What can the Republican Congress do?

The New Neo Posted on by

Let me begin by stating my point of view. I’m with commenter “Harold,” who writes:

Not only should Republicans break the filibuster, they should break, bend, ignore every rule and tradition in the Senate. Republicans don’t seem to get that they are in an Alinsky jam here. The Democrats are making them live up to their fine old rules while the Democrats live by power and power alone.

As soon as the Democrats ended the filibuster for judicial appointments, arguments for Republicans to retain it became weak, because the reason for keeping it was always to protect one’s own minority rights when the time came. This required that both parties support the rule, knowing that someday it would be their turn to benefit from it (when they were in the minority) and another day it would be their turn to be stymied by it (when they were in the majority but not the supermajority). Respect for the rule also required a modicum of compromise from whatever the minority party du jour might be if Congress wanted to get any work done at all. But that sort of thing ended a while ago, too.

So there is no longer any reason to uphold something I always had defended. Now the situation is such that Republicans are fighting a battle where the implicit rules of the game have changed. As “Harold” puts it, they are in an Alinsky jam here. And they better study up on their Alinsky or they’re going to be in huge trouble (they already are in trouble, actually). But I don’t think most of them have the temperament, or perhaps even the interest, to go bold.

However, let’s not pretend that the jam they face is one in which there’s a simple way out. There may not even be a way out at all, although there are ways that could offer at least a chance of an out. But the difficulty of the situation is why I not only am very frustrated with the Republican leaders (and some others) in Congress, I also am frustrated with people who say that it is obvious what they should do and that it surely would be successful. That is wishful thinking of the highest order—although I may agree with those people on the fact that the GOP should do it anyway.

Right after the election of 2014 there was a brief surge of joy among many on the right about a campaign hard fought and won. But then reality set in, a reality of which many of those same people had also been previously aware. It had long been clear that Obama and the Democrats would do whatever it took, and that a supermajority would have been needed to have had a really good chance of stopping them. Even had the GOP gotten a supermajority (and there was never any real chance of that happening in 2014) I believe that Obama would have just bypassed Congress even more and done exactly what he wanted. Defunding would, however, have been easier to accomplish.

But absent a Republican supermajority, Obama and Reid can continue to call the shots. Obama signaled right after the 2014 election that the Democrats’ loss meant nothing to him, and that he was perfectly willing to bypass Congress. As for the future, if the presidency is really a lock for Democrats from now on because of the Electoral College picture (I don’t believe this theory, but I’ve read many analyses that espouse it), and future Democratic presidents and Democratic members of Congress are willing to follow in Obama’s and Reid’s footsteps in terms of power and ruthlessness, the only conclusion I can come to is that Republican majorities in Congress will never matter much unless they are supermajorities, and that showdown after showdown (and shutdown after shutdown) would be the name of the game.

So what power does the current Republican Congress have? Why even bother to have elected them? One obvious reason is that they stop affirmatively Democratic legislation (such as Obamacare) from being passed. Congress was already Republican enough after the election of 2010 to have been doing that, of course, even when they didn’t have the Senate, because they had at least 40 votes there. Now they have a significant majority of the Senate, but little has changed in actuality because they still don’t have the 60 Senate seats to force cloture, nor do they have the needed 2/3 to override a presidential veto. So their power to pass affirmatively Republican legislation in the Senate continues to be to reduced.

That means that unless they can get a significant number of Democrats to cross party lines (good luck with that) they are limited to either (1) passing less controversial bills where they can get six Democratic senators to join, as with Keystone; or (2) ending the filibuster, in which case they can pass bills galore but can’t make them stick because of the veto problem and the lack of votes to override. But at least they could highlight Obama’s obstructionism as they pass—and he vetoes—bill and bill after bill.

To recap: they can impeach but not convict. They can pass bills in the House that can’t get through the Senate, or that can get through the Senate but not get past the veto. They can…they can…what? They can decline to fund important parts of government, and try to bully the Democrats and Obama into blinking, but Obama rests secure in the fact that the public will be manipulated by the press into blaming Republican “obstructionism” for any lack of funding. That doesn’t mean the Republicans shouldn’t do it anyway, but it does mean they run an excellent chance of taking the hit for it rather than Obama and the Democrats.

That’s the situation we have now. If Republicans don’t have the courage (or foolhardiness—take your pick) to act in this extreme way, it will be up to the courts to stop things, be it Obamacare subsidies or amnesty. Both issues have cases pending. At this point I’m willing to say that the current case pending in Texas about amnesty is one of the most important ones the courts (and ultimately it may be the Supreme Court) have ever faced. The lower court’s decision was based on very narrow grounds, but that was just an injunction and not the final word, which will almost certainly be decided on larger constitutional grounds by higher courts.

That’s one of the reasons I’ve always emphasized how crucial court appointments are. Of course, there’s always the possibility that Obama would defy the courts if the decision were to go against him. Would Obama do that? I have come to think the answer is “yes.” He would do it either overtly, or covertly if possible.

[NOTE: So, if the Democrats wouldn’t hesitate to end the filibuster if they needed to, why didn’t they do it in order to pass Obamacare? The answer is they didn’t need to; with the “creative” use of reconciliation, they passed it despite the election of Scott Brown that was specifically aimed at giving the Republicans the requisite 40 votes to stop Obamacare.]

Obama vetoes Keystone

The New Neo Posted on by

Of course he does.

And he will have no hesitation to veto everything else the Republicans pass that doesn’t have the votes to override. And since the Democrats tend to hang tough, that will be just about everything the Republicans plan to do.

You can rail all you want against the Republicans, but at this point it is clear that minus a president who cares about what the people want, if a president is willing to defy both houses of Congress and can get away with it, the only way to pass legislation these days with an opposition party president is to control more than 2/3 of both houses. But that’s a rare situation; it is not usually the case, historically speaking, that when a president is of a different party than Congress, the other party can muster that strong a majority.

It’s quite an impasses. The only way out I can see is for the Republicans to exercise the nuclear option on legislation in general. That would be quite a move, setting a dangerous precedent for the future when they are not in power. However, at this point it is clear that if they don’t do it the left is determined to make sure the right has no future (amnesty is one tool for that). There is no doubt in my mind that if the situation were reversed, the Deomcrats would jettison the filibuster in a heartbeat. They are playing for keeps.

[ADDENDUM: I realize that eliminating the filibuster would not help override a veto. Unfortunately. But it would enable the Republicans in the majority in this Congress to pass a lot more legislation and force the veto over and over and over, which I think would at least make it crystal clear what’s going on with this president. There is at least a small chance that this would increase the pressure on Democrats, especially moderate ones, to vote to pass certain measures that Obama opposes but which are popular with Americans (such as Keystone), and perhaps to join in an override of a veto. Obama doesn’t care about being re-elected, but maybe the Democrats in Congress do.

Unfortunately, though, without a 2/3 majority, and with Obama in the White House, the Republicans are limited in their possible approaches. Obama is willing to defy both Congress AND the American people, and the Democratic Party is willing to go along.

I don’t think America has ever faced anything like this before, certainly not on this scale.

The 2014 election was incredibly important (as the 2012 one had been before it). It was nearly impossible for the GOP to achieve a 2/3 majority in 2014, even though the GOP did really, really well. But without 2/3, even “really really well” matters little.]

I hate parking pay stations

The New Neo Posted on by

How about you?

Yes, they do away with the need to always have gobs of change on hand. Big deal. What they offer in that particular convenience they more than take away in the many other annoyances they provide.

How fun to have to hike to one in a storm, and then hike back to the car in order to place the little piece of paper on the dashboard. Even worse is when—as so often happens in New England—there are huge mounds of snow to traverse in order to even get near them.

Sometimes you have to wait in line to use one. That’s great, too. And then try to figure out how to work it, because they’re all just a wee bit different. Some of my favorites manage to trick you into buying more time than you want, if you’re not wary.

Progress.

parkingpaystation

I seem to recall having been in a city or two where they have individual parking meters into which one can insert a credit card or use cash. Now, that seems like progress. Choice and convenience.

If you need some cheering up…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and who among us doesn’t?—read this.

It would be immensely satisfying poetic justice if the man the Democrats set out to destroy in Wisconsin ended up becoming the next president in part because his fight against their attacks helped gain him national attention and an impressive history of victory over the left.

Obama and Iran: the shape of agreements to come

The New Neo Posted on by

Scott Johnson at Powerline alerts readers to news on the current state of negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, pointing to this AP article as well as this piece by David Horovitz at The Times of Israel.

The AP article is awfully ho-hum about it all, considering how high the stakes are. For example, the headline is “Historic US-Iran nuclear deal could be taking shape,” which doesn’t say a thing about good, bad, or indifferent. The article goes on with the usual back-and-forth between those who laud the potential agreement and its critics, but expresses no real sense of alarm (except for Israel’s alarm). It’s got quotes like these in it to appeal to those predisposed to trust the administration:

Still, a comprehensive pact could ease 35 years of U.S-Iranian enmity ”” and seems within reach for the first time in more than a decade of negotiations.

“We made progress,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said as he bade farewell to members of the American delegation at the table with Iran. More discussions between Iran and the six nations engaging it were set for next Monday, a senior U.S. official said.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said the sides found “a better understanding” at the negotiating table.

The tone of the article seems to be that the pending deal represents a balance of competing interests between two sides presumed to be negotiating at least somewhat in good faith (a preposterous notion in terms of Iran’s rulers, and suspect as well for this administration):

Iran says it does not want nuclear arms and needs enrichment only for energy, medical and scientific purposes, but the U.S. fears Tehran could re-engineer the program to produce the fissile core of a nuclear weapon.

The U.S. initially sought restrictions lasting up to 20 years; Iran has pushed for less than a decade. The prospective deal appears to be somewhere in the middle.

It ends on a note of optimism about the talks, and sympathy for Iran:

Daryl Kimball of the Washington-based Arms Control Association said that with the IAEA’s additional monitoring, the deal taking shape leaves “more than enough time to detect and disrupt any effort to pursue nuclear weapons in the future.”

In exchange, Iran wants relief from sanctions crippling its economy and the U.S. is talking about phasing in such measures.

Now let’s take a look at what the Horovitz article has to say. He observes that, although the Obama administration has been engaged in denying Israeli rumors of what might be in the agreement and accusing Israel of “misrepresenting the specifics for narrow political ends,” the pending agreement that the AP article describes not only contains many of the things Israel has been complaining about, but is even worse than previously thought. According to Israel’s “most respected Middle East affairs analyst,” Ehud Ya’ari, the deal would be likely to have some catastrophic consequences:

In his TV commentary on Monday night, Ya’ari highlighted that the deal could further embolden Iran as it expands its influence throughout this region, and he noted that the isolation of Iran even by Israel’s key allies was already cracking, with the firmly pro-Israel foreign minister of Australia, Julie Bishop, announcing an imminent visit to Tehran ”” the first Australian foreign minister to make such a trip in a decade.

Ya’ari also noted that the International Atomic Energy Agency has made clear that it lacks the tools to effectively monitor the kind of nuclear program that Iran will be allowed to maintain under the emerging deal ”” incapable, that is, of ensuring that Iran does not fool the West as it has done in the past.

The devil of such deals is generally in the detail. But the devil, here, is in the principle as well ”” the principle that the P5+1 is about to legitimize Iran as a nuclear threshold state. From there, it will be capable of rapidly breaking out to the bomb, well aware that the international community lacks the will to stop it…

…[I]f the deal now taking shape is indeed finalized, the chances of the regime being ousted from within, or effectively confronted from without, will drastically recede. This deal, indeed, will help cement the ayatollahs in power, with dire consequences for Israel, relatively moderate Arab states, and the free world.

Elections have consequences, and Obama’s election in 2012 has already had some mighty big ones.

The only consolation I can find is one that was pointed out several times in the comment section at the Powerline article, which is that Obama will never bring this to Congress to be ratified because he knows it’s highly unlikely to get Congressional approval. Although the deal wouldn’t require ratification because it’s not necessarily a treaty, as a non-treaty it probably would not be binding on a future president.

I said that was the only consolation, and I’ll add that it’s very scant consolation. Even if America’s next president ultimately goes back on the Iranian deal, Obama has shown the entire world that America no longer can be counted on to have a reliable and consistent foreign policy, even in such an important and basic matter. That sets a terrible, terrible precedent, even if the US (and Israel, and the world) ultimately dodge this particular Iranian bullet.

Anyone who has paid attention to Obama over the years can’t help but notice that his m.o. is to act unilaterally, in “historic” and sweeping ways, against public opinion, in order to get something into place as quickly as possible and hope it will become impossible to undo. Another pattern is to delay the worst consequences of the deal for a little while, in order to lull people into a false sense of security until there’s no turning back.

The Iran deal may be following similar patterns. Obama is not asking for approval, the policy change is huge, it has a delayed fuse, and he wants it completed ASAP so it will have been in place as long as possible, and done as much damage as possible, before a successor president is inaugurated who might try to clean up the mess. The longer in place the more entrenched a thing becomes, as Obama is well aware.

In US News and World Report, Harold Evans is if anything even more pessimistic about the deal than Israel’s Ya’ari was:

Look at the record of betrayals of trust that have enabled Iran to operate 19,000 centrifuges and another 1,008 IR2M machines that can produce bomb-grade, fissionable material five times faster than the other centrifuges. Back in 2005, the West was saying to Iran “zero centrifuges.” Let me repeat: zero. Next we were talking of a compromise at 5,000 centrifuges. The negotiations from 2005 and 2013 can be summed up in one word: retreat. A series of capitulations have left Iran with “the right” to enrich uranium, so now it has thousands of kilograms of enriched uranium. That’s enough to produce a bomb, contrary to the Obama administration’s commitment to Congress that it would not allow Iran to have nuclear weapons…

Now the United States seems prepared to make a deal that not only would suspend and ultimately lift the sanctions, but would do so while leaving Iran as a threshold nuclear power. This is the classic definition of a Bad Deal. And worse: Iran is on track to put a nuclear warhead on intercontinental missiles with a range reaching beyond Europe. This puts the whole civilized world at risk of nuclear blackmail but more, it threatens Israel’s very existence.

The American people understand. In a poll conducted late last year, 81 percent said Iran cannot be trusted. So too do many members of Congress from both parties.

Evans reports that many Democrats in Congress “are furious with Obama for ignoring their concerns and for pursuing his obsession to reach a deal with the Iranians at almost any cost,” and that Dennis Ross (a Middle East negotiator for both the Clintona and the Obama administration) “was scathing in his condemnation of the president’s weaknesses and his ongoing concessions to the Iranians.”

Let that sink in; it tells you how extraordinarily awful Obama’s stance must be if Democrats are criticizing it that harshly. But how much of this do we hear in the MSM? And how willing are Democrats in Congress to do anything about any of it? Just watch how many of them support Obama by boycotting Netanyahu’s Congressional talk; I predict it will be a significant number. And if sanctions on Iran ever come to a vote, just watch how many Democrats will be willing to join with the GOP. I bet it’s not enough to override the inevitable presidential veto.

Obama has made this treasonous travesty of an agreement with Iran the international centerpiece of his glittering second term, just as amnesty has been the domestic centerpiece. The latter is all about consolidating the power of Obama and his party, and the former is all about puffing himself up with pride and selling out Israel, the US, and the world to an evil empire. Despite how cynical I have become in recent years, part of me is still stunned that even this wouldn’t be enough to cause enough Democrats to get fired up with apprehension and outrage and finally make an impeachment and conviction of Obama possible. And yet I am virtually certain that will never happen.

I guess the “consolidate power” part overrides all the other considerations.

The Republican dilemma: appealing to the base and the middle at the same time

The New Neo Posted on by

It occurs to me that some of the disagreement we had in this thread reflects the fact that there are actually two populations to which the Republican Party could appeal.

The first is the base, the “preaching to the choir” group. The conservative base needs to be motivated to get out and vote, and must be kept energetic and enthusiastic in order to do that.

The second is the people who aren’t already on board, and who need to be convinced or “swung.” They tend to be more moderate and are the so-called “Independents” and also the low information voters or “LIVs.”

The two groups have a tendency to respond to very different and possibly contradictory approaches. This accounts for quite a bit of the turmoil in the Republican Party. The base is angry (often very angry) at anything that smacks of appeals to the center, the LIVs, the moderates, the undecideds. In fact, members of the base tend to be turned off by such appeals—and rightly so, I think, when a candidate ventures so close to the center in enough areas that he/she becomes nearly indistinguishable from an actual centrist or even a Democrat. That’s where the insult “RINO”—Republican In Name Only—comes from.

But as I see it, the base can sometimes confuse appealing somewhat to the center with being from the center or of the center. You can do the first without being the second. However, although it’s not easy.

So, how could a candidate reconcile the two approaches?

Of course, if the first group (the base) is large enough and motivated enough (and especially if the party is in the majority among voters to begin with), wooing the middle is much less important and can even be more or less dispensed with. All you have to do is turn out the base in enough numbers.

I believe that was why Obama won in 2012; he was still successful at doing so. It’s not that he didn’t appeal somewhat to the middle, most especially in the 2008 election, where he did it by pretending to be far more moderate than he actually was. The left was going to vote for him anyway, particularly because of his race, so I doubt he had to worry much about losing them and could afford to present himself as much as possible as a centrist. (I think almost anyone should have seen through his charade, which wasn’t very good, but apparently they did not.) It also didn’t hurt that Democrats were in the majority anyway, and that Bush had gotten such a bad rep by 2008 that people were eager for a change of party.

Republican candidates face a different task. First of all, during the last decade the GOP has not had the majority of voters who affiliate with a party or lean towards a party. So the GOP base is not enough, unless turnout is absolutely extraordinary for them and low for Democrats. That can’t be counted on; even in 2012, when Republicans seemed very motivated to vote, it didn’t come to pass that turnout was extraordinary (although there was no “missing 2 million Republican voters; that is a persistent myth I’ve written about before).

In any election under such conditions, the GOP must do those two contradictory things I’ve already mentioned: highly motivate its somewhat-perfectionistic base, and appeal to the middle. Some people think the best way to do this is to have a candidate who actually is from the middle, but I think that’s a poor solution. Some might say Romney fit that description, but I supported Romney because (1) he was the nominee, and I would have supported any Republican against Obama; and (2) I was and still am of the opinion he was more conservative than conservatives thought, and I devoted a fair amount of verbiage to trying to prove that.

But I think a conservative candidate can appeal to the middle as well as the base, if he/she is smart about it. That’s what Reagan was able to do so well. Reagan, of course, was sui generis. But in a different way, I think Scott Walker has the potential to do it, and that’s one of the main reasons he’s been my favored 2016 candidate for a long time. He has a proven ability to win as a conservative in a mostly-blue state, which involves appealing to the middle and even liberals, and to do it again and again while sticking to his conservative principles. He doesn’t do it by being an attack dog, although he does it by being dogged in keeping on message and delivering results. He doesn’t pander to the middle even in his rhetoric, but he also performs as a conservative who delivers the goods. That’s why I like governors as Republican candidates: they have a record to point to, and if successful at performing effectively as conservatives, it can be a very strong argument, even to the middle.

Obama: taking the gloves off at last

The New Neo Posted on by

Back in November of 2010 I made a prediction that frightened me:

The American people are a generally genial and forgiving (not to say trusting) lot, predisposed to like [Obama], and by [2012] he may indeed have rehabilitated himself in the eyes of enough voters that he will win his bid for re-election and even increase the Democrats’ Congressional representation.

And then, and then””voila! Four more years! Four years in which he won’t have to answer to the electorate at all. He will be unleashed to do whatever it is he really wants. And does anyone think that would look moderate at all?

I was wrong about two things: 2012 didn’t increase the Democrats’ Congressional representation. And Obama didn’t fake as much moderation between 2010 and 2012 as I thought he might in order to win it all in 2012. The rest seems to have come to pass as predicted. Let me say, as I’ve said before, that I don’t think I showed any remarkable foresight in predicting this. Any close observor of Obama could and should have done the same.

Now, however, he’s been extremely immoderate in his actions, and he’s telling his supporters that he has plans to do a lot more of it before he’s through:

Speaking of his remaining time in office, [Obama] said: “Two years is a long time.”

He can say that again ”” and did, attaching a scary promise about his plans for the twilight of his ­tenure.

“Two years is also the time in which we’re going to be setting the stage for the next presidential election and the next 10 years of American policy,” he told wealthy ­donors in San Francisco. “So I intend to run through the tape and work really hard, and squeeze every last little bit of change.”

There you have it. Instead of cleaning up the messes he’s created, Obama is hell-bent on making more of them.

The word that comes to mind is “rogue.” As in, the president is going rogue. Like an elephant on a rampage, he’s breaking free of all constraints.

The author of the article, Michael Goodwin, points out that people such as Putin and our enemies around the world are aware that the next president, be he/she Republican or Democrat, will probably try to assert more American control in the world than Obama has. That means they have two more freebie years to grab what they can and do as much damage as possible. And two years—as Obama rightly said—is a long time.

[NOTE: Jonathan S. Tobin continues to warn of the constitutional crisis we face (and remember that Tobin voted for Obama in 2008), describing a new immigration-ruling horror perpetrated by a single liberal judge in DC:

If liberal federal judges and the president are determined to trash the rule of law in this manner, we are on the verge of a full-blown constitutional crisis. As much as there is reason to grant many illegals a path to legality if not citizenship, without first securing the border, such proposals ought to be off the table. Rather than contribute to a consensus that might create real immigration reform, both the president and liberal judges like Boasberg are creating a set of circumstances where it has become impossible.

Oh, and the words “at last” in the title of my post were meant to be ironic.]

Giuliani explains

The New Neo Posted on by

You may or not agree with this new move of Giuliani’s. But in his explanatory column published in the WSJ he seems to be making several of the same points I’ve been trying to make over the weekend in my posts about tactics:

My blunt language suggesting that the president doesn’t love America notwithstanding, I didn’t intend to question President Obama’s motives or the content of his heart. My intended focus really was the effect his words and his actions have on the morale of the country, and how that effect may damage his performance…

Obviously, I cannot read President Obama’s mind or heart, and to the extent that my words suggested otherwise, it was not my intention.

In terms of tactics, however—you may be surprised to hear that I actually don’t agree with Giuliani’s WSJ column in the tactical sense. That is, I don’t think that it was a good move for him to try to explain afterwards and issue a near- or quasi-apology. The potential gains are not worth it. The left has already done with his original statement what it was inevitably going to do with it, and a column such as Giuliani’s that attempts to perform damage control ex-post-facto translates mostly as weakness after the fact.

The big plus of his original statement was its boldness and strength. So I think he ought to have let it be now and just moved on.

And the Oscar goes to…

The New Neo Posted on by

…I don’t much care.

But as in previous years, I like watching the fashion. So that’s what I’m doing.

And while I’m watching the fashion, I’ll just observe that, when you wear one of those boob-revealing dresses, they tend to smash the merchandise into the pancake look, which is not the most attractive possible mode of presentation.

Truth-telling and hard-hitting politics

The New Neo Posted on by

In the comments section to yesterdays’ post on Giuliani’s remarks about Obama’s lack of love for America, some people seemed to think I was saying not to tell difficult or challenging truths.

I don’t know why people would read that post and come to that conclusion. But I get the impression that a lot of people are sick of candidates who are seemingly afraid to criticize Obama (or other Democrats) in a hard-hitting way. I’m actually pretty sick of it, too.

So let me clarify and simplify my point from yesterday: I want a candidate who’s not afraid of telling the truth about what Obama and the Democrats have done and are doing, and what their goals appear to be. What I am objecting to—and will continue to object to—is candidates who opine about the inner workings of a person’s heart in terms of whether that person “loves” America. It’s something no one can know, so it’s way too easy for the opposition to attack comments like that. And comments of the type Giuliani offered aren’t persuasive to anyone who doesn’t agree with them already, anyway.

In my opinion, there’s a much better way to say something similar. As I wrote yesterday:

And [whether Obama loves America is] a thing that is inherently unprovable and unknowable, anyway, because it’s a statement about what’s in someone’s heart. The most we can say is that Obama’s behaves as though he doesn’t love America.

Giuliani actually qualified his initial statement by saying that he believes Obama doesn’t love America. However, not only did the MSM ignore the belief part, but Giuliani complicated things by adding more categorically (as well as somewhat more irrelevantly), “He [Obama] doesn’t love me. And he doesn’t love you.”

I would much rather Giuliani had cited some act or statement of Obama’s that demonstrates his lack of love for America, and then asked, “Does that sound like a person who loves America?” And then went on to list another act of Obama’s, or quote from Obama, that demonstrates his lack of love for America, and to follow it up again with, “Does that sound like a person who loves America?” In other words, I’d like to see a similar use of rhetorical questions as used in Mark Antony’s funeral oration for Caesar, only with the opposite intent—in this case, not to raise Obama’s reputation but to lower it. Better in my opinion to ask questions than to do what Giuliani did, and just as hard-hitting if not more, on the same topic.

Of course, the media will do what it will do with Republicans—which is to criticize nearly everything they say. The trick is to be very strong in criticizing the opposition without giving the MSM any more ammunition than necessary for its inevitable attacks. This requires a certain cleverness and a lot of thought, but it’s really not all that hard to do and is a good skill for a potential president to have.

I agree, however, that it’s better that it was Giuliani who did what he did rather than a current candidate or officeholder. Giuliani is more tangential at this point but can serve as a sort of pot-stirrer to raise “interesting” questions like Obama’s attitude towards America, questions the media certainly isn’t about to go into on its own. I just think there are better ways to do it than the way he went about it.

I also think, as I said several times in the comments, that this incident will blow over soon. It will be then replaced by another, and then another. In fact, it’s already been replaced by the ridiculous MSM-manufactured Scott-Walker-doesn’t-know-if-Obama-is-a-Christian!!! flap. Walker did well to answer that he didn’t know, and then he added:

To me, this is a classic example of why people hate Washington and, increasingly, they dislike the press. The things they care about don’t even remotely come close to what you’re asking about…

I would defy you to come to Wisconsin. You could ask 100 people, and not one of them would say that this is a significant issue.

Hear, hear! That’s what I like to see—throw it right back at them. Of course, that doesn’t mean the press will report the attack on their questions; they certainly didn’t focus on that last part of Walker’s message, did they?

So I have a further suggestion for Walker and any other GOP candidate: don’t even give them the satisfaction of the “I don’t know” part of the answer. In the case of these gotcha questions (especially ones about Obama or any other candidate’s state of mind) keep it very short and sweet. How about the all-purpose response of something on the order of, “Why on earth would you want my opinion on that?,” and then disagree with whatever claptrap they offer as an answer and say the question was irrelevant. Or offer this even shorter response to the initial question, “Why not ask Obama?” Or “That would be between Obama and God, wouldn’t it?” or any number of other variations on the theme of meeting a stupid question with a smarter question.

Whoever the Republican candidate ends up being, I don’t want him/her to be a pushover. I know that Reagan is always a dangerous standard to try to emulate, because he was a master in this regard, but a reaction more like his would be the goal: polite and even humorous, but very hard-hitting.

So, does Obama love America?

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: More on this topic here.]

I don’t think he loves it in any conventional sense. You don’t want to “fundamentally transform” something you love.

Or do you? For example, a family can get together in an intervention to try to motivate a loved one to stop doing drugs. They’re looking for a fairly fundamental transformation to occur, and yet they still love the person.

In fact, they would say they’re doing this because they love the person. And that’s how I think Obama would answer when questioned about why, if he loves America so much, he wants to fundamentally transform it, and why he criticizes it so much. He’d say he does it because he loves it so much.

Now, I happen to think the evidence is overwhelming that he not only doesn’t love America but that he doesn’t even like it. It’s a feeling I have about a lot of liberals I know, too, those who can’t seem to conclude a simple conversation about a seemingly-innocuous and non-political topic without dragging in some observation about how awful America is. It’s like they have a nervous twitch or Tourette’s; every now and then they just have to say it.

But I also think that Rudy Giuliani and other politicians would do well to stay far away from this particular topic. It gives the opposition a golden opportunity to pile on with the “mean, hateful Republicans” meme. And for what? The only people who respond positively to such statements about Obama and America are the already-convinced.

And it’s a thing that is inherently unprovable and unknowable, anyway, because it’s a statement about what’s in someone’s heart. The most we can say is that Obama’s behaves as though he doesn’t love America. But again, why bother?

As soon as I heard the story, though, a memory rose from my youth. We’re at a dinner of my extended family. Is it Thanksgiving, a birthday, or what? I don’t know, but at the table sit my mother and father, my brother and me, my maternal grandmother, and the uncle who is my father’s brother.

The conversation veers, as it so often does when my uncle is around, to the political. My uncle is around quite a bit, because he lives very nearby, as does my grandmother. All the adults at the table are liberal Democrats except for my uncle, who is a Communist (although carefully not a member of the Party), a fact I’ve known for just about forever because he is quite free with his pro-Soviet commentary. It is one of the leitmotifs of family life—that, and the rising volume of my father’s voice as he argues with his brother in frustration.

To my uncle, nothing America does is right. But everything the USSR does is wonderful. When I was young I got an education in what the mind of a leftist fanatic looked like, and it was astounding how he could take any event that you would think might reflect poorly on the Soviets, and flip it around somehow to make it sound okay and even benevolent (at least, to him).

My father’s family had come from Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, and my uncle had been born there and had come as a tiny child. My father, the younger one, had been born in the United States. They grew up poor and struggling and were self-made men. Like Obama, they were raised among many people who were pro-Communist, but that was in the days before and immediately after the revolution. With my father, Communism never took. But it established deep deep roots in my uncle.

My mother was from a very different background. Her family had been in this country since early in the 1800’s. They were liberal Democrats, including her mother, who was the only grandparent I really knew. My grandmother was a patriot. She had plaques on the walls of her apartment thanking her for her service on behalf of soldiers during the war, and she would listen to my uncle—the brother of her son-in-law—with growing fury.

And that’s what I remember best—when my grandmother could take it no more and finally would say something to him. She was already around eighty years old and her voice shook, but not with age. It shook with frustration and barely-suppressed outrage, as she said forcibly but not loudly (the intensity of her emotion actually weakened her voice rather than strengthened it; that same thing happens to mine if I get angry enough): “America has been good to you. If you hate it here so much, why don’t you go back to Russia where you came from?”

With a little smile, he would answer, “I have to stay here where I’m needed, to help bring about changes to make America better.” If pressed on the question of whether he loved America (a question he never was asked), I imagine he would say that he did, although I don’t know. But that would be an awfully odd sort of love, wouldn’t it?

Obama—as Giuliani also pointed out—was influenced by Communists in his youth. True enough, and if they were not necessarily members of the Communist Party, I know full well that doesn’t mean much. I know the milieu to which Giuliani is referring, and a person being raised that way (I was not) doesn’t always mean that person swallows Communism whole. AFter all, my father didn’t. But it certainly can mean the person becomes a leftist (call it socialist, Communist, whatever you like), and I think that in Obama’s case, as I’ve said many times, the evidence is that he’s a man of the far left and has been for his entire life. He has learned to hide that in order to get elected, but he certainly didn’t hide it very well (although well enough, well enough).

There is a dilemma for those who would criticize Obama such as Giuliani. Giuliani is out of office, and probably never will hold office again, so he is free of the need to be all that careful in order to protect his political career. When he made the original statement about Obama’s lack of affection for this country, Giuliani was at a rather small (about 60 people) and seemingly private Republican dinner. But Giuliani should know that nothing of that sort can be considered to be private anymore, and that whatever he says will be reported on if the press or the left thinks it can harm the right. So whatever he says, it will be extrapolated by the left and the MSM to be a demonstration of the animus that dwells in the heart of all Republicans. I think it’s best to not go in that direction. Leave it to the talk show hosts.

On the other hand, if no politician ever goes in that direction, we maintain the fiction that Obama is just an ordinary bloke who loves America and wants whats best for it, rather than a leftist who wants America to lose power and status in the world. But I think the best way to point this out is to stick to the facts and not the feelings, and the facts are what Obama has done to show his leftism and dislike of America. And he’s done plenty.

Is a doughnut always a dessert?

The New Neo Posted on by

Ann Althouse highlights what is apparently a highly-debated question on the Web: “Is a doughnut a dessert?” The person Althouse quotes has answered this pressing (dare I say weighty?) question this way:

Zach’s position: a doughnut is always and inherently a dessert. My position: a doughnut eaten in the morning is breakfast; a doughnut eaten later in the day is a dessert

I teeter on the bring of being derailed from this issue by poignant memories of doughnuts past. But I will stay relentlessly on target and say: when eaten for breakfast, a doughnut is a dessert eaten for breakfast. Same for a pie of pie, or any other food that’s usually a dessert and is eaten as a meal.

A dessert eaten for breakfast.

I love dessert, although I’m always trying to stay away from it. Usually I succeed, but if it’s in the house it gets eaten. It doesn’t even usually stay around till morning and give me an opportunity to eat it for breakfast.

But I don’t gravitate towards eating sweets (the generic designation allows us to avoid the entire semantic issue) for breakfast, anyway. I’m not ready for them yet at that time of day.