Romney’s quiet first

The New Neo Posted on by

When Obama was nominated and elected, one of the big deals was that he was the first African-American in that position. And that really was a big deal, given our racial history, and despite the fact that his black ancestry was more recently African.

Romney is a first too. But that first is not such a big deal, except perhaps among Mormons and those who don’t like them. James W. Ceaser explains:

And what of Willard Romney? His nomination also marks an objective first, though the near total silence about this fact is deafening. Romney rarely calls attention to the fact that he is a Mormon. Besides revealing something of his personal style, this reticence reflects the recognition that this first is not being widely celebrated. Why this is so most likely has much to do with the disposition of those who distribute the awards for tolerance. These judges, deriving mostly from the intelligentsia, appear reluctant to celebrate Romney’s first for fear of diminishing the more prized achievement of President Obama, as if the nation were incapable of celebrating more than one feat of tolerance at a time; or, seeing the success of so many Mormons, they may consider that this group does not suffer sufficiently from duress to warrant the acknowledgment of a first, although group success did not deter the widespread celebration of Joseph Lieberman’s nomination for vice president in 2000. It might also be that many do not see Mormons as a genuine minority. Take away Mitt Romney’s religion, and he looks, walks, and talks every bit as much like the perfect WASP as that other non-Protestant nominee, John Kerry. The most likely explanation, however, is that the tolerance-anointers are not very excited about Mormons””they may even have friends who utter less than sensitive comments about them in private company. This last possibility has been artfully deflected by the creation of the impression that only conservative evangelicals oppose the election of a Mormon president. In fact, polls show that by far the greater opposition comes from Democrats.

That last sentence comes as no surprise.

Stop the presses! Geriatric Claudia Schiffer still looks pretty darn good

The New Neo Posted on by

Wow! Can you believe that Claudia Schiffer, who first burst on the scene as a model in 1989, still can sell the goods?

At the mindbogglingly ancient age of—41?

I hate to break it to Shine and all the others going gaga (not Lady) over this, but a lot of women at 41 look pretty good, and almost indistinguishable from how they looked in their 20s. I, for example, was one of them (accent on the was). And it didn’t take that much work either: no substance abuse, a bit of exercise and fresh air, and not gaining an inordinate amount of weight. It’s later in life that time almost invariably takes a heavier toll, and that’s when you get the stars who look like plastic clones of each other, chasing after the rainbow of eternal youth through chemistry and/or the scalpel.

But 41? No problem. At 41 most people still look good enough that they think they’ll beat this aging rap. And if they started out as hot as Claudia Schiffer, they have a leg up on the competition to begin with.

Europe’s still there

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s easy to concentrate on the election here and miss what’s happening in Europe, such as, for example, Sarkozy’s threatened ousting in the impending French election by socialist challenger Hollande. It’s all about the economy, stupid:

With the highest joblessness in 12 years and an economy barely growing, Sarkozy has trailed Hollande in every poll in a head-to-head match in the past 11 months. Hollande promises more spending and higher taxes, saying Sarkozy’s tax cuts worsened French finances and failed to create jobs. Sarkozy claims credit for spending cuts and a retirement-age increase that he says warded off the worst of the euro debt crisis turmoil.

The French election has several rounds, of which Sunday’s is only the first, to narrow down the field—almost certainly to Sarkozy vs. Hollande, who leads so far.

There there’s the trial of Anders Breivik, home-grown Norwegian terrorist mass murderer. You can be forgiven for not wanting to revisit that story of almost unimaginable cruelty and horror, but in the Norwegian legal system Breivik gets a chance to speak at length at his trial and read a two-hour-long statement describing his crimes step by bloody step:

The 33-year-old spent two hours on Friday afternoon giving a bullet-by-bullet account of what he refers to as his “operation” on the island of Uté¸ya., where the youth wing of Norway’s Labour party was holding its annual summer camp. He shot and killed 67 people on the island that day; another fell off a cliff and died trying to escape. One more, a 17-year-old called Hé¥kon é˜degaard, drowned while attempting to swim away.

Leaning back in his chair, twizzling a pen in his right hand, Breivik ”“ flushed, but never losing control ”” told of how some of the children he killed were so paralysed with fear that he had time to reload his rifle before shooting them. He’d never seen such a thing, he said ”“ not even on TV.

He recalled teenagers “playing dead” whom he slowly approached before shooting them at close range.

Relatives of those he had killed hugged each other. Some who had dodged his bullets stared straight ahead. There were tears in the eyes of some of the most experienced journalists in the courtroom. Lawyers bit their lips as they listened to Breivik, in a clear, measured voice, remember how he decided halfway through the massacre to “look for places where I would naturally try to hide.”

One of the biggest questions in the trial is whether Breivik is insane, which in Norway means too psychotic too control his actions. Some psychiatrists have argued that he is, but Breivik himself says no and from what I’ve heard I would most definitely agree with him, although I’m not a psychiatrist.

Here’s Breivik on the subject:

“This case is very simple,” said Breivik. “I’m not a psychiatric case and I am sane … it’s very important to see the difference between political extremism and lunacy in a clinical sense.”

Questioned by his own lawyers how he was able to carry out the attacks, he described a “meditation” technique he had developed which mixed “Christian prayer” and Japanese “Bushido warrior codex” practised by Samurai fighters.

He insisted he was a “nice person” who was capable of empathising with those whose lives he had ruined, but that he had chosen not to as a self-preservation technique. “In many ways it is a protection mechanism,” he said. “First of all, if you are going to be capable of executing such a bloody and horrendous operation you need to work on your mind, your psyche for years. We have seen from military traditions you cannot send an unprepared person into war.”

Asked how he was able to talk about the atrocities in such an impassive manner, Breivik said he had learnt to rely on “technical, de-emotionalised language” ”” “if I was going to use normalised language it would not have been possible” to go through police interviews and “this trial”, he added. “People say, ‘he must be a monster, he cannot be from this planet, he must have no emotions and empathy left’, but this has to do with preparing and training.”

Questioned as to his client’s sanity after the end of the court session, Geir Lippestad, Breivik’s defence lawyer, said: “It’s not just a coincidence that very skilled experts have arrived at different conclusions.”

Alan Dershowitz and the Zimmerman prosecutor

The New Neo Posted on by

Noted liberal law professor and pundit Alan Dershowitz has not taken up the PC line in the Zimmerman case. Au contraire. Something about prosecutor Angela Corey’s behavior has really gotten his goat, as was evident in this video.

Now Dershowitz has gone a step further, after ABC news released a photo purporting to show Zimmerman’s head wounds:

After the release of the photo, however, Dershowitz went much further, telling Breitbart News that if the prosecutors did have the photo and didn’t mention it in the affidavit, that would constitute a “grave ethical violation,” since affidavits are supposed to contain “all relevant information.”

Dershowitz continued, “An affidavit that willfully misstates undisputed evidence known to the prosecution is not only unethical but borders on perjury because an affiant swears to tell not only the truth, but the whole truth, and suppressing an important part of the whole truth is a lie.”

When asked if it made a difference whether the prosecution had the bloody photograph at the time they charged Zimmerman, Dershowitz responded, “We do know that there were earlier photographs before the affidavit was done that strongly suggested blood on the back of the head, and we know the police had first access to him, so if there was blood they [the prosecution] would know about it ”¦

“I’ve had cases in Florida against prosecutors,” Dershowitz said, “and this is not the first time they have willfully omitted exculpatory evidence. It’s a continuing problem. Here, it’s not only immoral, but stupid. The whole country is watching. What do they benefit from having half-truths in an affidavit?”

Dershowitz’s anger at Corey is probably not such a surprise. Liberals traditionally have championed the rights of defendants, and at this point Zimmerman is a defendant. For Dershowitz, that trumps the racial angle, although it wouldn’t do so for everyone. My impression (and some of you will probably disagree) is that Dershowitz also is actually interested in the truth.

But in answer to his question, “What do they benefit from having half-truths in an affidavit?”, I think he ought to know the answer: the benefit is not legal, it is propagandist. The court of public opinion is the forum in which they’re looking to win. Even if Zimmerman is acquitted legally, they’re hoping that most people will have already concluded he is guilty, and become angry at the system that failed to convict.

Another case of Romney dog abuse

The New Neo Posted on by

Horrors! Could it be that a pattern is emerging?:

Nearly three decades ago, Mitt Romney left his office on a Friday afternoon, gathered his wife and kids in the family station wagon and drove out to spend the weekend at the Rhode Island beach house of Patrick Graham, a founding partner at Bain and Co.

Romney pulled into the driveway, jumped out of the car and immediately ran over to Graham’s Doberman pinscher, Samurai. Clad in a suit and tie, and eager to set a rollicking tone for the weekend, Romney grabbed Samurai’s favorite rubber ball from his mouth, led him racing down a sandy path to the beach and launched the ball into the water.

“Well, the damn ball didn’t float,” Graham said. “And my dog Samurai, he dove into that ocean for hours, and he’d come out of the ocean just whimpering.”

[ADDENDUM: A further point just occurred to me. This incident could be seen not only as an incident of dog abuse, but of racism and/or grudge-holding on Romney’s part. Was not the Doberman developed in Germany? And is not “Samurai” a Japanese name? So Romney is not only a serial dog-abuser, but is obviously is either anti-Asian, or someone who cannot let go of antagonism toward our former enemies, or both.

Clearly not presidential material.]

To a man with a hammer…

The New Neo Posted on by

…everything looks like a nail.

To the race-obsessed, everything looks like racism.

Or, even if it doesn’t, they’ll pretend it does. But that’s gotten very, very old.

I got curious about the origins of the hammer/nail phrase, and I discovered it’s attributed to psychologist (and liberal) Abraham Maslow (among others). Interesting. Even more interesting is the phrase in its original form, which goes like this:

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

Although cries of “racism” are not the only tools the Obama forces have at this point, they do have a rather small remaining kit. It seems to consist of racism (a tool that’s getting worn and rusty), class warfare (still fairly sharp), and ad hominem attacks on Romney’s “weird” and “retro” personality (a sort of boomerang could come back to haunt Obama, as I pointed out in this essay).

Perhaps I’m not being fair to Obama, though. There are a few things in his record that he could brag about. One, of course, is Bin Laden. Another is that some economic indicators have certainly improved over the years, albeit slowly. And I have no doubt that some people consider Obamacare to be a good thing.

The problem with this is that not only have we heard it all so very many times before, but a lot (perhaps the majority?) of voters believe that (a) the economy would have recovered faster without Obama; and (b) Obamacare is bad for the country as a whole. So, with the single exception of killing Bin Laden, they don’t think his “accomplishments” are really all that accomplished.

Obama didn’t run on the idea that he’d do certain specific things, anyway. He ran on his personality, which was supposed to be optimistic, mature, and inclusive. That notion is now thoroughly trashed among the general public, although there is still a substantial subset of loyal supporters who believe that he is exactly those things and has been thwarted every step of the way by the evil Republicans.

Religiosity and age

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a study that purports to indicate that people get more religious over time:

Belief in God is highest among older people and increases with age, perhaps due to the growing realization that death is coming closer, University of Chicago researchers said on Wednesday.

Summarizing data from surveys performed in 1991, 1998 and 2008 in 30 countries from Chile to Japan, the university’s National Opinion Research Center found that, on average, 43 percent of those aged 68 and older were certain that God exists.

By comparison, an average of 23 percent of people aged 27 and younger were firm believers in God, according to the report, which gathered data from the International Social Survey Program, a consortium of the world’s leading opinion survey organizations.

The problem with this study is the same one encountered over and over in studies that purport to measure changes that come with age: unless the study is longitudinal, following the same people over time, it is just as likely (perhaps more so) that what is being measured is generational differences.

Without the ability to get the original study, I can’t say for sure whether the researchers here have controlled for this, but several newspaper articles I’ve seen about it seem to ignore the problem. Here’s is the most complete report I’ve been able to find so far, and in it the University of Chicago researcher, Tom W. Smith, simply “noted that the higher level of belief does not appear to be simply a cohort effect.” That’s not very informative.

Branding Mitt Romney

The New Neo Posted on by

My new article, “Branding Retro Romney,” is up at PJ. It’s about the perils of casting Mitt Romney in the “Mad Men” role, as the Obama administration has been wont to do. You can comment there or here, or better yet, at both venues.

By the way, the video referred to in the piece is this one. Embedding has been disabled, so you’ll have to go to YouTube to view it.

The secret life of the Secret Service

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t written much about the story of the partying Secret Service agents and the prostitutes, because what is there to say? It’s obvious that something went very, very wrong in either the Secret Service recruitment process, training process, vetting process, or monitoring process (or all of the above) to have allowed the agency’s members to have fallen into behavior like this, especially while on assignment.

The potential for blackmail was one of the most obvious problems, but then perhaps blackmail isn’t what it used to be. And why or why would one of the agents be stupid enough to stiff one of the working girls?

There aren’t too many institutions we still look up to, but the Secret Service was one of them, at least for me. Now it seems very, very tainted.

Obama, working-class hero

The New Neo Posted on by

It continues.

Obama pointed out to an audience at a community college in Ohio that, ““I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth.”

The jokes come to mine (“no, you were born with a furry paw in your mouth;” no, you were born with a red diaper on your butt”) but seriously, folks, is this really a winning approach by the president himself? Surrogates such as Joe Biden and Axelrod will no doubt pound it home—“Mitt Romney, rich out-of-touch spoiled brat”—since it’s one of the few weapons they have against him. But it only makes Obama look petty and covetous when he says it himself.

On the other hand, petty and covetous is the basis for his campaign at this point, I’m afraid, although perhaps it will work. But he could just as easily have touted the Workforce Investment Act—which was the actual (or ostensible) subject of his speech—without the sly innuendo. His “silver spoon” statement also opens him up to the charge of historical ignorance, which I’ve yet to see the opposition make, since that great champion of the working man and the president whom Obama seems to be trying to emulate, FDR, was the quintessential infant with the silver spoon in his mouth.