Meanwhile, Andrew Breitbart is attacking Obama for having marched with racists a year and a half before he was elected President. But the way I skim that article, he didn't find a New Black Panther march and join in - rather, he was marching in what may have been a perfectly respectable parade and some New Black Panthers glommed onto him. Breitbart notes that Obama has other connections to the people in question and says that "[h]ad any of Obama's opponents appeared at an event with the KKK or Aryan Nation, The New York Times would have had to double its ink buy," which is probably true. At least, the Washington Post would have printed the story, at least if one of the members of the KKK were holding a rock with a bad word painted on it. But that doesn't mean this set of pictures is really newsworthy, it just means that the Washington Post will sometimes print stories that aren't.
UPDATE: If having frequented a place with a racial slur painted on a rock over two decades ago is a serious knock against a politician, how about attending a football game involving a team called the "Redskins"? I'll bet the Post could find some politicians who have attended such a game.
The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies.
Over the past 5 years, our federal debt has increased by $3.5 trillion to $8.6 trillion. That is ‘‘trillion’’ with a ‘‘T.’’ That is money that we have borrowed from the Social Security trust fund, borrowed from China and Japan, borrowed from American taxpayers. And over the next 5 years, between now and 2011, the President’s budget will increase the debt by almost another $3.5 trillion.
Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘‘the buck stops here.’’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.
I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.
þ Athens and Jerusalem, where it's explained that Senator Obama probably never literally spoke those words on the floor, simply having them added to the record after the fact.
The president visited the 10th Mountain Division today and congratulated them on their service. Then he told the soldiers that he had given the Medal of Honor to Jared Monti who came back from Iraq alive. Jared Monti was actually killed in Iraq in 2006.
I can understand why some of the milbloggers are upset about this. Maybe I should be, too, but any upsetness I feel is overwhelmed by my sense of bewilderment.
How did this happen? Did someone in the speechwriters' room happen to remember a 10th division Medal of Honor but not remember which one it was, and nobody fact-checked it? Or is there a better explanation?
Saturday, February 06, 2010 :::
Apparently, Obama doesn't know how to pronounce "corpsman", or didn't. Maybe he should have things spelled phonetically on his teleprompter.
Most of the takes I've seen on this have been pretty similar to mine: it shouldn't be that big of a deal. It should be almost as minor as believing that one has been given the correct spelling of "potatoe". But, as Dean has been pointing out, if you can't laugh at the misfortunes and humiliations of others, what can you laugh at?
"There are those who claim we have to choose between paying down our deficits…and investing in job creation and economic growth," President Obama said last week. "This is a false choice." During the same speech, he asked his audience to "let me just be clear" that his administration, having racked up the biggest budget deficits ever, is embracing fiscal responsibility, as reflected in his vow that "health insurance reform" will not increase the deficit "by one dime."
For connoisseurs of Obama-speak, the address featured a trifecta, combining three of his favorite rhetorical tropes. There was the vague reference to "those who" question his agenda, the "false choice" they use to deceive the public, and the determination to "be clear" and forthright, in contrast with those dishonest naysayers. These devices are useful as signals that the president is about to mislead us.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009 ::: This must be what Obama meant when be promised a "new kind of politics":
According to a Senate aide, the White House is now threatening to put Nebraska's Offutt Air Force Base on the BRAC list if Nelson doesn't fall into line.
seem to be the last guys on the planet in love with the sound of his voice and their one interminable tinny tune with its catchpenny hooks. The usual trick is to position their man as the uniquely insightful leader, pitching his tent between two extremes no sane person has ever believed: "There are those who say there is no evil in the world. There are others who argue that pink fluffy bunnies are the spawn of Satan and conspiring to overthrow civilization. Let me be clear: I believe people of goodwill on all sides can find common ground between the absurdly implausible caricatures I attribute to them on a daily basis. We must begin by finding the courage to acknowledge the hard truth that I am living testimony to the power of nuance to triumph over hard truth and come to the end of the sentence on a note of sonorous, polysyllabic if somewhat hollow uplift. Pause for applause."
I think a full-length parody would have to mention "special interests" and "lobbyists" as the entirety of those opposing the health care bill(s) currently being pushed in ads paid for by the pharmaceutical industry. But this is pretty good for its length.
Saturday, December 12, 2009 :::
Jennifer Rubin notes that "this is not an administration that takes in bad news". Which, along with the excessive spending, seems to be something it picked up from the last administration and turned up to 11.
Speaking of bad systems intensified, they're still working on the health care bill. Libertarian Matt Welch notes, though, that in many ways, the French system is more pleasant for the consumer than ours. Some of his points remind me of what Greenspan said when California was facing electricity shortages: a capitalist system would have produced enough electricity, and a socialist system would have produced enough electricity somewhat less efficiently, but the hybrid system in place (which, IIRC, fixed the retail price of electricity below what the market wholesale price ended up being) gummed itself up.
Sunday, October 11, 2009 :::
David Letterman has been getting pretty good ratings lately: "NBC Pressures Leno to Have Affair". Yes, it's satire.
Of course, some people assume we've been living a satire (see also the pseudonymous David Kahane, but mind that he's a Hollywood writer, hence neither subtle nor concise). I'm sure a lot of people saw the headlines Friday morning and wondered if they hadn't got up on the wrong side of the looking glass.
I pointed out a few days ago the DNC press release starting "The Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists"*, producing a combination of offensiveness and stupidity that some of us refer to as a "Michael Moore." Moe Lane notes that several prominent bloggers of the left are also siding with the terrorists. As is Saturday Night Live, though Ann Althouse notes that their mockery, while well-placed, has not been well-done.
If you're looking for well-placed and well-done snark, you are — as is so often the case — well-advised to read Mark Steyn. If you want to support the cause of nominating Obama for a Heisman Trophy, Byron York can tell you how. If you just want to see some other examples of the Nobel Peace Committee's greatest hits, Powerline has you covered.
Tom Friedman rounds up some good suggestions for Obama while noting that he was chosen for the award, in large part, because he's not the sort to accept those suggestions. I particularly like his own idea, that David Petraeus be sent to accept the prize on his behalf. But that's unlikely to happen.
* Incidentally, I've seen a few bumper stickers and blog comments snarkily concluding "or the terrorists win", but that press release is the first serious attempt to use terrorism as a cudgel in that way since about 2003. I had thought of the jokes as gauchely dated, but apparently not.
Saturday, October 10, 2009 :::
I'll echo my brother's point that, while the Nobel Peace Prize committee has beclowned itself, Obama has not done so, at least in this instance. His party has, though:
"The Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists - the Taliban and Hamas this morning - in criticizing the President for receiving the Nobel Peace prize," DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse told POLITICO.
I've also recently read that nominations for the prize were due on February 1. Just in case the prize didn't seem, at best, a little premature, the nomination was even more ludicrous.
I don't think my brother has directly contradicted any of this, but I want to stand by my assertion that, while the Nobel Peace Prize committee has its share of comic gestures in the past, this is more hilarious than most. Consider how your response to the headline that Obama won differed from what it would have been if Clinton had won; insofar as the committee occasionally fails to make an ass of itself, you might have retained high enough expectations for the prize to have rolled your eyes, inferred a strong political bias, and expected a rather tenuous explanation of why s/he — either Clinton, though I suppose Bill would have been more supportable — was selected. You would have expected them to find something, though; Obama is comic because, unlike Arafat, there's not even a really bad argument for him to receive it. This is what is, I would argue, qualitatively different about this one; having long ago transcended such bourgeois notions as "merit", they have finally transcended its last vestigial remnant, that of "justification", and, after getting closer and closer with each incarnation, any pretense of objective value to the award has finally achieved its long-sought extinction of the self.
But the truly comic part is, of course, that it was Obama. And here let me take a brief tangent to respond to a comment I heard about how Obama can "redeem" himself for this: this certainly isn't his fault, and I don't think any less of him for it. In fact, near as I noted his response, it seemed the obligatory one; short of marching the committee to the sea and forbidding the tide to come in, which isn't the least bit Obama's style, the only reasonable response was gracious acceptance. It's simply rude, even for the Nobel Peace Prize, to give an official response on receiving it of "What the f***?" Even if that's everyone else's unofficial response. Since there's no substance to the prize, there's no room for substance to the response, but that's all to Obama's strengths, anyway.
But of course that the excessive humility "isn't the least bit Obama's style" is part of what's comic. This is like Peter Sellers in "Being There"; this is the escalation beyond incredible escalation of the cult surrounding Obama. The arc of the Nobel Peace Prize has been intercepted by the arc of Obama, each at the zenith of its trajectory.
Incidentally, in re flashes in the pan, it's worth noting that the way Nobel described the prizes was not as lifetime achievement awards, but as awards for accomplishments in the previous year. Bednorz and Muller won the physics prize in 1987 for work done in 1986, but in practice the science Nobels have generally followed the lifetime-achievement model for all but maybe the first couple years of their history.
Friday, October 09, 2009 :::
Michael Moore has a new movie out:
Needless to say, because Moore is a Communist, the film is little more than crass, undisguised advocacy of Communism:
...there are calls for armed revolution delivered in Moore's trademark singsong, Bolshie bedtime-story voice. The movie ends with Moore telling us, "Capitalism is evil, and you cannot regulate evil. You have to eliminate it." Then he plays the bloodthirsty Soviet national anthem "The Internationale."
From the ads I've seen, though, it seems as though Moore has a different concept of "capitalism" than I do; I think of an economically libertarian or classically liberal system, but he seems to be referring to the government-industrial complex. Why he thinks the opposite of concentrating economic power in Washington is concentrating economic power in Washington is unclear, though, and I'm not going to spend $9 and two hours to find out.
Speaking of people with soapboxes and no ability to reason, anyone who hadn't already known that the Nobel Peace Prize committee has all the historical perspective and considered judgment of a typical adolescent should have learned something today. The Mankiw parody my brother linked to is appropriate in many years — scientists who did groundbreaking research decades ago and whose research has stood the test of time get awards in their fields, then the Peace committee announces an award to some trendy flash-in-the-pan who later turns out to be an embarrassment.
Speaking of Obama, last Saturday, Saturday Night Live finally poked fun at him, which has been widely noted as a milestone. What has been less commented on has been that the "attack" was from the left. The Obama impersonator spoke of having accomplished nothing, and even, in an aside, commented that he doesn't see why the conservatives are in such a fuss, as it ought to be the left upset with him for moving too slowly. Which they are, that doesn't mean inviting Congress to spend a trillion dollars on a porky "stimulus" bill; railroading bondholders and a bankruptcy court to put a car company in the hands of the government and an Obama-friendly union; encouraging the scapegoating of everyone in the financial industry for the housing/credit bubble without regard to actual responsibility while pushing the expansion of one of the laws that did cause the bubble; or pushing the federal micromanagement of the health care system (even if it hasn't yet been completed, or even resulted in an actual bill) constitutes not doing anything. Granted, I would prefer it if he'd make an actual decision with respect to Afghanistan, I think the economy ought to outweigh health care on his list of priorities, and I think the attempted stimulus bill would have been less bad if he had accepted the responsibility to write it in-house rather than let Congress write it. But, all things considered, I wish he had spent the last eight months doing nothing.
Saturday, September 26, 2009 :::
The circus was in my brother's town this week. Ghaddafi's speech garnered a lot of attention, but like a typical Grateful Dead song, it was long, pointless, and presumably a lot easier to listen to with drugs. Also like a typical Grateful Dead song, I ignored it to the best of my ability.
Obama's speech was typically narcissistic and vapid. Jonah Goldberg had some comments, as did Krauthammer.
[I]t is a pitiful reflection upon the state of the last superpower that, when it comes to the transnational mush drooled by the leader of the free world or the conspiracist ramblings of a terrorist pseudo-Bedouin running a one-man psycho-cult of a basket-case state, it's more or less a toss-up as to which of them is more unreal. To be sure, Colonel Qaddafi peddled his thoughts on the laboratory origins of "swine flu" and the Zionist plot behind the Kennedy assassination. But, on the other hand, President Obama said: "No nation can or should try to dominate another nation."
Friday, September 18, 2009 :::
Arnold Kling points out something that is well-known but not universally-known, yet is rarely commented on: while Obama talks about "my plan" or "the plan", he hasn't actually endorsed a specific plan, let alone presented one of his own.
I do think that, as I said last night, we have to get to the point where we can have a conversation about big, important issues that matter to the American people without vitriol, without name-calling, without the assumption of the worst in other people's motives.
But know this: I will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it's better politics to kill this plan than improve it. I will not stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are. If you misrepresent what's in the plan, we will call you out. And I will not accept the status quo as a solution. Not this time. Not now.
We are closer to reform than we have ever been. But this is the hard part. This is when the special interests and the insurance companies and the folks who want to kill reform fight back with everything they've got. This is when they spread all kinds of rumors to scare and intimidate the American people. This is what they always do.
Left as an exercise to the reader: find an excerpt from his speech on Tuesday that contrasted with that statement from Wednesday. They weren't few.
That's the proposal.And I say yes, but with an important condition. What Wilson did was to appropriate a solemn occasion — a presidential address to a joint session of Congress — to insert his own partisan political statement. He should apologize, but what I wantin additionis an apology for the masses of presidential supporters who repeatedly interrupted the speech with partisan applause, cheering, and standing ovations.
Either it is a solemn occasion not to be interrupted by partisan distractions or it is not. As a citizen TV-watcher, I was willing to listen to the President lay out his argument for us, but I would not watch a political rally. The Democrats who took advantage of the occasion to cheer the President on created an atmosphere that made Joe Wilson's 2 syllables of dissent a welcome pushback. If they had been decorous throughout, what Wilson did would have been appalling. But his behavior seen apart from that context is unacceptable. Let him then apologize, if all the others who wrecked the solemnity also apologize, and let us have future Presidents' visits to Congress be polite, respectful affairs.
I didn't see the speech and don't care to find it on youtube, but the standard of acceptable behavior is a bit fuzzy. Applause is traditional, and I think occasional cheers or boos should be accepted, kept to the point where they don't actually interrupt the speaker. No words, I think — I haven't come to a definitive conclusion. But it's certainly reasonable to suppose that Wilson's wasn't the biggest disruption of the evening.
The article to which Althouse links indicates that in the eyes of the House leadership, Wilson's sin wasn't yelling during a speech, it was calling the President a liar. Like Althouse, I think any standards of decorum should be more or less content-neutral (a ban on profanity might burden the President's critics more than his fans, but it wouldn't be an inordinate burden). If the President wants to hold a campaign rally — and in the case of this President, he clearly does — he can hold it somewhere else.
