Thoughts on Politics, Culture, Books, Sports and Anything Else Your Humble Author Happens to Think Is Interesting
"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."
Via Instapundit, a look back at an extraordinarily prescient October 25, 2008 analysis by the great Mark Levin:
I’ve been thinking this for a while so I might as well air it here. I honestly never thought we’d see such a thing in our country – not yet anyway – but I sense what’s occurring in this election is a recklessness and abandonment of rationality that has preceded the voluntary surrender of liberty and security in other places. I can’t help but observe that even some conservatives are caught in the moment as their attempts at explaining their support for Barack Obama are unpersuasive and even illogical. And the pull appears to be rather strong. Ken Adelman, Doug Kmiec, and others, reach for the usual platitudes in explaining themselves but are utterly incoherent. Even non-conservatives with significant public policy and real world experiences, such as Colin Powell and Charles Fried, find Obama alluring but can’t explain themselves in an intelligent way.
There is a cult-like atmosphere around Barack Obama, which his campaign has carefully and successfully fabricated, which concerns me. The messiah complex. Fainting audience members at rallies. Special Obama flags and an Obama presidential seal. A graphic with the portrayal of the globe and Obama’s name on it, which adorns everything from Obama’s plane to his street literature. Young school children singing songs praising Obama. Teenagers wearing camouflage outfits and marching in military order chanting Obama’s name and the professions he is going to open to them. An Obama world tour, culminating in a speech in Berlin where Obama proclaims we are all citizens of the world. I dare say, this is ominous stuff.
Even the media are drawn to the allure that is Obama. Yes, the media are liberal. Even so, it is obvious that this election is different. The media are open and brazen in their attempts to influence the outcome of this election. I’ve never seen anything like it. Virtually all evidence of Obama’s past influences and radicalism — from Jeremiah Wright to William Ayers — have been raised by non-traditional news sources. The media’s role has been to ignore it as long as possible, then mention it if they must, and finally dismiss it and those who raise it in the first place. It’s as if the media use the Obama campaign’s talking points — its preposterous assertions that Obama didn’t hear Wright from the pulpit railing about black liberation, whites, Jews, etc., that Obama had no idea Ayers was a domestic terrorist despite their close political, social, and working relationship, etc. — to protect Obama from legitimate and routine scrutiny. And because journalists have also become commentators, it is hard to miss their almost uniform admiration for Obama and excitement about an Obama presidency. So in the tank are the media for Obama that for months we’ve read news stories and opinion pieces insisting that if Obama is not elected president it will be due to white racism. And, of course, while experience is crucial in assessing Sarah Palin’s qualifications for vice president, no such standard is applied to Obama’s qualifications for president. (No longer is it acceptable to minimize the work of a community organizer.) Charles Gibson and Katie Couric sought to humiliate Palin. They would never and have never tried such an approach with Obama.
But beyond the elites and the media, my greatest concern is whether this election will show a majority of the voters susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic demagogue. This may seem a harsh term to some, and no doubt will to Obama supporters, but it is a perfectly appropriate characterization. Obama’s entire campaign is built on class warfare and human envy. The “change” he peddles is not new. We’ve seen it before. It is change that diminishes individual liberty for the soft authoritarianism of socialism. It is a populist appeal that disguises government mandated wealth redistribution as tax cuts for the middle class, falsely blames capitalism for the social policies and government corruption (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) that led to the current turmoil in our financial markets, fuels contempt for commerce and trade by stigmatizing those who run successful small and large businesses, and exploits human imperfection as a justification for a massive expansion of centralized government. Obama’s appeal to the middle class is an appeal to the “the proletariat,” as an infamous philosopher once described it, about which a mythology has been created. Rather than pursue the American Dream, he insists that the American Dream has arbitrary limits, limits Obama would set for the rest of us — today it’s $250,000 for businesses and even less for individuals. If the individual dares to succeed beyond the limits set by Obama, he is punished for he’s now officially “rich.” The value of his physical and intellectual labor must be confiscated in greater amounts for the good of the proletariat (the middle class). And so it is that the middleclass, the birth-child of capitalism, is both celebrated and enslaved — for its own good and the greater good. The “hope” Obama represents, therefore, is not hope at all. It is the misery of his utopianism imposed on the individual.
Unlike past Democrat presidential candidates, Obama is a hardened ideologue. He’s not interested in playing around the edges. He seeks “fundamental change,” i.e., to remake society. And if the Democrats control Congress with super-majorities led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, he will get much of what he demands.
The question is whether enough Americans understand what’s at stake in this election and, if they do, whether they care. Is the allure of a charismatic demagogue so strong that the usually sober American people are willing to risk an Obama presidency?
Kim Strassel is doing actual journalism at the Wall Street Journal, unlike nearly everyone else in the mainstream media, looking into the IRS' targeting of conservative non-profit advocacy organizations. Her article this week on Lois Lerner's suspiciously missing emails is priceless; here are the money paragraphs:
As to Ms. Lerner's behavior, consider that House Ways & Means Chairman Dave Camp first sent a letter asking if the IRS was engaged in targeting in June, 2011. Ms. Lerner denied it. She engineered a plant in an audience at a tax conference in May 2013 to drop the bombshell news about targeting (maybe hoping nobody would notice?). She has subsequently asserted a Fifth Amendment right to silence in front of the only people actually investigating the affair, Congress. Now we learn that her hard drive supposedly defied modernity and suffered total annihilation about 10 days after the Camp letter arrived.
Is there something in those lost emails? The fact that they are "lost" at all probably answers that question.
Hmmm... using the IRS to intimidate political opponents was one of the articles of impeachment against Nixon in Watergate. Consider then the following Machiavellian scenario:
1. The Obama Administration knew that using the IRS to silence political speech by conservative groups in the course of an election campaign was illegal and almost the definition of a "high crime and misdemeanor" because it attacks and betrays the heart of the system of democracy -- the right of individual citizens to organize for the purpose of advocating political positions.
2. But the Obama Administration had learned the lesson of Watergate.
3. Nixon wasn't impeached because Rosemary Woods erased 18 1/2 minutes of a particular Oval Office tape.
4. Nixon was largely impeached because Woods didn't erase all of them!
We started watching AMC's new show Halt and Catch Fire, watched two episodes, and decided that it wasn't worth watching. So last night I finally got the Regular Wife to sit down and start Top of the Lake, the murder mystery show starring Elizabeth Moss of Mad Men. The show is set in New Zealand, and it is very very very well written, well-acted, and beautifully shot in very haunting landscape. A big thumbs up so far.
... and they will, remember to show them this video about what Democrats thought of going to war in Iraq back before it became fashionable and politically expedient to oppose the war.
There is a very old strategy for White Houses in trouble. Obfuscate, delay, withhold evidence, kick as many cans as you can down as many roads, and then, when months or years have passed, declare that it's "old news" and anyone bringing it up is not focused on the real issues concerning average Americans. The Clinton White House did this repeatedly on Whitewater, Travelgate, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, etc. They count on two things: (1) a complicit mainstream media that will trumpet the "old news" meme; and (2) the stupidity of the American public, or at least the stupidity of the portions of the electorate that Democrats need... the low-information voters.
That's clearly what's going on in the IRS scandal, and in its latest episode, where Lois Lerner (shown above) and six other IRS senior officials have conveniently "lost" two years of emails related to their targeting of conservative 501c-4 groups. Look, I litigate cases every day that require my clients to produce emails going back many years. And, yes, emails get lost or misfiled or deleted. But, but, but... there is A WHOLE FREAKIN' INDUSTRY of forensic data retrievers who can take literally any system and, given enough time and money, resurrect supposedly "lost" electronic information. I know this, so certainly the sophisticated lawyers in the White House know this.
They know the "dog ate my homework" excuse is risible... but they are counting on the media to let them get away with it, and they are counting on their low-information constituencies to believe the whole "my computer crashed" fable, because they don't understand that emails aren't stored on your hard drive, but in servers, and that large organizations like the federal government have backups and backups to backups to backups for their electronic information.
The question is... will it work this time? I think it probably will, because there are precious few corporate incentives for reporters in the MSM to go after a liberal (and iconic) "first black President"... no promotions, no Pulitizer Prizes, no attaboys from the elites, no gigs on the Sunday shows. There won't be any Woodward and Bernsteins this time around, and Lois Lerner won't become this era's Rosemary Woods, because there's no Nixon to hate.
And, because, frankly, there really are tens of millions of low-information (read: dumb) voters out there who respond to current events the way they respond to Hollywood action movies, by deciding beforehand who the good guys and bad guys are, and then passively enjoying the spectacle presented to them.
Her Game of Thrones character, Ygritte, the wilding lover of Jon Snow,was killed in last night's episode, fittingly, by an arrow through the heart. She'll be missed.
I happen to be reading Amity Shlaes' biography of Calvin Coolidge, and happened upon this speech by Coolidge to the Massachusetts State Senate in 1914, a hundred years ago. It's so good, with so many sound ideas and wisdom about politics and life that I thought I'd print the whole thing:
Honorable Senators:
I thank you, with gratitude for the high honor given, with
appreciation for the solemn obligations assumed, I thank you.
The commonwealth is one. We are all members of one body. The
welfare of the weakest and the welfare of the most powerful are inseparably
bound together. Industry cannot flourish if labor languish. Transportation
cannot prosper if manufactures decline. The general welfare cannot be provided
for in any one act, but it is well to remember that the benefit of one is the
benefit of all, and the neglect of one is the neglect of all. The suspension of
one man's dividends is the suspension of another man's pay envelope.
Men do not make laws. They do but discover them. Laws must
be justified by something more than the will of the majority. They must rest on
the eternal foundation of righteousness. That state is most fortunate in its
form of government which has the aptest instruments for the discovery of laws.
The latest, most modern, and nearest perfect system that statesmanship has
devised is representative government. Its weakness is the weakness of us
imperfect human beings who administer it. Its strength is that even such
administration secures to the people more blessings than any other system ever
produced.
No nation has discarded it and retained liberty.
Representative government must be preserved. Courts are established, not to
determine the popularity of a cause, but to adjudicate and enforce rights. No
litigant should be required to submit his case to the hazard and expense of a
political campaign. No judge should be required to seek or receive political
rewards. The courts of Massachusetts are known and honored wherever men love
justice. Let their glory suffer no diminution at our hands. The electorate and
judiciary cannot combine. A hearing means a hearing. When the trial of causes
goes outside the court room, Anglo Saxon constitutional government ends. The
people cannot look to legislation generally for success. Industry, thrift,
character, are not conferred by act or re solve.
That the United States would want to obtain the release of any of its soldiers held by enemies in wartime goes without saying. There is thus nothing wrong with the desire of the Obama Administration to free Bowe Bergdahl from the Taliban.
Given the impending concession of defeat -- let's call a spade a spade -- when Obama pulls the last American troops out of Afghanistan, there is also an argument that exchanging five Taliban commanders for Bergdahl was a good deal, since we would likely release them anyway at the end of hostilities, and get nothing then. (The exchange can be seen, and perhaps Obama himself as an ESPN-watcher saw it this way, as an NBA deal where a team gets what it can for a player who's going to be a free agent at the end of the season anyway.)
But Bergdahl's platoon uniformly say he was a deserter, and some even say that he was a traitor, giving information to the Taliban that improved their techniques for roadside bombings, etc. And the evidence is strong that both Bergdahl and his parents were and are staunchly opposed, not just to American presence in Afghanistan, but to America itself.
There is almost no chance, in other words, that Bergdahl won't eventually be tried for desertion at the very least. Perhaps he won't be convicted, perhaps Obama would pardon him, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. But at the very least he'll be tried. Veterans, already scalded by the VA scandal, will demand no less.
So what on earth was Obama doing in the Rose Garden with this guy (Bergdahl's father) announcing the return of Bergdahl? And who on the White House staff failed to vett Bergdahl's father's comments, in Arabic and Pashto, that praised Allah when we are still at war with radical Islamists in Afghanistan and around the world? Bring him home, sure, but let's not act like he's some kind of hero. That's an insult to troops who served honorably, and an even bigger insult to the families of the men who died trying to find Bergdahl after he skedaddled.
Sheesh, just the optics might have alerted them that this was a bad idea. Does Obama think that average Americans look at the Arabic-speaking bearded loony he's standing with and see... what?
I would say this could be Obama's jump the shark moment, the time when everyone finally realizes that the Emperor Has No Clothes. But then there have been so many of those. And he still lingers at 40-45% approval. Apparently there are 40-45% of Americans who would approve of destroying their own country.
With three teenagers and three college educations to pay for in the next decade, the scandal of higher education cost inflation is hitting me right where I live. In the news over the weekend was this story:
The cost of obtaining a university education in the U.S. has soared 12 fold over the past three decades, a sign the educational system is in need of reform, according to lawmakers in both parties.
The CHART OF THE DAY shows college tuition and fees have surged 1,120 percent since records began in 1978, four times faster than the increase in the consumer price index. Medical expenses have climbed 601 percent, while the price of food has increased 244 percent over the same period.
Here's the chart:
And here's an attempt at an explanation of why this divergence is happening that seems persuasive to my admittedly right-wing sensibility:
I have a lot of thoughts on this subject, but I'll share them in a separate post.
Mad Men is both very good television and the most frustrating show on the air, probably for the same reason.... it never gives you what you expect. After last week's jump-the-shark Ginzberg's nipple moment, and after a season where the character who witnesses the horror, Peggy Olson, has been mostly angry and whiny, last night brought her back to her better self, working alongside Don Draper on an ad campaign and enjoying the hell out of it.
Peggy is, of course, played by the great Elizabeth Moss, who also moonlights in a very good detective show set in New Zealand called Top of the Lake.
In the category of Stories-That-We-Are-Hearing-Too-Much, a few days ago I saw this story on Glenn Beck's The Blaze:
On Thursday, May 15, Sudanese Christian Meriam Yahya Ibrahim, 27, was sentenced to death by hanging for the crime of apostasy.
Ibrahim, a physician who graduated from the University of Khartoum Medical School, refused to renounce her Christian faith. The Islamist Khartoum regime claims that Ibrahim is a Muslim because her father, who abandoned the family when she was six years old, was a Muslim. Ibrahim, however, embraced for herself the faith of her Ethiopian Orthodox Christian mother.
Independent Online noted that Judge Abbas Mohammed Al-Khalifa told Ibrahim, addressing her by her father's Muslim name Adraf Al-Hadi Mohammed Abdullah:
We gave you three days to recant but you insist on not returning to Islam. I sentence you to be hanged to death.
The judge reportedly instructed that her execution be carried out once the child has been weened but that she receive the 100 lashes for adultery soon after she gives birth. Morning Star News also reported that attorneys will file an appeal of the sentence on Sunday, May 18. This will put off execution of the sentence, including the flogging, until there is a ruling.
Ibrahim is married to Daniel Wani, an American citizen from South Sudan who came to the United States in 1998. She is in her ninth month of pregnancy with the couple’s second child. Their firstborn, Martin, 20 months, is imprisoned with his mother -- Sudanese authorities prohibit the Christian man from caring for his son. Wani has been prevented from seeing his wife and child since she was arrested along with her toddler son, but reports that she has not received proper medical care for complications from her pregnancy.
The correct solution is the one offered by Sir Charles James Napier, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in India in the mid-19th Century. When confronted with the issue of Hindus burning widows alive on the funeral pyres of their husbands, he replied: "Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."
The United States should not countenance the flogging or hanging of Christian women (and particularly Christian women married to U.S. citizens) for the crime of being Christian. Period. President Obama should announce that, if Mrs. Wani is not released within 24 hours, it will declare the Sudanese government an Islamist terrorist organization, and will immediately issue Presidential Directives ordering drones strikes on the presiding judge and prosecutor in her case.
They have a custom. We have ours. And our customs have high technology behind them.
Nancy Pelosi is a former Speaker of the House. So when she leads other Democrats in calling the Select Committee named by John Boehner to investigate the Benghazi scandal a "kangaroo court" she is doing something that is extraordinarily dangerous to the future of democracy. What she is essentially saying is that the Constitution, which created a House of Representatives and gave it an oversight function within our system of checks and balances, doesn't matter; that the people, who voted in each and every one of the Republican majority, don't matter; and, ultimately, that the rule of law doesn't matter.
Webster's defines a "kangaroo court" as one "in which the principles of law and justice are disregarded or perverted"; or one "characterized by irresponsible, unauthorized, or irregular status or procedures." Does she really believe that the House Select Committee, chaired by Trey Gowdy, a former federal and state prosecutor, will "disregard" or "pervert" principles of law or justice? Does she really believe that the Committee will be characterized by "irresponsible, unauthorized or irregular" procedures? If so, what procedures is she talking about? Identify them, and perhaps they can be remedied.
Here's the nut of the matter: does she really believe that it is somehow illegal for the House to investigate the Benghazi scandal? If not, she should shut up about "kangaroo courts."
I'm sorry, but if these are your top 10 players, the PGA is going to wither and die as a major sport:
1. Bubba Watson
2. Jimmy Walker
3. Dustin Johnson
4. Matt Kuchar
5. Patrick Reed
6. Jordan Spieth
7. Harris English
8. Zach Johnson
9. Chris Kirk
10. Ryan Moore
Seriously, would you be able to identify any of these guys walking through an airport?
Golf, which before Tiger Woods was a boring white guys sport has now become, in Tiger's absence... a boring white guys sport.
The Regular Son had a smart observation a couple of weeks ago about the new season of Mad Men, which has been pretty flat so far. He noted that the attraction of the early seasons had a lot to do with the look of the early 1960s, which was stylish in a Sinatraesque way. But the later seasons, as they move into the late 1960s, are much uglier to look at, and thus less entertaining. He's a painter, so his experience is more visual than mine, but I think he's right here. The writing of the show hasn't gotten significantly worse... maybe it wasn't that great all along. But the original look was fantastic, and the new look of the show is not. Ask yourself the question:
This is the sort of analysis (from NRO) that mainstream media outlets ought to engage in every time they are asked to print as "news" some press release from a liberal administration:
The Obama administration has released the names of 55 colleges and universities that it is investigating over their sexual-assault policies, part of an accelerating campaign against universities for allegedly turning a blind eye to the purported epidemic of campus rape. The list is top-heavy with the elite of the elite — Harvard, Princeton, UC Berkeley, Swarthmore, Amherst, and Dartmouth, among others. A more deserving group of victims would be hard to find.
Parroting over 20 years worth of feminist propagandizing, the White House claims nearly 20 percent of female college undergraduates are sexually assaulted during their college years. To put that number in perspective: Detroit residents have been fleeing the city for years due to its infamous violent crime. And what constitutes an American urban crime wave? In 2012, Detroit’s combined rate for all four violent felonies that make up the FBI’s violent-crime index — murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault — was 2 percent. The rape rate was 0.05 percent. And yet, despite an alleged campus sexual-assault rate that is 400 times greater than Detroit’s, female applicants are beating down the doors of selective colleges in record numbers.
And then they ought to refuse to credit as newsworthy such patent nonsense. If 20% of the daughters of the affluent upper middle class and upper class parents who send their kids to Ivy League type schools were being raped, there would be thousands of affluent young men in prison, and those parents would be fleeing those schools for safer environs. None of that is happening.
I've said before here (and many others have said) that the job numbers reported every month are somewhat misleading. Politicians will tout as a "good" job number when the economy creates 150,000 or 200,000 new jobs. But those figures are gross numbers and are meaningless except in relation to the size of the country, which is always growing. 150,000 jobs in a country of 30 million is a significant boom; 150,000 jobs in a country of 300 million is barely keeping up with population growth.
To get a real sense of how the economy is growing or not growing, you thus have to "net out" population growth. Here's a neat graph that compares the Reagan recovery of the early 1980s to the Obama recovery in terms of job growth adjusted to net out population growth:
Seems pretty obvious whose recovery was robust and whose recovery was weak. The fact that their policies were so different should suggest the failure of Obama's big government/Keynesian-socialist solutions to economics. That is, if people can learn from history. Which is not always the case, sadly.
Hat tip to Hugh Hewitt. An extraordinarily useful and instructive timeline on the Benghazi scandal:
March 2011: U.S. secretly approves arms shipments from Qatar to Libyan rebels.
May 2011: Al-Qaeda flags raised over Benghazi.
November 2011: Rebel leader Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi admits a significant number of Libyan rebels were al-Qaeda fighters who fought American troops in Iraq.
April 19, 2012: State Department rejects ambassador to Libya’s request for more security personnel.
June 20, 2012: Assassination attempt on the British Ambassador to Libya.
July 9, 2012: Ambassador Stevens asks the State Department for more security personnel.
August 8, 2012: The number of security personnel at Benghazi reduced by State Department.
August 16, 2012: U.S. Site Security in Benghazi alerts the State Department that conditions are perilous.
September 4–6, 2012: Democratic National Convention (“al-Qaeda decimated; bin Laden is dead and GM is alive; al-Qaeda is on the run”).
September 11, 2012: Ambassador Stevens alerts the State Department that conditions in Benghazi are deteriorating.
3:40 p.m. (D.C. time): Stevens calls deputy chief of mission Greg Hicks in Tripoli and alerts him that the consulate in Benghazi is under attack.
4:00 p.m.: The White House is advised that the consulate is under attack. 10th Special Forces Group in Croatia is three hours away; Brigadier General (Ret.) Robert Lovell, Deputy Director of Intelligence for AFRICOM, later testifies that intelligence knew immediately that it was not a protest but a terrorist attack; no request for aid comes from the State Department.
5:00 p.m.: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta discusses attack with President Obama.
6:00 p.m.: U.S. Embassy in Tripoli advises the White House and the State Department that al-Qaeda affiliate Ansar al-Sharia has claimed responsibility for the attack. CIA deputy director Mike Morrell later testifies that “analysts knew from the get-go that al Qaeda was involved with this attack.”
8:00 p.m.: Greg Hicks calls Clinton and tells her that consulate is under terrorist attack.
10:00 p.m.: Clinton and Obama talk.
10:30 p.m.: Clinton issues a statement linking the attack to an inflammatory internet video.
11:00–11:30p.m.: Former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Ty Woods killed.
September 12, 2012: Redacted e-mail from a State Department official says the official advised the Libyan government that the attack was carried out by Ansar al-Sharia. No mention of video.
September 12–15, 2012: CIA drafts several iterations of talking points; contains no known references to video as cause of the attack.
September 13, 2012: State Department memo blames the attack on terrorists.
September 13, 2012: Defense Intelligence Agency assigns blame for the attack on Ansar al-Sharia in Libya. No mention of a video.
September 13, 2012: Clinton condemns violence against U.S. consulate in Libya due to a video.
September 13, 2012: Jay Carney condemns attack due to a video.
September 14, 2012: State Department says the attack was a spontaneous demonstration due to a video.
September 14, 2012: Obama and Clinton receive the families of the fallen as their caskets arrive at Andrews Air Force Base; blame the attack on a video. Clinton tells Ty Woods’s father, Charles, that they will “get” the producer of the video.
September 14, 2012: Jay Carney blames the video.
September 14, 2012, 8:00 p.m.: Deputy national-security adviser Ben Rhodes sends an e-mail regarding the preparation of Susan Rice for the Sunday talk shows, advising Rice to underscore the video and that the attack is “not a broader failure of policy.”
September 15, 2012: Obama blames the video.
September 16, 2012: Susan Rice appears on five Sunday talk shows and characterizes the attacks as a spontaneous reaction due to a video.
September 16, 2012: Libyan president disputes Rice’s comments, asserting Benghazi was a planned attack.
September 18, 2012: Obama appears on the David Letterman show, blames the video.
September 19, 2012: The head of the National Counterterrorism Center testifies that the attack was not a protest but a terrorist attack.
September 20, 2012: Obama blames the video.
September 20, 2012: Obama and Clinton run an ad on Pakistani TV apologizing for the video.
September 21, 2012: Clinton says it was a terrorist attack.
September 24, 2012: Obama appears on The View, blames the video.
October 4, 2012: Clinton establishes the Accountability Review Board (“ARB”) to examine the circumstances surrounding the loss of personnel in Benghazi. Clinton not interviewed by ARB.
October 11, 2012: At the vice-presidential debate, Joe Biden claims the administration was not informed about requests for more security at the consulate in Benghazi.
October 16, 2012: Obama, in a response to a question from a reporter about whether he denied requests for aid to Benghazi on September 11 responds, “The minute I found out this was going on, I gave three directives. Number one, make sure we are securing our personnel and doing whatever we need to. Number two, we are going to investigate exactly what happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Number three, find out who did this so that we can bring them to justice.”
October 18, 2012: Judicial Watch makes a Freedom of Information Act request to the administration for talking points and communications regarding the events in Benghazi. The administration ignores the request.
October 20, 2012: Obama claims that he was not aware of any requests for additional security in Benghazi.
January 23, 2013: Clinton asks, “What difference, at this point, does it make whether it was a terrorist attack or a spontaneous demonstration?”
June 21, 2013: Judicial Watch sues the administration for unlawfully withholding documents pertaining to Benghazi.
July 25, 2013: Obama slams the “endless parade of distractions, political posturing, and phony scandals.”
August 2013: The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform requests Benghazi e-mails. The Ben Rhodes e-mail is not among those produced.
April 18, 2014: Federal court orders the administration to turn over documents to Judicial Watch. 41 documents are released, including the Ben Rhodes e-mail.
May 1, 2014: Tommy Vietor tells Fox News the president was not in the Situation Room on September 11, 2012.
May 2, 2014: Speaker John Boehner announces a vote to form a select committee on Benghazi.
May 4, 2014: Representative Adam Schiff (D.., Calif.), member of the House Intelligence Committee, suggests Democrats boycott the House select committee as a “colossal waste of time.”
May 5, 2014: Carney will not say whether White House will cooperate with the select committee.
Judicial Watch has uncovered, through a FOIA request, what many today are calling the "smoking gun" on Benghazi, at least in terms of how the Obama Administration sought to pin blame on a silly Internet video for what they already knew was a terrorist attack. Here is the email. Note that the recipients are all people like Dan Pfeiffer and David Plouffe, political hacks on the Obama permanent campaign, not foreign service officers or foreign policy experts. It was always already about politics, and saving the President's campaign of lies:
By the way, Plouffe and Pfeiffer are relatively young guys, 38 and 46, who by my reading of their resumes have never done a single thing outside of political campaigns. Neither have advanced degrees, and while I don't generally like credentialism, it does suggest something that they've never achieved much of anything intellectually and have never had gainful employment in the private sector either. That these lightweights are both "senior advisors" to Obama also suggests something about the type of people Obama likes to have around him.
UPDATE:The author of the email, Ben Rhodes, has a background that makes me cringe. This is from his Wikipedia entry:
Rhodes grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and attended the exclusive Collegiate School, graduating in 1996. Rhodes then attended Rice University, graduating in 2000 with majors in English and political science. He then moved back to New York, attending New York University and graduating in 2002 with an MFA in creative writing.
A rich (Upper East Side), preppy ("the exclusive Collegiate School") who wasn't smart enough apparently to get into an Ivy, so he went to Rice to be an English major, then took a creative writing MFA. Wow! Is there any company in America that would think that's someone I want running my business? But that's who Obama chooses to surround himself with.... a 37 year-old who has never done much of anything except write speeches for politicians. What on earth is he doing within a hundred miles of American foreign policy?
Oh, his brother is the President of CBS News. Hmmmm....
***
Oh, and isn't it interesting that the "paper of record," the New York Times, does not cover this breaking news story at all? Nada, not a word.
Face it, they are no longer a news organization. They are a wholly owned subsidiary of the Obama Left. They are Pravda.
Of course, this is the paper that employed Walter Duranty to write fairy tales about the Ukrainian terror famine in the 1930s, so maybe we shouldn't be surprised.
Apparently the newest putdown on college campuses is for women and minorities to tell white males to "check your privilege!" The point, like so much that passes for liberalism or progressivism these days, is to quash dissent from the liberal orthodoxy... a white male's opinion or accomplishments, being inherently biased by or produced by his "white privilege," must be discounted and dismissed a priori. If a government did this, we'd call it a "prior restraint" on expression. When private individuals do it to their fellow students, it's just bad manners. When professors permit it in their classes, it's pedagogical malpractice.
Anyway, a Princeton freshman named Tal Fortgang somewhat courageously (I wouldn't have had the balls to do it when I was a freshman there in 1977... but then it was a different time) has decided to fight back. Here's the money passage from his very well-written article:
I have unearthed some examples of the privilege with which my family was blessed, and now I think I better understand those who assure me that skin color allowed my family and I to flourish today.
Perhaps it’s the privilege my grandfather and his brother had to flee their home as teenagers when the Nazis invaded Poland, leaving their mother and five younger siblings behind, running and running until they reached a Displaced Persons camp in Siberia, where they would do years of hard labor in the bitter cold until World War II ended. Maybe it was the privilege my grandfather had of taking on the local Rabbi’s work in that DP camp, telling him that the spiritual leader shouldn’t do hard work, but should save his energy to pass Jewish tradition along to those who might survive. Perhaps it was the privilege my great-grandmother and those five great-aunts and uncles I never knew had of being shot into an open grave outside their hometown. Maybe that’s my privilege.
Or maybe it’s the privilege my grandmother had of spending weeks upon weeks on a death march through Polish forests in subzero temperatures, one of just a handful to survive, only to be put in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she would have died but for the Allied forces who liberated her and helped her regain her health when her weight dwindled to barely 80 pounds.
Perhaps my privilege is that those two resilient individuals came to America with no money and no English, obtained citizenship, learned the language and met each other; that my grandfather started a humble wicker basket business with nothing but long hours, an idea, and an iron will—to paraphrase the man I never met: “I escaped Hitler. Some business troubles are going to ruin me?” Maybe my privilege is that they worked hard enough to raise four children, and to send them to Jewish day school and eventually City College.
Perhaps it was my privilege that my own father worked hard enough in City College to earn a spot at a top graduate school, got a good job, and for 25 years got up well before the crack of dawn, sacrificing precious time he wanted to spend with those he valued most—his wife and kids—to earn that living. I can say with certainty there was no legacy involved in any of his accomplishments. The wicker business just isn’t that influential.Now would you say that we’ve been really privileged? That our success has been gift-wrapped?
The two big stories dominating today are the lifetime ban the NBA gave to Donald Sterling, the Clippers' owner, for what to my ear were mildly racist comments he made during a private conversation that was illegally recorded then leaked to the media; and the discovery of emails showing the White House's manipulation of the Benghazi story. Why are they the same story?
Consider... this man is now under a lifetime ban from a business he was involved with for 33 years because he said something that offended a particular group (African-Americans).
And this man, the "director" of the Internet video that Obama blamed for Benghazi, went to jail for nearly a year... again because his expressions (via the video) offended a particular group (Muslims).
Now, again, I hold no brief for either men. Sterling is a boor and Mark Basselly Youssef (the creator of the Innocence of the Muslims video) is a no-talent hack who appears to have gone out of his way to make something offensive.
But in both cases all they did was engage in expression, which ought to be protected under the First Amendment. Yet, in both cases, they were essentially demonized by powerful, billion-dollar enterprises, the NBA for Sterling, the Obama campaign for Youssef. Why? Because they offended people? Well, maybe.
But mostly... because they hurt the brand. Sterling hurt the potential sales of the product called NBA basketball. Youssef was a necessary scapegoat to ensure the reelection of the product called Barack Obama.
Two stories in the past week struck me as being essentially about the same thing, although I'm pretty certain no one noticed it.
The first story had to do with the announcement (in a press conference) that Chelsea Clinton is 16 weeks pregnant, and the subsequent outpouring (read: gushing) of celebratory coverage by the mainstream media. Now, I don't want to be unnecessarily harsh. Having children is a great thing, and the happiness they bring is something that we ought to celebrate. But there's a few things that bother me about the way this story was presented, both by the Clintons and by the media. More on that below.
The second story is frankly much harder to take, and even revolting:
Wannabe celebrity Josie Cunningham last night confessed the chance of appearing on TV’s Big Brother was worth more than her unborn child’s life.
Puffing on a cigarette and rubbing her baby bump, the controversial model and call girl – who will have her abortion at a clinic this week – said: “I’m finally on the verge of becoming famous and I’m not going to ruin it now.
“An abortion will further my career. This time next year I won’t have a baby. Instead, I’ll be famous, driving a bright pink Range Rover and buying a big house. Nothing will get in my way.”
Josie, 23, is already 18 weeks pregnant by either an escort agency client or a Premier League footballer. But she claims her late life-or-death decision has nothing to do with who the father is.
She says it is based on the breakdown of negotiations with Channel 5 to appear on the reality show.
Josie – who caused outrage in 2013 when she demanded a £4,800 boob job on the NHS to become a glamour model – said: “Channel 5 were keen to shortlist me then they found out I was pregnant.
"Then they suddenly turned cold. That was when I started considering an abortion. After the operation I will be going back to them and asking if they will still consider me.
“I’ve also had loads of other offers to further my career – and I’m not willing to give them up because I’m pregnant.”
Well! In addition to being a viscerally repellent skank, this young lady also wins the prize for most disgustingly immoral. I'm pretty sure every thinking adult person, left or right, liberal or conservative, even pro-choice and pro-life, would read that and come to the same conclusion.
But why? Ms. Cunningham's utter barrenness of human feeling for her own child isn't all that far removed from the standard rationales for abortion, is it? I mean, isn't that what everyone says, including President Obama? That it's somehow "unfair" for a young girl to have to sacrifice her education or her career by having a child?
Back during the race for the 2008 election, he famously said at a Johnstown, Pa., meeting that, “I’ve got two daughters. Nine years old and six years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.”
In fact, the phrase "punished with a baby" isn't ontologically different than “I’ve also had loads of other offers to further my career – and I’m not willing to give them up because I’m pregnant.” Why it wasn't an immediate disqualifier of Obama for the Presidency speaks to the moral emptiness and incoherence of our culture.
Which brings me to my point... why these two stories are really the same story. Consider: both involve mothers of babies who are about at the same gestational age. For Clinton, her child is 16 weeks old; for Josie Cunningham, 18 weeks. And Clinton, of course, undoubtedly would stand with her mother and father as staunch supporters of the abortion on demand regime of the Democratic Party. So although she demands in a press conference that we celebrate her pregnancy, she undoubtedly would defend Ms. Cunningham's decision to abort her child and, at least theoretically, would equally demand that we accept her own decision if, two weeks from now, she decides that, nah, having a baby now on second thought would hurt her career too.
What these two stories are really both about, in my mind, is the corruption of euphemism surrounding abortion. So long as people use the right words and wear the right clothes and come from the right family and couch their decisions about the life and death of their children in the politically correct verbiage, we celebrate their decisions, either way. But, peel the euphemism away and let a patently immoral fame-hungry mental midget truthfully articulate a common rationale for abortion and.... we recoil in horror.
But it is the act itself that is horrific, not the language in which it is dressed, nor the person who does it.
The beginning of last night's episode of Mad Men mostly concerned Megan's off-screen melt-down as an actress in Hollywood. She has apparently done poorly at auditions, then stalked the directors, weeping, asking for second chances. Not good. Her agent complains to Don and asks him to come out and calm Megan down. The explanation for her failure... she has lost her confidence.
Confidence. Isn't that the key idea behind the whole show? In the beginning Don Draper oozed confidence... as a man, and as an advertising "genius." He's the smartest guy in the room, the best-looking, the sexiest. He can win any account, get any girl. His main attribute is confidence, which makes sense, because at bottom he is a confidence man in the old-fashioned sense of the word.... a fake, a phony, a charlatan, a grifter. He has lied his way to everything he's ever gotten... his career, his marriages, his affairs, his money, his position, his reputation.
So if I had to sum up where Mad Men is going as it slouches toward its conclusion, I think that it is a story asking the question: "What happens when a con man loses his confidence?" Put differently, what happens when a man whose life is built on confidence and energy and coolness is humiliated?
Because that's what happened in a small way at the end of this episode... Don Draper was humiliated. His partners basically said to him, we're going to make an offer that any self-respecting adult man would refuse... you can come back, but you can't drink, you can't be alone with clients, you have to run your ideas past a dullard for approval, and if you break any of our rules we shitcan you. He says "OK" because he's desperate. Right before he said it, I shouted at the screen, "Say 'No!'" Because no one in his position ought to have to crawl to people like that.
And I think that's what's happening in the series as a whole as it goes forward... we are going to see a proud man unravelling before our eyes. Don Draper will be humiliated, brought low, shattered.
It makes for tough viewing and, frankly, not very appealing television. Who are we supposed to admire in this show anymore? Don't we have to admire someone in order to want to watch?
I hold no brief for Clippers' owner Donald Sterling who has been vilified over the weekend because of racist comments he made during an argument with his then-girlfriend that were recorded by the girlfriend and then released to TMZ.com, a sleazy gossip website. I don't know him and what I do know of him suggests that I probably wouldn't like him very much. But a few additional facts seem important, to me anyway:
Sterling is 80 years old. I.e. from a generation that may have habits of thinking about race that are difficult to break. I.e. also at an age where he may or may not have some signs of dementia.
The ex-girlfriend is in the midst of a lawsuit with the Sterling family. I.e., she has motives to sully his character.
The ex-girlfriend is herself of mixed-race. I.e., his racism apparently doesn't extend to who he chooses to date.
The ex-girlfriend is much younger. I.e., much of his diatribe has to be discounted as angry jealousy.
Sterling's racist rant, interestingly enough, did not include any use of racial epithets. I.e., no "N" word.
Sterling's rant seems to be comprised mostly of asking the girlfriend not to post pictures of herself with black men, because Sterling had been teased about it by a friend of his. I.e., Sterling may be in part just reporting the racism of another person.
California makes it a crime to record or eavesdrop on any confidential communication, including a private conversation or telephone call, without the consent of all parties to the conversation. See Cal. Penal Code § 632. I.e., Sterling was the himself the victim of a crime.
Sterling hired one of the first black GMs, Elgin Baylor.
Sterling hired the Clippers' current coach, African-American Doc Rivers.
Sterling has received awards from the NAACP.
Sterling is a liberal Democrat.
Look, like I said, I hold no brief for Donald Sterling. But these facts suggest to me that the situation is more complicated than simply putting a big Scarlet "R" on his chest and thenceforth forevermore shunning him from society. Does anyone really want to live in a country where you are read out of civilization because of something you said in private during an argument with your lover? Where you get a lifetime ban from your business because of something you said in a private conversation?
Really?
And if that's the case, the next time an NBA player or NFL player is charged with an actual crime (and not, like Sterling, a "thought-crime") such as, oh, beating up their wives or girlfriends, will the same punishment apply? Because I for one happen to think that beating up your wife or girlfriend is a more serious crime than saying a mildly racist comment in a private conversation.
So, I guess here's where I come out. I like to think of myself as a Christian. If Donald Sterling sincerely asks for forgiveness, he should be forgiven. An old man who said the wrong thing in an argument with his young girlfriend is to be pitied, methinks, not demonized.
When Pope John Paul II and Pope John XXIII are canonized this week, the Church will celebrate the two popes most closely associated with the sea change of the Church that was Vatican II. Pope John XXIII, of course, convened Vatican II, while Pope John Paul II, as the longest serving Pope since the adoption of the Vatican II reforms, more than anyone else brought its teachings into practice. What are they? Some might focus on the formalities -- moving away from Latin, increasing the participation of the laity in Mass, forcing the priest to turn around and face his congregation, etc. But to me, the main teaching of Vatican II is simply that everything the Church does, whether in its teaching role or in the sacraments, should be focused on bringing individual human beings to encounter Christ and His mercy.
What a great day April 27th will be! It's like we get a second holy week!
