Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

There is a lot of other news today but I’ve run out of time to write about it right now, so here’s a roundup:

A ceasefire in Ukraine—for the moment (see also this).

Chris Cuomo shows his ignorance of a very basic premise of the Declaration of Independence. I would wager his point of view has become very, very common.

Rep. Brooks of Alabama suggests the GOP eliminate the filibuster on spending bills, just as the Democrats eliminated it for judicial nominations. There is no question in my mind that the Democrats would do it in a heartbeat—in fact, will do it next time they come to power and it gets in their way. Performed now, the action would get the GOP out of a current bind, allowing them “to pass a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security while simultaneously revoking President Obama’s executive actions on immigration.” I predict they won’t do it, though.

They’re starting to be afraid of Tom Cotton

The New Neo Posted on by

Which means it’s time to up the attacks on him at the national level.

Here’s one way it will go: “Sarah Palin with a Harvard degree.”

Interesting. Unquestionably, one of the approaches to Scott Walker (who also frightens the left) is and will remain the fact that he has no college degree. Cotton most definitely has one, and from an Ivy League school of sterling reputation at that (as did that stupidhead George W. Bush). But Cotton’s Harvard degree will be paired with comparisons to Sarah Palin, with the insinuation that you can’t put Ivy League lipstick on a pig.

[NOTE: I wrote about Cotton here.]

I’m having cell phone transition angst

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I got a new cell phone, something I’d been meaning to do for months.

My old one had essentially died. The battery was losing power at an alarming clip, but that wasn’t even the biggest problem. The thing that forced my hand was that recently the little thingee into which you plug the charger wasn’t working any more. This meant that, unless I spent a ton of money to fix my old phone (not worth it; probably almost as much as a new phone would cost), the charge that phone had right now would be its very last.

So yesterday was the big day. I went into the store thinking I’d go from my Samsung Galaxy S3 to an iPhone6, but in the end I walked out with the Galaxy S5, for a number of reasons that seemed very reasonable in the store and probably are, at least theoretically. In addition, I had the weak hope that the transition would be easier because a Galaxy is a Galaxy is a Galaxy.

Right? Well, it might be right. But that doesn’t make any sort of change in technology easy for a techno-naif like me.

As the young guy in the store who waited on me said, in an effort to be reassuring: Don’t feel bad; you’re by no means the worst I’ve ever seen.

Well, I know that; I know some 100-year-old ladies, too. But I can’t hold a candle to your average 12-year-old—or even 21-year-old or 30-year-old, whose hands seem made to hold and manipulate a phone at the speed of light.

For me, the transition process yields headaches, literal and metaphoric. Samsung might call both the S3 and the S5 “Galaxy,” and they have strong resemblances to each other, but the road to “new, improved!” involves some pretty hefty changes.

I am now engaged in the process of assimilating those changes. The time spent (and wasted in fruitless searching) is extraordinary. Going back to the cell phone store to ask that nice young man for help is good in theory but not in practice. For starters, it’s a long drive. More importantly, I don’t yet know what I don’t know, and I need to know the right questions to ask before I can get the answers. So I will be watching some of those hour-long tutorials on YouTube and hoping they do the trick. Unfortunately, they tend to be geared to those who are already pretty sophisticated at this sort of thing—in other words, your average young person.

Meanwhile, patience is the word of the day—a trait of mine that’s gotten weaker over time.

Jews and politics

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s an old and un-PC saying coined by Jewish sociolographer and neocon Milton Himmelfarb:

Jews earn like Episcopalians, and vote like Puerto Ricans.

Commenter “John Dough” may or may not be aware of Himmelfarb’s barb, but he has a related question when he observes:

I continue to be amazed at the American Jewish community continued support for the liberal position. This Islamic sympathizing president is doing his best to foment another holocaust. Quoting from “Back to the Future” ”¦”¦ “Hello, is anybody home”?

Himmelfarb was speaking more of personal economics vs political affiliation; J. Dough was referring to a more existential dilemma. But the basic question is the same: why are Jews liberals?

The question is so puzzling, and the answer so complex, that another neocon—Norman Podhoretz—wrote an entire book on the subject a few years ago. It’s on my list of “must-reads,” but I’m sorry to say I haven’t gotten around to it (the list is long). The Amazon blurb mentions that it was the question Podhoretz was asked most often in his long career, and I can well believe it.

I said I have not read the book, but I’m pretty sure it’s well worth reading (Podhoretz usually is). From the descriptions at Amazon, it seems he’s saying that Jews historically supported liberalism because it favored the end of persecution, and that originally Democrats were big supporters of Israel. That ended quite some time ago, as did the pro-Israel stance of the left—or, as, Ruth Wisse put it in her review of his book, “Part of the answer comes in [Podhoretz’s] survey of the historical connection between the Jews and liberalism, the rest in his up-to-date analysis of how liberalism became a proxy for Judaism.”

That last phrase (“liberalism became a proxy for Judaism”) is, in my opinion, the key. My answer to John Dough and anyone who would ask the question he asked is that most (not all) of the Jews who support the left politically are Jews in the ethnic and perhaps cultural but not the deeply religious sense (I’ve already discussed the phenomenon of “Jews who are not Jews” here).

Religious Jews have very different politics. In fact, they tend to be Republicans:

Politically, Orthodox Jews are far more conservative than other Jews. For example, 57% of Orthodox Jews describe themselves as Republicans or say they lean toward the Republican Party, while 36% are Democrats or lean Democratic. Among Jews as a whole, the balance tilts strongly in the other direction: 70% of Jews overall are Democrats or lean toward the Democratic Party, while just 22% are Republican or lean Republican.

Orthodox Jews, however, are in the minority among American Jews. Some statistics here:

[A 2003 Harris] survey found that of the 4.3 million strongly connected Jews, 46% belong to a synagogue. Among those households who belong to a synagogue, 38% are members of Reform synagogues, 33% Conservative, 22% Orthodox, 2% Reconstructionist, and 5% other types…

The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey found that around 3.4 million American Jews call themselves religious out of a general Jewish population of about 5.4 million [some claim the Jewish population in the US is actually a million more than that, depending on how you define it]. The number of Jews who identify themselves as only culturally Jewish has risen from 20% in 1990 to 37% in 2008, according to the study.

If you add Reform Jews to non-religious Jews, you get over 54% (by my admittedly speedy calculations). That says a lot right there. Particularly for the non-religious Jews (37% of the total), and also for many Reform Jews (38% of the observant 46%, or 17%), identification with Israel is low. In fact, many Jews have absorbed the prevailing leftist idea that after the Six-Day War Israel made some sort of change that meant it was no longer on the side of good but had turned into something bad (we won’t get into the specifics here, but that was a turning point where the left began to see Israel as a colonizer and exploiter rather than a nice noble socialist nation).

You might wonder why these Jews don’t understand that in an atmosphere of growing anti-Semitism they, too, would be at risk. The capacity of the human being for denial is large, and secular Jews in particular have a tendency to think this couldn’t or wouldn’t happen to them. They feel quite secure in their ability to demonize Israel because they do not identify strongly with it or its fate.* In the words of Mitchell Bard, “Jews have devoted themselves to politics with almost religious fervor.” Some of that fervor is the fervor that used to be given to religion itself.

[* NOTE: In another survey, even many so-called “religious” Jews are mostly secular:

…62% [of Jews surveyed] say being Jewish is mainly a matter of ancestry and culture, while just 15% say it is mainly a matter of religion. Even among Jews by religion, more than half (55%) say being Jewish is mainly a matter of ancestry and culture…

More details here

”¢ 61 percent of American Jews agree that “there a way for Israel and an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully. Compare this to 50 percent of the American public.

Ӣ The biggest supporters of a two-state solution are secular Jews (72 percent), Conservative Jews (62 percent) and Reform Jews (58 percent).

”¢ The biggest skeptics are Orthodox Jews (30 percent) and white Evangelical Christian (42 percent)…

”¢ 60 percent of Jews say they approve of Obama’s policy toward Israel. This is highest among Jews over 65 (at 66 percent) and Reform Jews (65 percent). Conservative Jews are also supportive (60 percent), with secular Jews a touch less so (54 percent).

”¢ Support is lowest among Christian groups; 38 percent of American Christians support Obama’s Israel policy, including just 26 percent of white Evangelical Christians.

”¢ The most critical Jewish group is Orthodox Jews, 36 percent of whom approve of Obama’s approach to Israel…

”¢ Pew came up with nine different traits commonly associated with Jewish identity and asked Jewish respondents to answer whether each is “essential to being Jewish.” Among those nine traits, “caring about Israel” was the fifth most likely to be selected. 43 percent called this essential.

”¢ Traits more likely to be considered “essential to being Jewish” than caring about Israel, from most to least popular: Remembering the Holocaust, leading an ethical and moral life, working for justice/equality, being intellectually curious.

Ӣ Among religious Jews, 49 percent called caring about Israel an essential Jewish trait. It still ranks fifth for this group.

”¢ Among secular Jews, only 23 percent called caring about Israel an essential Jewish trait. It ranks sixth, behind “having a good sense of humor.”

It’s very telling, I think.

I would add that most American Jews live in the strongly liberal enclaves of New York City and Los Angleles. These cities are liberal in part because they have so many Jews, of course, but there are plenty of other US cities without such huge Jewish populations that are just as strongly liberal. It is highly possible that the Jews of NY and LA are so strongly liberal for many of the same reasons that the non-Jewish populations in large urban coastal centers are so strongly liberal.]

It’s what Obama didn’t say

The New Neo Posted on by

We’re very used to Obama denying that the Muslim religion has any connection with terrorism. But in the president’s interview with Matt Yglesias of Vox he also declined to state the obvious fact that in the Paris grocery attack the victims were selected because they were Jewish.

Obama’s verbal gymnastics around this were so awkward that they caused widespread comment as well as puzzlement and criticism. Here’s what he said:

It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.

In the conflagration that has ensued, instead of merely saying “of course the president knows they were targeted because they were Jews,” spokespeople Josh Earnest and Jen Psaki first spent some agonizing minutes (there are videos) trying to claim the grocery shooting really was “random,” and then ultimately tweeting that of course the shooting was anti-Semitic and that the administration has always said that.

And they are correct that the State Department has been saying that for quite some time. But not Obama, curiously enough. In fact, the only time Obama referred to anti-Semitism as a motive in the attack (at least that I could locate, and I tried pretty hard) was in this short press release that was written rather than spoken, and sent to the UN on the occasion of a conference specifically on the topic of anti-Semitism. It mentions the attack as an example.

The word in the Yglesias interview that seems to have garnered all the fuss is “random,” and Earnest and Psaki spent a good deal of their efforts on explaining how the victims were randomly chosen among the customers in the grocery store (some have referred to it as a “deli,” as the president did, but I’m going with “grocery store” because that’s what it seems to have actually been). That seems an odd point—that they weren’t called out by name and assassinated—but even their randomness is in question.

Reports are that at least two of the victims were chosen by the terrorist Coulibaly from among the hostages because those two had performed particularly heroic actions:

Yohan Cohen, aged 22, and Yoav Hattab, aged 21, were hailed as heroes by their fellow hostages, as they were murdered by Coulibaly while seeking to overcome him and free the other hostages in the store. Coulibaly reportedly abandoned one of his weapons on a counter-top in the store as he entered, after it had jammed. After Coulibaly proceeded to threaten a customer with a small child at the beginning of the attack, Cohen, an employee, attempted to grab the abandoned weapon with the help of Hattab, and take down Coulibaly. When the malfunctioning gun jammed on Cohen at that moment, Coulibaly shot Cohen in the head, and then proceeded to shoot Hattab.

But I think it’s wrong to nitpick over the word “random”—although the attack, in a kosher grocery on Friday, right before the Sabbath when most observant Jews would be shopping in preparation for the holiday, and in which the killer specifically stated he targeted Jews, was clearly not random. What is more important is what Obama didn’t say. After all, how hard is it to use the words “kosher” or “Jewish” or “anti-Semitism”to describe the attack? These things are clear and obvious; you have to go out of your way to create weird constructions in order to not use the words.

So it wasn’t the word “random” that was such a problem, although it appeared to be at first glance. It was the absence of the word “Jew” or something of the sort. To illustrate my point, do a thought experiment: if Obama had said “randomly shoot a bunch of Jews in a deli in Paris,” would there have been a similar hue and cry? I doubt it, because we would have known just what he meant. It was the use of the word “random” combined with the absence of any words like kosher or Jewish, and the strange phrase “bunch of folks.” The sidestepping is extreme enough—and consistent enough (I have been unable to locate a single spoken statement in which he mentions Jews or Jewishness or anti-Semitism in connection with the attack)—as to seem an intentional avoidance on Obama’s part.

So–why can’t Obama say the obvious?

Here are the possibilities: (1) Obama doesn’t want to stir up any sympathy for Jews, either for geopolitical reasons involving his antipathy for Israel, or because he really is anti-Semitic (2) The more he identifies Jews as the intended victims, the more people will link the terrorists with religious motivations involving Islam, which he wants to discourage (3) He is so in the habit of using obfuscatory speech about religion for Islamic terrorists that phrases like “a bunch of folks,” and the leaving out of the word “kosher,” are nearly-reflexive and automatic edits of religious content (he lacks a similar reluctance when speaking of Christianity and the Crusades, of course).

At the time of the kosher supermarket killings, Jonathan S. Tobin wrote in Commentary:

Not mentioning anti-Semitism when Islamist killers specifically seek out Jews to slaughter ”” as if anyone could possibly believe a terrorist assault on a kosher market in Paris could be mere happenstance ”” is more than insensitive. It is a sign that this administration does not take the many attacks on French and European Jews seriously. It is also a message to the Muslim world that the United States does not take the issue of anti-Semitic violence seriously. To his credit, French President Francois Hollande did specifically condemn the attack as an act of anti-Semitism, a statement President Obama should have echoed.

Obama’s Yglesias interview signals that his attitude and message has not changed in the month since Tobin wrote those words. I submit that it is unlikely to change.

On the death of Kayla Mueller and ISIS propaganda

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t for a moment think that Jordanian air strikes caused the death of Kayla Mueller, as ISIS has claimed. But even if such air strikes had been the cause, the full responsibility for her death would still lie with ISIS, the group that kidnapped her and placed her in that position.

Let’s assume, though, that ISIS murdered her, and probably quite some time ago. This would be consistent with their behavior so far towards other American hostages. What is inconsistent, however, is their not using a film of the process for propaganda purposes.

So—understanding that this is all highly speculative—I’ve wondered why they would not have done the same with Mueller’s death as they have with the murders of her hostage predecessors. In other words, why no video? Here are some possibilities:

(1) It’s a different branch of ISIS with a different m.o..

(2) ISIS is beginning to think these videos are backfiring. Either they’re not helping with recruitment, or there is new fear that they will arouse a response like the Jordanian one, which took them by surprise and has inflicted harm.

(3) ISIS has no reluctance to enslave, rape, murder, or torture women. But I don’t recall them releasing any propaganda videos of the beheading or burning of a woman so far. Unless I’m forgetting something, all the hostage murder videos up to this point have been of men. It may be that ISIS has decided recently that there would be a backlash against a similar Mueller video because she was a woman, and that therefore the best propaganda use of her death would be to try to blame it on the Jordanians.

When the Nazis committed horrendous and sadistic crimes against innocents, they usually considered it best to perform these acts in relative secret because they felt it could inflame their own population against them. Of course, some of the knowledge of concentration and death camps seeped out, but there was an effort to hide them from the German people as much as possible rather than to flaunt them, and although the Nazis even did some filming of these things it was not for public dissemination or propaganda. It is not a sign of human progress that the sadists of ISIS now consider it a good idea to broadcast the murders they commit, the more torturous the better, in order to attract those of like mind.

[NOTE: This article claims that ISIS “sentenced” Mueller to death last year.]

Smiley face in space

The New Neo Posted on by

Wow. Just wow:

smiley

What is causing the illusion? Something as marvelous as the face itself:

In this case, the cosmic “face” is actually caused by a neat galactic phenomenon as well: gravitational lensing. Large galaxy clusters sometimes produce such a strong gravitational pull that they warp the time and space around them. This can be a great thing for scientists on Earth, because that warping can act as a natural “lens” and magnify faraway objects behind the clusters, making them more visible to space telescopes. But the magnification also warps the objects.

The ring that makes up the “face” is called an Einstein Ring, and it’s produced by a very particular view of one such warped galactic cluster. Another line of warping forms a lopsided smile.

Inside the ring, two bright galaxies are perfectly positioned as eyes, completing the illusion.

Kayla Mueller’s death announced

The New Neo Posted on by

ISIS has been holding American aid worker Kayla Mueller hostage, but her death has just been confirmed by President Obama.

It is unclear how many details the government knows. But as yet the public doesn’t know how she died, when she died, or what proof of her death was provided.

Although ISIS claims that Jordanian air raids were responsible, that is both unlikely and irrelevant, the latter because ISIS is responsible no matter what the mode and agency of her actual death.

Kayla Mueller was 26 years old, a well-traveled activist and idealist who had worked for many causes (AIDS, domestic abuse) and who was motivated by the plight of the Syrian people to work there, too. She had been kidnapped in Syria while “working along the Turkish-Syrian border with a group from Doctors Without Borders”:

On the morning that she was supposed to catch a bus in Aleppo for the return to Turkey she became one of “the disappeared.” And for all these months, from the summer of 2013 to last week, her parents along with a few family friends and the United States government wondered, worried, and worked at gaining her release; that, every hour of every day.

That’s a very long time and a lot of suffering. My heart goes out to them for what they have endured and are still enduring.

Not only is the mode of Mueller’s death unclear as yet (although the government may have gotten some information on that), but the time of it is unknown as well. It may even have occurred a while ago and ISIS was just waiting for a propitious moment to capitalize on her death with some propaganda, and saw its opportunity in the Jordan raids. If so, I doubt very much they will succeed in convincing anyone that Jordan is to blame.

RIP, Kayla Mueller.

[ADDENDUM: Mueller’s family has released a touching letter she wrote to them from captivity.

The full text is even more profoundly touching. This was an extraordinary young woman.]

Axelrod admits Obama lied, nation yawns

The New Neo Posted on by

David Axelrod has made an admission in his new book:

Barack Obama misled Americans for his own political benefit when he claimed in the 2008 election to oppose same sex marriage for religious reasons, his former political strategist David Axelrod writes in a new book, Believer: My Forty Years in Politics.

“I’m just not very good at bullshitting,” Obama told Axelrod, after an event where he stated his opposition to same-sex marriage, according to the book.

Axelrod writes that he knew Obama was in favor of same-sex marriages during the first presidential campaign, even as Obama publicly said he only supported civil unions, not full marriages. Axelrod also admits to counseling Obama to conceal that position for political reasons. “Opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church, and as he ran for higher office, he grudgingly accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me, and modified his position to support civil unions rather than marriage, which he would term a ”˜sacred union,’ ” Axelrod writes.

So, let’s recap. Axelrod admits that (a) Obama lied (b) mainly to his religious black supporters (c) about not only his opposition to gay marriage, but about his religious beliefs (d) in order to win election. And then he lied about his change of heart, which was no change at all but a strategic move. And Axelrod admits this in a book called, ironically Believer (I haven’t read the book, but from the title it appears the “believer” is Axelrod as a political animal).

I contend that this changes nothing, and that the lack of change is a mark of the deep cynicism of the American public. For the most part Obama’s supporters will applaud (and many are already doing so, if the comments on this blog are any example). Good on him, if it helped him get elected! is a common reaction, as well as approval that his heart was always in the right place. His critics care—especially because he lied about his religious beliefs, a matter of principle—but this is only just one more offense of Obama’s, and not a surprising one at that.

Many of Obama’s critics either already supported gay marriage in 2008, or have come to support it since 2008, or have come to accept that gay marriage is here to stay whether they support it or not (or will be here to stay when SCOTUS takes it up). Gay marriage, pro or con, is not the issue here. Lying about a material fact, and especially about religious beliefs, in order to deceive the American public—that is the issue.

Over the years Americans have become cynical about lying presidents. Some date that cynicism—or at least a great leap forward for that cynicism—to the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal and the fact that Clinton survived it. The left, of course, says “Bush lied” about WMDs, but the right points out that Bush relied on intelligence reports around the world that were mistaken, and that is different than a lie, and that a lie would have been wrong.

The case of Obama and gay marriage is different in several ways. There is no question this was a lie, a falsehood told for political gain about a matter of principle, and the people Obama intended to fool were among his most fervent supporters—black voters. And yet I predict it will make hardly a ripple now.

Axelrod quotes Obama as having told Axelrod “I’m just not very good at bullshitting.” Perhaps Obama didn’t say it, and perhaps it’s just Axelrod’s way of presenting him now as having been sincere in the middle of his lying—as a reluctant, poor liar and therefore really a truth-teller in his heart, with a noble cause. Or perhaps Obama really did say it—but if so he was lying (or mistaken, or too modest) about that because he’s actually an excellent bullshitter.

But he was correct about one thing: he was not such a good bullshitter about that particular topic. I’m not sure how many people Obama’s original lie really convinced at the time he first told it. My guess is that it was enough people to make the lie worth his while to tell.

It occurs to me, watching this video of Obama stating his religious opposition to gay marriage in 2008 at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, that another group of people Obama may have fooled at the time (besides the black churchgoers Axelrod cited) were a fair number of white evangelicals who then went on to vote for him.

You be the judge of how good a bullshitter he was on this issue:

Obama admitted long ago that for many people he acted as a blank screen on which they projected their own views. But the screen isn’t always so blank. He has often carefully projected on that screen whatever he thinks might be a pragmatic image of himself at the time he says it.

Most politicians do that to a certain extent, but Obama does it to a greater degree, and he has become much more open about the fact that he lies, because he realizes that most of America just doesn’t seem to care. This seems relatively new, and bodes ill for the future of the country, because the less we demand of our politicians the less we will get.

[NOTE: I haven’t seen any reactions from the black religious community yet, but it’s possible they might be quite displeased at this news. It’s one thing to change your mind on something; it’s another to lie to religious people about your religious beliefs.]

Climate change data “fiddling”?

The New Neo Posted on by

Christopher Booker wrote a piece in the Telegraph that claims that climate scientists have fiddled with temperature data, and calls it “the biggest science scandal ever.”

Here’s a quote:

Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.

This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world ”“ one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.

Booker goes on to describe multiple instances of similar practices, and adds that “this wholesale manipulation of the official temperature record ”“ for reasons GHCN and Giss have never plausibly explained ”“ has become the real elephant in the room of the greatest and most costly scare the world has known.”

Blogger Ace of Spades writes, “I have some reservations, because it looks like so much something that it feels like this almost can’t be right.”

I’m with Ace on the reservations. This argument has been going on in one way or another for quite some time, and although Booker claims that the explanations offered by the scientists and their defenders aren’t “plausible” to him, they certainly have many explanations for what they do (here’s a sample).

The gist of the back-and-forth, as best I can tell, is that the scientists’ explanations offer the sort of justification that makes me think “garbage in, garbage out.” In other words, there’s so much trouble getting accurate measurements, and so much need to adjust them, that they end up being less than persuasive.

That’s if you accept the explanations at face value. But there have been other, more pointed, critiques (see this and this, for example). I have no way to evaluate the strength of the scientific arguments either pro or con, but I invite the scientists among you to wade in.

Let the vetoes begin!

The New Neo Posted on by

Obama is preparing to veto the Keystone pipeline bill, issuing the first of what promises to be a blizzard of vetoes of legislation due to be passed by the current Congress.

Never mind that the Keystone bill was bipartisan, passed in the Senate 62-36 (nine Democrats joined) and previously in the House 266-153 (28 Democrats joined; although there will have to be another vote in the House within the next few days to align the two bills, it is expected to go similarly).

I love the way the article puts it:

Still, if Obama vetoes too many bills, especially ones with Democratic support, Republicans could have success portraying him as partisan and unwilling to negotiate.

“One veto doesn’t make him obstructionist,” said James Thurber, a professor of government at American University. “Now maybe after 3, 4, 5 vetoes, then they could start painting him that way.”

Portraying him. Painting him. Not, of course, that he is that way.

Here’s a statistic: since the beginning of this Congress in January, Obama has issued eight veto threats. That’s “the most ever for the start of a new Congress.”

Obama thinks this projects strength, and to his supporters it most definitely does. When the Republicans—even if in the majority in one house of Congress, and even with Democratic support—tried to block something Obama was attempting, that was unreasonable and stubborn obstructionism. When Obama blocks what a Republican majority Congress has done, even when those Republicans have a significant amount of support from moderate Democrats, it’s a show of strength and resolve.

At the moment, Republicans don’t appear to have the votes to override Obama’s veto of Keystone, although it’s not completely outside the realm of possibility that they might obtain them. But it’s not easy to get to a two-thirds majority, and if a president is bound and determined to veto a bill it often dies.

Historically, most presidents have saved their vetoes for the issues that matter most to them, because they have been afraid to challenge what appears to be the will of the majority of the people too many times. But Obama has no such hesitations. The last time he cared about the will of the people was on November 6, 2012.

[ADDENDUM: I noticed a number of people in the comments section pointing out that many presidents have used the veto a great deal. I responded in the comments, but I thought I’d highlight my response here, too.

First of all, note the actual quote, “most presidents have saved their vetoes for the issues that matter most to them, because they have been afraid to challenge what appears to be the will of the majority of the people too many times.” That sentence doesn’t reflect on sheer number totals of vetoes.

By saying “most presidents save their vetoes for the issues that matter most to them,” I didn’t mean to imply that some presidents haven’t vetoed a great deal of legislation. Often those vetoes have been pocket vetoes, and some have been vetoes of legislation on fairly small matters, but it is certainly not the case that previous presidents have all been reluctant to use their veto power, and even to sometimes use it on larger issues. It’s the second half of the sentence, about challenging the will of the people, that is the point and connects up to the first half. Never has a president come out of the box and immediately threatened a new Congress with this many vetoes on significant legislation that the public favors, and in many cases strongly favors. That is what is happening here. Keystone, for example, has bipartisan support, and has been consistently popular with voters (see this).

Another point, although a tangential one, in terms of sheer numbers of vetoes: the longer a president is in office with a Congress controlled by the opposite party, the more vetoes you would expect him/her to use. President Obama has issued (as I quoted) “the most ever for the start of a new Congress.” This Congress has been in session only a little more than a month, and this is the first Republican-controlled Congress Obama has faced, one with the numbers to pass bills he doesn’t like (although he had a Republican House since 2010, the Democratic Senate was able to block almost everything the Republican House tried to do).

I doubt that, even given this, Obama will end up with a large total number of vetoes. For one thing, he doesn’t have that much time. But I predict that his vetoes will be of legislation that is more significant and more popular than the bills his predecessors in office vetoed.

In addition, there is no question that Obama has the power, and the right, to veto every single piece of legislation handed to him, should he desire to do so. Every president has that same right. That doesn’t make it a good idea, although it may seem that way to those who support him.]