Hey, let’s pile on Christie!

The New Neo Posted on by

Like sharks in the water, they smell blood. So there will probably be more of this sort of allegation, which seems to rest on word of mouth and involves two more officials in Christie’s administration.

And I would not be a bit surprised if some woman comes forward with sexual harassment charges soon. They are especially useful because they’re so hard to prove or disprove. In addition, no doubt teams of reporters are going through dumpsters in Christie’s vicinity even as we speak. At the very least, they might find some empty ice cream cartons.

Bridgegate was clearly true since it was substantiated by emails from the culprits themselves. Nothing has tied their actions directly to Christie, and probably nothing will. These new allegations – and whatever ones will follow – have the purpose of trying to create an atmosphere around Christie that will lead people to conclude (if they haven’t already) that of course he’s behind all of it.

That’s the way memes work. Bush is a dummy. Palin is a troglodyte Christian science-denier. Romney is an uncaring rapacious capitalist pig. Cain is a serial rapist. Christie is a corrupt bully.

My reaction? I thought threats like these were the way New Jersey politics works. I can’t imagine how, even if Christie were completely innocent (and I have no idea whether he is or isn’t), he could possibly keep this sort of thing from occurring at the hands of someone somewhere in his administration.

Of course, this is the way politics is done in Chicago, too. President Obama is part of that culture, and there is very little doubt that his administration is rife with such behavior. But hey, he doesn’t look like a corrupt bully, does he? And the MSM is playing a very different game with him than they are with Christie.

If you read just one biography of Robert Frost…

The New Neo Posted on by

…I think it should be this one by Jay Parini.

I’ve read quite a few, and Jay Parini’s is the only one that seems to capture the Frost I sense from Frost’s poetry and his other writings. Plus, Parini’s book is very readable, with an excellent flow—something I can’t say for many of the other biographies. It reads almost like a novel.

What’s more, Parini is a poet himself and has lived most of his life in Frost country, teaching at Dartmouth in New Hampshire and Middlebury in Vermont. He understands both poetry and the territory, and he spends quite a bit of his book in fresh and insightful reading of the poems.

From a review of the book, which came out in 1999:

Robert Lee Frost, that quintessential New England writer, was born in 1874 in San Francisco. His ill-matched parents seem to have stepped from some nasty naturalist novel of the period. Frost’s mother, pretty and ”ethereal,” as Jay Parini describes her in his sturdy and well-informed new biography, ”Robert Frost: A Life,” was besotted with Swedenborg and spiritualism — her name, Belle Moodie, could hardly have been more apt. Will Frost, by contrast, was a hard-drinking, pistol-packing newspaperman who kept a jar of pickled bull’s testicles on his desk (meaning, presumably, ”Don’t mess with me”)…

Robert Frost was a brilliant student; as Parini notes, he became a better Latinist than those self-proclaimed ”classicists” Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. But he found academic rituals stultifying and thought the classroom was about the last place to pick up anything useful. ”We go to college,” he wrote, ”to be given one more chance to learn to read in case we haven’t learned in high school.”…

In 1958, when Frost turned 85, his publisher gave a party in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria and invited Lionel Trilling to be the featured speaker. Trilling, who preferred cities to rural idylls, shocked everyone by confessing that he had only recently come to admire Frost’s work, specifically for its overlooked grimness. ”I regard Robert Frost as a terrifying poet,” he announced. Trilling sent a letter to Frost apologizing for the stir his remarks had caused. ”Not distressed at all,” Frost wrote back. ”You made my birthday a surprise party.” And then, in one of those swooping summations with which he regularly rewards his readers, Frost added: ”No sweeter music can come to my ears than the clash of arms over my dead body when I am down.”

Frost had a wry, playful way of speaking, so that reports of things he said or things he wrote in letters have a naturally aphoristic quality, almost like small poems themselves. And his poems have a colloquial quality, too. It all seems to be of a piece.

Want to know what Scott Walker thinks about it?

The New Neo Posted on by

He tells you, here, in a long interview with John Hawkins of Right Wing News.

On Obamacare:

…[W]hat we should be doing is sharing in the frustration that most Americans have with it and then showing them that we’ve got a positive, viable alternative that’s not based on more government. It’s based on putting patients in charge, giving them the ability to purchase plans across state lines, giving them the ability to have the same tax benefits whether they buy their health insurance through their employer, whether they buy it in the market, whether they go off and do something like a health savings account. The government shouldn’t be treating them differently when it comes to tax advantages. Health care should be something that we control, not something the government controls.

…I think you’ve got to get rid of everything with Obamacare. The whole thing is a mess and I think for the handful of pundits that say, well, what about this, that, or whatever, there are little tiny components like you said, like opening up the access over state lines or things like that, that could be done ”” but I think it should be very limited and I’m not an advocate of going back to the old system. I think you repeal it and go the opposite direction. I think the old system was too bureaucratic and had too much in government intervention.

On the basic message Walker thinks Republicans should be delivering:

…[O]ne of the things that frustrates me so much in the Presidential election is I thought there was a tremendous lost opportunity ”” and obviously the clearest example of that was when Republican nominees talked about the 47% and also in a similar conversation talked about not worrying about the poor because the poor had a safety net. That really, truly doesn’t match where I’m at. I don’t think it matches with people like Ronald Reagan who was a great inspiration for me as a kid. I went back in the book and talked about how Reagan in 1980 at the National Convention in Detroit in his acceptance speech talked about things like saying if you’re living in poverty, we want to lift you out. If you’re living in despair, we want to be hope, but that hope isn’t based on more government. It’s based on empowering people with the skills and the talents and the abilities that they need to go out and control their own lives and so I think the message is really simple, I believe, and I think this was the missed opportunity. I believe the president and his allies in Washington in particular measure success in government by how many people are dependent on government, by how many people are on Medicaid, by how many people are on food stamps, by how many people are on unemployment. That’s why they want to extend unemployment benefits. They want more people signed up, more people dependent. I think we as Republicans should measure success by just the opposite ”” by how many people are no longer dependent on the government, not because we’ve got to be careful to articulate this correctly, not because we don’t care about people or because we want to push people out to the streets, but because we understand that true freedom and prosperity don’t come from the mighty hand of the government. It comes from empowering the people to control their own lives and their own destiny.

”¦.And that’s the message that we’ve got to get out to people ”” that the Left, they want you under their thumb. They want to control you. They want to control your lives. They want you to be dependent on the government. We should say we’re the ones, not only for the poor, but for young people coming out of college, for working class families, for immigrants, for others out there. We should say we are the ones who empower the American Dream. We’re the ones who say you can do and be anything you want, but it’s because we empower you with the ability and the platform to do that. Then it’s up to you to make that happen. The other side tells you they want to help you, but in the end they want to keep you limited in how far you can grow.

I think that last paragraph might be the more important part. It’s hard for politicians not to sound as though they’re just saying the same-old same-old blah blah blah. I’m not the best judge of how political rhetoric comes across—when most politicians (on either side) speak, my reaction alternates between a cringe and a yawn. Ordinarily, for me the difference between a Republican speaker and a Democratic speaker is merely the cringe/yawn ratio, and I usually can’t take too much of either.

The things I like about Walker (my front-runner so far) are his executive experience, his principles, and his guts and fighting spirit, as well as his success in a mostly-blue state such as Wisconsin countering whatever the left could throw at him. That is a formidable accomplishment.

His rhetoric and charisma, I suspect, leave quite a bit to be desired. But I don’t know how much they are lacking because I haven’t watched or listened to him speak all that much. I fear Walker will have too much of the blah-blah-blah factor, but I don’t know; that last paragraph I quoted above seems to have a good ring to it.

What do I like about Christie (and yes, as I’ve written before, if he’s nominated I most definitely plan to vote for him—unless some new and truly abominable revelation comes out)? His executive experience, his guts and fighting spirit, and his success in a blue state such as New Jersey. Note what I left out from the Walker list: his conservative principles. I do think Christie has some, at least in fiscal matters.

But the one thing Christie’s got that Walker doesn’t have is the fact that when Christie speaks he minimizes both the boring factor and the cringe factor, at least for me. Perhaps I’m partial to his manner because it speaks to me of home. It’s very very familiar to me because it conjures up the people who surrounded me where I was growing up (not my family especially, but the larger community where I was raised). I recognize it and think I understand it. The style has energy, humor, and bluntness, and I find that refreshing in a politician.

I don’t know how many people agree with me, though. I’m not exactly typical of voters, or even of Republican or conservative voters. Nor, probably, are you.

[ADDENDUM: I just noticed that Ann Althouse highlighted that same paragraph I did from Walker’s interview. That’s interesting, since Althouse voted for Obama in 2008. She writes:

That’s a nice combination of staunch conservatism with empathy and caring, which is, I think, what the GOP should want in its next presidential candidate. Walker has absorbed and processed the “income inequality” theme that the Democratic Party has chosen to push.

Agreed.]

[ADDENDUM II: Ace weighs in, too.]

Obama announces new NSA policy—sort of

The New Neo Posted on by

Actually (and I didn’t listen to his speech) it appears that he asked Congress to study the situation and make recommendations by the end of March as to how the phone metadata program can work to collect the information without that data being stored by the government. Andrew McCarthy adds:

Expect delay on this, with the tough calls punted to Congress. It is entirely appropriate that this should be settled by legislation, but the controversy will still center on how the executive branch ”“ which has independent constitutional authority to conduct surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes ”“ exploits whatever Congress designs.

It’s interesting that Obama is saying to Congress, “You figure it out.” And then, as McCarthy suggests, he’ll do whatever he wants?

“Wolf of Wall Street” fashion

The New Neo Posted on by

And now for a change of pace—I guess they still call it “fashion.”

These outfits were seen at the UK premiere of the Scorcese film “The Wolf of Wall Street.” I am in awe at the almost infinite variety of their deep horribleness, although some are clearly more horrible than others.

This woman was putting on her underwear, then unfortunately got tangled in a sooty cobweb. Pressed for time, she decided to throw on her boyfriend’s jacket and hoped it would cover the whole thing. It didn’t:

WWS

This woman’s inspiration: flying squirrel? Bat? Zorro?

WWS2

This woman had the same initial problem as the one in the first photo, except instead of throwing on her boyfriend’s jacket, she decided to go with her very own flesh-colored bathrobe:

WWS3

This lady is attempting the French schoolgirl look, a la Leslie Caron in “Gigi,” but doesn’t quite make the grade (although she is by far the best of the lot):

WWS5

Why? WHY? Any of these women could wear nearly anything and look better than this.

In case you’re wondering about Leslie Caron and that French schoolgirl look, this is what I mean:

LC2

LC3

Caron—an absolute charmer.

Senate Intelligence Committee report on Benghazi released

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not at all sure most people will care, because the left has succeeded in making just the word “Benghazi” a big yawn for way too many people. But for what it’s worth, the Senate Intelligence Committee has issued a fairly blistering report on the Benghazi debacle.

Aside from some all-important pre-2016 minimizing of Hillary Clinton’s role by the majority Democrats, who claim that the early “it was a video” emphasis was the result of poor communication by US intelligence rather than an administration coverup, here are the some of the highlights (or lowlights, depending how you look at it) of the report’s findings, as described by Ed Morrissey at The Fiscal times:

The committee found that a string of terrorist attacks in Benghazi against Western targets, especially one three months before the final attack on the US facility itself, should have alerted State to the danger it faced. Furthermore, the committee questioned how State could have ignored its own security standards to approve the use of the building, a decision reapplied in July when State renewed the lease ”“ just weeks after the previous attack.

These two issues ”“ of the terrorist activity and the inexplicable waivers for proper security ”“ drive most of the bipartisan condemnation of the report. The committee pointedly notes that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) warned the Obama administration in June 2012 of the growing threat against Western interests in Benghazi in a report with a title that should have grabbed attention: “Libya: Terrorists Now Targeting U.S. and Western Interests.”…

The CIA did not formally share knowledge of the existence of their annex with the Department of Defense. The commander of US Africa Command, General Carter Ham, had no idea that there were more personnel to protect until the attack, leading the Republicans to muse: “We are puzzled as to how the military leadership expected to effectively respond and rescue Americans in the event of an emergency when it did not even know of the existence of one of the U.S. facilities.”…

It’s as if the Pentagon, CIA, and State Department set out to ignore the red flags they themselves had been raising all year long. No one was prepared on the anniversary of 9/11 for an attack in the region where everyone knew al Qaeda to be “establishing sanctuary,” openly operating, and where the US predicted attacks would escalate.

The State Department in particular didn’t take action to bring its facility into compliance with its own security requirements, purposefully waiving them, in a city where terrorist attacks had already begun to escalate ”“ including one on the facility itself ”“ nor took action to get Americans out of harm’s way, despite the departure of other Western nations from Benghazi earlier in the year.

One does not need a name at the top of this report to know where responsibility rests for this massive failure. Hillary Clinton ran State, Leon Panetta ran Defense, and David Petraeus ran the CIA. But the distributed nature of the failure indicts the Obama administration and Barack Obama himself, too. The White House is responsible for interagency coordination, for one thing, especially when it comes to national security and diplomatic enterprises.

However, Obama’s responsibility extends farther and more specifically, too. The reason that eastern Libya had transformed into a terrorist haven in the first place was because of the Obama-led NATO intervention that deposed Moammar Qaddafi without any effort to fill the security vacuum his abrupt departure created.

Americans, who should care, seem to be sleepwalking through all of this. The fact that the Democratic majority on the committee signed off on it is unusual enough to be worthy of note and should be significant. But unless both parties are prepared to make a big stink about it, I’m afraid that nothing will happen as a result.

The anti-Christie forces have settled on a meme…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and the meme is “bully.”

Which I think is an interesting word to use for a politician. “Bully” conjures up all the current anti-bullying campaigns that have to do with school and the playground, but politics is not the schoolyard nor are we children (we just act like them sometimes). “Bully” also plays on Christie’s bulk: the picture is of a big hulking nasty guy punching out the little kids.

But again, this is politics. Doesn’t the word also convey the idea that he’s not a wimp, that he’s a fighter? I’m talking about metaphors here, not reality; no one thinks Christie throws any literal punches. And of course, as a fat guy, Christie is actually the one who’s the more natural target of bullies—including his opponent in his first New Jersey governor’s race, Jon Corzine, whose bullying of Christie for being fat failed to win Corzine the election.

Daniel Henninger points out the contrast between the treatment of Christie for Bridegate and the winking at the far more serious bullying (although he doesn’t use that word) perpetrated by the Obama administration, Obama, and his underlings, as well as the left in general:

The Christie bonfire has burned for a week. In that same week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the FBI found nothing in the IRS’s targeting of conservative political groups that warrants criminal charges…

Thus, two of the most powerful public institutions in the U.S.””the FBI and the IRS””have concluded no harm, no foul, and the memory hole swallows the Obama administration’s successful kneecapping of the GOP’s most active members just as they prepared to participate in the 2012 presidential campaign. Many””ruined or terrified by the IRS probes””shut down. Mr. Obama won.

One may be thankful that corners of the U.S. judiciary remain intact and unintimidated. Late last week, a judge in Wisconsin slowed down what was essentially a Democratic prosecutor’s star-chamber investigation of conservative groups that supported Republican Gov. Scott Walker. A special prosecutor armed with subpoena power had been poring over the groups’ finances, while a gag order stopped the groups from saying they were his targets.

On Friday, a court quashed some of the subpoenas for lack of probable cause. That’s good, but don’t expect to see Friends of Scott Walker going on offense any time soon. Legal pistol-whippings by state prosecutors can have that effect, win or lose.

As Henninger writes earlier in the piece, this sort of thing makes Chris Christie (and/or his aides) look like Little Bo Beep.

Note also how important the legal system and the courts are to the other stories Henninger points out. People often ignore the vast effect that judicial appointments have on the way things go, but they are vital. The more the left takes over that system, the more deeply entrenched leftist thought becomes. That is one of the main reasons that the Senate recently established simple majority approval for presidential appointments; they know how overwhelmingly important this is for their agenda. The left wrote the book on “bullying”—only that’s way too mild a word for it.

Something people don’t seem to understand about Obamacare

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve noticed this before, and I noticed it again while reading this article in the Washington Examiner about Obamacare. Here’s the quote that caught my attention:

Former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey, a Republican who is now a health care advocate, said Obamacare’s lack of first-class hospitals is a big problem.

“It’s not just the number, but who they are. You’ll find under the Obamacare exchanges that the academic hospitals have declined to participate, along with the specialists who practice at those hospitals. The same is true of cancer hospitals,” she said.

“People who are seriously ill need to stay away from these exchange plans,” McCaughey said.

But what McCaughey doesn’t appear to understand—and what my research so far has told me is true (although Obamacare is so Byzantine there’s always the possibility of error)—is that in the individual market there is almost no way for people, seriously ill or otherwise, to “stay away from these exchange plans.”

For those with employer-based insurance, they can stay away (for now—we’ll see how that changes next year). Employer-based plans still have good networks. But people without employer-based insurance who must seek individual policies don’t for the most part have access to those networks, they only have access to the more narrow Obamacare networks.

You might say, “But what of people who buy individual insurance off the exchanges? Can’t they circumvent the problem?” After doing a lot of research (including phoning insurance companies), everything I’ve read and heard points to the fact that the entire individual health insurance business has restructured itself to conform with Obamacare, and that individual policies off the exchanges are the exact same policies as those on the exchanges.

That includes the narrow networks. The only difference is that off the exchanges you can’t get a subsidy, although the plus side is that off the networks you don’t have to deal with the healthcare.gov website and its perils.

As an alternative, you can buy temporary catastrophic insurance that allows you to go to any doctor. But temporary insurance is just that: temporary. It is limited to one 6-month period or at the most two, depending on the state. Then you are not allowed to buy it anymore.

So the only way a person buying individual insurance could act according to McCaughey’s suggestion is to not buy insurance at all. If you’re paying out-of-pocket, then you can go anywhere you want. Most people can’t afford to do that, of course, especially the “seriously ill,” the ones McCaughey was addressing in her statement.

If anyone has done research that contradicts what I’m saying, please let me know. Obamacare is a maze of complications, arcane rules, and contradictions, and it’s much like an iceberg, the bulk of which is invisible.

The ladder of evil

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Ymarsakar” made an interesting observation two days ago. The subject:

When the world declares Jews, Republicans, and whites to be non humans that need to be exterminated to get rid of a threat to humanity, most people will Obey.

Most will. They have nothing in their spine that can resist the Power of the World and its numbers. Nothing.

I have a slightly different take on it. I’ve long conceptualized the whole thing as a hierarchy of evil and the resistance to it, a sort of ladder with many rungs. Here they are, in order from most evil to most dedicated to fighting evil:

Some people will conceptualize, plan, and implement it as leaders.

Some people will actively cooperate with vigor.

Some people will support it but not actively participate.

Some people will be indifferent unless it directly reaches them or their family.

Some people will be somewhat disturbed by it, but manage to put it out of their minds most of the time and go on with their lives.

Some people will be disturbed by it and contemplate various forms of resistance, but will be too frightened to act.

Some people will be disturbed by it and will decide to act in small ways to resist it, ways they consider lower risk.

Some people will be disturbed by it and will decide to take great risks in order to resist it, but could be stopped by threats (not necessarily threats to themselves, but threats to friends and family).

Some people will risk all to actively resist it in every way they can.

An example of the latter would be those Poles who continued their rescue efforts and resistance despite this type of retribution from the Nazis:

Poland was the only place where German law rendered any assistance to Jews punishable by death. That punishment was severe and collective: It was meted out not only to the rescuer but also to his entire family and to anyone else who knew about such activities and did not report them. Almost 1,000 Poles were killed this way, including entire families whose children were not spared.

When we talk about the prevalence of evil in humanity, and whether people are “good at heart,” this is what I think we’re actually discussing. What percentage of the population belongs to each group? I don’t know, but if I had to guess at the shape of a graph, it probably would be a normal distribution—that is, the biggest bump would be in the middle groups, with much smaller numbers for the beginning and ending rungs of the ladder of evil.

So what causes the difference among the groups? Why is a person in one rather than another? Darned if I know, but I have ideas. Some of it probably has to do with devotion to something beyond oneself, which could be religion (in certain circumstances it could even be Communism—in Poland, for example, many of the resisters to the Nazis were Communists). This can lead to good or to evil (such as the 9/11 terrorists). Many of the differences among groups almost certainly involve personal traits that are some combination of nature and nurture, such as the extent of the devotion to liberty. And although psychopaths/sociopaths (the ladder’s first couple of rungs) are often born, certain societies in certain times can be especially effective at fostering and encouraging and promoting them, and using them most fully to further goals of the group rather than just goals of the individual psychopath/sociopath.

In the end, though, there is something mysterious about it all: the problem of evil, with which humankind has been wrestling for aeons.