DANA PERINO AND SUSAN MOLINARI defend Columbus Day.
Archive for 2010
October 11, 2010
DER SPIEGEL: ‘Obama Has a Considerable Ego’. You don’t say.
Meanwhile, Richard Wagner has this take on Obama’s campus tour this fall:
Remember that scene in Groundhog Day where Bill Murray’s character, Phil, was trying to relive the perfect romantic day he previously had with Andie McDowell’s character, and he was just going through to motions as though it should all easily happen again, when it clearly was not going to? That is what Obama is doing right now, with similar results. At the risk of stating the obvious, Obama is Phil, and Obama’s now not-so-enthusiastic 2008 supporters are McDowell’s character.
Well, you tend to repeat what works, until it doesn’t.
COSTCO IS NOW IN THE apocalypse provisioning business.
ED RENDELL: Vote Democratic . . . or Die! “Vote like your life depends on it — because, you know, it just might.”
IS THE MEDIA GIVING UP ON OBAMA? Hey, they’ll go down for you, but they won’t go down with you. . . .
IT WAS MY UNDERSTANDING that there would be no math.
A PRETTY DECENT one-day sale on computer speakers. I upgraded my office with something similar from Klipsch, and it’s become one of my favorite places to listen to music. I just can’t turn the subwoofer up too high.
UPDATE: Reader Mason Kidd writes: “Once again Amazon shows how great they are. I looked at those speakers a couple of months back as an upgrade for my office, and couldn’t justify the money at the time. This morning, I open my email and Amazon just thought I should know they were on sale now. I couldn’t resist this time.” Yeah, they do that to me a lot, too . . . .
CHARGE: White House Has “Enemies List.”
THINGS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED THIS WEEKEND, if you were out, you know, having a life or something:
Rumors of a “Pumpkin Panic.”
Mickey Kaus: How ObamaCare is like the BP oil spill.
Obama’s foreign-money complaints bring back memories of how his campaign was financed.
Important fashion advice for men.
A McCarthyite attack on Victor Davis Hanson.
Beyond whoredom: The other Jerry Brown insult.
MTV, Teen Mom, and domestic violence against men.
Revolt of the accountants.
Russ Feingold really, really admires the Tea Party now.
Nick Gillespie: If Obama is so Gung-Ho About Fixing Education, Why the Hell Won’t He do the Smallest Goddamn Thing to Change the Status Quo?
SECURITIES LAWS, LIKE TAXES, ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Insider Trading On Capitol Hill.
PROFESSOR JACOBSON: OBAMA WAS RIGHT ABOUT XENOPHOBIC BITTER CLINGERS. And now he is one!
HMM: Obama administration knew about foreclosure irregularities. “It appears that the Obama administration chose to tolerate the irregularities that now threaten the housing market and the financial industry because it preferred that banks use their limited resources to focus on giving breaks to folks who couldn’t pay their mortgages, rather than on handling foreclosures properly. I don’t know whether the irregularities in question justify an extended moratorium on foreclosures. But if they do — or even if they don’t, and we still end up with such a moratorium — then it looks like the Obama administration will bear considerable blame for the consequences.”
AN IDEA SO CRAZY IT JUST MIGHT WORK: Billboard trucks urge ABC, CBS, NBC to ‘tell the truth’ in news. With their ratings, they might as well give it a try. They’ve tried everything else. What have they got to lose?
INSTITUTIONALIZED SEXISM: Duke Contacting Those Affected by Sex “Thesis.”
COLLEGES STRUGGLE TO RECRUIT MORE MEN: “How many women entering higher education realize they are going to de facto Women’s Colleges?”
HAPPY COLUMBUS DAY: Many in the West will demonstrate their fierce originality and intellectual independence today by condemning Christopher Columbus using the same shopworn cliches they used last year. For those of a different bent, I recommend Samuel Eliot Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea : A Life of Christopher Columbus, which takes a somewhat different position. Here’s an excerpt:
At the end of 1492 most men in Western Europe felt exceedingly gloomy about the future. Christian civilization appeared to be shrinking in area and dividing into hostile units as its sphere contracted. For over a century there had been no important advance in natural science and registration in the universities dwindled as the instruction they offered became increasingly jejune and lifeless. Institutions were decaying, well-meaning people were growing cynical or desperate, and many intelligent men, for want of something better to do, were endeavoring to escape the present through studying the pagan past. . . .
Yet, even as the chroniclers of Nuremberg were correcting their proofs from Koberger’s press, a Spanish caravel named Nina scudded before a winter gale into Lisbon with news of a discovery that was to give old Europe another chance. In a few years we find the mental picture completely changed. Strong monarchs are stamping out privy conspiracy and rebellion; the Church, purged and chastened by the Protestant Reformation, puts her house in order; new ideas flare up throughout Italy, France, Germany and the northern nations; faith in God revives and the human spirit is renewed. The change is complete and startling: “A new envisagement of the world has begun, and men are no longer sighing after the imaginary golden age that lay in the distant past, but speculating as to the golden age that might possibly lie in the oncoming future.”
Christopher Columbus belonged to an age that was past, yet he became the sign and symbol of this new age of hope, glory and accomplishment. His medieval faith impelled him to a modern solution: Expansion.
Morison’s book is superb, and I recommend it highly as an antidote to the simplistic anti-occidental prejudice of today — which, as Jim Bennett has noted, has roots that might surprise its proponents:
This is primarily an effect of the Calvinist Puritan roots of American progressivism. Just as Calvinists believed in the centrality of the depravity of man, with the exception of a minuscule contingent of the Elect of God, their secularized descendants believe in the depravity and cursedness of Western civilization, with their own enlightened selves in the role of the Elect.
Indeed. Nonetheless, Bennett thinks that a different Italian deserves the real credit. (Reposted from 2005, but it still fits.) [Doesn’t this leave you vulnerable to charges of recycling too? –ed. I prefer to think of it as “They came at us in the same old way, and, you know, we beat them in the same old way.”]
UPDATE: The original link to Bennett’s column seems to have succumbed to link-rot, but I believe this is it.
GREG MANKIW EXPLAINS THINGS TO THE WHITE HOUSE: “I Can Afford Higher Taxes. But They’ll Make Me Work Less.” “Now you might not care if I supply less of my services to the marketplace — although, because you are reading this article, you are one of my customers. But I bet there are some high-income taxpayers whose services you enjoy.”