Romney and “Independence Day”

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day I watched the last half of a movie on TV that I’d never caught before: “Independence Day,” made in 1996. A few minutes into it Bill Pullman, the actor playing the US president, came into view.

I was stunned. He was a ringer for Romney. I’ve said before that Romney looks like a president sent from Central Casting, but I hadn’t before realized it was literally true.

The resemblance isn’t quite as dramatic in full face closeup. But in profile and three-quarters face, and especially when the actor’s whole body is shown–the proportions of the head/body, and the proportions of the features within the head shape—it’s especially striking.

By the way, in the film the president is a former fighter pilot. More like Bush senior, and somewhat more like Bush junior, than like Romney.

Is the spin making you dizzy?

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s almost funny to read the contrasting headlines, best seen on a site like RealClearPolitics. Here’s the list I found there last night:

Obama’s Road to Victory in Ohio – Nate Cohn, The New Republic
The Inflection Point: Obama Won’t Catch Romney – Rick Wilson, Ricochet
The State of the States: Obama’s Odds Still Over 70% – Nate Silver, NYT
Gallup Party ID Figures Predict Solid Romney Win – Neil Stevens, RedState
Two Types of Romney Malarkey – Noam Scheiber, The New Republic
The Obama Campaign Is Right to Panic – Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post
It’s Always Been a Matter of Trust – Steve Benen, MSNBC
Holes in the Obama Battleship – Jonah Goldberg, National Review

Yin and Yang, matter and anti-matter, glass half full half empty—these paired-yet-opposite sets of prognostications give us whiplash as they cancel each other out. Of course, some are right and some are wrong, but we won’t know which is which until the final denouement.

Until then, only the Shadow knows, and he’s not telling.

[NOTE: Like you, perhaps, I tend to think that the articles that predict the election will go the way I want it to display more logic and better reasoning all around. But alas, that doesn’t mean they will end up being correct.]

Here’s the question you’ve no doubt been wondering about

The New Neo Posted on by

So, what about the sex lives of cojoined twins?

Lest you think I’m just being frivolous and/or sensationalistic, the topic raises perplexing issues of identity and perception. With cojoined twins such as Chang and Eng Bunker, the original “Siamese” twins, who had separate bodies joined at their intact livers and with a small bit of extra cartilage, their sex lives would probably have been more like having a constant witness. But that ever-present spectator would be a person so psychologically close that non-cojoined non-twins can’t even begin to imagine the relationship, except to say that everything—toileting, sleep, walking, going to the movies—would have been occurring in the company of the other person since birth.

The Bunker twins could have been easily separated these days, with modern surgical techniques. Those cojoined twins who remain joined today are much more inextricably entwined. Modern twins such as Abby and Britanny Hensel (subjects of a recent TLC TV show), who have two upper bodies and one lower, face a very different situation. Quite obviously (unless there’s something I’m missing), sharing a single lower body would mean that each twin would physiologically participate in each act of sex.

But the mind is an amazing thing. Any cojoined twins would have to have had almost no notion of privacy throughout their entire lives—or rather, perhaps, an exquisitely attuned and highly developed sense of privacy that involves remaining separate psychologically while being in each other’s constant company, a delicacy and discretion born of extreme necessity. And to twins cojoined in the particular manner of Abby and Britanny, sex would present only a specialized subset of a conundrum the twins had been forced to deal with long ago.

It’s their partner[s] who might have more difficulty growing accustomed to the situation, rather than the twins themselves. The legal system might have a bit of difficulty with it, too: who would actually be married to whom? For example, would any marriage to the Hensels be defined by necessity as bigamy? And would they both be the legal mothers of any child? To the Hensel twins—who have surmounted so many difficulties so far, with such overwhelming psychological health—it probably all seems like small potatoes.

Obama feels your pain

The New Neo Posted on by

On the campaign trail, his voice “coarse and tired” (don’t they mean “hoarse and tired”?), Obama tries empathy:

“Look, Ohio, I know we’ve been through tough times,” Obama said. “Every day I think about everybody out there across the country who’s still looking for a job…whose homes may be still under water or at risk of foreclosure. The folks out there who at the end of the month are sitting at the kitchen table trying to figure out, How am I going to make all these bills? Michelle and I understand it, because we know what it’s like to have a tough time sometimes.”

We know what it’s like to have a tough time sometimes. What does that even mean? That once he and Michelle had a problem of some sort? That he and Michelle, graduates of some of the finest educational institutions in the land, with many positions from which to choose (and early celebrity and book contracts on his part, contracts which were extended when he failed to produce), didn’t know where their next meal was coming from, or how to provide for the basics?

Whatever is he talking about?

I know what he’s talking about, of course. He’s setting himself up as the proletariat vs. the privileged aristocrat Romney. Your struggle is his struggle, and all that.

And then there’s the myth of Obama the racial healer

The New Neo Posted on by

This is in some sense a companion piece to the post below it, continuing the theme of “how could they have ever thought this?” Ann Althouse writes about a Camille Paglia interview in which Paglia says she’s not voting for Obama again (she’s not voting for Romney either, by the way) because [emphasis mine]:

I was very excited about him. I thought he was a moderate. I thought that his election would promote racial healing in the country…

And instead: one thing after another. Not least: I consider him, now, one of the most racially divisive and polarizing figures ever. I think it’s going to take years to undo the damage to relationships between the races.

I’m glad she came to her senses, but the fact that Paglia initially thought Obama would promote racial healing is but another example of supposedly smart people believing really dumb things about Obama. Althouse shared Paglia’s belief to a lesser extent; she says she hoped for moderation in attitudes about race.

But the catch is that there was absolutely nothing in Obama’s background that indicated he would have some magical ability to do this—unless you count (as perhaps Paglia and Althouse counted) his very existence as a black person who had been elected president. That would be a sign of how far America had come, though, not a mechanism for racial healing but evidence that it had already occurred.

Obama’s actual behavior (as opposed to his rhetoric) was something else entirely. During the 2008 campaign he was actively and vigorously playing the race card, calling opponents racists in various not-so-subtle ways (see this). How could anybody paying attention not have noticed—and seen the significance of—this 2008 statement by Obama himself?:

We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?

And this at a time when no one in the Republican Party or the McCain campaign had done any such thing, nor would they. Back then I referred to Obama’s tactic as “playing the pre-emptive race card,” and it certainly couldn’t be called an example of a propensity for racial harmony and healing. Nor, of course, would Obama’s long-term veneration of “mentor” Reverend Wright. This did not portend a lack of racial divisiveness; Wright stood for racial divisiveness.

The whole thing probably comes down once again to seeing what we want to see, and especially the overvaluation of words over actions among so many of those who deal with words for a living. I noticed the phenomenon back in June of 2008 and even wrote a post about it, but I guess I’m still having trouble accepting and understanding how widespread it is. The principle of the importance of actions over words seems so basic that I simply cannot understand the propensity to ignore it among so many.

And too many of those people (although not Paglia, and perhaps not Althouse) are still supporting Obama despite everything they’ve learned in the past four years. If Obama is re-elected, it will be due to their continuing hope that somehow Obama is the man he says he is rather than the man he had been proven to be.

In which the scales finally fall from Peggy Noonan’s eyes

The New Neo Posted on by

But my question is: why was she ever fooled by Obama in the first place?

This is the mystery to me: the spell Obama wove over bright people who should have known better. I know, I know: he’s a con man (after all, I wrote a piece on that subject myself, three long years ago). And yet, and yet, I just can’t quite wrap my mind around this sort of thing from Noonan, describing Obama’s first debate with Romney [emphasis mine]:

What [Obama] couldn’t do was present himself, when everyone was looking, as smaller than you thought. Petulant, put upon, above it all, full of himself. He couldn’t afford to make himself look less impressive than the challenger in terms of command, grasp of facts, size.

But that’s what he did.

And in some utterly new way the president was revealed, exposed. All the people whose job it is to surround and explain him, to act as his buffers and protectors””they weren’t there. It was him on the stage, alone with a competitor.

What was “utterly new” about this? “Petulant, put upon, above it all, full of himself”? That’s been Obama from day one, has it not?

But Noonan, like so many, just didn’t see it. I haven’t read too many of Noonan’s columns, so I don’t know much about the quality of her critical thinking, but as Reagan’s speechwriter she has some creds with me. Of course, speech writing and thinking for oneself are not necessarily synonymous; they require different skill sets. But one would hope they go together, although they probably don’t.

For Noonan, it may be as simple as admiring Obama’s speeches and mistaking them for the man. Since I never saw anything but empty and grandiose platitudes in his speeches, that puzzles me too. But I’m not a speechwriter, and Noonan may have been listening to Obama in admiration with a speechwriter’s ear. Noonan goes on to say:

He is not by any means a stupid man but he has become a boring one; he drones, he is predictable, it’s never new.

Well Peg, I hate to tell you, but that happened quite some time ago, too—in fact, some time around 2008. I still don’t have a clue why you failed to notice.

At any rate, she’s noticing now. And she comes to a remarkable conclusion. Quoting an unnamed US senator, Noonan writes:

People back home, he said, sometimes wonder what happened with the president in the debate. The senator said, I paraphrase: I sort of have to tell them that it wasn’t a miscalculation or a weird moment. I tell them: I know him, and that was him. That guy on the stage, that’s the real Obama.

Since this “real Obama” has been in evidence from the start, I’ll try to answer the question of why so many people were able to see it during the first debate who (like Noonan) had never seen the “real Obama” before.

Obama’s previous moments of petulance, etc., were short-lived and interspersed with the loftier rhetoric of speeches. There were an awful lot of petulant, arrogant moments, but people didn’t connect the dots because they saw orator-Obama much more often. Remember, also, this is a president who hardly ever gives press conferences, and whose interviews are puff pieces with softball questions, perfect set-ups to allow Obama to pontificate freely and maintain his nice-guy facade of equanimity. The debate with Romney gave viewers a much fuller dose of non-teleprompter Obama than before, and the sight wasn’t a pretty one.

But wait a minute—the 2008 debates four years ago were also a time when, for Obama (as Noonan writes), “It was him on the stage, alone with a competitor,” for the same amount of uninterrupted non-teleprompter time. So why wasn’t the “real Obama” revealed back then? The reason is that John McCain was an enervated competitor, afraid to hit Obama hard, and whose forte had never been debating anyway. Obama was relaxed and supple. Plus, back then Obama had no record to defend; it was all about words, and he could promise almost anything and still be believed.

So during the first debate of 2012 the difference wasn’t just that it was Obama “on the stage, alone with a competitor.” That had happened before. It was that it was “him on the stage, alone with Mitt Romney”—and Obama’s own record.

The contrast between the two men was extraordinary. It was apparently revelatory to people like Noonan, and even to Chris Matthews and other pundits of the left. It wasn’t just that Romney wasn’t the cold, rapacious, heartless capitalist pig that Obama had painted him. It was that he seemed smarter and warmer and more—yes, there’s that word—presidential than the president himself.

Gloria Allred tries to implement Obama’s absolute favorite campaign tactic

The New Neo Posted on by

It appears that Gloria Allred has achieved one of her goals but not all of them. She will have to rely on the Boston Globe to do the heavy lifting.

I predict this will not work. People are tired of Allred’s shenanigans, and the “woman scorned” angle taints it even further.

So sad that Romney himself doesn’t have any divorce records to unseal, so they have to go for surrogates. Romney is so squeaky-clean it’s ridiculous; must have the Obama campaign fuming.

[NOTE: If you’re still unaware of Obama’s history with this sort of ploy, read up on the story of Obama vis a vis Blair Hull and Jack Ryan.]

[UPDATE: It turns out even Romney’s dirty linen is clean.]

Size matters

The New Neo Posted on by

That is, in the self-reports of 33% of female Scottish university students who have mostly vaginal orgasms and who have had enough sexual partners to compare size experiences.

And the size that mattered was length.

Sixty percent of the female Scottish university students who report having mostly vaginal orgasms and who have had enough sexual partners to compare size expiences (are you still with me, folks?) say size doesn’t matter.

Probably best to stay away from those female Scottish university students, though, just to be on the safe side.

And if you’re thinking female sexuality is a bit hard to understand, try this on for size.

Obama continues to be…

The New Neo Posted on by

…a class act.

The above link is the current featured headline on Drudge, but right now you can’t get to the article. The Drudge attention appears to have crashed the Weekly Standard site, demonstrating just how much traffic Drudge can drive.

The Drudge Report’s Wiki page says that Drudge gets 3 million visits a day. I don’t know if that’s a current figure—right now, with the election pending, it’s probably even higher—but that has crash-inducing potential, for sure.

If Obama loses…

The New Neo Posted on by

…(and my hand trembled as I typed that title, so badly do I want it to be so), the excuses will have been written ahead of time.

Odd, isn’t it? But fully in line with the word from Obama himself: blame, blame, blame. And when in doubt, blame some more. Nothing is this guy’s fault.

And following the rules about campaign donations? You’d think there’s do an uproar, wouldn’t you? But following the rules is for the little people. Not for Obama the Great.

I am also becoming convinced that, if Obama were to lose in 2012, should he want to run again in 2016 the nomination would be his for the asking. I don’t know if he’d deign (Michelle’s word) to run again, but if he did stoop to do so, he would probably remain the party’s standard-bearer.

[NOTE: That “deign” remark of Michelle’s was one of the most revealing ever, taking on even more significance in the four years since it was uttered. I don’t know why it didn’t get more attention and widespread condemnation, but here it is in full:

Barack is one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics.

Narcissism/grandiosity/hubris, thy name is Barack.]