Mad Men in Shark-Infested Waters

Mad Men hasn't quite jumped the shark yet, but it's getting close.   I don't have time for a lengthy dissertation, but to put it bluntly, it's got two main problems, one involving the writing, and one involving the casting, neither of which is solvable at this late date, and perhaps both of which were inevitable.

Writing

As to the writing, for a long time now it's been evident that Matthew Weiner envisions Don Draper as his version of Tony Soprano (Weiner made his writing bones on The Sopranos).   We are supposed to watch the arc of his life and anticipate his death or, at best, his destruction.  

But Tony Soprano was always watchable and fascinating because he was always from the outset a nasty sociopath criminal, so we were surprised by moments of humanity with his family, and we wanted to see if he was redeemable, even though we knew he probably wasn't.    Draper is becoming increasingly unwatchable for the opposite reason -- he was sold to us as a dashing leading man type, but we are now compelled to watch him increasingly become a nasty sociopath with little human connection to his wife or children (or anyone, really).  

Wondering whether the Devil can be saved is interesting.   Watching a man we thought was heroic go to Hell isn't... it's frankly kind of depressing.   Thus last night's episode where Don indulges in some creepy sex play with his mistress, Sylvia Rosen (Linda Cardellini), was almost unbearable.   I had to turn away.

Casting

Now for the casting problem.   This is somewhat inevitable, and Weiner is actually pretty obviously conscious of this and making an effort to make it into a thematic aspect of the show -- 7-8 years later, Jon Hamm just doesn't look the same.   He was male-model handsome when the show began, and he's still handsome, but he's also obviously 40-something now, and getting (as we all do), jowlier.   He doesn't obviously seem, just by being gorgeous, to be cooler than everyone anymore.   He's this guy now:

Okay, not bad.   A good-looking 40 year-old man.   And Hamm can play Draper as a guy the years are catching up to... too many late nights, too much booze.   OK, I get it.   But, still, he's not this guy:

This guy I would watch do anything because he's beautiful.   The other guy?   He looks like too many middle-aged lawyers in my firm.  

***

In a way the writing problem and the casting problem are the same problem... the central character is no longer the magnetic sexual beast he was at the beginning.   Now he's becoming a creepy middle-aged dude who should grow up already.   The kind of guy you wouldn't really like to have around.

So why watch?

Why Drudge Still Rocks II

Coincidence?

The White House press room had to be evacuated today for an hour because of a smoke incident.

Hmmm... if I wanted to get a look at the types of notes the White House press had taken in yesterday's "deep background" meeting about Benghazi, and/or get a quick look at White House press laptops, I might stage something like this.

I'm just sayin'.

Quick Thoughts on the IRS Scandal

The IRS admitted yesterday that its Cincinnati office had targeted 501(c)(4) tax exempt organizations for audits where the words "tea party" or "patriot" appeared in their names.   In other words, they were using the power of government to harass political opponents.  The IRS claims that this was just "local" personnel.   But Cincinnati is the central IRS hub responsible for all 501(c)(4) organizations in the country, so that line of excuse shouldn't wash.   Moreover:

What state is Cincinnati in?

Ohio.

What state was the most important for the Obama campaign to win in 2012?

Ohio.

Where would it be most useful to the Obama campaign to tie up staff and funds of conservative activist groups in 2012?

Ohio.

Hmmmmm.....

***

Also...  why release the story on Friday?  
The Friday before Mother's Day weekend.
During a week where there were a lot of competing news stories: Benghazi, Jodi Arias, the Cleveland kidnapping.

Hmmmm....

***

Also... this is the same Obama campaign that had a major theme of demanding to see Mitt Romney's tax returns, which are supposedly private.

Does anybody really believe that an administration that sicced the IRS on its political opponents wouldn't violate the privacy of Mitt Romney and steal a look at his tax returns, see something in there they could use, and then gin up a controversy about why Romney won't release them?

Scoundrels.

"Scrubbed" and the Smoking Gun

ABC News reports that the Benghazi talking points went through twelve versions in which the Obama Administration scrubbed the document of any reference to al Qaeda or terrorism or the warnings the Administration:

When it became clear last fall that the CIA’s now discredited Benghazi talking points were flawed, the White House said repeatedly the documents were put together almost entirely by the intelligence community, but White House documents reviewed by Congress suggest a different story. 

ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack. 

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department. The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.
 

The smoking gun in the story is an email from Victoria Nuland, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's spokesperson:

State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland raised specific objections to this paragraph drafted by the CIA in its earlier versions of the talking points:

“The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al-Qa’ida in Benghazi and eastern Libya. These noted that, since April, there have been at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy. We cannot rule out the individuals has previously surveilled the U.S. facilities, also contributing to the efficacy of the attacks.”

In an email to officials at the White House and the intelligence agencies, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland took issue with including that information because it “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either? Concerned …”

The paragraph was entirely deleted.
 

This is almost the definition of a cover-up... government officials deliberately obscuring facts that would make their own conduct look bad.

Benghazi and Election '12 - Romney's Lost Opportunity

There was compelling testimony on Wednesday in Congress by three American career State Department officials that went a long way toward demonstrating that the Obama Administration had been derelict in their duties regarding the Benghazi consulate attack by (a) not beefing up security in the months before 9/11/12; not beefing up security specifically in anticipation of 9/11/12; (c) not having rapid response military and air ready to go in reaction to any terrorist attack on Mediterranean consulates; and (d) not reacting in real time to send help on 9/11/12.  

The testimony also was compelling that there was a coverup of what happened in Benghazi, through editing of intelligence, through misleading "talking points," through intimidation of witnesses.   Given the misfeasance described above, the malfeasance of the coverup makes sense.   With Obama's 2012 election on the line, and with Hillary Clinton's 2016 prospects in jeopardy, the administration would literally say anything, do anything.

Some of this was not known in the fall of 2012 in the weeks leading up to the election.  But the basics obviously were.   Four dead Americans.   The first ambassador in 30 years to be killed.   The fecklessness of the President and the Secretary of State.

Why didn't Mitt Romney hit Obama with an ad like this (which was apparently in the can)?



***

UPDATE: Peggy Noonan has a good piece up at the WSJ. Here's the money quote:

What happened in Benghazi last Sept. 11 and 12 was terrible in every way. The genesis of the scandal? It looks to me like this:  

The Obama White House sees every event as a political event. Really, every event, even an attack on a consulate and the killing of an ambassador.  

Because of that, it could not tolerate the idea that the armed assault on the Benghazi consulate was a premeditated act of Islamist terrorism. That would carry a whole world of unhappy political implications, and demand certain actions. And the American presidential election was only eight weeks away. They wanted this problem to go away, or at least to bleed the meaning from it.  

Because the White House could not tolerate the idea of Benghazi as a planned and deliberate terrorist assault, it had to be made into something else. So they said it was a spontaneous street demonstration over an anti-Muhammed YouTube video made by a nutty California con man. After all, that had happened earlier in the day, in Cairo. It sounded plausible.
 

Noonan is right on the mark that the Obama White House sees everything through a political lens.   You could say the same thing about Hillary Clinton.   Just as Obama is all about Obama, the Clintons are all about the Clintons, and always have been.  

But I would add this:   we have too many lawyers at the highest levels of government.   They tend to see everything in an adversarial posture, where they are looking at every issue in terms of whether it helps or hurts their "client," the President.   Thus you get scrubbed talking points massaged by the lawyers to minimize the risk to their client.   They read like interrogatory responses... purposefully incomplete and vague.

The problem, of course, is that the lawyers in the government have a conflict of interest.   They think of their jobs as serving their client, the President.   But the President isn't their client... the American people is the client.  

Why Drudge Still Rocks

Ted Cruz Has Balls... Exactly What the GOP Needs

Ted Cruz circulated this set of pictures on his Twitter account today:

Cruz, by the way, is what Obama only wishes he was.   Yes, they both went to Harvard, but Cruz
was magna cum laude (Dershowitz says he was "off the charts brilliant"), and went on to write 80 briefs for the Supreme Court and do nine Supreme Court oral arguments.   This was after he was the first Hispanic clerk for a Supreme Court Justice (Rehnquist).   He's the real deal.

The Regular Son Suggests a Telling Juxtaposition

I may have the only high school sophomore son in America who for fun this month read Clausewitz and, now, a biography of Bismarck.   But it does have the advantage of providing a useful antidote to contemporary political nonsense.   Here is the Regular Son's idea of a telling juxtaposition:



Versus:

Jay Carney, Duped Patsy or Co-Conspirator?

Here is Jay Carney, the Obama Administration's press spokesman, on 9/14/12, answering a question from Jake Tapper about the deaths of Ambassador Stevens and three others on 9/11:



Either Carney was duped by his superiors into relaying a talking point that was, we now know, false in all of its major particulars -- there was no protest in Benghazi, there was a pre-planned attack, and the attack had nothing to do with an obscure Youtube video -- or else Carney is a co-conspirator in perpetrating a Big Lie on the American people.

So which is it?   And, either way, why should the media ever trust what he says again?

Shattering Testimony on Benghazi

Will the MSM care?   Will the American people?

Sharyl Atkisson at CBS on the Benghazi Hearings

Props where props are due... Sharyl Atkisson has been doing yeoman's work on Benghazi.

Girl of the Day - Jeany Spark

She plays the daughter of the detective Kurt Wallander (Kenneth Branagh) on the BBC show Wallander, which is the new show the Regular Wife and Regular Son and I are watching now on Kindle (for free!).   It's very good, although it makes you wonder what's going on with the Swedes that they have this steady diet of sex crime/murder mysteries.

Ted Cruz... The Most Talented Republican Rhetorician Since Reagan?

Well, maybe.   But this is a jewel from the "Brutus is an honorable man" school of rhetorical evisceration, particularly as he takes on the odious Harry Reid:

The Word "Watergate" Becomes Relevant Again

From the pen of Michael Ramirez:

Girl of the Day - Audrey Hepburn

I missed the birthday over the weekend of the great Audrey Hepburn.   So, to make amends:

The Heritage Study on the Costs of Immigration Reform

Heritage has a new study out that estimates that the long-term cost of granting amnesty to 10-15 million illegal immigrants will add more than $6 trillion to the US national debt, because illegals, once naturalized, will become eligible for social welfare programs.

Look, I'm not against immigration reform and ultimately a "path to citizenship" for illegals.   The reality is that we are not going to deport 10-15 million Mexicans, not now, not ever.  Concentration camps and cattle cars wouldn't look too good for the TV cameras.   And, besides, that's not who we are as Americans.

But we also have to be realistic.   We cannot afford our social programs as they exist today. Add 10 million or so to the food stamp rolls andthe welfare rolls and the Medicaid rolls, etc., and the fiscal Armageddon accelerates. But no one is saying "get rid of food stamps," even though we have an obesity epidemic, not a starvation epidemic. And no one is saying "get rid of Medicaid," even though an Oregon study recently showed there was little to no positive impact on health from having Medicaid coverage rather than being uninsured.

And we aren't creating enough low-skilled manufacturing jobs to use the workforce we have now, and our government, via its massive regulation of industry, is effectively hostile to manufacturing job creation.

And our public schools are bad, and even if they were good, you can't turn people with IQs of <100 -- which by definition at least half of the illegal immigrants are -- into computer programmers or engineers.

So amnesty coupled with a serious border fence is nice, but it's not enough. What we would really need is amnesty coupled with a serious border fence...

• Plus gutting the EPA and OSHA and all of the other regulation regimes that keep manufacturing firms from locating factories and creating jobs in America.
• Plus unleashing oil and gas production so that manufacturers can get cheap energy to compete with cheap labor overseas.
• Plus cutting or eliminating the minimum wage so that low-skilled workers become efficient hires.
• Plus deregulating education so that trade schools and charter schools and private schools can compete with the public school bureaucracy.
• Plus significantly cutting back on disability, welfare, food stamp, Medicaid, etc., so that we stop disincentivizing work.

Then, maybe, just maybe, amnesty might make sense. But amnesty in a European-style welfare state with a post-industrial information economy is a recipe for disaster.

 

Since I think there is little or no chance that any of my bullet points will ever be enacted in a country that seems intent on self-destructing, I'm betting on "disaster."

Benghazi Bombshell

From Sharyl Atkinsson at CBS (of all places):

The deputy of slain U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens has told congressional investigators that a team of Special Forces prepared to fly from Tripoli to Benghazi during the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks was forbidden from doing so by U.S. Special Operations Command South Africa.

The account from Gregory Hicks is in stark contrast to assertions from the Obama administration, which insisted that nobody was ever told to stand down and that all available resources were utilized. Hicks gave private testimony to congressional investigators last month in advance of his upcoming appearance at a congressional hearing Wednesday.

Obama lied.   People died.

Look, there's two possibilities:

1. Obama wussed out on sending available forces to rescue the Benghazi consulate personnel under siege on 9/11, because he didn't want an incident involving American forces at a moment in the campaign where it would have caused him difficulty if it didn't go right.

2. Obama failed to anticipate the need for keeping quick reaction forces available in the Mediterranean despite the obvious factors:  turmoil in Syria and Egypt and Libya; the date... 9/11 anniversary.

So he was either a coward or an incompetent.   Either of which would have been a potential disqualifier in the 2012 election.   Which is why they had to do the coverup.

Ain't Nobody Got Time for That

The Regular Daughters think this is just about the funniest thing ever:





Youtube is eating the world.

Cardinals Sweep!

Our beloved St. Louis Cardinals came to town and the Birds swept four games from the hometown Brewers.   The Regular Son and I went to yesterday's game, had very good seats up the third-base line, and saw the Cards pound the Brew Crew, 10-1, beneath perfect blue skies with 65 degree weather.   A glorious day all around.   Some thoughts on the Cards:

• Jaime Garcia seems to give up a lot of hits and a lot of fly balls to the warning track, but seems to get outs and get them efficiently (i.e., without running his pitching count up).   Something about his stuff, which tops out only at about 90 mph, just seems to make it difficult for hitters to square him up.   Movement, sink, changing speeds, I don't know what it is.   He's just a pitcher, not a thrower.   I suspect he'll be a good to very good starter for a long time, then end his career with a number of years as a productive LOOGY.  
• Carlos Martinez pitched the ninth.   He's 21, just up from Double A Springfield, and has long been touted as one of the Cards' up and coming prospects, what the VEB crowd calls our "Faberge eggs."   Well, he's the real deal... nothing but FBs topping out at 99 mph, and he looks like he throws it as easy as playing catch.   Wow.   I don't think he's ever going down to the minors again.
• Matt Holliday can really bruise a baseball.   Another long, long HR on Sunday.
• Allen Craig gets RBIs the way Uncle Drew gets buckets.   Not sure how he does it, he just seems to get hits when guys are in scoring position.   When his power picks up this year, he'll end up with huge numbers.   He's on pace right now to have a weird year... 5 HRs, but 125+ RBIs.   Those of us old enough to remember Tom Herr remember that he had a year like that in the early 1980s.
• Pete Kozma is playing really really well at shortstop and secretly has a very strong and VERY accurate arm.   If he hits .250, he'll start 150 games.   He and Molina are the glue of the team in the field right now.
• Speaking of Molina... does he ever have a passed ball?   Garcia throws CBs in the dirt regularly.   They all end up three feet in front of the plate after a perfect Molina block.
• Jon Jay has had a little bit of a power surge.   Starting to swing the bat really well.
• David Freese takes too many good pitches to hit.  He's in a funk still.
• Ty Wigginton cannot hit at all and needs to be released.   This is almost an "integrity of the game" issue... he simply isn't a major league player anymore, and he's taking the spot of someone who has earned it like Jamie Romak at AAA.
• The throwback uniforms to the 1913 Cardinals were awesome!  

It's May 6th, the Cards are 20-11, best record in baseball, and we really haven't started hitting and our bullpen has thrown away five games.   In other words, we're really really good.

Looks like a fun summer!

Girl of the Day - Adrianne Palicki

Our favorite high-school bad girl from Friday Night Lights, Adrianne Palicki, turns 30 today:

Tempus fugit.  

Calling George Orwell, Your Memory Hole is Open for Business

It may be that this week's testimony in the House by Benghazi whistleblowers will "blow the lid off" the scandal.   We can already sense the Obama administration's angle that all of this is "old news," when Jay Carney sighs in a White House press briefing and laments that Benghazi was "a long time ago."   And, to a degree, it is.   Anyone with any political sense knew that Obama wanted to bury the leded of the story during the final months of the campaign -- that al Qaeda was alive and well, and hadn't been "decimated" despite his administration's drone program.

Nevertheless, the evidence gets clearer that the White House actively tried to cover up the fact that the the Benghazi embassy attack was a concerted effort (on September 11th, no less) by al Qaeda-connected terrorists, and not a spontaneous demonstration in response to a Youtube video, as the administration first claimed.   Here, for instance, is what we now know were the three versions of the White House's talking points immediately after the attack, which were clearly scrubbed to omit any reference to terrorism.   

Look particularly at the change in the first bullet point from the first to the third versions.   Where Friday morning, 9/14, the State Department was saying that "we do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda participated in the attack," by Saturday morning, 9/15, that reference is massaged in the second version to omit reference to al Qaeda, then in the third to omit any reference to Islamic extremists at all:  "There are indications that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations."   So they might have been environmentalists or Tea Partiers for all we know.

This is Orwellian/Nixonian cover-up bureacrat-speak at its most finely honed:

Picture. Worth. A. Thousand. Words.

From the great Michael Ramirez:

A Tipping Point on Abortion?

I wish I could say we were reaching one.   It seems to me that no one who isn't morally depraved could watch this new video from Lila Rose and Live Action and not come to the conclusion that what is going on in America's abortion clinics is very very wrong.   Have we really become so numbed as a culture that seemingly normal professional people can talk about a 24 week-old baby who they describe as being eight inches long from head to buttocks and possessing all of its organs, and then describe how they will use "instruments" to make sure it doesn't "come out whole," but then assure their customer that, if it does come out whole and moving, they won't try to keep it alive?   I don't know.   I suppose what saves the pro-choice side is that they can avoid ever seeing things like this, because the mainstream media surely won't show it.

Sorry in advance for the horrifying nature of this video.   I don't like watching it anymore than you do.

Cardinals-Brewers Game Tonight!

And the Regular Guy will be there!

Science Be Cool 2

I don't see a way where, as a lawyer, I could have this much fun at work.   Here's a movie made by IBM researchers using a scanning tunnellling microscope to manipulate individual atoms.  

That's right.   Individual freakin' ATOMS!





Engineers... making the world more fun while you sleep!

Girl of the Day - Game of Thrones Version! (Emilia Clarke)

Emilia Clarke, who plays Daenerys Targaryen, the future queen of Westeros (maybe), on HBO's Game of Thrones.   The show's most interesting character arcs seem to be among the women.   Daenerys has grown from a child-bride sold into marriage to the leader of an Army of freed slaves called the "Unsullied," and the master of three actual fire-breathing dragons.

I know that all sounds silly.   But the show is still fun for some reason:

Are We Allowed to Notice a Pattern?

Here's the FBI's most wanted terrorist list.   If you look closely -- or even if you don't -- you can't help noticing that 30 out of 31 names listed are self-evidently Muslim.

Oh, and the only other name on the list is a fellow named Daniel Andreas San Diego who is wanted for trying to blow up a biotech company and nutrional products company in the San Francisco area.   He is listed as a vegan animal rights activist who was born in Berkeley, California.

In other words, not a member of the Tea Party.

I'm just sayin'.   Whatever the rhetoric of "domestic terrorism" from the left focused on right-wingers, there are only two significant sources of terrorism in America today.   Radical islam.   And radical leftism.   Don't let anyone tell you different.

It's Official.... America Has Lost Its Mind

What kind of person thinks that this is OK?

The Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that the contraceptive known as Plan B should be available without a prescription for all women 15 and older. 

The move is sure to stir controversy among social conservatives, some of whom view Plan B as a form of abortion. Unlike other forms of birth control, Plan B is intended for use after sex, rather than before.

Put aside your views on abortion, or contraception, or premarital sex, or morality in general.   What kind of person thinks that it's OK that 15 year-old children should be able to get a strong chemical substance to take, I suppose, in secret, without their parents knowing about it and consenting?   I have a 13 1/2 year-old daughter.   I wouldn't want her taking an aspirin without telling my wife or me.  

Sheesh!   These are the same people who think we need government to monitor how big our sodas are!   But let's give strong medicine to children because... well, because killing babies is the new religion of liberalism.

Greatest Sentence Ever?

Well, probably not.   But this pretty much sums up how the mainstream press has abdicated its responsibility to cover major news stories, like the story from the foreign press that broke yesterday that the Saudi intelligence service had identified Tamerlan Tsarnaev as a potential jihadist long before Boston, and told the CIA and the White House, but nothing ever happened after that:

I find it quite remarkable that in the short span of 5 years we have evolved as a country from the era of presidents steering hurricanes to minority neighborhoods with Halliburton-controlled weather machines to the highest office in the land just being too darn complex for any one man to influence inconsequential subtleties like national security and intelligence gathering.