Approval: it always astounds me…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that Obama’s approval ratings remain so high:

approve1

Among Democrats, a few have turned on him, but most still approve. The big change since 2009 is that many have gone from strong to mild disapproval. BFD, as Joe Biden would say:

approve2

Republicans have always disapproved, and now they disapprove more strongly. No surprise there:

approve3

But I beg of you, please tell me who—WHO?—are these “Republicans” who still strongly approve (3%) or moderately approve (6%). Are they jokers pulling Gallup’s metaphorical leg?

[ADDENDUM: Another poll of interest.]

Obama’s tan suit

The New Neo Posted on by

First let me make myself perfectly clear: I don’t care one way or the other about what Obama’s tan suit signified, the one that has been causing such a ruckus. On the scale of things I have to criticize Obama for, it doesn’t even register.

But let me say, in defense of tan suits everywhere, that I like them. Tan suits conjure up a very specific memory for me, that of Manhattan in summertime.

Those who don’t live in New York or visit there may not know how sweltering it can be in the summer. Not as bad as DC, or cities south, but not far behind them. Humid and sultry, with skies that more often than not give off a colorless glare rather than a nice clear blue, and sidewalks on which the proverbial egg could be nicely cooked.

When I was a teenager in New York, I used to very much admire the sartorial splendor of the men on the street in summer, who in those days used to wear a great many suits. They made especially good watching the summer I worked for a midtown life insurance company. They looked good in their tan ones, and they looked good in their seersucker ones, and they just looked good.

I haven’t been there in the summer in a while, so I have no idea whether it has continued. But Obama is certainly dressed in that mode here:

tansuit1

Obama is a man with darkish skin. I am a woman with darkish skin. My experience dressing myself and looking in the mirror all these years has informed me that people like Obama and me have to be very very careful when we wear tan clothing, especially if the color is anywhere near the face. We can look washed out and sallow.

We have to be careful not to chose a tan shade that goes towards the yellow of the spectrum; best to keep it more taupe, which Obama has done here. That said, I find it best to generally avoid wearing tan clothes altogether, because they never are really flattering on me.

Those who fight for ISIS are not Americans

The New Neo Posted on by

And we shouldn’t call them that.

I had started a draft for a post on this very subject, but Michael Walsh has covered the ground so well that there’s no need for me to do a full court press on it.

The point is quite simple and really common sense: “Americans” who leave this country to fight for ISIS, or any other country or entity or group who is our enemy, are no longer Americans (if they ever were in the first place) and should have their citizenship revoked.

And the press should stop referring to them as “Americans,” too. I know; fat chance.

And this isn’t just true of Somalian-Americans or whatever hyphenated-Americans might be guilty of this behavior. It’s true of people like John Walker Lindh, one of the first “American” jihadis. Remember him?

I came out for a proposal like this over four years ago, when Joe Lieberman (remember him?) backed it. My support has only become stronger in the intervening years.

I haven’t gotten around to writing about the Rotherham scandal (so much happening in the world that it’s hard to cover it all without a staff, and I don’t have a staff). But Walsh has this to say:

This comes in the wake of the burgeoning Rotherham scandal, in which some strapping “Yorkshiremen” turned an entire “British” town into a white-slavery ring. (“An independent report has found that at least 1,400 children were sexually exploited in Rotherham by gangs of men who were predominantly of Pakistani origin between 1997 and 2013. Report author Professor Alexis Jay said that girls as young as 11 were raped by “large numbers of male perpetrators.”)

But to describe things as what they actually are would be to let the cat out of the multi-culti bag.

[NOTE: In Walsh’s article I also found a link to, and a quote from, a book called Rules For Radical Conservatives. Not having read it, I have no idea whether it’s wonderful or awful or somewhere in between. But it certainly sounds potentially interesting. Commenter “Eric”? Are you there?]

[NOTE II: This photo of ISIS at work appears as part of Walsh’s article:
ISIS

Very reminiscent of the Nazis, is it not?]

[NOTE III: Also see this.]

[ADDENDUM: If you’re curious on the details of how citizenship could be revoked, and under what legal authority, there is already a controlling statute. See this. It could be slightly expanded to explicitly include joining or fighting for groups such as ISIS, or it might even apply as already written.]

The Democrats’ plan; which backlash is more likely?

The New Neo Posted on by

The Democrats have a plan, according to Marc Ambinder:

Go big on immigration [through Obama’s executive action]. Wait for the GOP counter-reaction. Quietly pray for the government to get shut down. Use it like a cattle prod to wake voters up just before the midterms.

At the same time we hear that Democrats in Congress are spooked by Obama’s threat of amnesty through his pen and phone, because they feel it threatens their election prospects.

The two sound contradictory, but not necessarily. The fear of the Democrats that it would hurt their chances doesn’t take into account a possible Republican reaction to shut down the government. Those who believe that would happen are more sanguine, because they remember that such an action was largely unpopular the last time Republicans tried it.

So, how Democrats feel about it depends on what they think Republicans will do in return. Will they try to shut things down, or won’t they?

And remember all that “Republicans want to impeach Obama” talk just a little while back? It was predicated on the same idea: that Republicans might be provoked into impeaching Obama before the midterms, with no real chance of conviction, a series of acts which the American people would not favor. Or, next best thing, the public could be talked into thinking the Republicans want to do it, and that would engender a voter backlash against them, too.

A more callous, manipulative, hypocritical set of actions on the part of Democrats could hardly be imagined (actually, it can, but I’m using hyperbole). But even if they do manage to provoke another shutdown attempt, I’m not sure it would work the same way it did last time.

The reason is that this issue is huge, and Americans are energized about it more than about most other issues. They do not want Obama to do this. This is not only because they do not want amnesty given to these people in the current climate of border overrun and terrorist resurgence, but also that quite a few people (even, perhaps, some low information voters) are aware that the issue of amnesty for illegals has been debated for decades in Congress, and they might get a trifle riled up at Obama’s trying to do this all by his lonesome.

Obama and the Democrats would be bargaining that people want the issue resolved, and are fed up with Congress not “fixing” it in all this time, and therefore wouldn’t care about Obama’s power-grab because he would finally be solving the problem. But that completely ignores the fact that he would be “solving” it in the opposite direction from what the majority of people would like (see this and this).

It’s as though you’ve brought an ill relative to the emergency room. The staff there is making you wait much too long, and you’re getting angry. You want to see your relative get some treatment. Then a doctor comes along and says, “I’ll fix it!”, grabs your relative by the arm, twists it, and then takes out a gun and shoots him dead. It’s an action and a solution, all right, but not the one you were looking for.

The press and Israel

The New Neo Posted on by

I noticed that commenter “Severely Ltd.” recommended this article about press coverage of Israel.

It’s long, and I’ve only had a chance to skim it. But I thought I’d highlight it here for discussion, because it looks good.

I’ve seen articles very much like it over the years, but this one seems particularly comprehensive. And it has a special punch because it’s written by a former AP reporter and present liberal. I also noticed the following in the comments section to the article, of interest because we all know how hard it is to change a mind:

The greatest measure of any piece of critical writing is its ability to actually alter someone’s thinking, and this you have accomplished with me. I never really thought the antisemitism charges related to coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had any basis in fact, but I begin to see your point, that the coverage of Israel and its actions are so disproportionate to covering the other horrors going on in the region.

The article didn’t appear in the MSM. It was published in something called Tablet: A New Read on Jewish Life. Would that it could reach a larger audience. Obviously, most of its readers are going to be Jews, religious or secular. The religious ones tend to already know all this, and are more likely than any other Jewish demographic to vote Republican, especially if they are Orthodox Jews. But since a lot of Jews (including religious Conservative and Reform Jews) seem to be liberals who swallow the MSM whole and support the Democratic (or even more leftist) Party, the article could do some good.

The political breakdown for Jews, according to a Pew poll taken in 2013, is as follows:
Jewspolitics

Obama the aloof

The New Neo Posted on by

Obama’s supporters seem surprised and perplexed at his growing isolation, even from them.

Or maybe, especially from them:

Nearly six years into his term, with his popularity at the lowest of his presidency, Mr. Obama appears remarkably distant from his own party on Capitol Hill, with his long neglect of would-be allies catching up to him.

In interviews, nearly two dozen Democratic lawmakers and senior congressional aides suggested that Mr. Obama’s approach has left him with few loyalists to effectively manage the issues erupting abroad and at home and could imperil his efforts to leave a legacy in his final stretch in office.

But what did they expect? Even before Obama’s first term, it was known that he had a famously cool style, few friends, and a history of being emotionally removed. His allies may not have done their homework on the character of the man they were electing, but his personality was no secret whatsoever.

One of the few people who knew him during his Harvard Law Review president days and was willing to speak out about it in 2008, Carol Platt Liebau, said [emphasis mine]:

I knew him reasonably well ”” as well as most people knew him, if not better ”” because quite in contrast to this image that Barack tries to project, as someone who is warm and all-embracing and all that kind of stuff,” Liebau said…

“Quite in contrast to this all-embracing kind of ”˜earth father’ image ”” this sort of messianic blaze of glory with which he’s deemed to envelope our television screens ”” he was a pretty cold fish,” she said.

“He was not a warm person. He was not the type of person that gave you a warm and fuzzy [feeling]. And you got the sense that he even wasn’t even terribly fixated or focused on what he was doing.”

Liebau also describe Obama as a guy “whose eyes were always looking over your shoulder to see if anyone more important is in the room” and that he was always looking for “bigger and better things.”

There was also this lengthy article that appeared in the NY Times in July of 2008. It featured Richard Epstein, who was a colleague at the University of Chicago Law School during Obama’s teaching days there.

Even the headline tells the tale: “Teaching Law, Testing Ideas, Obama Stood Slightly Apart.” Everything Epstein says about Obama dovetails nicely with what Liebau said, and what we know about Obama today. The operative word is “removed.”

It’s not that lots of people other than Liebau and Epstein were talking about what a warm and friendly man Obama was, either. They were not. They were talking about how brilliant he was, how “presidential” he seemed.

I will never understand those who perceived Obama as “likeable,” as anything other than a cold guy. And I don’t think his high likeability scores were merely a function of people giving him the benefit of the doubt because of his race; I know plenty of people who really, really liked him. I am better able to understand those who didn’t know he was a leftist (despite all the “tells”), or who thought him so very brilliant (despite his failure to demonstrate anything special in that regard), than those who thought him warm or friendly or engaged with people in the way we’ve grown used to in presidents such as LBJ and Clinton and George W. Bush. Obama’s demeanor has always seemed chilly, offputting, and angry to me, with a thin veneer of affability covering it up.

There was also no evidence whatsoever, pre-election, that Obama would be able to work effectively with people, and certainly none about his warmth or liking of people. The thing was, his supporters either imagined it was there when it was not, or somehow thought its lack wouldn’t matter. His brilliance would override everything.

Well, we’ve seen how that’s worked out.

I’m hoping…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that Sean Trende is right, and that Scott Brown now has a good chance of beating Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire.

And for those of you who say he’s a RINO, it’s not ideal but so what? His Republican opponents are either obscure or unpleasant, and Brown is neither. Jeanne Shaheen is a typical liberal party hack, and a mediocrity as well.

Taking the Senate, and especially getting rid of the reign of the odious Reid, is important. And “important” really is a mild word for what it is. Which doesn’t mean it will solve any of the deeper and more systemic problems in this country.

I figure…

The New Neo Posted on by

…why speculate on an audio that hasn’t even been confirmed yet as authentic?

Of course, that didn’t stop CNN from airing it. The cable news coverage of Michael Brown’s killing has exceeded in scale even the treatment of the Zimmerman case. It seems that with each such incident, there’s an escalation of news interest in it. One might have thought that, with the release of the convenience store robbery video, at least the characterization of Brown as an innocent overgrown child might have ceased. But no; any cracks in that narrative must be stomped out, and the offender made to apologize.

Hide-and-seek: Lois Lerner’s emails

The New Neo Posted on by

Who knew the IRS was so playful? And that hide-and-seek would be their favorite game?

After all—you just try playing it with them, and see how far it gets you.

Nevertheless, the revelations just keep coming:

We all know by now that Lois Lerner’s hard drive crashed in June 2011 and was destroyed by IRS. The emails of up to twenty other related IRS officials were missing in remarkably similar “crashes,” leading many to speculate that Lois Lerner’s Blackberry perhaps held the key. Now, the Observer can confirm that a year after the infamous hard drive crash, the IRS destroyed Ms. Lerner’s Blackberry””and without making any effort to retain the emails from it…

With incredible disregard for the law and the Congressional inquiry, the IRS admits that this Blackberry “was removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012.” This is a year after her hard drive “crash” and months after the Congressional inquiry began.

The IRS did not even attempt to retrieve that data. It cavalierly recites: “There is no record of any attempt by any IRS IT employee to recover data from any Blackberry device assigned to Lois Lerner in response to the Congressional investigations or this investigation,” according to Stephen Manning, Deputy Chief Information Officer for Strategy & Modernization.

“This investigation” is the suit filed by Judicial Watch nearly a year ago against the IRS under the Freedom of Information Act:

…to compel the agency to produce records of all communications relating to the review process for organizations seeking 501(c)(4) non-profit status since January 1, 2010. The lawsuit also asks the court to order the IRS to provide records of communications by former IRS official Lois Lerner concerning the controversial review and approval process.

It’s this same suit that revealed that oh yes, all of Lerner’s emails probably exist on a back-up system, but it would be too “onerous” to retrieve them.

Try playing that game with the IRS, too.

By the way, Judge Sullivan of the DC District Court is the same Judge Sullivan who ruled that prosecutors in the Ted Stevens case were guilty of gross misconduct. Sullivan is an African-American, a graduate of Howard University and Howard Law School who was appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan, promoted to the DC Court of Appeals by Bush I, and to the DC District Court by Bill Clinton. It’s an interesting bipartisan history.

Kipling again

The New Neo Posted on by

When I was in junior high we had to memorize a lot of poetry. One poem was Kipling’s old chestnut (which was not quite as old at the time as it is now, but then again, neither was I) “If.”

A few minutes ago I had occasion to quote the poem. I had still remembered much of it, but not every word, and as I looked it up (thank you, internet!) and re-read it, I noticed two lines I’d forgotten but which seemed to be especially apropos for the right these days:

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools…

They are followed by these lines, which seem to fit, too:

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools…

The left may have felt that way back in 1980, when Reagan was elected, and then again in 1984, when he was re-elected. They certainly managed to build them up again, didn’t they?

The right faces that situation now. Let’s hope the tools aren’t really all that worn out, or that we come up with some more effective new ones. Fast.