…whether this article, which I found at Drudge, is reporting the truth.
If it is, however, that would be a very ominous sign in Egypt.
On the other hand, ye olde blood libel is alive and well and living in Sauda Arabia, as well as a number of other middle-eastern Muslim countries.
…but it turned out maybe not so much.
Here’s more on how that came to be.
Author Mark Mackinnon writes:
…[A]ll of this could have been avoided had President Obama simply led and acted on the 2010 Simpson-Bowles plan.
Simply? Simply? Hardly; Obama was never going to do something so relatively reasonable and so at odds with his agenda.
[NOTE: I came across this post from 2006 the other day and thought it could bear a recycling.]
When I was in junior high there was a large poster of the Periodic Table of the Elements that hung in the science classroom in front of a little-used blackboard spanning the right side of the room, next to where I sat.
I’m not sure whether anybody in the junior high learned what the chart was about—we certainly didn’t. But it was a grim reminder of what awaited us in high school, when we’d be required to take Chemistry and Physics and Geometry and Trigonometry and a bunch of other subjects that sounded Hard, and sounded like An Awful Lot of Work.
I wasn’t looking forward to the experience. In my more bored moments in class (and I had quite a few of them) I would glance at that chart on the wall and idly ponder its arcane mysteries. It looked like a more old-fashioned and slightly yellowing version of this:
That chart was the sort of thing that made me nearly sick to my stomach whenever I looked at it, something like slide rules and drawings of the innards of the internal combustion engine, and the long rows of monotonous monochromatic law books in my father’s office.
But then time passed—as time often does—and I found myself a junior in high school, sitting in chemistry class and finally (and reluctantly) about to penetrate the secrets of the Periodic Table. The teacher, a small, elderly (oh, he must have been at least fifty), enthusiastic, spry man, explained it to us.
I sat awestruck as I took in what he was saying. That chart may have looked boring, but it demonstrated something so absolutely astounding that I could hardly believe it was true. The world of the elements at the atomic level was spectacularly orderly, with such grandeur, power, and rightness that I could only think of one term for it, and that was “beautiful.”
I did very well in chemistry, and even thought of majoring in it in college, although in the end I stuck to psychology and anthropology. But I never forgot the lesson of the Periodic Table (actually, it taught many lessons, although some of them I did forget). But the one I remembered most was that appearances can be deceptive, and that what lies beneath a bland and stark exterior can be a world of magic.
And now I’ve finally discovered a Periodic Table worth its salt—or, rather, its sodium chloride. Take a look at this, a Periodic Table nearly as lovely as the elemental wonders it illustrates:
If you follow the link to the poster at its source, you can click on parts of it to enlarge them and see more of the detail. And then you might say with Keats:
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,””that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
I’ve got a piece up at PJ about Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
I know there’s some deep meaning lurking in here somewhere, if only we could find it:
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I hadn’t thought of this before, but it’s an interesting point that Peter Shrag makes:
For the first time in the 236-year history of the Republic, no one on either presidential ticket belongs to the once-prototypical American group, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
Until 2008, when black Protestant Barack Obama ran with Catholic Joe Biden, we’d never had even one party offer a non-WASP ticket.
But that’s not all:
Looking past the presidential contenders, John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, is Catholic, and Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader is Mormon. There’s not a WASP to be found among the nine justices of the Supreme Court (one black, five Catholic, three Jewish). That’s a clean sweep of all three branches of government.
Shrag goes on to add a lot of horse manure about how the voter ID laws are a backlash to all this, and an example of xenophobia. He conveniently ignores the fact that the same people who champion that movement are supporters of Catholic Paul Ryan, and black men such as Herman Cain and Allen West, as well as Marco Rubio and Bobby Jindal and many others of varied ethnicities.
And funny thing, Obama seems to be the most WASP-like of the foursome, since that’s the predominant ethnic group on his mother’s side.
By the way, I can’t say I care much about the issue. I think of it more as a historical curiosity.
I think they’re at least perturbed by him, not only because he’s smart and articulate, but because he’s got an incredibly likeable demeanor. That goes against the narrative about Republicans. It’s hard to pin the “callous, cold” label on him and make it stick.
He’s also young, which is attractive as well.
The linked article by Jeffrey Lord took me back to a time—the Reagan era—when I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to politics, although I never ignored it entirely. But I was a young mother with a young baby to tend to, and I didn’t choose to spend the almost nonexistent amount of free time I had reading about what was going on in DC.
So I missed little nuggets such as this statement by Democrat Tip O’Neill, House Speaker, referring to Reagan:
The evil is in the White House at the present time. And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations of America, and who likes to ride a horse. He’s cold. He’s mean. He’s got ice water for blood.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
And note the “likes to ride a horse” bit. Shades of the liberal critique of Ann Romney. Who knew that demonizing the horsey set had such a lengthy and distinguished political pedigree?
What an elitist!:
…that we will have Joe Biden to kick around some more.
I don’t think that was ever in doubt. In this particular case, I think Obama is telling the truth when he says he has no intention of getting rid of Biden as WP. As I wrote yesterday:
Biden is exactly and precisely what Obama wants as his VP””someone who won’t challenge him or show him up in any way, and who has proven his loyalty time and again.
I will add that in general, Obama is not big on swapping horses, in mid-stream or otherwise. His appointees and aides don’t have to be competent in the way we ordinarily think of competence, they merely have to perform the tasks Obama has in mind.
Think back to how many people Obama has let go in his administration and/or his campaign so far. I can think of only two major figures who have left: Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel. That’s a very small list with three things in common: they were never Obama loyalists in the first place, they disagreed with him on certain important matters, and they resigned (whether at his behest or not is unclear).
Ever since Romney picked Paul Ryan as his VP, there’s been an awful lot of even-stranger-than-usual stuff coming from the mouths/pens/computers of Democrats.
One of the oddest is a column by Maureen Dowd, which basically says that Ryan shouldn’t look so nice and smiley and handsome because he’s actually a mean sonofabitch.
I kid you not:
[Ryan]’s the cutest package that cruelty ever came in. He has a winning air of sad cheerfulness. He’s affable, clean-cut and really cut, with the Irish altar-boy widow’s peak and droopy, winsome blue eyes and unashamed sentimentality.
Who better to rain misery upon the heads of millions of Americans?
But twisted as that is, it pales in comparison to Ezra Klein’s latest effort, which is less colorful but decidedly more convoluted. In Klein’s fevered imagination, Obama not only wanted Ryan to become the de facto leader of the Republican Party because Obama thought his views would be easy to run against (which Obama may indeed have believed), but the president has actively worked for several years to build Ryan up and then tear him down with this very aim in mind.
Therefore, according to Klein, Ryan is Obama’s creation (the title of his piece is “How Obama Created the Greatest Threat to His Presidency”):
Here’s the weird thing about Paul Ryan being named to the Republican presidential ticket: It’s all part of Barack Obama’s campaign plan — a plan that’s working better than his strategists could have hoped.
You need to read the whole thing to get the flavor of it. The summary version is that Obama knew that Ryan’s detailed plan would not appeal to the American people, and that initially even Republicans agreed with him on that, so way back in January of 2010 Obama started praising Ryan and building him up for a while. Then he slammed Ryan and his plan hard, forcing the Republicans to rally around both. And now all of Obama’s careful efforts have borne fruit in this nomination.
The problem, of course, is that Klein realizes that Romney-Ryan may actually win, a disastrous result by Klein’s lights—made even worse by the fact that, according to Klein, without Obama’s machinations leading to Romney’s picking Ryan (stay with me, folks), Romney probably would have governed as a centrist but now will be severely conservative.
Obama’s playing four-dimensional chess, for sure. I’m not certain what Klein’s playing.
[NOTE: For those of you who don’t know what the word “golem” means, see this; also this section, which has special relevance for Klein’s piece.]
…we cannot lead the world in the 20th century in making automobiles?” asks Joe Biden.
Nowhere, Joe, nowhere—because history tells us that we did do just that.
Only problem is, it’s the 21st century now.
I actually have some sympathy with Biden on this one. As an oldish person myself, I sometimes forget we’re not still in the only century I used to know, the 20th.
On a related issue: will Obama dump Biden? My answer is: absolutely not. Biden is exactly and precisely what Obama wants as his VP—someone who won’t challenge him or show him up in any way, and who has proven his loyalty time and again.
I have absolutely no way of knowing whether this is true, and I take everything campaign aides say with a grain of salt. But if true, it’s exceedingly interesting [emphasis mine]:
The Republican presidential candidate lit into his White House rival at a rally in Chillicothe, Ohio. Though some of the candidate’s speeches are written by staff, aides told Fox News that Romney personally wrote this one over the course of two days.
I highlighted “personally wrote this one” because it’s so unusual for candidates to do this, and because this speech was widely hailed by conservatives in particular. But I might also have highlighted “over the course of two days.” As a writer, I find that very impressive, too, especially in light of a candidate’s grueling schedule.
