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.
…(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.]
And now for a change of pace.
I’ve written before about the many failed plots to assassinate Hitler—the most famous, of course, being that led by Claus von Stauffenberg, with which you’re almost certainly familiar.
Here’s a different perspective on the Stauffenberg plot, based on a 2008 interview with von Stauffenberg’s oldest son Berthold, who was ten years old at the time of the assassination attempt that spared Hitler but cost his father (and many others) his life:
Claus’s eldest son recalled with precise clarity how he learned of the event that shattered his family’s lives. “On 21st July I heard a radio report of a ‘criminal attack on the fuhrer,'” Berthold said. “But my questions about this were evaded, and the adults tried to keep me and my next youngest brother Heimaren away from the radio.
“Instead, we children were taken for a long country walk by our great-uncle Nux – a former general staff officer in the Austrian Imperial Army – who kept us entertained with stories of his youthful adventures as a big-game hunter in Africa,” said Berthold. “Naturally, none of us knew that he, too, was a member of the anti-Hitler conspiracy. Today, I still ask myself what thoughts were going through his head during that walk.” Uncle Nux would be tried and hanged a few weeks later for his part in the plot.
The entire thing is well worth reading.
Everything—and I mean everything—that’s wrong with Obama’s character was on full view during the 2008 election and earlier for anyone who cared to notice.
The tendency to unseal divorce records to take down opponents.
The immaturity.
The excuses.
The grandiosity.
The snark.
The overvaluation of his own abilities.
The broken promises and the forgiveness of followers for them.
The bad taste.
The eagerness to stab people in the back and then smile and smile and be a villain. This should have been no surprise at all, based on his behavior during his very first foray into elective politics, the Alice Palmer affair of 1996. I continue to marvel how few people know about Obama and Alice Palmer, although the facts are not in dispute and have not been from the start. Anyone who thinks him a decent sort of guy has only to study what he did to former mentor Palmer—as well as his other Democratic opponents in the 1996 Democratic primary—and there will be no doubt that he’s a ruthless SOB.
And speaking of grandiosity and overvaluation of his own abilities, here’s a stellar moment I’d forgotten (till William A. Jacobson reminded me of it):
Has there ever been a president in the history of the republic so conceited (there’s no other word, really) and so unapologetic about it? With so little reason to be?
And what did he do (or not do) about it?
Or shall we play battleship snark instead?
Like Rose Syracuse, retiring at 92 after 73 years working at Macy’s:
Many people think it’s virtually certain that Thomas Jefferson had an affair with slave Sally Hemmings and fathered at least one child by her. After all, wasn’t it proven by DNA testing?
No, no, a thousand times no, says this new book on the subject. The DNA testing involved merely implicated some male in the Jefferson clan:
But there are approximately 25 known potential male candidates…Jefferson’s younger brother Randolph, a widower and regular visitor to Monticello who was ignored in the initial research of Annette Gordon-Reed, was in better health than Jefferson and said to “play the fiddle and dance half the night” with the slaves, while the president was not known to do so. A tradition among descendents of Eston Hemings held that an “Uncle Randolph” was Eston’s father””that being a name by which Randolph Jefferson was known at Monticello. A surviving letter from Thomas invites Randolph to come to the house shortly before Hemings became pregnant with Eston. Randolph was reported to have fathered children with other slaves: Might he be a more probable father than Thomas?
There’s much, much more. And actually, the fact that a different male Jefferson might have been a better candidate as Eston’s father was well known right along. A combination of ignorance of science on the part of readers, and politically correct hype (Founding Fathers as hypocritical exploiters) on the part of theory-populizers, conspired to make the Thomas Jefferson fatherhood narrative seem more certain than it should have seemed to the general public.
Comment of the evening:
Two weeks left; I say, fix bayonets!!
Those picayune military details are hardly Obama’s forte, although that doesn’t keep him from mocking Mitt Romney. Actually, I’m hard-pressed to think what Obama’s forte might be: snark, perhaps? It’s sure beginning to look that way.
I didn’t watch the debate and I got back too late to join in the comments. But from my perusal of the blogosphere it seemed that Romney was trying to run out the clock and appear presidential and above the fray, whereas Obama was his now-familiar petty debate self, nasty and small.
That Obama is the same Obama most of us have seen for four long years. For some reason Romney’s personality works to bring out that side of Obama even more than usual, and it’s not a pretty sight.
To Obama, Romney must seem like a big fat hanging curveball right smack in his wheelhouse, and Obama can’t resist taking a good hard swing at it. But apparently the pitch that looks so eminently hittable is really a dancing knuckleball after all.
Here’s a thread for discussing debate number three, which takes place tonight at 9:00 PM Eastern Time.
I have a family event to attend and won’t be watching, although I might be home in time to see the very end and to comment afterward. But you all have a go at it here.
You know how I hate debates anyway. I don’t feel as nervous as I did before debate number one. But whatever the polls say, I will be anxious and worried right up through election evening—and then depending on the results, I will be either exceedingly distressed or quite elated and relieved.
So in the meantime:
:
But I’m pretty sure the vast majority of people neither know nor care at this point. The media’s inattention is just as powerful—perhaps even more so—than its attention.
So, what do you think about this? Was Lance Armstrong guilty, despite having passed a gazillion doping tests at the time? Is the testimony of former teammates under the following circumstances convincing enough?:
Former Armstrong team mates at his U.S. Postal and Discovery Channel outfits, where he won his seven successive Tour titles from 1999 to 2005, testified against him and themselves and were given reduced bans by the American authorities.
“It wasn’t until the intervention of federal agents…they called these riders in and they put down a gun and badge on the table in front of them and said ‘you’re now facing a grand jury you must tell the truth’ that those riders broke down,” McQuaid added.
I confess I haven’t followed this story—or cycling itself—much. Its practitioners at the highest level, like those in so many other sports, are driven to be the very best, and many are willing to cut corners to do so. The more people who dope, the more the others will feel it necessary that they do it too to keep up, even though it’s wrong.
That means the sport will probably always be a race between the doping detection commissions and the cheaters to see who’s more technically advanced.
And if everybody was doing it, why focus on Armstrong? Is it because he started it, or because he perfected it, or because he did it more often? Or is it just because he was the very best—at cycling and at doping?