “I love you” in a Lifestyle Channel soft-focus blur accompanied by saccharine strings make? As they see it, the perpetrators of “honour killings” love their daughters: that’s why they kill ’em. Would Kristof wish to swap his options for the set menu served up to Muslim women? How would he like it if, just as he was getting ready to head to Oxford on his Rhodes Scholarship, his dad had announced that he’d arranged for him to marry a cousin? Oh, and in Canada.
I used to think that oil, Arab demography, fear of Islamic terrorism, and blowback from its close association with the United States explained the global double standard that is applied to Israel.
But after the hysteria over the Gaza flotilla, the outbursts of various members of the Turkish government, and Ms. Thomas’s candid revelations, I think the mad-dog hatred of Israel is more or less because it is a Jewish state. Period.
...How odd that the more the activists, political leaders, and media figures issue moral strictures against Israel, the more they prove abjectly amoral. And the more they seek to pressure Israel, the more they are liberating it to do what it feels it must.
Now that the gulf faces a crisis that's poised to be potentially worse down the road for the region, Hollywood celebrities are not only absent from the area - they are practically silent. Unlike after the earthquake in Haiti in January, there hasn't been an overwhelming response of donations, large-scale fund-raisers, contribution-driven Web sites and hotlines or public service announcements encouraging Americans to do all they can to help out the fishermen or the oil-drenched ducks.
Not because celebrities don't want the media attention, but because their guy, Barack Obama, is in the middle of the mess.
We need to think carefully about what that means and whether we can take a holiday from history.
Front-page headline in my New York Post this morning:
2 + 2 = 5
NY passes students who get wrong answers on tests
The accompanying story describes a further dumbing-down of state math tests for kids in grades 3 to 8. Half marks are given for fragments of work; also for wrong answers arrived at via correct methods: “A kid who answers that a 2-foot-long skateboard is 48 inches long gets half-credit for adding 24 and 24 instead of the correct 12 plus 12 . . . ”
...I must admit that there is more than one silver lining to this entire sordid affair. While it has provided us another example of Ehad Ha’am’s cold comfort that the world can be wrong while Israel is right; it has also done us the favor of exposing precisely who is who in this world of ours. We now know for certain which politicians, journalists, and activists are conscienceless liars, fabulists, conspiracy theorists, and feverish opponents of anything resembling basic human decency.
Funny, I’m no expert, but that’s not how Gandhi behaved in the movie. Maybe there was a sequel with Chuck Norris as the Mahatma? “Gandhi’s back, and this time it’s personal!”
Only one question remains: At a time when Europe is discovering that its democratic socialism does not work, why in the world is the United States doing its best to copy it?
Well golly, Fareed. Really? I remain perplexed that Newsweek is going broke with insightful analysis like this.
The five other ships in the “Freedom Flotilla” were boarded and escorted to Ashdod, the passengers were disembarked, and the humanitarian aid was transferred over the border into Gaza. This was apparently not newsworthy.
This is a good news, bad news column. The good news is that crime is again down across the nation -- in big cities, small cities, flourishing cities and cities that are not for the timid. Surprisingly, this has happened in the teeth of the Great Recession, meaning that those disposed to attribute criminality to poverty -- my view at one time -- have some strenuous rethinking to do. It could be, as conservatives have insisted all along, that crime is committed by criminals. For liberals, this is bad news indeed.
At a New Jersey town meeting, Gov. Chris Christie, the newest YouTube star for the limited-government set, was reproached by an unhappy teacher. The governor, facing a budget shortfall of $11 billion, has proposed, among other economies, a one-year salary freeze for New Jersey teachers. Her voice raised in anger (that’s a normal speaking voice in my home state), Rita Wilson protested that she should be paid $83,000, the only reasonable compensation in light of her “education and experience.” Christie’s reply got an ovation: “Well, you know what? Then you don’t have to do it.”
As for many great “thinkers,” for Barack Obama and his coterie words seem to exist mostly in the realm of metaphor rather than as descriptors of actual action actually occurring in anything so humdrum as reality. And so it is that, even as his bungling administration flounders in the turbulent waters of the Gulf, on the speaker’s podium the president still confidently sails forth deftly steering the ship through the narrow ribbon of sludge between the Scylla of sonorous banality and the Charybdis of gaseous uplift.
The big surprise with the current president is not so much that he is incompetent, inexperienced and divisive, but the extent to which he is all of those things, and the extent to which anyone is surprised. It’s not like there weren’t enough warning signs on the way in, all of which were summarily dismissed.
‘Joe Biden.” With the exception of “broken teleprompter,” these are the scariest two words in the White House communications shop.
One advantage Biden has over Obama is he can always claim he was “just being Joe” whenever he says something controversial. In this way, Biden reminds me a bit of the late PLO leader Yasser Arafat, who would say “nice” things in English and evil things in Arabic. The press would largely ignore the Arabic and take him at his word in English.
