Jay Carney steps down as Obama’s press secretary.
I can’t believe he lasted as long as he did. What an awful, awful job.
His successor is named Josh Earnest, which sounds like a joke name but is not.
On radio later today
The plan is for me to be interviewed by Lars Larson today, around 6:45 PM Eastern time (3:45 PM Pacific time). The general topic will be the Ibrahim Ishag case, although other things might come up. The interview should last about ten or fifteen minutes.
So if you’ve been missing the sound of my dulcet tones since the podcasts ended, please tune in here.
Second wind
Pretty astounding kick:
Feet of clay and naked emperors
Even the WaPo seems to have noticed that Obama has been attacking a host of strawmen. And the WaPo is not alone; the NY Times suggested something similar when it wrote, as part of its editorial about Obama’s West Point speech: “In some ways, that was a straw-man argument…”
Obama’s actually been attacking strawmen from the beginning; it’s one of this favorite ploys. But something has changed ever-so-slightly lately, something in the air. Even the left is frustrated with him, and the frustration has been growing.
Why, I wonder? Do they think he looks dull and disorganized rather than smart at this point? Were they still expecting more from him in that speech at West Point? Not necessarily different content, but just something more resolute, more eloquent, more firm? Are they now embarrassed about their previous fulsome over-the-top support for him?
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t for a moment think that they are changing their politics; they’re not about to come out for Republicans or conservatives. I think they have just become more and more disgusted with Obama’s weakness and repetitiveness, and his reliance on words, words, words.
Of course, that was always true of Obama. But previously they believed he could deliver in many areas, and most definitely in this one area in particular: making the world respect us, getting along well with other countries. He’s not been doing that, has he? And so when NBC’s Richard Engel says he’s “hard-pressed” to find one country where relations with the US have gotten better under Obama, you know that the disillusionment has grown so large that some can no longer pretend as well as they did before. They’re exhausted with the effort it requires.
Barack Obama’s speeches have always been composed—from the very start of his national campaign, when I first began to follow him—of some combination of these things: platitudes, self-references, outrageous statements (lies, or promises that turn out to be lies), passing the buck to others, criticizing the US, ascribing bad motives to the opposition, and attacking strawmen. Has he ever had any other arrows in his quiver? I can’t think of any.
He’s still doing all of this, but even the left seems to be getting a little bit sick of it (does that mean they’ve turned into racists?). Oh, I suppose it would still be okay with them if his accomplishments were more obvious. But the biggest one so far, Obamacare, may turn out to be a pyrrhic victory.
That could all change, of course, if immigration “reform” passes. Ensuring a permanent Democrat majority and making the American people more and more dependent on big government would be the biggest accomplishment of all.
What’s Obama’s problem?
He’s too modest.
No, really, just too modest.
And what’s he too modest about? All the efforts he’s made around the world.
Let’s give him an A for effort:
Among this administration’s many, many flaws is that its public presentation is fundamentally unserious and insincere. That happens sometimes when you’re lying through your teeth and you know it, and the people you’re speaking to know it, and everybody knows it.
Shinseki resigns
President Obama has announced that he’s accepted Shinseki’s resignation.
Shinseki is guilty of more or less the same thing Obama is guilty of re the VA: being informed of the abuses and doing essentially nothing. Too bad Obama won’t accept his own resignation.
Of course, then we’d have Joe Biden as president, who would do more of nothing about the VA.
I think that, in general, Biden would do marginally less damage as president than Obama has, if only because his “fool” quotient is somewhat higher than Obama’s. And if he resigned, then we’d have John Boehner as president. That would be…weird.
By the way, John Kerry is fourth in the line of presidential succession, and Eric Holder seventh. If you look at the list (which has not been updated; Sebelius and Shinseki are still on there, for example) it is a parade of mediocrities at best, knaves at worst.
Sobering.
I suppose Shinseki had to go. But it seems to me as though he’s just the fall guy.
Maybe Obama should get a new speechwriter
Richard Fernandez, that is.
My favorite line: “There’s no problem so pressing that you can’t forget it by changing the subject.”
It’s a brilliant, brilliant piece.
[Hat tip: commenter “J.J.”]
Risky childhood play
A while back The Atlantic had an article by Hanna Rosin describing how it was that in just a couple of generations Americans became intolerant of exposing their children to what used to be considered normal risks.
Some of it had to do with lawsuits:
…[P]ark departments all over the country began removing equipment newly considered dangerous, partly because they could not afford to be sued, especially now that a government handbook could be used by litigants as proof of standards that parks were failing to meet…[T]he cultural understanding of acceptable risk began to shift, such that any known risk became nearly synonymous with hazard.
The consequences are somewhat paradoxical, but they make sense. Removing danger does away with an important learning experience:
Children are born with the instinct to take risks in play, because historically, learning to negotiate risk has been crucial to survival; in another era, they would have had to learn to run from some danger, defend themselves from others, be independent. Even today, growing up is a process of managing fears and learning to arrive at sound decisions. By engaging in risky play, children are effectively subjecting themselves to a form of exposure therapy, in which they force themselves to do the thing they’re afraid of in order to overcome their fear. But if they never go through that process, the fear can turn into a phobia. Paradoxically, Sandseter writes, “our fear of children being harmed,” mostly in minor ways, “may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.”
Not to mention dependency. On government regulation and protection from risk, perhaps?
The public does not ♥ Obamacare
Despite all efforts, Obama and the Democrats have not been able to make the public like Obamacare, a fact reflected in polls such as this one from Gallup.
This is the chart that must make them gnash their teeth:
It is remarkably flat over time, isn’t it?
And this chart can’t warm the cockles of their hearts either:
That’s pretty low support among blacks and Hispanics, considering their support for Obama and Democrats as a whole, and considering that Obamacare was designed to supposedly help low income people the most.
How widespread is the VA rot?
It now appears that an award-winning VA hospital in Texas was cooking the books for years—falsifying wait times in order to keep winning those awards and bonuses.
Investigations went nowhere:
Emails and VA memos obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast provide what is among the most comprehensive accounts yet of how high-level VA hospital employees conspired to game the system. It shows not only how they manipulated hospital wait lists but why””to cover up the weeks and months veterans spent waiting for needed medical care. If those lag times had been revealed, it would have threatened the executives’ bonus pay.
What’s worse, the documents show the wrongdoing going unpunished for years, even after it was repeatedly reported to local and national VA authorities. That indicates a new troubling angle to the VA scandal: that the much touted investigations may be incapable of finding violations that are hiding in plain sight…
“This newest case just further illustrates that the scandal is much more far reaching than most people realize,” Rieckhoff said, “Phoenix was just the tip of the iceberg. Scandal has become the new normal, it’s the status quo at the VA right now.”
Apparently it’s been the status quo at the VA for years. The only difference now is that it’s being revealed.
So we have the lengthy wait times, which would be bad enough. But then there was the coverup, motivated by the fact that long wait times were penalized and short wait times incentivized. The solution: lie about the wait times. It worked for quite a while, didn’t it? In a system that rewards lying, the truth-teller loses:
There’s enormous pressure to report favorable wait times for VA patients, the Texas whistleblower explained, even if those wait times are completely false.
“If [VA] directors report low numbers, they’re the outlier. They won’t stay a director very long and they certainly won’t get promoted. No one is getting rewarded for honesty. They pretty much have to lie, if they don’t they won’t go anywhere,” the whistleblower added. Weighted more heavily than other performance measures, the wait time numbers alone “count for 50% of the executive career field bonus, which is a pretty powerful motivator.”
Though VA hospitals may be struggling with increasing patient loads and inadequate resources””including too few medical providers””they are punished for acknowledging those problems.
Something that looks good on paper and seems to make sense—rewarding short wait times—is deeply flawed if it’s really really hard to effect short wait times because the resources to do so just aren’t there. So the lying begins, and people realize there’s no other way to function in that system.
That doesn’t make the lying okay, but it does make it explicable. Those who won’t lie tend to be winnowed out in a process of natural selection, a survival of the fittest for that particular environment. Not everyone in the system was corrupted, but enough were to make it a widespread and practically standard occurrence.
The article goes on to describe a coverup of the coverup, exoneration by an investigation that was also fraudulent.
And the final paragraphs of the article are just plain sad:
The current investigatons are not enough, Rieckhoff said. Having a White House political operative looking into this is not an adequate solution. This is not something that one of the president’s lieutenants should be handling.”
“There’s definitely reason to think there may have been criminal activity,” Rieckhoff said. “Maybe it’s time for Attorney Genral Holder and the Department of Justice to get involved, or for someone else trained to investigate criminal cases to take the lead on this.”
Do not sit on a hot stove waiting for that DOJ investigation to take place. And what is Eric Holder if not one of the president’s most loyal lieutenants?
The search of the area where “pings” were heard…
…thought initially to possibly be from the missing Malaysian airplane is complete, and it has turned up nothing.
Back to the drawing board.
The linked article calls the fate of the airplane and its passengers “one of aviation’s most baffling mysteries.” But I’d say it actually is aviation’s most baffling mystery so far.
Here’s a list of ten other supposedly baffling mysteries involving aviation. Some aren’t even baffling; they’ve been solved. Others continue to baffle, but I don’t think any of them are in quite the same league as Flight 370. They either occurred before instrumentation and tracking had reached today’s sophisticated level, or they represent a mystery in the sense that we don’t know why they crashed or why they weren’t found. No single event presents the depth of mystery that Flight 370 offers, involving these questions and more: why did the entire communication system turn off while the plane continued to fly for a long time? Did the plane even crash? Why has no debris ever been found, if the plane landed in the ocean?
Obama goes to battle against straw men…
Headline: Greatest Orator Since Cicero Successfully Refutes That Which Was Never Contended
Variously seen on Twitter, spoofs of Obama’s foreign policy address to the commencement class at West Point:
Lachlan Markay: “”Some say we should nuke the entire Asian continent. Others want our capital to be Pyongyang. Unlike everyone else, I’m a rational centrist.
Ben Shapiro:”We need to do stuff. And the stuff we will do will not be stuff that a crazy person says we should do. It will be good stuff.”
In a shocker, Obama informed the captive audience at West Point that from now on, the US military will be using might in the service of right. A revolutionary thought!
More from Scott Johnson at Powerline on the address:
I find it difficult to imagine the mental nullity required to draft and revise this speech.
I have felt that way about all of Obama’s speeches. But hey, that’s just me.
It also strikes me as ironic that, unlike their fellow graduates at so many other universities, the West Point graduates were unable to protest their commencement speaker, who dearly deserved it.