Michael Hastings, Obama, and the swoon

The New Neo Posted on by

Journalist Michael Hastings, 33, died last Tuesday in a fiery LA automobile crash that has the internet buzzing with theories about governmental murder plots.

I know people just love, love, love conspiracy theories, but this one seems fairly weak. There were witnesses, and Hastings’ car was going close to 100 miles an hour in a suburban zone at 4 AM. He was also a habitual abuser of alcohol, which figures in some of his writing. Contrary to the idea that conflagrations such as the one that engulfed his car, and powertrain ejections such as occurred right before the fire, could never happen to a well-built Mercedes that hits a tree broadside at 100 mph (as Hastings’ car appears to have done), they can and they do, although it’s not common (see many of the comments here if you don’t take my word for it). There are also much easier ways to kill someone and hide it if the government wanted to do so, and more pressing targets than Hastings as well.

Although I’ve criticized Hastings’s writing in the past, that’s not really what this post is about. I extend deep sympathy to his family and consider his death tragic at such a young age. I’m writing this post, though, not to talk about his death, but because I am fascinated by something I came across that I’d missed earlier, which appeared in a book he wrote about the 2012 Obama campaign.

The book might even be an interesting one; I don’t know, because I haven’t read it. It’s called Panic 2012: The Sublime and Terrifying Inside Story of Obama’s Final Campaign, and you can read more about it here, including the quote that grabbed my attention:

One of those off-the-record moments [with the press during the 2012 campaign] was an event where President Obama joined reporters for drinks while the campaign was in Orlando, Fla., an event that Hastings partially details in the book.

“The behavior of the assembled press corps was telling. Everyone, myself included, swooned. Swooned! Head over heels. One or two might have even lost their minds,” Hastings writes, as each reporter had a chance to speak personally with the president. “We were all, on some level, deeply obsessed with Obama, crushing hard, still a little love there. This was nerd heaven, a politico’s paradise, the subject himself moving among us ”” shaking our hands, slapping our shoulders!”

It’s not as though we didn’t already know about this sort of thing. After all, haven’t we joked for years about “tingles” Chris Matthews of MSNBC and “pants crease” David Brooks of the NY Times? But there’s something about the above quote that still sent a shiver of horror down my spine: the blatant, bizarre, hyper-emotionality and near-eroticism (Hastings, by the way, was not gay) of the attraction.

I can think of no equivalent in modern politics in America. I certainly can in other countries, but would risk invoking Godwin’s Law if I did. The best example in this country I can think of would be JFK, and even then, although the press liked and respected Kennedy (and even loved him, in a sense), the emotion seemed to be more about Kennedy’s wit and humor than anything else.

I simply cannot imagine what it is about Obama that gets people going this way (and yes, I understand there’s a racial element of attraction to a cool black guy, but that doesn’t really explain the depth and weirdness of it, IMHO), except to say that it’s clearly something non-verbal. I believe it has been operating with Obama for virtually his entire life and has worked to his very great advantage. Quite a few people have always reacted to him as though his mere presence were almost supernaturally attractive, as if he exuded a kind of force field that made them—as Hastings so well put it—practically swoon.

It’s a dangerous phenomenon. I believe that Obama understands it and cultivates it, too. And no, I don’t think it’s actually hypnosis, although it works in some powerfully suggestive manner. It also takes advantage of the fact that so many journalists today are very young writers (like Hastings) who have done almost nothing else for a living, and so they seem especially susceptible. In the mid-20th century, reporters for major publications used to be uniformly older and to have had more varied prior experience in life and the world—more hard-boiled and hard-nosed, and less susceptible to swooning hero worship, although they were hardly immune to respect and liking.

More:

Hastings reveals that [one evening] the president spent “over an hour” with reporters who later stayed up late buzz[ing] over every detail of the evening.

“Did this inform our reporting, did seeing the man in the flesh, in a somewhat staged and casual setting, provide new, deep, and lasting insights?” asks a reflective Hastings in his book. “Yes, I would say, but again, I’m not at liberty to share.”

Later, Hastings detailed campaign journalists’ jealous protection over the details, as members quickly reminded him that the event was “off-the-record.”

Much to the ire of his fellow reporters, Hastings revealed that the event occurred ”“ a month later.

Even though the event itself was off-the-record, Hastings argued, the press corps had a duty to report that the event occurred, adding that the behavior of his fellow reporters, wasn’t necessarily off the record either.

Naturally, Hastings was chastised by many of his campaign colleagues for revealing some of the precious details of the event.

“The fear was that the White House would collectively punish all of us by revoking the already limited access or, worse, Obama might never come down and hang out with us again,” Hastings writes.

Campaign spokesperson Jen Psaki, Hastings notes, was furious and angrily phoned his editor Ben Smith for publishing details of the event. In response, the Obama campaign banished him from the campaign plane for a week.

That’s the way this White House works on the press: engender hero worship bordering on the hysterical, and then use the threat of withdrawal of the chance to be in the loved one’s presence to compel compliance.

Sick. Dangerous. And it explains quite a bit, doesn’t it?

[NOTE: It reminds me of the title of Bernard Goldberg’s 2009 book A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media. I haven’t read the book so I don’t know the content, but from the description at Amazon Goldberg appears to be describing the media’s liberal/left bias that caused reporters to lean so heavily in Obama’s direction in 2008, fail to report on his many flaws and his sordid history, and therefore enable his election.

But while this is all true, and important, I’m talking about something else—something more emotional and deep, something that interacted synergistically with the liberal biases Goldberg describes and accentuated them immensely. We are all reaping what was sowed.]

Snowden: none dare call it treason

The New Neo Posted on by

Actually, some do. But the charges filed by federal prosecutors under the Espionage Act against Edward Snowden don’t:

Snowden has been charged with three violations: theft of government property and two offenses under the espionage statutes, specifically giving national defense information to someone without a security clearance and revealing classified information about “communications intelligence.”

Each of the charges carries a maximum of 10 years in prison…

The U.S. has filed a “provisional arrest warrant,” formally asking the police in Hong Kong to arrest Snowden. Because the FBI has no jurisdiction outside U.S. borders, U.S. prosecutors must ask local police to make the arrest.

The arrest would start the formal extradition process in court, which will be governed by Chinese law and could take several months to resolve.

But by then, Snowden may be in Iceland or elsewhere. My best guess is that he will avail himself of one of the offers that will come his way through his many supporters around the world and flee to territory even less cooperative with the US than Hong Kong and the Chinese courts.

Wikileaks is helping him, naturally. As I’m sure are groups such as this one run by Daniel Ellsberg (don’t know if that exact group is still in operation, but I have little doubt there are plenty of others, and my guess would be that they helped him before the fact as well as after), about which I wrote in 2006. A brief excerpt from a much longer article:

“The Truth-Telling Project””“now, what might that be? Wretchard quotes from its web page, which offers the following description of the organization’s purpose and function:

The Truth-Telling Coalition, comprised of high-level national security truth-tellers, as well as non-profit whistleblower organizations, provides a personal and legal support network for each other and for government insiders considering becoming truth-tellers.

So, according to its own description, the group appears to be an organization dedicated to supporting the spilling of secrets by national security officers…

There doesn’t seem to be much question that Snowden is guilty of these particular charges. Although there may be some finer points that escape me, it appears pretty straightforward. And according to what I’ve read (which is hardly comprehensive), whether or not the disclosures have actually done damage to national security doesn’t seem to need to be proven in order to convict. If vows of secrecy in security matters are to mean anything, this must be the case.

Of course, Snowden’s defenders—such as accomplice after the fact journalist Glenn Greenwald—say the government is being “vindictive” in charging him. Surprise, surprise:

[Greenwald] told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that it’s not surprising that the Obama administration would, once again, engage in severe “overcharging” when what Snowden did, as Greenwald argued, was “not espionage in any real sense of the word.”

Greenwald noted that Snowden didn’t work for a foreign government, he didn’t provide information directly to America’s enemies, and he didn’t sell any top-secret information, so the espionage charge seems extreme to him.

Only one possible catch (although I doubt it would be one to trouble Greenwald): the counts with which Snowden was charged, listed above, don’t appear to require those elements to be present, although they do come under the Espionage Act. But if you read the charges’ language here, the definitions of the crimes do not seem to require foreign recipients, just ones who are unauthorized, and the first charge (theft) doesn’t require recipients at all. At least, that’s my reading of it, although I’m hardly an expert on the matter. And the penalties are also relatively mild, considering the possibilities.

As I already said, though, I believe Snowden will walk (or rather fly, to Iceland or some other amenable place) and the US will be impotent in this as in so many other matters. As for those of you who foresee a drone (or other method of killing) in Snowden’s future, I think it would generate too much negative publicity for the US to do such a thing, although I imagine Obama would dearly love to.

[NOTE: The title of this post comes from a book of the early ’60s written by John A Stormer. I’ve never read it, but it was very well-known in my youth:

Stormer’s main book None Dare Call It Treason argued that America was losing the cold war because it was being betrayed by its elites, who were procommunist. The title of the book is derived from an epigram of Sir John Harington: “Treason doth never prosper. What’s the reason? Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” It was published in 1964, during Barry Goldwater’s bid for the presidency, and sold over one million copies in the first six months.

Sounds sort of apropos, doesn’t it?]

Philip K. Dick and me

The New Neo Posted on by

Oh, I was a strange, strange child. And not the least of my strangenesses was that I loved the stories of Philip K. Dick.

That was odd in several ways. First of all, it was odd because I was a girl, and most girls in those days didn’t read science fiction. Secondly, I was eight or nine when I was doing this reading. Thirdly, Dick’s stories themselves are very strange; they seem that way to me even now.

But they are very very good. Dick’s become a great deal more famous now than he was then, and his short stories and novellas and novels have been made into several films, including “Blade Runner.” The stories, although they were the stuff of nightmare—children’s minds being especially susceptible to that sort of thing (at least mine was, with the power to frighten me in a very deep and disturbing way)—were extraordinarily compelling.

And yet I kept reading. They were just that good, and stretched the mind in a way I found almost irresistible. My favorite was probably “Second Variety,” an extraordinarily grim tale for a child—or for an adult, for that matter.

So I was delighted to read this piece at American Thinker about Dick. You may enjoy it, if you’re a fan. And you may enjoy it even if you’re not:

But in Philip Dick’s world technology is twitchy, with endless glitches, often open to abuse and exploitation by unsavory elements both in and out of government. Reality itself cannot be depended on — it can collapse under your feet like a rotten stairwell. Nothing is what it seems — even a beloved pet can turn out to be a product with an expiration date. Government officials can simply be simulations, if they exist at all. Threats can appear out of nowhere, often irrationally or even whimsically. To escape all this, the public retreats into drugs or obsessions with apparent trivia — games, “setups” for dolls, hallucinatory virtual worlds. A functional aristocracy has returned, creating a kind of techno-feudalism — (think of Tyrell, abiding alone within the peak of his vast pyramid in Blade Runner). Dick’s world can kill you in a nanosecond without anybody wondering why or even paying much attention.

[NOTE: You may also enjoy this piece about Dick, a man often thought crazy. Let’s just say he had a very unusual mind.]

Distrust vs. security, domestic and foreign: Part II

The New Neo Posted on by

[here’s McCarthy recently on how the NSA program and much of the Patriot Act had the intent of ending the firewall http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2013/06/12/congressman-sensenbrenner-is-wrong-on-patriot-act-records/ ]

Vietnam War ended right after Watergate, no coincidence. Ford was not committed to the war. Congress was reacting in part to Watergate, although mostly just to the long arduous haul. Also, the plumbers were to plug leaks, and had to do with Ellsberg at first, and Ellsberg was let off because of Watergate.]

Here’s the great McCarthy article.

Here’s my post on the history of the firewall (from August of 2005):

The antiwar movement that rose as a result of the Vietnam War had a distrust of American power and intelligence gathering and of agencies such as the CIA. The events of Watergate only “deepened the aversion,” since the burglars included former intelligence officers, and Nixon also used the CIA to obstruct the work of the FBI in trying to investigate the break-in. Furthermore, the CIA was engaged in some domestic spying scandals and other acts considered excesses, such as attempts to assassinate foreign leaders (investigated by the Congressional Church Commission of the mid-70s). The upshot of all this was, among other things, a desire to limit the power of the executive branch of government and of intelligence-gathering, because the fear was that these entities, unchecked, could (and would) combine in corrupt ways to undermine our liberties.

What were the mechanisms by which these limits were applied? Congressional oversight, and rulings by federal courts. Previously, the executive branch had been trusted in manners of national security without much input from these branches; after Vietnam and Watergate, no more”“Congress and the courts sought to keep the executive branch and the intelligence bureaus on a tight leash.

In addition, national security issues and intelligence-gathering began to be regarded as a form of law enforcement, especially when the activities took place domestically. It’s well worth quoting from McCarthy’s article on the difference between law enforcement and national security; his writing is incredibly lucid on these matters (and, coincidentally, Belmont Club touches on some of these issues in today’s post, entitled “Law vs. War):

Actually I could (and should) quote the whole thing, because it’s very relevant in tracing the conflict between civil liberties and security (and the loss of trust), and the different ways we’ve gone about trying to preserve civil liberties. After Vietnam, the pendulum definitely swung way in favor of that. And 9/11 was probably a direct result. Ironic, no?

The firewall was removed for the most part, I think. But this coordination and communication has allowed things like the NSA databank to spring up.

The fact that Obama was not trustworthy and fought dirty to win (because, as Hanson says, a lot of the scandals are for political reasons, winning the election) should have come as a surprise to no one. And yet it did. Ask Alice Palmer and Blair Hull and Jack Ryan for starters; they know.

Helen Smith: on men saying “no thanks” to marriage

The New Neo Posted on by

I confess I haven’t yet read Helen Smith’s book Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream – and Why It Matters, but it sounds fascinating. I’m quite familiar with Helen Smith’s work in general and her blog, which has long been on my blogroll.

Here’s an interview with Dr. Smith about the book.

More on the immigration bill

The New Neo Posted on by

It strikes me more and more every day that the country’s so-called leaders have no intention of dealing with illegal immigration except to give illegals citizenship and to encourage (or at least not discourage) more such immigration. The liberal/left/Democratic forces pushing this are strong and determined and disciplined, and very few Republicans seem to have the will or even the inclination to resist. Whether this is because these Republicans stupidly think support of the bill will gain them votes (my perception is that if a voter is faced with a choice between a real Democrat and a fake one, he/she will go for the real one every time—I forget who first said that, but it wasn’t me), or whether these Republicans actually believe in the principal behind the bill, or whether they’ve been paid off in some way, at this point I neither know or care. I feel a steamroller effect, and would be very surprised if some bill involving a path to citizenship and weak lip service to border security isn’t passed.

I see this as an economic disaster for the country, and a societal one as well. The latter is not because of some innate flaw in Hispanics (which I don’t think exists), it’s because of our own lack of insistence on cultural assimilation, a decision we seem to have made at some point in my own lifetime decades ago although I can’t date it exactly. That decision has done neither the country nor the Hispanics who have come here (legally or illegally) any good, although some may perceive it that way.

But when I try to think what would be the solution to the issue of what to do with the many many illegal immigrants and their children who already live here, it’s a problem so knotty that I’ve not heard a good suggestion that seems doable. We clearly don’t had the will or intent to deport every last one of them and build some sort of fence so high that no one could scale it and so deep that no one could tunnel under it. It just seems like the horse left the barn on these issues so long ago that there’s no recovering it. So at least part of the impetus for the bills that have been under consideration lately is widespread despair at the prospect of solving a problem that got out of hand ages ago.

[Hat tip: Legal Insurrection.]

What computers can do these days

The New Neo Posted on by

If true, this is both interesting and frightening:

At a research center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, agency scientists and engineers are building super computers capable of running at exaflop speed–that’s one million, trillion operations per second. Very useful in performing complex tasks, such as logging and categorizing every phone call dialed in America every day (emphasis ours), or performing brute force calculations required to break advanced encryption systems.

By some accounts, NSA has already achieved an incredible breakthrough in computer speed, creating machines in the 10-20 petaflop range, optimized for code-breaking. Others suggest the agency isn’t quite there yet, opining that the new Utah Data Center is being built to store vast amounts of information until the next generation of NSA computers can begin plumbing its voluminous haul.

Orwell was a brilliant guy with a great imagination, and his “telescreen” was a chilling concept and image. Remember, also, that his book was titled 1984. If he had written 2013 instead, he might have come up with something more computer-oriented.

One thing, though, that I object to in the above quote is the word “dialed.” Vanishingly few phone calls in the US today are “dialed.”

Congress, immigration, Republicans

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s lots of stuff today (see this, this, and this for some interesting commentary) on the pending immigration legislation.

But I’m shying away from discussing it myself right now because (a) I don’t have any more time to write today; (b) others have done plenty of the discussing for me; (c) it’s so frustrating; and (d) I’m sick not only of Republicans (and of course Democrats) but I’m sick of trying to guess how it will go down. I’m pretty sure, though, whatever the exact result, it will be lousy.

Of course, if I get too sick of (d), then I won’t be able to blog much, will I :-)?

America: a nation of drug users

The New Neo Posted on by

Legal ones, that is:

Researchers find that nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug, and more than half receive at least two prescriptions.

Mayo Clinic researchers report that antibiotics, antidepressants and painkiller opioids are the most common prescriptions given to Americans…

According to the CDC, the percent of persons using at least one prescription drug in the past month increased nearly 50 percent between 2007 and 2010 [it was “only” 48% in 2007].

I can understand that there are a lot of Americans taking blood pressure and cholesterol drugs (although, strangely enough, the latter is not specifically mentioned in this slightly more detailed report at the Mayo Clinic site). After all, more older people are living longer, and the parameters by which these conditions are defined as pathological have moved ever downward so that people who would previously have been described as healthy are now considered in need of medication.

But what gives with the 17% who have taken antibiotics in the past month? And 13% on opioids and 13% on antidepressants (including a great big whopping quarter of the women between 50 and 64??!).

You can castigate Big Pharma if you wish, but clearly doctors are part of this because they’re writing the prescriptions, and the public is probably demanding them.

I went to the online Mayo Clinic site where a longer version of the research results is supposed to be found but I haven’t been able to locate it so far. But I did see this article on a different subject, which looks pretty interesting. I don’t have the time now to read it, so I’ll save it for later. But a very brief skim indicates to me that its subject matter could be summarized this way: we know next to nothing about obesity, what causes it, or what its real effects are on health (especially mild obesity, the most common kind), and yet it doesn’t seem to stop us from spouting off about it.

Come to think of it, one of the contributing causes of obesity in America could be the prevalence of some of those drugs. For example, quite a few antidepressants and high blood pressure medications are known to cause weight gain that can be very hard to counter.

Obama’s legacy: the audacity of audacity

The New Neo Posted on by

For the past five years or so I’ve been musing on Obama as man, as politician, as president. But now I want to look again and say a few words about Obama as precedent.

Like everyone, Obama is a unique individual, and it stands to reason that his particular combination of traits and abilities will not come again in exactly the same package. Whether or not his work will live on depends on how the American people react and whom they elect next time and for the foreseeable future, and that of course includes any changes in the makeup of the voting public that might be voted into place by this Congress (i.e. immigration “reform”).

But it strikes me that one of Obama’s most pernicious influences—and there are so many to choose from—has been that he has let future politicians know what is possible in America. And, unlike his supporters, I don’t mean that in a good way.

There used to be certain assumptions on the part of politicians who would be president. As president, you needed to keep a lofty tone and leave the more vicious and divisive attacks to your Vice President; it wouldn’t be “presidential” otherwise. You had to make sure you tended to a faltering economy or you’d be blamed. You had to support our allies and be tough with those countries who were working against us. You had to propose legislation on issues the American people cared about and supported, not just your pet projects, and that had some bipartisan support, especially if the changes were sweeping. You had to answer to the press or they would turn on you. And you had to respect Congress and the Constitution enough to go through Congress in order to do what you thought should be done if it was a power Congress usually had, not go around it through executive order

Some of this could be violated, of course, and has been, particularly the last one, because power is one of the things for which presidents strive. But if you went against too many of these rules the American people (and perhaps Congress, perhaps even your own party in some cases) was very likely to turn against you and not re-elect you. Or if it were a second term you’d lose your “mandate” and political capital and become a lame duck immediately. At least, that was the fear. So the idea that there would be consequences for such things helped hold previous presidents in check to a large extent, although of course there were some who violated this tenet or that and survived.

But generally there was a certain respect for the unwritten law of natural consequences: the belief was that the American people had its limits. You could con all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, and all that. But enough of the people would be onto your game to stop you.

Obama has proven all of that is bunk for the right person at the right time. What’s more, his entire career has proven that he is that person. He has managed somehow to be one of the trickiest and dirtiest of politicians (from the start of his rise in local Chicago politics, as I’ve described many times before), one of the most double-crossing and double-dealing and just plain doubling, presenting himself as one thing and acting like another while simultaneously presenting one of the smoothest and most above-it-all facades ever exhibited by a politician. He has talked his way out of every jam, or stonewalled his way out, with nearly complete impunity and lack of consequences. He had accomplished very little in his path leading to the presidency—except, of course, having won election to his previous positions—and still had no trouble convincing people he should receive the highest office in the land at a fairly young age. And most importantly, in his first term he egregiously violated every one of the rules I listed above and was re-elected. His popularity had fallen but not enough to matter in any way in terms of consequences.

How he has managed to accomplish this is something I (and many many others) have described in literally hundreds of post. So that’s not the point of this one. The point of this one is to say that he has shown future presidents that these previous assumptions are false, and that the rules that held presidents in check can be violated with impunity if you know what you’re doing and do it with enough audacity.

If that stands, it may be one of his worst legacies: the knowledge that you can fool enough of the people enough of the time and get away with it.

On patience: the West vs. Islamicist totalitarianism

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a re-post of an piece I wrote in 2008. I found it yesterday while doing a search for some information I wanted for a comment, and I thought that, in light of recent news in Syria and elsewhere, it could bear repeating.]

Our post-9/11 unity was fleeting, if not totally illusory. We are now bitterly divided on how to fight the war against Islamicist totalitarianism.

We are divided on whether there is such a war. We are divided on who our most important enemies in that war might be. We are even divided on whether we truly have what we might call enemies, or whether a nice friendly dialogue might not be enough to make us all get along better.

But on reading this article by Clfford D. May in National Review entitled “100 Years of War?”—a reference to Barack Obama’s distortion of John McCain’s remark that we might need to keep troops in Iraq for that long a time, similar to what we’re already doing in Germany and South Korea—it occurred to me that there is another division, and that this division might actually be the heart of the matter.

This split may have begun to occur as early as 9/11 itself, shortly after the towers fell. It has to do with the perception of how long we should expect this fight to take. The division is between those who always assumed it would be long and arduous, and those who did not. Continue reading →