IT’S ALMOST LIKE GENDER ISN’T A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT OR SOMETHING: Millennial ‘Mr. Moms’ turn out to be all talk.
Archive for 2015
August 6, 2015
THE BEST, CLASSIEST DEBATE EVER: “Donald Trump is essentially Norm MacDonald’s Burt Reynolds impression from the Celebrity Jeopardy sketch running for president.”
OF COURSE IT IS: FBI investigation of Hillary’s emails is ‘criminal probe’.
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Netanyahu: Iran Nuclear Deal Will Ensure ‘Horrific’ War In Middle East.
AT AMAZON, summer deals on Outdoor Toys & Games.
Plus, deals on Fall Denim.
RAND PAUL: OBAMA-HUGGING CHRISTIE ‘MISUNDERSTANDS BILL OF RIGHTS:’ “I don’t trust President Obama with our records. I know you gave him a big hug, and if you want to give him a big hug again, go right ahead.”
VIDEO: LET’S GET THIS PARTY STARTED RIGHT, WITH TRUMP’S REFUSAL TO SAY HE WON’T RUN AS AN INDEPENDENT.
FORGET GREXIT: Daniel Hannan makes the case for Brexit.
SCOTT OTT IS LIVEBLOGGING THE MAIN EVENT: 1st GOP Presidential Debate.
LIBERALS, NEWSEUM HONOR COMEDIAN JON STEWART AS ‘WALTER CRONKITE OF HIS TIME:’ After reading leftwing historian Douglas Brinkley’s unintentionally damning biography of Cronkite last year, that’s a spot-on comparison, but not for the reasons Stewart’s fans think.
FIORINA SHOWS HOW TO PUSH BACK AGAINST CHRIS MATTHEWS ON HARDBALL.
UPDATE: Video here; note that Matthews had no rebuttal to Fiorina’s charges against Hillary’s lies.
ROGER SIMON: Fiorina Wins First Fox Debate; Pataki, Graham Shine.
THE FLIP SIDE OF optimism about life on other planets.
Related: Why I Hope There’s No Life On Mars.
JAMES TARANTO: Obama goes “Full Orwell.” He’s been full Orwell for many years now, but Taranto’s right that Obama’s speech yesterday on the Iran nuclear deal was especially rich with patent falsehoods.
Rather than enumerate every flaw of Barack Obama’s defense of his Iran deal yesterday, we’d like to look deeply at the most glaring one, namely this passage:
Just because Iranian hard-liners chant “Death to America” does not mean that that’s what all Iranians believe. In fact, it’s those hard-liners who are most comfortable with the status quo. It’s those hard-liners chanting “Death to America” who have been most opposed to the deal. They’re making common cause with the Republican caucus. . . .
Obama’s “common cause” argument rests on several factual premises that seem to us obviously false, and that certainly are not obviously true—among them, that Republicans desire war, that there is a meaningful distinction between “Iranian hard-liners” and the Iranian regime, and that those hard-liners would prefer American military action to American appeasement.
But there is an even more basic objection to Obama’s statement. Assume for the sake of argument that the “Iranian hard-liners” and the Republicans really do want an all-out military confrontation. Now, consider an example from history when such a result actually obtained. On Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. On Dec. 8, Congress declared war on Japan. Would it make any sense to say that the Japanese and the U.S. Congress had made “common cause”?
Obama is equating mutual antagonism with its opposite, “common cause.” Again, Orwell put it more pithily: War is peace.
If Republicans who oppose the deal are “making common cause” with “Iranian hard-liners,” does it not follow that so are the Israelis—as well as those Democratic lawmakers who’ve announced opposition to the deal (seven so far, all in the House, according to the Hill), and 57% of the American public (including 55% of independents and 32% of Democrats), according to the latest Quinnipiac poll?
Lame duck Obama no longer cares about even the appearance of civility with Republicans, or any Democrat who dares to oppose him. His gloves are now off, it’s all personal to him (and his worshippers), and his radical ideological agenda is on full display. It’s full Orwell, replete with blatant lies, rewriting of history, and assault on the fabric of society itself. Obama is a bully, with a bully pulpit, and he doesn’t give a damn about the Constitution or its founding principles, which he thinks is deeply flawed. He has done more to damage the Constitution, the economy, and societal unity than all prior presidents combined.
January 2017 cannot come fast enough.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Nullifying juries more interested in justice than some prosecutors: The fact that jurors can let the guilty go free was intended to protect us from unjust laws. Yes, there are two this week. I’ve moved up to a double-column schedule.
ASHE SCHOW: Carly Fiorina the clear winner of Thursday’s undercard debate.
The Hill: Fiorina stands out in Republican ‘happy hour’ debate.
Slate: Carly Fiorina Won the Preliminary Debate. It Wasn’t Even Close.
UPDATE: DNC makes clear that it sees Carly Fiorina as a threat.
MORE: Carly Fiorina won the ‘Happy Hour’ debate. By a lot.
ALSO: Carly Fiorina Eviscerates Ghost of Trump, Wins Fox News JV Presidential Debate.
THE PERFECT GOODBYE TO JON STEWART:
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: 6 NSFW Reasons Why Robots Are The Future Of Sex. “Robophilia may be alien now, but could be normal in the near future.”
Nobody tell Matt Yglesias.
ALAN DERSHOWITZ: “Mr. Obama, your Iran deal will fall apart.”
The Framers of our constitution probably would have regarded the nuclear deal with Iran as a “treaty,” subject to a two thirds ratification by the Senate. At the very least they would have required Congress to approve the agreement by a majority vote. It is unlikely that it would have allowed the President alone to make so important and enduring an international agreement.
If President Obama doesn’t treat the Iran agreement with more respect, all his arguments today are beside the point. The agreement won’t have the force of law. . . .
In the two and a quarter centuries since the ratification of the Constitution, the power of the executive has expanded considerably, but the Framers would be shocked by the current situation in which the president alone gets to make an important and enduring international agreement that can be overridden only by two thirds plus one of both the senate and the house. At the very least, this important and enduring deal should have required a majority vote of Congress. . . .
While a majority of the House and the Senate voted for this exceptional set of rules for approving the Iran agreement, it was only to assure themselves that they would have any say at all in the matter. President Obama’s position was that he could make the “executive” agreement without Congressional approval. . . .
With regard to the deal with Iran, the stakes are so high, and the deal so central to the continuing security of the free world, that it should — as a matter of democratic governance — require more than a presidential agreement and one third plus one of both houses of Congress. This is especially true where there is no clear consensus in favor of the deal among the American people. Though we do not govern by polls, it seems fairly clear that a majority of Americans now oppose the deal.
Let us never forget that America is a democracy where the people ultimately rule, and if the majority of Americans continue to oppose the deal, it will ultimately be rejected, if not by this administration, than by the next. An agreement, as distinguished from a treaty does not have the force of law. It can simply be abrogated by any future president.
Exactly. David Rivkin and Lee Casey made similar arguments last month in the Wall Street Journal. But of course Rivkin and Casey are conservative lawyers, so their concerns about bypassing the Constitution’s treaty provisions may not carry much weight with anyone who is politically left-of-center. Because Dershowitz is a well-known political leftist (and former professor of Obama at Harvard), his opinion may garner more attention. It’s nice to see some liberal/progressives growing a pair, especially those who know a little something about the Constitution (and still care about it). Dershowitz’s Harvard Law colleague, Laurence Tribe, has recently spoken out about the constitutional infirmity of Obama’s Clean Power Plan, and he has been excoriated by Obama worshippers. Dershowitz will presumably now join Tribe on the Obama Administration’s blacklist.
LIVEBLOGGING THE FIRST 2016 GOP PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: Scott Ott is live from the Red State 2015 Gathering in Atlanta.
THE EBOLA GAMBLE: How Public Health Authorities Put Reassurance Before Protection. “In December 2014 and February 2015, after public attention to Ebola had waned, two medical articles quietly appeared that exhaustively summarized the available literature on how Ebola is transmitted. In the gently descriptive language of scientists, these papers walked through most of the CDC’s and the World Health Organization’s major claims about Ebola — that it cannot be transmitted via water supplies, sewage, or the air; that its maximum incubation period is 21 days; that patients are contagious only when symptomatic — and showed how each, though stated definitively on posters and in public statements by the CDC and the WHO, was not only based on fragmentary evidence, but had evidence to qualify or contradict it.”
“THE POLITICS OF DELUSION: Mayor Bill de Blasio’s radical dreams are leading straight to chaos,” Myron Magnet Writes at City Journal, along with a fascinating glimpse of how de Blasio’s punitive socialist worldview was formed:
To call de Blasio a self-made man would be a charitable way of putting it. More accurately, he is a made-up man. Born Warren Wilhelm, Jr., he painfully watched his Loomis- and Yale-educated war-hero father decline into anger, depression, and drunkenness after he lost his federal budget-analyst job in the wake of a congressional probe into his and his wife’s left-wing politics. Sparked by ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers, who’d known the couple as fellow Time magazine staffers before the war, the investigation cleared both Wilhelms of being Communists but noted their “sympathetic interest in Communism,” which cost de Blasio’s father his security clearance, even though he had shown ample proof of patriotism by giving part of his leg for his country at the Battle of Okinawa, for which he won the Bronze Star. So, despite going on to prestigious posts as a Texaco economist and an Arthur D. Little management consultant, he couldn’t let go of the grievance of being a target of McCarthyism. He destroyed his marriage when his son was only seven, ultimately got fired, and put a bullet through his heart in 1979.
“I have a real respect, and a real anger and sadness at the same time,” said de Blasio, trying to describe his feelings about his father to the New York Times. “I don’t think I’ve ever been able to do the math on exactly what it all means.” So wounded was he by the triple abandonment of alcoholic stupor, divorce, and then suicide that he junked his father’s name and took his Smith-graduate mother’s maiden name. Returning as a Sandinista-booster from a Nicaraguan trip after NYU and then Columbia graduate school, de Blasio brought his angry radicalism with him when he joined the administration of Mayor David Dinkins, whose placidly feckless Leftism might have seemed tamer than his 33-year-old aide had hoped.
Earlier this year, in a piece titled “California Is So Over,” on Jerry Brown’s mismanagement of California’s resources, and how the state is becoming “feudal, super-affluent and with an impoverished interior,” Joel Kotkin wrote that “Brown has waged a kind of Oedipal struggle against his father’s legacy” of gubernatorial competency. (At least when compared to Jerry.) Similarly, as we noted earlier this week, a new documentary is making the rounds titled The Brainwashing of My Dad.
See, dad was once a “nonpolitical Kennedy Democrat,” or as Mark Hemingway writes at the Federalist, “In other words, he supported the Catholic pro-life guy who slashed marginal tax rates, fought the commies aggressively, and would otherwise be a completely unwelcome figure among today’s liberals, both culturally and politically.” Dad now finds his worldview being reinforced not by today’s Democrats (see also: Bill de Blasio and Jerry Brown) but by Rush Limbaugh, the late Bob Grant, and Fox News — hence the “brainwashing.” Exploring the Hollywood of the 1970s, Easy Riders/Raging Bulls author Peter Biskind documents the troubled relationships that the simultaneously New Left/new Hollywood Young Turks of that era had with their fathers, even to the point of writing that “parricide” is one of the key leitmotifs that runs through many of the greatest films of that era.
Hatred of what seems like mom and dad’s provincialism really does seem to be a recurring theme to explain away one’s move to the far left side of the aisle, doesn’t it?
ROGER AILES SAYS GOODBYE TO JON STEWART:
During his show last week, Jon Stewart showed a clip of the Ingmar Bergman movie, The Seventh Seal, only he substituted Ailes for the Death character. Ailes told THR he hadn’t seen the segment, but he isn’t surprised at the vitriol aimed at him.
“He’s feeling unrewarded because Fox News beats him on the amount of money we make, on ratings and on popularity. I’m sure it’s very depressing when he sits home at night and worries about it. We never did,” Ailes said.
“He’s a brilliant comedian. He’s actually a very nice guy, and I saw him with his kids on the street. He’s a good father. He has a bitter view of the world and you see it embodied in how he’s reacting to Fox News, equating it with death.”
But then, bitterness is a frequent byproduct of discarding comedy and replacing it with agitprop, and jettisoning genuine, earned laughs with “clapter” — in which a robotic audience who agrees with your politics unwittingly plays the role of the mechanical prerecorded laughtrack from TV’s salad days.