“Meeting the goal” set for the Obamacare website…

The New Neo Posted on by

…by moving the goalposts.

I guess they’re counting on the fact that most of America isn’t paying attention to what the goal actually was, or is.

[NOTE: More here. I’ll just add that the “Mission Accomplished” banner that Zombie references, the one that became so notorious for President Bush, actually referred to the mission of the aircraft carrier on which he gave the speech. That mission was indeed over, as were the major combat operations that Bush specifically mentioned in his speech:

The banner stating “Mission Accomplished” was a focal point of controversy and criticism. Navy Commander and Pentagon spokesman Conrad Chun said the banner referred specifically to the aircraft carrier’s 10-month deployment (which was the longest deployment of a carrier since the Vietnam War) and not the war itself, saying “It truly did signify a mission accomplished for the crew.”

The White House claimed that the banner was requested by the crew of the ship, who did not have the facilities for producing such a banner. Afterward, the administration and naval sources stated that the banner was the Navy’s idea, White House staff members made the banner, and it was hung by the U.S. Navy personnel. White House spokesman Scott McClellan told CNN, “We took care of the production of it. We have people to do those things. But the Navy actually put it up.” According to John Dickerson of Time magazine, the White House later conceded that they hung the banner but still insists it had been done at the request of the crew members

I’ve written before about the issue of what Bush meant when he said that major combat operations were over in Iraq, but it bears repeating here [this is an excerpt from the speech Bush gave that day, but the emphasis is mine]:

Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country…

We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We are bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We are pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes. We have begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated. We are helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people. The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. And then we will leave ”” and we will leave behind a free Iraq…

Al-Qaida is wounded, not destroyed. The scattered cells of the terrorist network still operate in many nations, and we know from daily intelligence that they continue to plot against free people.

It certainly doesn’t sound like a person saying the struggle is over, does it? The promise to stay until our work was done was not kept, of course. But it was Bush’s successor who broke that promise.]

Wouldn’t any song, played over and over and over…

The New Neo Posted on by

…become an instrument of torture?

But these are supposedly the Big Five for that purpose:

(1) “I Love You” by Barney the Dinosaur

(2) “Panama” by Van Halen

(3) “The Real Slim Shady” by Eminem

(4) “Copacabana” by Barry Manilow

(5) “Born in the U.S.A.” by Bruce Springsteen

I’m trying to think what my choices would be, and there’s no question about the leader (dare I say it? The very title runs the risk of inducing the dread earworm): “It’s a Small World After All.”

And for some reason this one, a song I happen to like somewhat, has the same ghastly tendency (listen at your own risk):

Suggestions?

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing…

The New Neo Posted on by

…but.

Actually, I think I’ll just present this one without comment, except to say that it’s from August of 2009:

By the way, the video is still up at whitehouse.gov, under a heading that reads “Health Insurance Reform Reality Check.” But Linda Douglass left Obama’s employ in April of 2010. My guess is that she’s mighty happy right now that she did.

Believing his own bullshit

The New Neo Posted on by

Towards the end of this recent post I wrote:

I was thinking today that Obama and his helpmates lie so often and so globally and reflexively that I wonder if they can even discern when they are lying and when they are not.

Commenter “Charles” responded:

I have thought this often as well. I’m no psychiatrist; but, don’t real narcissists actually believe what they say? Sort of like they live in their own made-up reality and cannot tell fact from fiction.

Not only that, but presidents—all presidents, not just Obama—tend to live in a bubble where the isolation of White House living, the puffery and perks of the office, and the protection their underlings afford from harsh reality tend to increase as time goes on, which in turn increases the inclination to lose track of truth and begin to believe one’s own lies.

A president needs to be wise enough to counter this by making it clear to his staff that he wants to hear the worst. But the news from the Obama White House is that Obama has given his staff the opposite message:

…[N]o one wanted to even hint to the president that this techno-savvy administration possibly had a website stuck in, say, 1995. “People don’t like to tell him bad news,” says an ex-White House staffer. “Part of it is the no-drama culture.”…

Indeed. People who have served in top jobs at the White House seem to agree on one thing: a president who wants to get at the truth has to understand the extent of his own isolation. And then establish a zone of immunity for truth-tellers.

Not gonna happen, and that’s due to the narcissism. Obama would rather deal with the worshipful (and I mean that literally) Valerie Jarrett:

He knows exactly how smart he is… I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually… He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do. He would never be satisfied with what ordinary people do.

Obama’s opinion of himself even before taking office was extraordinarily high, and that’s compared to a group (presidential aspirants) not especially known for their humility.

But perhaps the most telling quote in terms of what Obama believes or doesn’t believe is true comes from Obama himself. It occurred during a conversation with journalist Richard Wolffe, and appears in Renegade, a book published in 2009 and based on Wolffe’s coverage of Obama’s 2008 campaign:

Every now and then in Renegade, a moment arrives when it seems Obama might reveal something, some tiny thing, about himself. “You know, I actually believe my own bullshit,” Obama told Wolffe with a smile. But what for a nanosecond seemed like candor – would the candidate actually examine his own B.S.? – was just another talking point, as he explained to Wolffe that he truly wanted to bring change to America for better health care, for better schools, and especially for “the kid on the streets.”

There’s much about this quote that’s revealing. First, there’s the serious message Obama is trying to deliver within the joke about bs: “I truly believe that I can make people’s lives better.” But if he really does believe that, then why insert a subtle disclaimer (it’s all “bullshit”) inherent in the casually deprecating tone that seems to negate its seriousness and casts an ironic and juvenile eye on the entire enterprise?

And then, of course, there’s the more subtle message beneath. Obama seems to be admitting that, at least at the moment when he utters whatever bullshit he happens to be spewing, he does believe it. That trick of believing and yet not believing is one of the exercises at which narcissists and con men are skilled. In order to sell a product convincingly, it’s necessary to believe your own bullshit, if only temporarily.

But there’s also another level operating here, one that was described very well by Hilton Kramer. In the following quote he is speaking of Stalinists, but what he says is applicable to the majority of leftists such as Obama as well:

It is in the nature of Stalinism for its adherents to make a certain kind of lying – and not only to others, but first of all to themselves – a fundamental part of their lives. It is always a mistake to assume that Stalinists do not know the truth about the political reality they espouse. If they don’t know the truth (or all of it) one day, they know it the next, and it makes absolutely no difference to them politically For their loyalty is to something other than the truth.

So Obama’s ability to lie, and his relationship to his own lies, is multiply-determined: by his narcissism, by the fact of his being a president who is protected from the harsh truth, and by his leftism. He believes and does not believe at the same time, and shifts between the two depending on the strategic value of one or the other attitude at any given moment.

Black Friday at Amazon

The New Neo Posted on by

For me, it’s Leftover Friday. Each to his own.

But since it’s in my interest to promote shopping at Amazon through the neo-neocon portal—I’ll point out that Amazon has a ton of special deals for Black Friday and lasting through November 30. Here’s an offer that relates particularly to books.

And remember to please shop through neo-neocon whenever you use Amazon, year-round. I appreciate it very much.

Next up: Medicaid

The New Neo Posted on by

Perhaps the most important Obamacare lie will turn out to be the one about Medicaid:

The biggest lie of all is that 15-30 million additional people who will be enticed or shoved onto Medicaid will receive quality health care.

In reality, they will receive health care “insurance,” but there will be few doctors willing to see them because the reimbursement rates are so low.

Everyone who was even remotely familiar with the way Medicaid works was quite aware of this at the time Obamacare was passed, because Medicaid recipients were already having great difficulty getting a doctor to see them due to the low reimbursement rates. The Obamacare Medicaid expansion provides people with the trappings of care but is unlikely to be able to deliver all that much of it.

Unless, of course, more doctors come under the thumb of government:

Forcing doctors to accept Medicaid patients will be the inevitable solution.

Oh, doctors. They earn too much money anyway, don’t they?

Not in the Soviet Union. Not even in post-Soviet Russia. Why? Here’s why [emphasis mine]:

Soviet doctors never had anything like the status and money of Western doctors. The medicine they practice was considered to be below the levels of the West, the system always suffered from shortages, and the social status of a provincial general practitioner was akin to a schoolteacher’s, respectable, but modest…

But under Communism, doctors at least lived no worse than anybody else — and maybe a bit better.

That has changed. Caught between an impoverished government that cannot afford universal medical care and a deep-rooted Soviet scorn for medicine-for-profit, many of Russia’s doctors, especially here in the provinces, seem worn thin, out of canteen water but still marching ahead.

”When everything else took the capitalist road of development, and medicine was left on the socialist road, we got an imbalance that is killing medicine,” said Dr. Aleksei Golland, one of a handful of private doctors in Kostroma.

”It’s an economic death,” he said. ”If it continues like this, I see the murder of medicine in that the masses of quality doctors don’t have ground to stand on. A surgeon has to plant potatoes to feed his family.”

Ask what keeps the government-paid doctors going and the same words keep coming up: Vocation. Duty. Mercy. Naked enthusiasm…

A few doctors are doing pretty well. There are a handful of legally private doctors. And there are the doctors who practice a sort of black-market medicine in which they operate in state facilities, but charge their own little tolls.

Has the situation changed much in Russia since the above quotes were written in 2000? It certainly doesn’t seem that way. And I wonder if that’s part of the reason life expectancy there is so lousy.

Here’s your post-Thanksgiving regimen

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m all for keeping fit, but Robert Durbin is a bit extreme. He’s 64 and lost 70 pounds seven years ago by radically transforming his health habits, going on a rigorous diet and exercising. He had already quit smoking and drinking some years before that.

Did I say “exercising”? There should be a stronger word for what Durbin does:

Every morning right after he wakes up, he does about a mile on his elliptical ski glider, followed by 1,200 to 1,800 repetitions of abdominal exercises.

Then it’s off to the gym, where he spends three hours doing CrossFit, weight training and skills training.

At night, he repeats his ski glider workout and abdominal exercises before he goes to bed. And he visits the gym several evenings per week for kettlebell, yoga and kickboxing classes.

Durbin isn’t quite satisfied, though, “I’d still like to get a little bit of the skin gone down there, you know, around my lower stomach.”

In the video of Durbin at the link (I can’t find a way to embed it, so you have to go here to view it) he says that one of his motivations for getting fit was that he was afraid that he wouldn’t have much time left with his grandchildren. He may have improved his chances for longevity—and he’s most definitely improved his mobility, because before beginning his regimen he was even having trouble walking. But I’m not at all sure he’s got more time now on a day-to-day basis to see his grandkids, with a schedule like that.

For someone like Durbin, the line between conscientious and obsessed can be a fine one. I’m well aware of the problem. I don’t have a physique anything like his (or rather, anything like the female version of his). But I’ve long been accused of being somewhat obsessive about exercise, and back in my dancing days I definitely was—as most dancers are.

Here’s Durbin:

“I just go bonkers if I can’t get to the gym or something,” he said. “My gym, I think it’s closed (on Thanksgiving) so I’m going to have a fit.”

That doesn’t seem all that…healthy.

I guess the Iranians were correct…

The New Neo Posted on by

…when they said the Obama administration lied about its deal with them.

It’s a sad thing that, on hearing those Iranian claims, I was already inclined to believe their version more than Obama’s. That’s how little meaning his word has these days. And now the WaPo, not known for dissing Obama, has published an editorial that begins:

The fact sheet distributed by the Obama administration about the nuclear agreement with Iran is notable for its omissions.

I suppose Obama misspoke again, because somehow the WaPo manages to write the entire piece without once directly accusing him of lying, and also without once citing the Iranian claims of mendacity that almost certainly sparked the WaPo’s examination of the terms of the agreement.

Here’s the way the editorial deals with the central issue of enrichment:

Though White House officials and Secretary of State John F. Kerry repeatedly said that Iran’s assertion of a “right to enrich” uranium would not be recognized in an interim deal, the text says the “comprehensive solution” will “involve a mutually defined enrichment program with mutually agreed parameters.” In other words, the United States and its partners have already agreed that Iranian enrichment activity will continue indefinitely. In contrast, a long-standing U.S. demand that an underground enrichment facility be closed is not mentioned.

But that’s not even the worst of it, according to the WaPo:

The most troubling part of the document provides for what amounts to a sunset clause in the comprehensive agreement. It says the final deal will “have a specified long-term duration to be agreed upon,” and that once that time period is complete, “the Iranian nuclear program will be treated in the same manner as that of any non-nuclear weapon state party” to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran thus could look forward to a time when there would be no sanctions and no special restrictions on its nuclear capacity; it could install an unlimited number of centrifuges and produce plutonium without violating any international accord.

Administration officials say they regard Iran’s agreement to the words “long-term” in the sunset clause as a significant concession. In theory, this might mean 15 to 20 years. Iran, however, has proposed a far shorter period; we are told it was three to five years.

The piece is so delicately and carefully worded to avoid accusing Obama of actually lying that it seems to have been composed by diplomats itself, rather than being an editorial about diplomacy.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited repeat of a previous post]

I wish all of you a wonderful Thanksgiving. Here’s some corny American pictorial propaganda in honor of the occasion, one of my favorite holidays:

This painting was not originally created for the Thanksgiving holiday. It was part of Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” series of 1941. Inspired by a post-Pearl Harbor speech of FDR’s about the war effort and why we were fighting, and designed to help sell war bonds, this particular one illustrated “Freedom from Want.”

So on this Thanksgiving Day I’ll reiterate the sentiment: may we all have freedom—of religion, of speech, from want, from fear.

This year, it just so happens that today is an extraordinarily singular day: the first day of Chanukah begins on Thanksgiving, making it Thanksgivukkah.

ThanksCandles

The cranberry sauce speaks

The New Neo Posted on by

And it’s got a lot to say:

I’m a legitimate part of the meal, and it’s about time I was treated as such…Look, do you think I don’t see what you see? I’m repulsive. I stick out like a sore thumb. A red, wobbly sore thumb. Plopped down on this table with the ridges from my can still branded into my side, othering me, shaming me…

Confession: I can’t stand the jellied type of cranberry sauce. When I have Thanksgiving at my place, or when it happens at my brother’s, we always do it ourself. Cranberry sauce is so delicious and so stupendously easy to make—cranberries, water, sugar, simmer for a while till it tastes good—that I don’t see why everyone doesn’t make it. My sister-in-law also does a cranberry chutney that is amazingly addictive.

Don’t have the recipe, but I’ll try to get it and post it.

Lessons from the Sandy Hook report

The New Neo Posted on by

There don’t seem to be any, except that some acts of evil are inscrutable and beyond our understanding.

Many of the assumptions people had about Adam Lanza and his murders are undermined by the official report, according to Jacob Sullum at Reason. For example, Lanza had played a lot of video games but only some were violent. He had Asperger’s, but had never threatened or even hinted at a desire to harm people, and Asperger’s is not linked to an increased incidence of violence anyway. His mother had the guns legally, but banning them would not have prevented his acts or even slowed him down, because his rate of fire was not particularly fast.

Lanza was from a family of divorce, but many such killers are not (for example, Columbine’s dark duo were from intact families) and divorce is common although mass murderers are not. Lanza did consider Columbine an inspiration, but that’s more a symptom of his troubles than a cause.

Were antidepressants a factor? The report indicates there were no drugs in Lanza’s system, and he was not on any drugs regularly, antidepressants or otherwise:

Reportedly the shooter did not drink alcohol, take drugs, prescription or otherwise, and hated the thought of doing any of those things.

Although I haven’t read the report itself, except for a tiny bit (it’s very long), I came across two paragraphs that contain quite a bit of information:

The mother did the shooter’s laundry on a daily basis as the shooter often changed clothing during the day. She was not allowed in the shooter’s room, however, even to clean. No one was allowed in his room.

The shooter disliked birthdays, Christmas and holidays. He would not allow his mother to put up a Christmas tree. The mother explained it by saying that shooter had no emotions or feelings.

Note the phrase “would not allow.” Lanza was twenty years old and lived in his mother’s home, but it seems he dictated quite a bit and his mother acquiesced in order to keep the peace. She may even have done this on the advice of a health professional.

But it’s not at all clear that any other approach Lanza’s mother could have adopted towards him would have helped or changed a thing. I offer as evidence that last sentence in the above quote: “shooter had no emotions or feelings.” Emotions and feelings cannot be taught if a person lacks them, nor are their absence the result of anything a parent has done or not done. If Lanza was a sociopath/psycopath—and it appears he probably was—and secretly inclined to violence but giving no indication of it, it is unlikely that anything could have been done to prevent his crime.

Next on Obama’s “to do” list

The New Neo Posted on by

This?:

The US and Hezbollah are in secret indirect talks managed by London dealing with the fight against Al-Qaida, regional stability and other Lebanese political issues.

Senior British diplomatic sources, quoted in a report in Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Rai on Wednesday, said British diplomats are holding discussions with leaders of the Lebanese organization and transferring the information to the Americans.

…Because the US, unlike the UK, recognizes both the political and military wings of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization and refuses to distinguish between them, US officials cannot legally meet with any member of the party. But according to the sources, the US is willing to hear the views of the party and “warm up to a direct relationship in the future.”

Three years left of Obama’s term is a long time, and no doubt a lot can be accomplished, especially with secret talks.