Obama: you ain’t seen nothing yet

The New Neo Posted on by

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.

Another child opera singer

The New Neo Posted on by

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.

The war on the 1% and the war on the opposition

The New Neo Posted on by

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.

The Huckabee ruckus

The New Neo Posted on by

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.

State of the Union Address to focus on income inequality

The New Neo Posted on by

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.

French kiss—and tell

The New Neo Posted on by

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):

FT

Royal:

SR

Trierweiler, the present French First Lady:

Valerie Trierweiler

The new girl in town, French actress Julie Gayet:

JG

One can only conclude that Henry Kissinger was a wise, wise man when he said, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

A new Democratic meme: “Tea Partiers support raising the minimum wage”

The New Neo Posted on by

This article about Chuck Schumer’s plans to undermine the Tea Party is mostly a big yawn:

“The fundamental weakness in the Tea Party machine is the stark difference between what the leaders of the Tea Party elite, plutocrats like the Koch Brothers want and what the average grassroots Tea Party follower wants,” [Schumer] will say.

Schumer will argue Democrats must defend popular government programs, such as extended unemployment benefits and student loan subsidies, to persuade Tea Party voters they could benefit from federal programs.

“The average Tea Party member, like the average American, likes government run Medicare, likes government built highways and water and sewer lines, likes government support for education, both higher and lower,” he will say.

Yada yada yada.

First there was the “Tea Party is racist” lie. Then the IRS attack on the Tea Party. Now the “we’re your buddies and we have your best interest at heart; the Koch Brothers are not and don’t” approach from Schumer, who could promise most Tea Partiers the moon and they wouldn’t care.

This is what caught my eye from the article:

Democratic pollsters say a majority of Tea Party voters support increasing the minimum wage, which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will address later this year.

“What the senator is getting at is, they’re very populist, and they are hard-pressed economically,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said of Tea Party voters. “So I think there is an interesting point right now where Democrats can lay out an economic agenda that really pressures the Tea Party leaders.”

Lake said Schumer and other Democratic leaders would be hard pressed to convince Tea Party voters to embrace big government, but they could push a populist economic agenda that resonates with them.

“A majority of Tea Partiers do support raising the minimum wage. They like to stand up for the little guy,” she said.

That would certainly surprise me, although I suppose anything’s possible. But I wondered what this was based on; the article didn’t say.

What I found when I researched it was that “Tea Partiers support raising the minimum wage” is a popular new Democratic meme, seemingly without much foundation. It appears to have started a few weeks ago on—where else?—MSNBC:

…[F]ormer congressman and frequent MSNBC contributor Harold Ford stated, “Chuck Todd said the majority of Tea Party members support an increase in the minimum wage.”…

…Margaret Carlson makes the statement that there are a “majority of Tea Party Activists who are for an increase in the minimum wage.”

In the case of both statements, Ford’s and Carlson’s, no survey or formal data was referenced. Efforts to contact Ford, Carlson, and Chuck Todd for verification or validation of these claims have met with no response…

In fact, TheBlaze did find one minimum wage survey that mentions the opinions of Tea Party members. The polling, done by the Public Religion Research Institute in November of 2013, found that 57% of Tea Partiers opposed raising the minimum wage.

And here’s a Pew poll from August of 2013 that also supports the idea that Tea Partiers do not favor raising the minimum wage:

Tea Party Republicans (32% favor) are far less likely than those who do not agree with the Tea Party (60%) to support raising the minimum wage.

According to the same poll, 50% of Republicans overall favor raising the minimum wage, while 47% oppose. Who are those Republicans who favor it? The less well-educated, and those with lower incomes. Perhaps Schumer is confusing “less-well-educated” and “lower income” with “Tea Party members.”

Then again, perhaps he’s just making s*** up.

Impatience: Virginia AG Mark Herring refuses to defend the state’s gay marriage ban

The New Neo Posted on by

Mark Herring, Virginia’s newly-elected AG in a photo-finish race that featured a recount, will be joining the plaintiffs in lawsuits challenging the state’s ban on gay marriage. So not only is he declining to defend the state’s gay marriage ban, which was passed with 57% of the vote in 2006, but he is fighting to strike it down as unconstitutional.

You may recall my position on gay marriage: I believe bans are constitutional, and that the decision to allow gay marriage or ban it should be up to each state. So in a situation such as Virginia’s, it seems that if the people of Virginia wish to repeal the ban, the proper remedy would be to repeal the ban. And if the judiciary of Virginia thinks it is correct to declare the ban unconstitutional in the meantime, the proper remedy is to do so.

But until the people of Virginia officially declare otherwise, the proper role of AG Mark Herring would be to defend the law of Virginia in court, and therefore to work on behalf of defending the ban on gay marriage. If he wanted to declare it unconstitutional, he should have tried to become a judge. At the very least, he should have campaigned on the fact that he would be fighting the state’s gay marriage ban in court.

Republicans in the state seem to agree with me, not surprisingly:

“It took Mark Herring less than a month to decide he doesn’t want to be Attorney General. The first job of Virginia’s Attorney General is to be the Commonwealth’s law firm, and to defend the duly passed laws of Commonwealth,” said Republican Party of Virginia Chairman Pat Mullins.

To be fair, according to this article, Herring seems to have “stressed marriage equality as part of his campaign last year.” The article neglects to tell us what he actually said about it. Was it something general about gay rights, or did he promise to join the lawsuit against the ban? Somehow I doubt the latter.

The only other information I could find about Herring’s gay marriage promises during his campaign is from this article by David Weigel in Slate. Weigel, no fan of the gay marriage ban, approves of Herring’s actions, so it is probably true when Weigel writes that:

Gay marriage played no role in [Herring’s] campaign; in fact, Herring voted against gay marriage when it came before the legislature.

Herring would also have us think he just changed his mind on this. But does anyone actually believe that? I can’t imagine that it’s true.

Weigel also mentions this poll taken last July, which shows support for same-sex marriage in Virginia standing at 50%, and the opposition to gay-marriage at 43%. If that poll represents reality, it certainly seems that Virginians may have been poised to (as Weigel points out) “wave in gay marriages.”

Okay, if they wished to do so. But if so, why wasn’t the amendment repealed? Apparently, the pro-gay marriage forces were too impatient to allow the process to work its way through in the way it should have, and too worried that it wouldn’t succeed:

State Sen. Adam Ebbin (D-30th) has introduced legislation [in late November, 2013] to start the ball rolling to repeal the state constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman…

To repeal the 2006 amendment, legislation would have to pass the General Assembly two times with an intervening election, then would go on the ballot in the next succeeding general election. If it won first passage in the 2014 session, the measure would have to again pass the legislature in the 2016 session after the next state election, meaning the earliest the measure could go before voters would be November 2016.

Even gaining first passage in the General Assembly could be the longest of longshots, particularly in the House of Delegates. A companion bill to Ebbin’s has been introduced by Del. Joseph Morrissey (D-Richmond).

In the 2013 session, a similar measure by Del. Scott Surovell (D-Fairfax) failed to make it out of a House subcommittee. There was no companion bill in the state Senate.

When the marriage amendment was approved by the General Assembly in 2006, it passed on votes of 73-22 in the House of Delegates and 29-11 in the state Senate, winning support from a bipartisan mix of legislators. The six members of the Arlington legislative delegation at the time all voted against it.

Weigel doesn’t go into this background of how repeal might have worked, given enough time and support. Nor does any other article I’ve read so far about Herring’s recent decision not to defend the gay-marriage ban, by the way. But Weigel refers to it obliquely in the following manner:

So Virginia’s one of those states that’s probably ready to wave in gay marriages [according to the poll that showed 50% approving], but can’t, because an older and more conservative electorate locked and bolted the door.

“Locked and bolted the door”? I guess that’s how we now describe the usual, time-honored, amendment process—the same process by which the law was passed in the first place. The door isn’t “bolted” forever. It’s just that the pro-gay marriage forces know they don’t quite have the legislative support to unbolt it yet, and they don’t think there’s any reason they should have to wait to muster it. They are hoping that liberal judges—with the help of Virginia’s new AG, rather than his opposition—will do it for them.

[NOTE: This is somewhat akin to the history of Proposition 187 in California. If you’re not familiar with it, please read.]

Why Wendy Davis’ lies might matter, according to Chris Cillizza of the WaPo

The New Neo Posted on by

Because they might end up hurting her chances in 2018, by which time the demographics in Texas could favor a Democrat:

By running now, Davis effectively reserves her place at ”” or close ”” to the front of the line in future statewide races. (This happens all the time in both parties; Ed Gillespie is running for Senate in Virginia this fall with at least one eye on running well and losing but being first in line for governor in 2017.)

Unless, of course, Davis is seen as running a sub-par candidacy. And that is where the danger in these résumé questions lies for Davis. If the campaign is dogged by stories about her bio and her star ”” which is ascendant at the moment ”” is viewed as tarnished in some real way, then her ability to reserve that place at the front of the line is far less certain. And, remember that both Julian and Joaquin Castro as well as a slew of other ambitious, young Texas Democrats are eyeing Senate race in 2018 and 2020 as well as the governor’s race in 2018.

What Davis then needs most of all is not to win ”” although that would be nice for her and her supporters ”” but rather to be seen as having run a creditable campaign that continues to elevate her star status. Allegations like these about her résumé, if they persist and/or lead to other problems with the campaign, are perilous to that perception.

Otherwise, no big whoop if a Democrat runs on a resume that he/she has misrepresented to an alarming degree.

And by the way, WaPo, the word allegations in that last sentence is incorrect. An allegation is “a claim or assertion that someone has done something illegal or wrong, typically one made without proof.” The corrections to Davis’ resume are facts, facts which she has not even denied once they were publicized. They are merely inconvenient truths.

More from the Wendy Davis campaign: Greg Abbott; what does he know of struggle?

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I wrote a post about Wendy Davis that got quite a bit of blogosphere attention and traffic. It contained the surprising (to me, anyway; most Texans already knew it) piece of information that Davis’s opponent Greg Abbott has been a paraplegic since a terrible accident in his mid-20s, and that despite this fact Davis was accusing him of a failure to understand struggle and hardship. She added, with no sense of irony, that her attackers hadn’t “walked a day in my shoes.”

It turns out these statement were hardly flukes. Today I found two more quotes of the same type, both issued on Monday. No, they don’t have the gaffe-like quality of “walked a day in my shoes.” But if anything they’re even worse in terms of substance.

The first is from Matt Angle, head of the Lone Star Project, an anti-Republican group that is self-described as “one of the most aggressive and effective political research and strategic communications organizations in Texas” [emphasis mine]:

The Abbott attacks are a malicious expression of fear. Greg Abbott knows that Wendy connects with and inspires Texans. The Abbott campaign to tear down Wendy and her family show an overall hostility to mothers who have to juggle work with getting an education with raising their kids. Moreover the attacks show that Abbott is profoundly out of touch with Texans who face challenges and meet them with a courage he just can’t muster…Wendy struggled through some tough times when she was younger, worked hard, fought hard and came out a success, with daughters who adore her. That’s a real and inspiring Texas story that terrifies Greg Abbott.

The second is from Davis herself, in an interview with a reporter from the San Antonio Express-News, the original of which is unfortunately behind a firewall:

In an interview, [Davis] called [Abbott] “completely out of touch with the reality of the struggles that a young woman like I faced.”

So this is a very focused and well-thought out campaign to (a) double down on Davis’ message of how much she has struggled, despite the discrepancy between her original narrative and the facts; and (b) accuse Abbott of insensitivity to people’s struggles, as well as cowardice and fear.

From what I’ve read about Greg Abbott (most of it in the last two days), he—unlike Davis—doesn’t seem to be one to get into a contest about who’s had more suffering in life. But I’ve done the research, and I’m writing about it.

And you know what? The fact that he became a paraplegic as a young man is only part of it:

Abbott said he has been driven by the notion that he wants to do the right thing, that time is precious and life can change in the blink of an eye.

That idea came to him long before his injury, when as a teenager [Greg was 16] his father died of a heart attack. A grandfather’s death also was sudden — in a car wreck, he said.

“I’ve seen that repeat — losing my dad in an instant, actually losing my granddad in an instant too … and what happened to me, obviously,” he said. “And so basically I have an oversimplified mantra and that is you never know when a tree’s going to fall on you. … What would you do differently if you knew that? And I know that.”

Abbott is straightforward about what he lost when his legs became paralyzed, saying the last photograph of him before his accident was from a dance he attended with Cecilia [his wife].

“The inability to ever dance with her again, or to see her eye to eye as she is standing, or to hold her … or to walk into a lake — you know how it’s fun when a dad and daughter get to walk into a lake together and curl your toes into the sand? Not happening,” he said. “The little things in life that matter the most — many of them are lost.”

Still, he said, his life “has been fuller and better after my accident. It’s hard for people to understand. But there’s a greater closeness to God and a greater closeness to family and I spend time with my daughter in ways that I may not have had I not encountered this situation,” he said.

He and Cecilia adopted their daughter, Audrey, after 16 years of marriage.

Cecilia said the father-daughter bond is tight. When their daughter was 5 or 6 and people asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, Cecilia said, “She would say I want to be a judge in a wheelchair.”

What a coward. A man who clearly “is profoundly out of touch with Texans who face challenges and meet them with a courage he just can’t muster.”

Davis’ supporter Matt Angle may have thought he was writing about Abbott, but he inadvertently described Davis and her entourage instead when he wrote that the “attacks are a malicious expression of fear.” Exactly. The attacks on Abbot are not just malicious and fearful: they are stupid and despicable.

Notes from Bakunin

The New Neo Posted on by

I studied Russia’s Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) in college and I must say he puzzled me; I never quite “got” him. He seemed to be a mass of contradictory impulses.

I’m not about to take (or give) a refresher course on Bakunin, nor am I endorsing him. But I’m highlighting him here because I came across a couple of quotes from him that show how well he seemed to understand that Communism (or Marxism, or Bolshevism, or whatever he would have called it at the time) would lead to the very biggest of Big Governments and tyranny.

Here’s one quote to give you an idea of what I’m talking about:

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.

And there’s this, longer but in a similar vein:

The State has always been the patrimony of some privileged class or other; a priestly class, an aristocratic class, a bourgeois class, and finally a bureaucratic class”¦. But in the People’s State of Marx, there will be, we are told, no privileged class at all ”¦ but there will be a government, which will not content itself with governing and administering the masses politically, as all governments do today, but which will also administer them economically, concentrating in its own hands the production and the just division of wealth, the cultivation of land, the establishment and development of factories, the organization and direction of commerce, finally the application of capital to production by the only banker, the State. All that will demand an immense knowledge and many “heads overflowing with brains” in this government. It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars.

I especially like that “pretended” in the last sentence.

It’s kind of amusing…

The New Neo Posted on by

…to observe someone like New Republic’s Isaac Chotiner struggle to retain his admiration for Barack Obama’s towering intellect and superb temperament as Chotiner simultaneously realizes that Obama is actually a supremely condescending blowhard who uses a great many more words than necessary to say absolutely nothing except how wonderful he is:

Yes, the president is capable of giving intelligent and mature answers to questions. But the intent is so obvious””and the effort shows such strain””that the answers feel more condescending than enlightening. Remnick’s [New Yorker] piece, in fact, doesn’t show Obama’s complexity; it shows Obama applauding his own complexity. The president is like a novelist who demands on telling you the motivation of every character, except he is the only character.