…when Andrea Mitchell says “more or less” at around minute 1:00 of this clip from last night, maybe she actually means “less.”
A lot less.
Because otherwise, we’d have to come to the conclusion that she’s just making stuff up and hoping the American people are incredibly ignorant/stupid. Or else it’s Mitchell who’s just that stupid.
And what’s Chris Cillizza’s excuse?
[Hat tip: Ace.]
[UPDATE (9:25 PM): Give Stephen Green a big round of applause. And a drink; the man needs a drink. Why? He’s liveblogging the SOTU speech. For the umpteenth time.]
“Union?” What union? Obama’s speech is reported to be planned to be a broadside against Republicans:
Democrats consider President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday a launching point for a year of sustained assault on Republicans over a populist economic agenda, part of an effort to focus more on bread-and-butter issues and less on income inequality.
Actually, Obama’s entire presidency has been a “sustained assault.”
But I predict this speech won’t do a thing one way or the other. I am probably typical of many on the right when I say I won’t be listening to it. I will read it, and read about it, and probably write about it. But even among independents and liberals, there aren’t many people left who trust Obama and have faith in his abilities to turn things around, or who want to listen to him talk any more.
That doesn’t mean he won’t get some of what he wants, by hook or by crook (and at times with Republican help). It just means his speech tonight won’t be triumphant.
I’m providing this thread for you to discuss it—including those hardy souls who will actually watch it.
The National Review lays out the reasons why passing a bill right now legitimizing illegal immigrants would be a bad, bad idea.
I wouldn’t have thought this needed to be spelled out at this point. But apparently it does, because according to all reports I’ve read so far, the Republicans are poised to pass such a law.
This is exactly the sort of thing that gets conservatives shrieking against the sellout “establishment” Republicans on the Hill, and in this case I join them. If this bill is passed it will be a deep betrayal of both the Republicans’ constituency and the best interests of the nation.
So, why are they so close to doing it? Well, this is one reason:
In this it reflects the obsession of the business establishment, for which the answer to the dire employment crisis among low-skilled workers is always to import more low-skilled workers.
Money talks, nobody walks, as the old ad used to say.
But there’s another reason, and it’s an even stupider one, IMHO: the idea that this will somehow bring the Republicans more votes. Memo to Republicans: au contraire. Hispanics aren’t going to thank you for it. The people (Hispanic and otherwise) who like the idea of amnesty want real amnesty, and know that it’s far more likely to come at the hands of the Democrats. And the entire Republican Party is likely to turn on you for it.
As Bill Kristol wrote recently in the Weekly Standard:
Speaker Boehner…should announce that he will not bring any immigration legislation to the floor this session. If there’s one thing that could blow up GOP chances for a good 2014, it would be an explosive debate over immigration in the House. The only sure way to avoid such a debate is not to let anything onto the floor in the first place. Once even an innocuous-sounding measure gets passed, then the pressure to go to conference with the loathed Senate bill will be great. And whatever ultimately were to happen, activists would spend months worrying about and agitating against a betrayal by the leadership, business interests would spend months urging such a betrayal, and Republicans would be consumed by infighting and recriminations on an issue that does them no short-term political good. Bringing immigration to the floor insures a circular GOP firing squad, instead of a nicely lined-up one shooting together and in unison at Obamacare and other horrors of big government liberalism. Since there really is no need to act this year on immigration, don’t. Don’t even try.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. This would be a huge, self-inflicted wound. Why Boehner et al might consider it a winner can only come down to money in the end: their own financial support must depend on it. And yet, if they do this, I don’t see how the voters can ever trust them again, even the remaining few who still trusted them up to this point. It seems to me they’ll be signing their own political death warrant. Can money save them from that?
Ah, I see that Pete Seeger, troubadour of my youth, has died.
My feelings about Seeger are mixed, to say the least. First, the bad: he was an activist Communist, and even a Stalinist back in the day. Let’s not whitewash that, like the Chicago Trib article I just linked to did [emphasis mine]:
Seeger also was known for his liberal politics, working as an environmentalist, protesting against wars from Vietnam to Iraq and being sentenced to prison for refusing to testify to Congress about his time in the Communist Party. The case was dismissed years later…
Seeger’s life of music and political activism could be summed up in “The Hammer Song,” the enduring anthem he wrote more than 60 years ago with his good friend Lee Hays to support the progressive political movement in the U.S.
Popularized by Peter, Paul and Mary in the 1960s, the song embodied the heart of Seeger: his musicality, his activism, his optimism and his lifelong belief that songs could and should be used to build a sense of community to make the world a better place.
Liberal? Progressive? Supporting Communism to make the world a better place? Those are euphemisms, I’m afraid. And although his “time in the Communist Party” did end some time in the 50s, his time of sympathy with the Communist Party went on.
Contrast the Trib article with this piece from 2009 (hat tip: Instapundit):
Seeger was a member of the Communist Party from the 1930s through the 1950s. He left the party but never gave up the faith. He told the Washington Post in 1995 “I am still a communist.” Like his comrades and fellow travelers Seeger twisted and turned with every pronouncement from Moscow…Seeger’s sycophancy for murderous communist tyrants didn’t end with Stalin. During the Cold War he praised Ho Chi Minh and provided a hearty jacket endorsement for Tomas Borges’ the brutal Sandinista thug’s book…To be fair Seeger did eventually get around to realizing the horrors of Stalinism, albeit 50 years too late…[but]the moral equivalencies Seeger used to water down his apology for supporting a regime that murdered more people than 20 million people [were unimpressive].
Those of you who follow this blog closely may recall that I know that genre well; quite a few of my more distant relatives (not my immediate family, however) shared Seeger’s politics. What I mostly remember of get-togethers in my youth with that side of the family were the shouting matches about politics (if you don’t believe that liberals and Communists can fight very bitterly with each other about politics, you should have come to those family parties). Quite a few of the most rabid relatives never, at least to the best of my knowledge, denounced Stalin at all. So Seeger was ahead of them.
That probably colors my ability to acknowledge Seeger’s huge political flaws but to also look at his singing and music separately from his politics. Not that he always separated them, but for the most part his music can stand alone. I’ve written about Seeger before, and for me it was the energy of his voice that was the draw:
We had a shaky old record player on which I’d play the scratchy Weavers records that featured Seeger’s unique voice and vibrant banjo. I loved those old songs, but I especially loved Seeger’s voice.
Why? It wasn’t pretty, nor was it exceptionally musical. There are many ordinary people who can make far more beautiful sounds, although I’m most definitely not one of them. But Seeger had what I’ve noticed is a prerequisite for great voices: a unique and utterly identifying timbre, much like a fingerprint, and instantly recognizable as that person and no one else.
Seeger’s voice had an uplifting quality mixed with something indefinable, something between a lilt and a sob. Although the lilt always dominated, the sob was always present as well, much like the complexity of a fine wine with a hint of many flavors to give it a special richness and depth.
Seeger played a mean banjo, too. Here’s a video of the Weavers in their prime, singing a typical number (the vast majority of which were traditional and non-political, except in the most subtle sense), a medley of songs from around the world that supposedly illustrate our oneness (I tried to find one of my very favorites, “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” but no dice). Note, also, the pride of place given to an Israeli song, back when Israel was still beloved by Leftists:
When I think about it, virtually every pop, folk, or rock singing voice that interests me has that same quality of distinctiveness of sound.
Seeger was not a simple figure. But for the joy he gave me and so many others, I loved him. RIP.
…is beginning to resemble Marlene Dietrich in her later years.
Well, Dietrich did wear suits, including white ones:
Here Dietrich (who was apparently bisexual) is again in a suit, older this time:
But for the Madonna comparison, I’m thinking that, except for the suit, she looks more like an anorexic Mae West (is that an oxymoron?):
The following passage is from the book Robert Frost: A Living Voice, edited by Reginald L. Cook. It’s from a talk Frost gave at Bread Loaf in July 27, 1960, when he was in his 80s. He starts by describing a conversation he had with Julian Huxley about evolution:
…I said, “We’ve come up?” He said: “Yes, up! up!” He thought “up.” He thought we’d come up, not down. I just wanted to know. And I said: “What do you suppose steered us up?” He was very vague about that. Then, in that kind of corner, just sort of out of indignation, patient indignation, I just said: “Wouldn’t it have been possible to say that it was passionate preference—preference—passionate preference?” This didn’t seem to make a hit with him particularly. He seemed to think it was some sort of an upward uplifting, I guess, that was accidentally upward. No God in it at all. Nothing but spirit. I would think it would be something like that—that everything has a tendency to prefer—even teachers. That’s one of the things we’ve tried to throw away in teaching and give everybody the same mark. But we’ve decided we’ve got to do something about that.
My anger at that made me say that we were going to so homogenize society that the cream would never rise again. And that’s the way some people are talking about education—so homogenized it that now they’re looking for cream again. Beat the Russians. They’re creaming, why shouldn’t we cream? That’s where a good deal comes from—that kind of pressure that you’re cornered and you’re bothered. There’s a certain debate in your life that you don’t ever feel you’ve got the best of, that there’s still something unsettled. If He’s a God of mercy, is He also a God of justice? Naturally there’s a constant natural conflict between justice and mercy. The big joke is that somebody on earth ought to balance them up. Probably God does. It could be assumed. That is the most Godlike thing: to balance them—mercy for justice or a just mercy. But there’s something there that’s almost too hard for a mortal man to get.
The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are having quite a time about it right now. They both want to sound merciful enough, and they both want to sound just enough. They’re going to outdo each other in getting that right. The nice way is to choose the Democrats for being too merciful. Somebody calculated that the mercies that they promised the world were going to cost us about fifty billion dollars a year—if they did all they had in their program. The Republicans have got to sort of match that somewhere if they don’t get broke.
So, Frost seems to have been an amalgam of Cassandra, Will Rogers, and Thomas Sowell, in the guise of a rumpled old New England poet. Of course, he didn’t foresee the actual numbers; they’ve become too large for most people to have imagined. Even in the 30s, Frost was a strong opponent of the New Deal, by the way; not because he was unmerciful, but because he knew where the trend was headed.
William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection points out that the most dangerous years of the Obama administration are upon us. He quotes a WaPo article by Scott Wilson that describes a supposedly “new” approach of the president’s.
Wilson’s article, which appears to be written from a purely descriptive point of view, is one of the most important things I’ve read in quite a while. It outlines as “new” what most of us on the right have long expected from Obama’s second term. For example, in November of 2010, less than two years into Obama’s first term—when some people were speculating that he might tack more to the middle for the last half of that first term—I wrote that even if he did, it would represent only a temporary feint to lull the American people into a false sense of relief at his moderation:
It need only be until the next election…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?
Back then I already had a much greater fear of Obama’s second term than his first. Freed of the fear of consequences, he could exercise power in whatever way he might think possible to get around the limitations of our system of checks and balances. Neither I, nor anyone who has actually watched and studied Obama carefully, should believe he has anything but contempt for those boundaries where he is concerned. That is the mark of tyranny.
Wilson’s article is long, but well worth reading in its entirety. The following are some excerpts and my commentary on them [emphasis mine]:
Obama has said that his fraught relationship with Congress, especially after Republicans won the House in 2010, complicated his ability to promote his agenda. But for the first time, following what many allies view as a lost year, the White House is reorganizing itself to support a more executive-focused presidency and inviting the rest of the government to help.
The new approach comes after weeks of internal White House debate over a single question: What went wrong in 2013?… Senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer outlined the lessons learned in a three-page memo that Obama discussed with his Cabinet in recent weeks, according to several administration officials who have read the document.
So first we have the framing of this as a new approach, one to which Obama came reluctantly, forced by the stubborn resistance of Congress’s Republicans to his agenda. Of course, his approach is neither new, nor forced—although I suppose it’s “forced” inasmuch as it wouldn’t be necessary if Congress was still controlled by Democrats who could be trusted to merely rubber-stamp Obama’s desires. And it’s “new” in the sense that it will now be intensified. Obama is also attempting to capitalize on Americans’ dislike for and disapproval of Congress, which is far more unpopular even than he is.
More:
Among [a Dan Pfeiffer memo’s] conclusions is that Obama, a former state legislator and U.S. senator, too often governed more like a prime minister than a president. In a parliamentary system, a prime minister is elected by lawmakers and thus beholden to them in ways a president is not.
As a result, Washington veterans have been brought into the West Wing to emphasize an executive style of governing that aims to sidestep Congress more often…
“A State of the Union creates a contract with the public about what you say and what you will do,” said John D. Podesta, a senior adviser to Obama brought in this month to help design an effective governing strategy around the president’s goals.
“In that sense it is like a campaign, and it disciplines the priorities of the White House by creating an operation manual for the year ahead,” he said. “It is certainly in that spirit we are approaching this year’s State of the Union.”…
After Obama’s second inaugural address last January, Podesta, then head of the Center for American Progress, the administration’s off-campus think tank, said Obama “no longer feels to me like a prime minister.”
“He now understands the full range of the power of the presidency to get things done,” Podesta said at the time.
Now in the West Wing for a year-long stint as senior adviser, Podesta acknowledged that he was brought in partly to make that early prediction a reality…
Again, we have the carefully cultivated—and media-supported—myth of the heretofore reasonable and retiring Obama, hamstrung by his deference to Congress. Along with this is the notion that only recently has come the idea of politicizing Obama’s State of the Union speech, and that only recently Obama “gets” that he can accomplish a lot more by executive fiat than he ever thought possible before. He’s doing it for you, folks, to get around those people in Congress who thwart all the good he would otherwise do for you.
Who needs Congress? Not Obama. But that’s not new; he made it clear even in his first term that he would expand executive power though the liberal (pun intended) use of agencies and executive orders, if Congress wouldn’t play ball. After all, how many divisions does Congress have? Or SCOTUS? And he knows the MSM won’t object, and in his second term he no longer fears the people, if he ever did in the first place.
The proliferation of TV programs that feature amateur singing competitions has brought out a swarm of child singers. Some of them even sing opera with remarkable maturity, something that usually is reserved for the grownups among us, and a select few grownups at that.
You’ve probably heard of Jackie Evancho, one of the earliest of the famous child opera singers. All of them tend to have a sweet solemnity that belies their years (and our times) and make them seem throwbacks to another era. In a piece I wrote about Evancho when she first burst on the scene, I quoted a singing authority on how a child is able to make that surprisingly adult sound:
Carol Tingle is a Los Angeles-area voice teacher who has been instructing private students since 1966. “Technically what’s she’s doing is lowering her larynx to get that opera sound. Singers are incredible imitators of sound. It wouldn’t surprise me if she hasn’t listened to many opera singers, so what she’d be able to do is adjust the larynx and imitate the sound she is hearing either recording or by her coach.”
All children imitate their heroes, whether it’s basketball or singing. A good teacher will make sure pupils channel that enthusiasm into finding their own style. In Evancho’s case, her teacher has an additional challenge: safeguarding that voice.
The same is true for Holland’s Amira Willighagen—except when the 9-year-old appeared on “Holland’s Got Talent” this past fall (she won the whole thing just a couple of weeks ago), she said she’d never had a singing teacher. I’ll bet she’s got one now.
Willighagen is an imitator—she learned how to sing opera from YouTube, after all—but she is no parrot. The thing that strikes me most about her is her delicate and sensitive musicality. Although her voice is not fully developed (there’s a minor crack here and there), her artistry is firmly in place:
Why do I put these videos up? I find them encouraging signs of—something, maybe just the idea that art lives on, if young children can still aspire to this particular kind of effort. It doesn’t seem that anybody forced Amira. She just surfed YouTube and came up with “O Mio Babbino Caro” herself.
Several people in the YouTube comments section, as well as one of the judges, have compared her voice quality to that of Maria Callas. I know very little about opera, although of course I’ve heard of Callas and seen a few videos of her, mostly of the harsher, very dramatic Callas. But YouTube allowed me to find this:
My guess is that Amira listened to Callas quite a lot when she was learning the song. Note that Callas isn’t just singing but acting, too, which was her forte.
In a controversial letter published in the WSJ today, Tom Perkins compares the war on the 1% to the escalation of hate propaganda in Germany that led to Kristallnacht:
I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent…This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?
Predictably, when a person invokes a Nazi comparison people scoff, and Perkins compounded his scoffability quotient by invoking the Nazi comparison while defending the rich (if you want to see scoffing, read the comments about his piece in blogs on the left). Nevertheless, what Perkins said isn’t even really all that controversial. He’s talking about the dangers of drumming up hatred, not mere disagreement with, a segment of society. His point was about Germany in the early days of the Nazis’ rise (Hitler was not even chancellor yet in 1930), not Germany in 1938 (the date of Kristallnacht) or Germany later, when the Nazi machine had gotten the death apparatus fully in gear. His point is that it’s a continuum, and the early days contain the seeds of the later ones.
It is the fate of Cassandra to prophecy and not be believed. The hard left just pretends not to believe; the liberals for the most part are naive about what the hard left is capable of, and what the liberal role is in the drama.
Does this mean Kristallnacht and then the camps are coming? I happen to think what’s happening today will take a different form, a form it is already showing: continuing legal persecution and rhetorical demonization of those who dare to question the liberal line, minus the death camps and the rest. But I also believe that, if killing people ends up being necessary for some reason, the hard left here would have absolutely no hesitation in doing so. I just think, as I’ve written before, that this movement in the US has the earmarks of Chavez more than Hitler or Stalin. That could change.
Let’s just stipulate that Mike Huckabee is not exactly a young up-and-comer in the Republican Party. I don’t think he was going anywhere in 2016 anyway.
Let’s also stipulate that his recent remarks were mostly about what he perceives Democrats as doing, and that what he said was twisted almost out of recognition by the left.
But it’s been solid “Huckabee’s hatred of women and their sexuality” coverage for quite some time, now that Bridgegate has lost a little bit of its newness (although none of its future usefulness to the left—ongoing investigations galore will be the gift that keeps on giving). And Huckabee stands, of course, for the entire GOP, which supposedly endorses exactly what he said, whatever it may be.
All a Republican has to do these days is mention women and sex and a firestorm erupts. Huckabee was careful to preface his remarks with a host of “women are strong and wonderful and great” statements, but it did him no good. He had stepped in a meme, and the meme was a big pile of do-do. This will happen to any Republican who dares mention anything of the sort.
For the record, here’s the text of Huckabee’s remarks:
I think it’s time for Republicans to no longer accept listening to Democrats talk about a ”˜War on Women.’ Because the fact is, the Republicans dont’ have a war on women. They have a war for women ”“ for them to be empowered, to be something other than victims of their gender.
Women I know are outraged that Democrats think that women are nothing more than helpless and hopeless creatures whose only goal in life is to have a government provide for their birth control medication. Women I know are smart, educated, intelligent, capable of doing anything anyone else can do.
Our party stands for the recognition of the equality of women and the capacity of women. That’s not a war on them, it’s a war for them. And if the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control, because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government, then so be it. Let’s take that discussion all across America, because women are far more than Democrats have made them to be. And women across America have to stand up and say, ”˜Enough of that nonsense.’”
Huckabee’s remarks are about the Democratic Party’s message about not birth control but the need for the government to supply birth control. But let a Republican merely say the words “birth control” or “libido” and it’s open season.
The Democrats are not stupid. They know their appeal is to women more than men, and that single women and young women are particularly strong adherents of the party line. They know that the “Republican War on Women” meme—the one that Huckabee was trying to attack in his speech—is a goldmine in political terms. And they know the mine is still full of precious ore.
Of course it will; that was a foregone conclusion. The left thinks this will distract everyone from the problems the Democrats and Obama have been having. When in doubt, stir up class envy and turmoil.
Oh, and by the way, upward mobility has not declined, according to a large and important recent study. And that was reported in the NY Times, of all places; I wonder how they let that slip by? The researchers were economics professors at Harvard and Berkeley, by the way.
In recent years I’ve thought more and more about the tenth commandment, the one against coveting. As a child, I regarded it as weird. Even the word was old-fashioned: covet? What did it mean? And compared to murder and theft, it seemed so minor—not to mention impossible to fulfill, because who doesn’t sometimes envy, or covet, in his/her heart?
But the older I’ve gotten, the more I see it as central, not just in the personal but in the political sphere. Not that I’ve banished it from myself—I have not—but I’m certainly aware of the importance of the struggle against it. And politically, it is wrong to try to exploit it in the way that Obama has, although that is the leftist m.o.. Because it works, doesn’t it? “Envy” wasn’t called one of the seven deadly sins for nothing.
It’s a completely different thing to say let’s try to lift more people out of poverty; even Republicans want to do that, although they may disagree on how much poverty there is, how to define it, what its causes are, and how best to go about making an improvement. But focusing on how rich the rich are, and how wide the gap is, seems to me to be the politics of envy and covetousness.
If the rich get their money illegally, then go after their crimes. If not, concentrate on doing what you can to lift all boats. As one of my favorite guys, Churchill, said in one of my favorite (and oft-repeated) quotes:
Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.
It used to be that the French were said to be oh so sophisticated. So sophisticated that they shrugged their collective blasé (a French word, after all) shoulders when their leaders had affairs.
But at least their leaders could be said to have affairs, because they were cheating on their wives.
But in this brave new socialist world, French President Frané§ois Hollande doesn’t seem to have wives in the first place, he has domestic partners. His first, Ségolé¨ne Royal, is another socialist. The two lived together and had four children, but never married (too bourgeois for them; hey, that’s another French word!). They were too sophisticated even for a PACS (legal civil union), and were more or less split up during an (ulitmately lost) election in 2007 but tried to keep it quiet till afterward (I wrote about the matter here).
The split between Hollande and Royal was occasioned—or at least, brought out into the open—by Hollande’s affair with the woman who was to become his next whatchamacallit, Valérie Trierweiler, who is reportedly now broken up (and breaking things) at the revelation that—yes folks, hard to believe but oh so true—Hollande is having an affair! With another woman!
One might say, “live by the sword, die by the sword” (which is not a French expression). After all, not only was Hollande with another woman, Royal, when he and Trierweiler got together, but Trierweiler was actually married at the time (she’s just an old-fashioned gal, I guess). So she shouldn’t be altogether surprised that he might stray.
Here are the main characters in this thoroughly modern and yet timeless French drama:
Hollande (and I didn’t choose an especially unflattering photo; there are many that are a lot worse, although there are a few that are better):
Royal:
Trierweiler, the present French First Lady:
The new girl in town, French actress Julie Gayet:
One can only conclude that Henry Kissinger was a wise, wise man when he said, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”