On Hillary’s mendacity: the performance is all that counts

The New Neo Posted on by

Andrew McCarthy has written a National Review article entitled “Hillary’s Breathtaking Mendacity.”

It describes the lies that were revealed and “made explicit” in Clinton’s testimony before the Benghazi committee on Thursday, and it’s well worth reading in its entirely. But it also exhibits a response that’s occurring only on the right. McCarthy’s clear and painstaking description of how Clinton lied to the American people (but not to her daughter) is freely available to all who read National Review, but how many people would that be, compared to those who read the ubiquitous MSM spin that says she acquitted herself admirably in the hearings and no one laid a glove on her, nor was any new or interesting information revealed?

The Benghazi hearings have underlined—even though such underlining wasn’t needed—how those who control the narrative control the perception and even the conclusion. Clinton can lie through her teeth about material facts for political reasons, it can be demonstrated over and over (or it can be obvious to anyone listening or paying a particle of attention), and if the media decides to ignore that fact, how many people will look for themselves and decide for themselves? Very few, I’m afraid.

Apparently, facts are not stubborn things. Not any more. Maybe they never were.

But there’s a lot more going on here than that. One thing that’s going on is that much of the public has become cynical enough not to care about Hillary’s lies. Yes, there’s the low information voter whose views are shaped by the MSM, and by the mere headlines in the MSM at that. But there are also a lot of people like the friend I described in this post from December of 2012:

The American people do not seem to be “concerned,” [about Benghazi] either, not at all. Major Garrett can ask all the questions he wants”¦but few people except us blogophiles on the right are listening, and Carney and Obama have learned that simply thumbing their noses at the American people is an excellent way to get the people to shrug”¦

I discovered this myself a few days after the election, when I had dinner with an old friend who is an intelligent, moderate, non-leftist Democrat with some conservative tendencies. This friend just didn’t care about Benghazi or the administration’s handling of it, didn’t know the details and was cynically dismissive of the topic because “all politicians lie.”

Well, they surely do””but not this brazenly, because most politicians at least have the fear of being called to account by the media and then the American people”¦

As true as that was then, it is even truer now. And I’ll go it one better: the left and a growing number of liberals applaud a lie if it serves the cause of the left.

The left was always like that, of course. But I think a lot of liberals used to be more principled than that. What’s made the difference? A decades-long immersion and education in the doctrine of moral relativism:

What is truth, and can it be determined? Way way too many people answer “no,” and so they’ve given up trying or caring. And if they don’t care, why should our public officials answer inopportune and potentially embarrassing questions? No; what’s important is feelings…And most Americans will nod, if they’re paying attention at all.

I will expand on what I wrote back then and add that, this past Thursday, what seems to have been important to most pundits in the MSM (and therefore most liberals) was Hillary’s demeanor: she was measured, calm, and quick to respond. It belied the idea (as did her performance in the recent Democratic debate) that she’s too tired and old, too mentally spent, to be president. She’s still sharp, all right, when need be.

But the substance of what she actually said and did, now and back in the fall of 2012 and after, should be seen as abhorrent. Yet it doesn’t appear that enough Americans care, and because of that we may be in the lamentable situation where Hillary is in a good position to become the next president of the United States.

Jacques Brel: lost in translation

The New Neo Posted on by

One evening a while back, I began looking at old videos of Jacques Brel. The last thing I imagined was that the question of politics would rear its ugly head.

What an arresting guy! I became curious (as I often do) to learn more about his life, and so I started researching that, too. Somewhere along the line I came across this 2009 article by Graeme Thomson in the Guardian which makes the following claim about one of Brel’s songs:

La Diable (é‡a Va) is a song about western arrogance, colonial ghosts and bombs exploding on railway lines…

Ah yes, doesn’t that just sound like the Guardian? But does it sound like Jacques Brel?

Here’s Brel singing the song La Diable, with subtitles giving the English translation. It shows you what an extraordinary performer Brel was, how adept at creating a mood and character of great intensity.

In the lyrics there is indeed mention of bombs exploding on railway lines, but I don’t see or hear any talk of Western arrogance. In fact—well, you be the judge of what the song is actually saying:


Jacques Brel Ca Va Le Diable engl. sub. by lightning49

In the Guardian, Graeme Thomson also has something to say about the lyrics to Brel’s famous song “Fils de…”:

Fils De … is a deeply human anti-war song.

Well, it’s certainly “deeply human.” But there’s not a single word in it about war—anti, pro, or otherwise. Here are the lyrics in the original French, with a literal English translation; see for yourself. And here’s Brel singing it:

Song lyrics in translation do not necessarily follow the original text exactly, or even at all. With “Fils de…” it’s actually the non-literal, free-wheeling English translation of the song that contains what I assume Thomson decided are the anti-war sentiments, although his conclusion is a big stretch, even then. Here is the non-literal English version, which is really more of an “inspired by” than a literal translation:

…Through fields of gold, through fields of ruin
All of the children vanished too soon
In tow’ring waves, in walls of flesh
Among dying birds trembling with death
Sons of tycoons or sons of the farms
All of the children ran from your arms…
So long ago: long, long, ago…
But sons of your sons or sons passing by
Children we lost in lullabies
Sons of true love or sons of regret
All of the sons you cannot forget
Some built the roads, some wrote the poems
Some went to war, some never came home
Sons of your sons or sons passing by
Children we lost in lullabies…

A very slender thread on which to hang Thomson’s antiwar claim, and there’s no correspondence to Brel’s own lyrics at any rate. If you go to the link and read Brel’s lyrics to the song in the English translation, rather than the above re-interpretation, you’ll see that Brel says nothing anti-war in it at all. It’s about the kingdom of childhood, and it’s a much lighter song:

But son of your son
Or son of a stranger
All children
Are magicians
Son of love
Son of an affair
All children
Are poets
They are shepherds
They are wise men
They make clouds
In order to fly better
But son of your son
Or son of a stranger
All children
Are magicians
It’s not until after
A long time after”¦

Thomson must not have bothered to check out the French lyrics at all, which seems like a significant oversight—but hey, who cares when you have your own agenda to fulfill?

More musings on Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony yesterday

The New Neo Posted on by

I watched some of Clinton’s testimony yesterday, but at a fairly early point I decided to stop.

The reason? My gut feeling was that nothing would come of it. Note I don’t write that “there was nothing worthwhile that was said or revealed.” There was plenty, and it should have been meaningful. But all of it was just an underlining, with more proof based on emails, of things we already knew—things the right cares about and the left doesn’t.

I think it’s really just as simple as that. And what’s even simpler was predicting what the MSM would say about it. Sure enough, on the Yahoo page that comes up when I go to check my email, the featured story was advertised with a photo of Hillary Clinton and a headline and blurb that went like this:

“Benghazi panel gives Clinton presidential platform”

The 11-hour hearing yields precious little new information and no major political missteps by the Democratic front-runner.

If I was the person (in terms of politics) I’d been until fourteen or so years ago, I’d most likely have scanned that headline and figured it meant that Hillary had done well, had done nothing wrong, there was nothing new, all was okay, and that I didn’t have to read any further. All I needed to know was contained there: nothing more to see, move right along. And I’d have been only too happy to have done so, because hearings are boring and there’s lots of better things to do. Multiply that by many, many, many millions.

I’m remembering back to the Watergate hearings, though, when there were also better things to do and yet we were riveted to our TV screens. What was the difference?

One difference was that televised hearings were relatively few and far between in those days compared to our C-SPAN era. Another was that something was up, something was in the air, something that felt very important. How did that get conveyed? It had become clear for quite some time that President Nixon might be implicated, and Nixon was the sort of figure that even most of his own supporters didn’t like all that much, and whom the MSM absolutely detested. There was no way the media was going to defend him, and that was part of the “something in the air.”

Besides, the media itself was a big part of the story. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward were cast as heroes, and they and the rest of the press had a big investment in seeing a president brought down (especially this president). Plus, there were characters such as Democrat Sam Ervin, who became an audience favorite. He was given to pronouncements such as this one, part of his reaction to Nixon’s refusal to turn over the tapes (at least somewhat analogous to Hillary’s initial stonewalling on the emails):

I deeply regret that this situation has arisen, because I think that the Watergate tragedy is the greatest tragedy this country has ever suffered. I used to think that the Civil War was our country’s greatest tragedy, but I do remember that there were some redeeming features in the Civil War in that there was some spirit of sacrifice and heroism displayed on both sides.

Hyperbole much? Can you imagine if a Republican senator had referred to Clinton’s behavior as “the greatest tragedy this country has ever suffered,” how much that senator would have been ridiculed? And yet, in quite a few ways, I see Benghazi as worse than Watergate. Certainly, the reaction of the Democrats is far far worse than the reaction of Republicans to Watergate; it was Republicans who ultmately turned on Nixon and forced him out by withdrawing their support.

I wrote about the Democrats’ reaction to Benghazi two years ago, when the Issa hearings on Benghazi had already began:

David Gelernter nails it:

It is the Democratic Party that’s on trial today; and to a lesser extent, America’s mainstream media. For Democrats (and especially Democratic senators) it is put-up-or-shut-up time: are they Democrats or Americans first?…

How would Republicans act if a GOP administration were under this sort of cloud? We know exactly how. It was the radically partisan Edward Kennedy who proposed that a senate select committee investigate Watergate””but in February 1973, the Senate voted unanimously to create that committee. Republican Senator Howard Baker was vice chairman, and asked the key question: ”What did the president know and when did he know it?” Which Democratic senator will ask that question today, now that the issue isn’t breaking-and-entering but lying about four murders, including the murder of an American ambassador? Which cabinet member will be Eliot Richardson and resign rather than continuing to be part of a coverup? Will John Kerry rise to the challenge?

The answers, unfortunately are “none” and “no.”

It’s only gotten worse, much worse. Republicans are not even asking about the president any more; he seems irrelevant even though he almost undoubtedly is not. And it’s been proven without a shadow of a doubt that the person soon to be the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, “lied about four murders, including the murder of an American ambassador,” and not a single Democrat can seem to manage to say a word against her on that score. Nor, as far as I can see, can the liberal MSM.

It’s a bit like this Onion piece:

More than a week after President Barack Obama’s cold-blooded killing of a local couple, members of the American news media admitted Tuesday that they were still trying to find the best angle for covering the gruesome crime.

“I know there’s a story in there somewhere,” said Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, referring to Obama’s home invasion and execution-style slaying of Jeff and Sue Finowicz on Apr. 8. “Right now though, it’s probably best to just sit back and wait for more information to come in. After all, the only thing we know for sure is that our president senselessly murdered two unsuspecting Americans without emotion or hesitation.”…

What exactly is the news hook here?” asked Rick Kaplan, executive producer of the CBS Evening News. “Is this an upbeat human-interest story about a ‘day in the life’ of a bloodthirsty president who likes to kill people? Or is it more of an examination of how Obama’s unusual upbringing in Hawaii helped to shape the way he would one day viciously butcher two helpless citizens in their own home?”

“Or maybe the story is just that murder is cool now,” Kaplan continued. “I don’t know. There are a million different angles on this one.”

So far, the president’s double-homicide has not been covered by any major news outlets.

Just now, looking at that “Benghazi panel gives Hillary presidential platform” story with which I began this post, and starting to read the comments there, I saw this one that references Watergate:

You know, Watergate evolved to what it became in American history because of a cover-up. A cover-up of deceitful politics. HRC’s cover-up of Benghazi (she finally admitted to it) is equally shameful and four people died. America kicked out a president in 1975, in 2015 America seems to celebrate presidents (or at least candidates) who don’t even attempt to pull the wool over your eyes. Somewhere between then and now Americans have traded in their moral compass and for what I am not really sure.

They traded it in for self-congratulatory pats on the back, government dependence, and self-esteem awards for everyone. But what they’ll get goes way beyond that, and it’s not good.

[NOTE: If you want to look at some of the substantive revelations at the hearings yesterday, see this from the WSJ. Some excerpts:

Here’s what the Benghazi committee found in Thursday’s hearing. Two hours into Mrs. Clinton’s testimony, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan referred to an email Mrs. Clinton sent to her daughter, Chelsea, at 11:12 the night of the attack, or 45 minutes after the secretary of state had issued a statement blaming YouTube-inflamed mobs. Her email reads: “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Queda-like group.” Mrs. Clinton doesn’t hedge in the email; no “it seems” or “it appears.” She tells her daughter that on the anniversary of 9/11 an al Qaeda group assassinated four Americans.

That same evening, Mrs. Clinton spoke on the phone with Libyan President Mohamed Magariaf, around 8 p.m. The notes from that conversation, in a State Department email, describe her as saying: “We have asked for the Libyan government to provide additional security to the compound immediately as there is a gun battle ongoing, which I understand Ansar as Sharia [sic] is claiming responsibility for.” Ansar al Sharia is al Qaeda’s affiliate on the Arabian Peninsula. So several hours into the attack, Mrs. Clinton already believed that al Qaeda was attacking U.S. facilities.

The next afternoon, Mrs. Clinton had a call with the Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Kandil. The notes from it are absolutely damning. The secretary of state tells him: “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack””not a protest.” And yet Mrs. Clinton, and Ms. Rice and Mr. Obama for days and days continued to spin the video lie.

In other news Thursday, Judicial Watch unveiled a new cable, sent the day after the attack, from the Defense Intelligence Agency to the State Department Command Center. It explains that the attack was carried out by a “Salafi terrorism group” in “retaliation for the killing of an Al Qaeda operative.”

The cable says “the attack was an organized operation with specific information that the U.S. Ambassador was present.” The cable included details about the group’s movements and the weapons it used in the assault.

Count on the Obama administration to again resort to blaming “confusing” and “conflicting” information at the time for its two-week spin. That was Mrs. Clinton’s flimsy excuse at the hearing. But her own conversations prove she was in no doubt about what happened””while it was still happening.

Yawn and ho-hum, says at least half the country.]

Digital elephants and other things I know nothing about

The New Neo Posted on by

Except that I’ve a strong hunch that they’re important:

Here is a simple fact: right now, the GOP is on the road to defeat, set to be overwhelmed by a superior digital voter microtargeting operation on the other side, and hamstrung by a refusal to focus on the future of predictive analytics and Big Data application technology. These are the things which translate through e-mail and online contacts, into both donations and (even more importantly) boots on the ground in the thick of a general election campaign: door-to-door mobilization. Everything else ”” the theater, the social media back-and-forths, the SNL appearances and Sunday morning show interviews ”” is almost meaningless. The 2016 pool of potential GOP nominees represents the deepest reserve of young Presidential-level talent the Republican Party has had in ages, and none of it may matter because while the engineers and developers on the Democratic side aren’t necessarily personally invested in Hillary or Bernie, they do believe in the greater Cause. And, more to the point, these are the sorts of people who simply enjoy solving equations and problems.

GOP candidates are facing a mammoth two-pronged problem: 1) the failure of will and lack of funds to field large data-driven get-out-the-vote operations, and; 2) Hillary Clinton’s well funded allies in Silicon Valley, specifically Eric Schmidt and Google. On top of that, this is a party whose candidates look like they are playing catch-up in the areas of digital operations and field mobilization.

The article goes on to state that Republicans have actually made a great many advances in this arena since 2012. But they’re still behind, and that seems to matter.

Carson surpasses Trump in Iowa poll

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not sure whether this poll has any significance, but I report it.

Ace has the following to say about it:

This might just be one poll but Carson has been shown ahead of Trump in Iowa before.

Allah goes deeper into it, and finds it to be a very bad poll for Trump beyond the toplines. 30% of Iowa voters say they definitely would not vote for Trump, which is higher than resistance to Bush, and certainly higher to resistance to Carson (which is only at 4%).

Every once in a while there’s a poll that’s really bad for Trump and everyone jumps on it…This could just be one of those occasional bad polls for Trump, or we could see the emergence of the Establishment’s new favorite stalking horse to take down Trump — Ben Carson.

Well, it’s Iowa, Jake. I wouldn’t expect the state to be a Trump stronghold, although he’s been doing well there so far for the most part.

In addition, the idea of Carson as a possible establishment tool doesn’t seem right. He may, however, be someone the “establishment” would be happy to see taking over from Trump, although he certainly doesn’t seem to be an establishment figure.

Other observations: I think the Ben Carson phenomenon has been underrated and under-discussed so far in the news, and that’s purposeful. After all, the fact that attack dog Trump has been doing well fits the “Republicans are nasty, bigoted, crass stupidheads” narrative far better than Republican support of calm, nice-guy-demeanored, African-American Carson does.

I don’t think the MSM would quite know what to do with him should Carson become the frontrunner. Of course, there’s always “he has no experience,” but that was true to a large extent of Obama, which somewhat undermines the argument. There’s also “he’s not a real black person,” but that’s not the strongest of attacks either, is it, when you’re trying to advance the idea that the GOP is bigoted? Carson may not be a real black person by the MSM’s definition of real black people (they must be liberal or leftist), but he’s black, and he’s real, and he’s a person.

Lastly, they could always trot out women to accuse him of sexual harassment, which is a favored line of attack against people of his general description (remember Cain). But I happen to think it will be very difficult to find candidates for that particular tactic with Carson.

Knave/fool redux: back in March of 2009…

The New Neo Posted on by

…Richard Epstein, who had known Obama at the University of Chicago, had Obama’s number to a great extent.

At the time, Epstein was also one of the few people who could be said to have “known” Obama at all, although one of the main points Epstein was making was that Obama was excellent at making himself unknowable and presenting a controlled mask in most of his interactions.

It wasn’t the first time Epstein had criticized Obama, either; he hadn’t waited till Obama was elected to spill the Obama beans. But I guess not enough people were listening.

Epstein’s description of Obama in the following excerpt dovetails rather well with mine, then and now. It also impacts on the “knave or fool” question that still seems to preoccupy a lot of people and to which way too many people (IMHO) reply “fool.”

I especially note this from Epstein (remember, this was said in March of 2009, not long after Obama first took office):

Epstein:…Obama…can sit in a room with you, he can listen to you, and he can talk to you, and you really get the sense of a man who is in complete self control…

He is a fierce competitor and he likes to be in control of his environment.

His positions are not close to the middle, and so he sees no reason to compromise with Republicans unless and until they can mount a veto threat in the Senate. He is very, very dogmatic about his substantive positions. He knows what he believes and he knows why he believes it, and it is extremely difficult for people on the outside to change his mind…

Robinson: He has a reputation as a brilliant orator. We now know that he will not give even brief remarks, the kinds of things that chief executives from Washington, through Reagan, through even George W. Bush would give with only a note card or even off the cuff, he won’t speak without a teleprompter. How come?

Epstein: Same point. He is very much a man who wants to be in total control. The moment you start to improvise, you are like me, and you will start calling the President “this guy”, and then you will say no, that’s not the phrase I should have been using in this circumstance.

Robinson: Charles Krauthammer described the dinner that Obama attended at the home of George Will with a number of conservative journalists shortly before the inauguration.

Krauthammer said that after Obama left, some stayed around and talked for an hour or so, and they could not decide whether he was a centrist who wanted to throw bones to the Left, or a Leftist who was willing to throw bones to the center. Which is it?

Epstein: The reason they couldn’t figure it out is the same thing that I mentioned before. Obama has a sort of stone-faced experience, and it is quite on purpose.

The answer is pretty clear. He is a man on the left who will, if necessary, throw bones to the center. He is not a man from the center. Some of the appointments of his may sound centrist. But again, I just don’t believe in this as a serious indicator.

So, even conservative journalists, talking among themselves, couldn’t figure Obama out by that time. I’m not sure who those people were (I can certainly give a few guesses, such as George Will and David Brooks, and the latter isn’t what most of us would call “conservative” but is conservative compared to most journalists), but Obama’s con routine apparently worked on them.

It didn’t work on everyone. I have long been impressed by this column of Tony Blankley’s, written right after Obama’s first inauguration. He takes the same information as Epstein—Obama’s purposeful “blank screen” inscrutability—and draws the logical, and it turns out correct, conclusions:

President Barack Obama is a beguiling but confounding figure. As he said of himself in “The Audacity of Hope,” “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

It is indeed audacious that he should proclaim this consciously disingenuous attribute. And as one reads his inaugural address, it is hard not to conclude that it was crafted shrewdly to perpetuate such confusion.

Run-of-the-mill politicians try to hide their duplicity. Only the most gifted of that profession brag that they intend to confound and confuse the public. Such an effort is beyond ingenious; it is brazenly ingenuous.

And it is working. Many of my fellow conservative commentators are embarrassingly eager to search Obama’s words, groveling for hopeful signs that he is not a radical intent on changing the face and nature of our republic. Some of our Tory conservatives have clung to his words (“hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old; these things are true”) as evidence of a deep conservatism….

Blankley goes on to describe many different ways in which conservative pundits looked for the silver lining in Obama, and found what they were looking for. This is somewhat of an old story, of course; something of the sort occurred in Germany and around the world with Hitler (and no, Obama isn’t Hitler; I’m describing a process—dissemblance—that both used, however).

More from Blankley in January of 2009:

I believe that Obama intends to craft a new nationalism, using the disassembled timber of our traditional values to build a new, more collectivist and less individualistic ship of state. The planks will look vaguely familiar, but the ship will be quite different. It is as if he would disassemble the warship Old Ironsides and build with its timbers a collectivist’s ark.

…[Perhaps I] have misread Obama. But one is entitled to be suspicious of a politician who openly brags, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” That strikes me as a conscious intent to deceive in order to diffuse opposition to his designs until it is too late to block them. Ronald Reagan never hid his policy intentions from public view. Neither, in fairness, did Lyndon Johnson or Walter Mondale or Barney Frank or Nancy Pelosi.

A politician who will not sail under his own flag sails, in effect, against all flags. Such a strategy may, in time, undercut his support from increasingly suspicious progressives, liberals, moderates and conservatives — once they recognize the deception.

It’s only in that last sentence that Blankley shows a lack—and a slight lack at that—of foresight. His statement is conditional; “may.” And certainly many moderates and conservatives have stopped making excuses for Obama. Liberals, not so much, although again you have a few, a very few. But progressives? They have no problem with the deception; they applaud it, and understand that as time has gone on it has become less and less necessary to deceive.

[NOTE: Unfortunately, the prescient and perceptive Blankley died in January of 2012. By the time he wrote that column I quoted, he’d had some impressive experience that probably made it easier for him to spot Obama’s fraud and the reasons behind it than it was for most people:

…Blankley served President Ronald Reagan as a policy analyst and speechwriter…Before coming to Washington, D.C., he spent 10 years as a Deputy Attorney General with the California Attorney General’s office.

Blankley’s political opinions were generally considered to fall within traditional conservatism although he was labeled as a neoconservative by some critics. He denied that label by claiming that his views are more comparable to a classic conservative such as Reagan. His political career spanned several decades, and his most prominent position was a seven-year stint as House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s press secretary.]

Open thread for Hillary Clinton’s testimony before the Benghazi Committee

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a thread for discussing Clinton’s testimony today.

I will be watching pieces of it. That’s probably more than most Americans will be watching. Most people will be reading the commentary on it and watching selected clips, if that. Their perceptions will be shaped by those whose business it is to shape them.

Speaking of perceptions, already most people feel this is a politically motivated interrogation:

Majorities in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll disapprove of the way Hillary Rodham Clinton has handled questions about the attacks and her conduct using a personal e-mail server while secretary of state.

But a nearly equal majority identify the Republican-led investigation into the events as a politically motivated attempt to damage the former secretary of state rather than an effort to raise legitimate concerns.

If you look at the partisan breakdown of the poll numbers, the vast majority of Republicans disapprove, the vast majority of Democrats don’t, but 55% of Independents also disapprove. And if you look at the change over time on the question of whether the hearings are politically motivated (question 21), many more people think so today than thought so last May (thanks, Rep. McCarthy, Democratic talking points, and the MSM).

This, by the way, is the same poll that showed 51% job approval for Obama, so that tells you a lot about the makeup of the respondents.

There are some other interesting things in that poll, such as question 13, where 60% of people leaning Democratic say that the more they learn about Hillary Clinton the more they like her. My oh my. Respondents who lean Republican were asked the same question of Republican candidates, and the ones who got very strong approval the more people know about them were Carson, Fiorina, and Rubio, and then to a lesser extent Cruz. Trump more or less broke even. But Jeb? Less Jeb-love the more people know him.

But back to the Benghazi hearings. From what I’ve seen, Clinton hasn’t flinched (I think “steely-eyed” is a good description) and will give her supporters exactly what they want.

[ADDENDUM: By the way, Clinton’s ability to hold up under questioning for so many hours will almost certainly have the effect of undermining the argument that she’s too old and tired to be president.]

More on the Canadian election, and on ours

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a piece by a Canadian explaining (at least somewhat) the results of Canada’s election.

It rings true, I think. Basically, it was a personality contest, with Harper as the Nixonian cold fish and Trudeau as the young Obama-esque figure.

Voters do that sort of thing; I remember how important the “he understands me” vote was in 2012, when it was already quite clear that Obama was a leftist and a disaster. And lest you think those who want such “understanding” are all bleeding heart liberal women, the moment I realized Romney was in big big trouble before the 2012 election was when I talked to a taciturn, libertarian/conservative, blue collar New England man I know and he said that he didn’t want to vote for Romney because Romney didn’t understand him.

It was about ten days before the election, and my stomach turned over because I knew at that moment that Romney was sunk. I ended up convincing the guy to vote for Romney, but what he had already said had made a deep deep impression on me.

What does this mean for the 2016 election in this country? It’s a general problem for Republicans that they are perceived as, and portrayed by the left and the MSM as, uncaring. Hillary sure doesn’t seem to have much warm and fuzzy caring either, but as a leftist Democrat she’s got that built-in assumption of caring. On the GOP side, I’m not sure who comes across as most caring (not that I’m saying that’s what I pick a candidate on), but it seems to me that Marco Rubio conveys more of the young, charismatic, caring qualities than any of the others.

If that’s what you’re looking for. And apparently, a lot of people are.

In non-news of the day…

The New Neo Posted on by

…Joe Biden announces he’s not running.

I know; it’s news, not non-news. But for whatever reason, I never took the possibility of Biden running especially seriously, and wrote very little about it (although in one very short post I did link to an article that said it was a very real possibility he might run with Warren). One of the oddest things about his quasi-candidacy is that polls showed he was unlikely to get the nomination, but that he polled the best against the Republican field.

Biden always seemed like a placeholder to me when he talked about running in 2016; someone who gave the appearance of an alternative to Hillary Clinton but who really wouldn’t be. “Placeholder” was more or less his function as Veep, too, although that’s often the function of a VP. In that role he was a real trouper for Obama, as well as providing intermittent comic relief, although I’ve never found him funny.

Now the way is paved for Hillary’s coronation as the Democratic nominee, and perhaps next president. I really have never seen any obstacle in her way for the first of those two roles. Let’s hope there are some formidable obstacles in the way of the second.

[ADDENDUM: And this is really non-news: Webb drops out, too.]

Burning House

The New Neo Posted on by

This song was playing on my clock radio the other day to wake me up. I’d never heard it before, but it certainly brought me to attention–haunting voice and lyric: