Archive for 2012
October 3, 2012
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Tear Gas in Tehran And The World’s Best Chance For Peace.
20 THINGS NOBODY TELLS YOU about having an affair.
STEPHEN GREEN IS DRUNKBLOGGING TONIGHT’S DEBATE. I suspect a lot of us will be drinking through this one. . . .
Green: “Obama is doing his best I’M NOT PEEVISH face. If the all-caps didn’t give it away, the face is not entirely convincing.” He also keeps stressing how much he agrees with Romney on taxes, etc. Interesting. . . .
UPDATE: Okay, despite the lying, people on the right should be glad that this is an argument about who’ll cut taxes.
But why does Lehrer keep cutting Romney off?
More from Stephen Green: “Romney is doing the job of making Obama angry, without being mean. The split-view camera reminds me of Bush versus Gore 12 years ago.”
Plus: “Obama keeps saying ‘math,’ but Romney keeps using numbers. You do the math.”
Obama compares himself to Dwight Eisenhower. Not seeing it. And remember that promise to cut the deficit in half in his first term? How’s that working out? . . .
Reader Tim Miller writes: “I wish Romney would tell Obama that he’s confusing the 5 Trillion number with the debt he’s added during the past 3+ years.” I think it’s more like $7 trillion.
Warren Buffett won’t like that corporate jet remark.
Plus from Stephen Green: “Obama just slammed the F-22. I guess Lockheed is going to send out those layoff notices after all. If not, they’re fools.”
Obama’s blaming Bush for the deficits because of “two wars on the credit card.” So look at Bush’s second-term deficits:
Declining steadily until the 2008 bailout. Blaming the war is, well, basically a lie.
Also, Obama keeps mentioning “folks like my grandmother.” You mean the “typical white person” grandmother? I guess she’s back out from under the bus.
Reader Bob Read emails: “Are you watching Intrade? Obama is down 5 since the debate started.”
Stephen Green: “Romney has been practicing his split-screen face. When Obama is speaking, he looks like I hope I look, when my six-year-old is trying to sell me on a line of total crap.”
I’m watching C-SPAN, but reader Ed Kiesel emails: “The twitter feed at the bottom of CNBC is 90% pro Romney, and damn is it funny!”
Lehrer is doing his best to run interference for Obama, but it’s not enough.
Talking about Dodd-Frank, it’s obvious that Romney actually knows what Dodd-Frank does. Obama, not so much.
More from Stephen Green: ” Aaron Hanscom, our managing editor, just emailed to tell me Andrew Sullivan is wailing and rending his garments over Obama’s bad performance. What, he was expecting another McCain?”
Jonah Goldberg tweets: “Maybe Obama can turn this around by just reverting to his 2004 DNC Keynote speech?”
Obama: They’re not “Death Panels,” they’re just panels made up of expert doctors who’ll decide if your treatment should be paid for.
CHARLIE MARTIN: Watching The Polls Unskew.
Some people are suspicious. “I think they adjust the skew to get the result that suits the propaganda purpose, and they’re temporarily making the race look tight to make the debate seem super-important. (That’s good for CNN’s ratings, so there’s a commercial, nonpolitical reason too for poll fakery.) Then they can make a show of breaking the news that Obama got big debate bounce.” When Obama voters feel this way, you know the press has lost credibility.
CURIOSER AND CURIOSER: More Poll Dancing. (In this as with announcements that unemployment is falling or that income is “skyrocketing” in the rustbelt… or with ignoring the Benghazi outrage, or with their several “summers of recovery” the media is gaslighting * us. Or, in more earthy terms — they’re er… urinating down our necks and telling us it’s raining.) *From Wikipedia:
The term “gaslighting” comes from the play Gas Light and its film adaptations, in which a husband secretly dims the gas lights in the house and, when his wife remarks on it, he claims that she is mistaken. This is done to convince the woman that she cannot trust her own judgment, and so will not be believed if she tries to report other strange things that are genuinely occurring, which the husband wishes to keep secret. The term is now also used in clinical and research literature
COMPETENCE: WaPo: Sensitive intel documents still lying on the floor of looted Benghazi consulate. Plus: “At least one document found amid the clutter indicates that Americans at the mission were discussing the possibility of an attack in early September, just two days before the assault took place.”
OF COURSE HE DID: Obama voted against Katrina Waiver
AP: UNEMPLOYMENT FALLS IN 90 PERCENT OF U.S. CITIES, “mainly because more people gave up looking for work.”
BARACK OBAMA’S HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD DAY: Sometimes Obama benefits from the fact that even stuff against him comes out in a torrent when it comes, and therefore a lot of it gets buried. So here it is, all in one place! well… all for one day, that is.
STACY MCCAIN: Mitt Romney Wins First Debate. “This verdict may shock some readers, seeing as how I’m publishing it a full hour before the debate actually begins.” Hey, it’s nothing Lewis Lapham hasn’t done.
GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE: when I was deep in the political closet, I used to read Neo-Neocon and be part of her blog community. Perhaps some of that time formed our minds alike. I agree with her points in this article. I disagree with her teensy-little hint that the country has changed that much since 1980. I think if it has it is to the right. It’s just that the media has moved further left and become more ruthless and shameless. But my gut still says Romney will win. Not because he’s a great campaigner, not because he’s the best we have — but because he’s not Obama and because the media has got so blatantly biased it’s hard to ignore.
SOCIAL ENGINEERING: New Anti-Obesity Ads Blaming Overweight Parents Spark Criticism.
Blame the government schmucks who created the food pyramid instead. When will we see that ad?
Meanwhile, reader Jill Ellis writes: “Did you see the “bullied” overweight newscaster who was a top story on all the MSM outlets? Don’t you think this is Michelle Obama’s fault? She’s the one who is making us bullies. You must be thin, you must eat certain foods…starting in grade school, our kids are being indoctrinated into being prejudice against fat!” Division and bullying does seem a hallmark.
SWIMMING POOLS go Au Naturel.
POLITICO: Romney Up 4 in Swing States.
AT AMAZON, at Amazon, up to 50% off on Men’s Shoes. Dress, athletic and casual.
Also, on women’s shoes.
IT ALWAYS HAPPENS SLOWER THAN YOU THINK, THEN FASTER THAN YOU EXPECT: Hyperinflation Has Arrived In Iran.
WELL, I SAID THE DISCOVERY PROCESS would be interesting.
THAT OBAMA DAILY CALLER VIDEO: Most interesting as proof of media hypocrisy. “For starters, the hypocrisy meter has now blown a gasket. The media crowd that would consider Mitt Romney’s hair-cutting episode to be front page news and has played pin-the-gaffe-on-Romney for an entire election cycle now sniffs that this video is not only not important, but not even news. The mainstream media clown show continues unabated.”
Meanwhile, reader Tim Ryan writes: “I’m thinking the dismissive journalists are right – the video won’t hurt Obama that much, because everyone knows he’s a crypto lefty . . . but it is another body blow to the MSM, which I think will never recover its reputation lost during the Obama presidency in general and in particular their intentional dereliction of duty for two consecutive elections.”
Related: JournoList flashback: MSM Busted Plotting To Kill Jeremiah Wright Scandal.
Among those who were uncovered to be part of the plan to quell Wright coverage were Richard Kim of the Nation, Michael Tomasky of the Guardian, Thomas Schaller of the Baltimore Sun, Holly Yeager of the Columbia Journalism Review, Slate magazine contributor David Greenberg, columnist Joe Conason, Chris Hayes of the Nation, and Spencer Ackerman — then of the Washington Independent.
Strong reported that Ackerman even once “urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, ‘Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.’”
Hey, was Conor Friedersdorf a member of JournoList?
Meanwhile, Nick Gillespie comments:
Whatever else you can say about Barack Obama before he beat John McCain four years ago, his actual presidency has been far, far worse than could have been predicted. Was his boyhood mentor “Frank” a secret communist? Did Bill Ayers write his books? Did young Barry harbor a soft spot for Franz Fanon and smoke dope like a Cheech & Chong extra? Did he get into Columbia despite being an adult illiterate raised in Kenya by Rosicrucians? Let’s play along and say yes to all this and more.
So freaking what? Compare any and all of that to the grim landscape that Obama has presided over like a dime-store Ozymandias. The guy got just about everything he wanted – expanded auto bailout, mega-stimulus, health-care reform, troop surge in Afghanistan, a free pass to deport immigrants and raid legal-under-state-law pot dispensaries. And it hasn’t worked. The best that the Obama administration can do to defend its objectively awful record – don’t forget the inability to muscle a goddamn budget through the Democratic Senate or deliver a deficit under $1 trillion – is to say that it would have been even worse if McCain had been elected. That sort of counterfactual – and the insistence that it’s alway George W. Bush’s fault – is the last resort of a scoundrel. That was the essence of Clint Eastwood’s bizarre but memorable appearance at the Republican National Convention: Obama hasn’t gotten the job done. If anything, he’s made things worse.
That’s certainly true. But then the media didn’t just tell us he was post-racial. They also told us he was smart and competent. Equally true, I’d say.
UPDATE: More Hypocrisy: Obama Voted Against Katrina Waiver.
Obama was one of a small minority in the Senate who voted against the bill that waived the Stafford Act that made assistance funds available to the New Orleans Katrina victims without their having to match them with a 10% contribution.
That’s the same Stafford Act he lied about in his 2007 Hampton speech, the waiver that had actually occurred several weeks before he made the speech, the waiver that he voted against.
See this for a list of those who voted for and against. You’ll note that Obama’s “nay” vote was one of only 14 cast against the act, almost all of them liberal Democrats. No doubt he would say he knew the act would pass and so he felt okay voting against it in order to protest the Iraq war funds that were also part of the bill. But there’s something profoundly distasteful and almost grotesque about him voting against the waiver, knowing the bill had passed despite his vote, and then lying to the audience to make them angry that the waiver hadn’t happened.
Also typical.
MORE: Important Poll- Hilary vs Obama: Whose Fake Black Accent is Better?
MORE STILL: Thoughts from James Taranto:
That the 2007 video is getting wide attention only now does tell us something unflattering–albeit again something hardly novel–about the media. The speech got some coverage at the time–the Chicago Sun Times’s Lynn Sweet published an “as prepared” transcript that left out some inflammatory improvisational bites–but it might have been worth a closer look, if not in 2007 then the following year, when Obama was clearly a serious presidential contender and his association with Wright was blowing up in his face. But journalists in 2008 largely did not take the sort of adversarial approach toward Obama that they are taking today with Romney. Yet while that is a good reason to mistrust the media, it is not a particularly strong argument against voting for Obama.
One other observation is worth making about the difference between 2007, when Obama gave the new old speech, and today: The then-senator’s implicit premise, that America still regarded blacks as something less than full citizens, is manifestly false today in a way that it was not then. America has disproved it precisely by electing a black president.
The left, predictably enough, has responded to the video with shrieks of racism. This is partly reflexive and partly defensive–i.e., an effort to make absolutely certain that the video doesn’t hurt Obama. But suppose Obama gave a speech today like the one he gave in 2007. Could anyone seriously argue that he would not deserve to be held to account for divisive racial demagoguery? There’s a reason why the 2012 video announcing “African Americans for Obama” was so (you’ll pardon the expression) vanilla.
For decades racial appeals have been understood to be evil when directed at whites but acceptable when directed to blacks. That double standard was justifiable when white supremacy was a reality, then a recent memory. It becomes less so with every passing year, and especially with milestones like the election of a black president. The left’s overwrought reaction to the new old Obama video probably doesn’t say much about the state of the 2012 campaign, but it does portend difficulty in maintaining a worldview in which paranoia about racism plays a central role.
Indeed.
A BLEG FROM CHARLIE MARTIN: over at the Tatler — in the comments, please link me examples of the Democrats saying that something actually happened during the Bush Administration or under Republican control of the Executive functions.
VODKA TAMPONS DON’T WORK AS ADVERTISED: Okay, so maybe butt chugging works (who knows?) but an experience in my very young teen years (no, it didn’t involve drinking. It was an hygiene-freak thing) always made me doubt the distaff side use of vodka soaked tampons. This woman’s experiment seems to prove my thoughts. (Warning — that link goes to an author who is so uncouth as to PREFER drinking gin. Words fail me.)
UPDATE: I don’t mean to imply Butt-chugging doesn’t work. My fans can stop sending me explanatory emails and “true experiences” now. I just say that vodka tampons don’t, unless the woman is a SERIOUS masochist.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST: Can Jim Lehrer Moderate Debate Fairly Given Romney’s Desire To Cut Subsidy For PBS?
THE QUESTION THEY’RE ASKING IN THE WHITE HOUSE: What Does It Feel Like To Be A Smart Person?
But nobody there seems to know the answer.
SHOUT IT FROM THE ROOFTOPS: The federal government instructing Lockheed Martin NOT to follow the law and NOT to warn employees of possible layoffs is a mini-coup. (via Ace of Spades.) The president is not our king. The president is not above the law. The president is not the country. (If I had Glenn’s photoshop of Obama as Louis XVI I’d post it here.)
UPDATE (from Glenn:): Ask, and ye shall receive.
Thank you! – Sarah