Peggy Noonan needs to read an article on narcissism

The New Neo Posted on by

Then maybe she will figure out the answer to what’s puzzling her so about Obama:

Why did the president make such mistakes? Why did he make decisions that seemed so unknowing, and not only in retrospect?

Because he had so much confidence, he thought whatever he did would work. He thought he had “a gift,” as he is said to have told Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He thought he had a special ability to sway the American people, or so he suggested to House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

But whenever he went over the the heads of the media and Congress and went to the people, in prime-time addresses, it didn’t really work. He did not have a magical ability to sway. And””oddly””he didn’t seem to notice.

It is one thing to think you’re Lebron. Its another thing to keep missing the basket and losing games and still think you’re Lebron.

And that really was the problem: He had the confidence without the full capability. And he gathered around him friends and associates who adored him, who were themselves talented but maybe not quite big enough for the game they were in. They understood the Democratic Party, its facts and assumptions. But they weren’t America-sized. They didn’t get the country so well.

It is a mystery why the president didn’t second-guess himself more, doubt himself. Instead he kept going forward as if it were working.

No, Peggy. It’s no mystery at all.

[NOTE: In the Wiki article about narcissism, here are some ideas about the possible causes [emphasis mine]:

The cause of this disorder is unknown, according to Groopman and Cooper. However, they list the following factors identified by various researchers as possibilities:

An oversensitive temperament at birth
Excessive admiration that is never balanced with realistic feedback
Excessive praise for good behaviors or excessive criticism for bad behaviors in childhood
Overindulgence and overvaluation by parents, other family members, or peers
Being praised for perceived exceptional looks or abilities by adults
Severe emotional abuse in childhood
Unpredictable or unreliable caregiving from parents
Valued by parents as a means to regulate their own self-esteem

See also splitting [emphasis mine]:

People who are diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder use splitting as a central defense mechanism. According to psychoanalyst Kernberg, “the normal tension between actual self on the one hand, and ideal self and ideal object on the other, is eliminated by the building up of an inflated self-concept within which the actual self and the ideal self and ideal object are confused. At the same time, the remnants of the unacceptable images are repressed and projected onto external objects, which are devalued.”

The merging of the “inflated self-concept” and the “actual self” is seen in the inherent grandiosity of narcissistic personality disorder. Also inherent in this process are the defense mechanisms of devaluation, idealization and denial. Other people are either manipulated as an extension of one’s own self, who serve the sole role of giving “admiration and approval” or they are seen as worthless (because they cannot collude with the narcissist’s grandiosity).]

Why Leon Panetta?

The New Neo Posted on by

In following the Benghazi debacle I am reminded of what an exceptionally poor choice Leon Panetta was, first for CIA head and then for Defense.

That’s not a new thought. I said as much when he was first appointed as CIA head in 2009 by Obama (as did almost everyone, including Diane Feinstein and the New Yorker—that lets you know what a rotten choice it was thought to be). The following is from my post about how and why Panetta was chosen to head the CIA; it’s instructive to go back and read it in light of what happened on September 11, 2012 in Benghazi:

To say Panetta is inexperienced in intelligence would be an understatement. He is profoundly inexperienced, even more so than other previous CIA chiefs who came from a basically non-intelligence background. His main qualification appears to be that he was President Clinton’s chief of staff, and yet nevertheless supported Obama in his campaign against Hillary.

The real problem that seems to have led to the appointment of such a complete outsider was that everyone with any sort of background in intelligence was considered tainted by ties to the supposedly nefarious Bush-era CIA, which approved controversial techniques such as waterboarding.

So Obama decided to throw out the baby (intelligence) with the bathwater (coercive interrogation techniques). To find a CIA head with the properly squeaky clean hands, Obama had to find one with no hands-on experience at all. Panetta fit the bill, since he not only had the requisite lack of background, but he had also been outspoken in his condemnation of all CIA practices that could conjure up any suggestion that they might arguably represent torture. Therefore he was doubleplusgood.

Panetta is worse than incompetent; that’s why Obama picked him, and named him to Defense later (the latter appointment was to oversee budget cuts). It has been a pattern for the president to tend to nominate people who lack actual expertise and who are political operatives loyal to Obama (Petraeus, head of the CIA since 2011, is an exception). That way they would not be as likely to challenge him, since Obama is smarter than anyone else could possibly be, so he really only needs people who don’t get in the way of his superb decisions.

So then comes 9/11/2012, and although we don’t know exactly who made what decision and why, we know that both Obama and Panetta would (or should) have been deeply involved in the process. So is it any wonder the ambassador and his defenders were left hanging? And that the decisions made around the incident, both at that time and subsequently, seem to have been almost entirely politically motivated?

And then there’s Obama’s National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon, a completely political animal with virtually no experience in foreign policy, although he was a successful lobbyist for Fannie Mae. A distubing portrait of the Obama administration’s foreign policy and military decisions, and the basic players, was painted in Bob Woodward’s 2010 book Obama’s Wars, which describes a president obsessed with exit strategy rather than victory in Afghanistan, and contemptuous of his generals:

According to Woodward’s meeting-by-meeting, memo-by-memo account of the 2009 Afghan strategy review, the president avoided talk of victory as he described his objectives…”Everything we’re doing has to be focused on how we’re going to get to the point where we can reduce our footprint. It’s in our national security interest. There cannot be any wiggle room.”..

Woodward’s book portrays Obama and the White House as barraged by warnings about the threat of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and confronted with the difficulty in preventing them. During an interview with Woodward in July, the president said, “We can absorb a terrorist attack. We’ll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever . . . we absorbed it and we are stronger.”…

Tensions often turned personal. National security adviser James L. Jones privately referred to Obama’s political aides as “the water bugs,” the “Politburo,” the “Mafia,” or the “campaign set.” Petraeus, who felt shut out by the new administration, told an aide that he considered the president’s senior adviser David Axelrod to be “a complete spin doctor.”

It’s really all of a piece with the picture in Benghazi, isn’t it? Politics before security seems to be the motto.

It’s hard to believe that Obama might be elected to another term as president despite all of this. And yet that is exactly the possibility we face.

In closing, I bring you the following:

Puzzling polls

The New Neo Posted on by

Two pundits have noted a puzzling discrepancy between the national polls and those in the battleground states.

First, Jay Cost:

On the one hand, Mitt Romney has built a narrow but durable lead in the national polls, averaging around a 1 percent advantage over the last three weeks. This has cheered the hearts of conservatives everywhere.

Yet, liberals retort, Obama has a lead in enough swing states to add up to 270 electoral votes, and that is really what matters.

What to make of this?

For starters, they cannot both be right. If Mitt Romney wins the popular vote by 1 percent or more on Election Day, the odds that he will lose the Electoral College are quite small.

Next, Sean Trende:

Put simply, the national surveys point to a Romney win, while the state polls collectively point to an Obama win. Both can’t be correct.

Both men then go on to number-crunch in order to underline why either the national polls or the state polls are almost certainly wrong. And they both conclude they haven’t a clue which it is. No wonder so many people on both sides are tearing out their hair!

Why are the polls so strange this year? I think it’s because we’re in the midst of a of polling transition. For years the response rate—the number of people who answer polls—has been shrinking, and it may have reached a point where it’s mattering more and more in creating poll variation of some sort. If only 9% of respondents cooperate, versus over 25% just a decade ago, we should become less and less sanguine about whether the respondents can be said to be a random sample.

It is often said that if a sample is large enough, randomness matters less and less. But that’s only true if the sample is truly jumungous, which does not occur with polls. Otherwise, even a very large sample is garbage in/garbage out if it isn’t representative of the group’s composition.

That’s why I think there’s so much weirdness going on with the polls this year. I would love to know if state polls generally have a different methodology than national ones, because such differences could go a long way to explaining the disparities between the two. For example, does one type of poll generally include cell phone users while the other type does not? Does one type of poll use recorded questions and the other type live questioners? Does one type of poll occur at a different time of day than the other type? I don’t even know what some other differences might be, but my guess is that they exist, and they could matter.

I know I get nervous when, in order to think my guy is winning, I have to invalidate the results of too many polls. “That one doesn’t count because the Democratic sample is too large.” That one doesn’t count because the poll is too small.” “That one doesn’t count because the pollster is biased.” And on and on and on. It’s been my experience that the losing side is the one that has to make more of these excuses prior to the election.

This year, though, both sides are making a lot of excuses—just about different things. That’s why my teeth are slowly grinding down.

The Benghazi ooze

The New Neo Posted on by

Is it happening, slowly but surely? And will it be fast enough to affect the election on Tuesday?

There are a couple of signs that the Benghazi furor may have reached enough critical mass to actually enter mainstream consciousness. The first is that Jay Leno made a joke about it. The second is that the WaPo published a David Ignatius column dealing with it.

Pretty small potatoes compared to what ought to be happening. But it’s an indication that the dam might not be holding, even if only a trickle of water is coming through right now. And although Ignatius’ column does refer to the Fox reporting on the subject, he spends quite a bit of time making excuses for the administration and leaving out important facts that would tend to implicate Obama and company. Nevertheless, Ignatius is at least asking some hard questions, too, and refusing to ignore the story entirely.

It’s a sad thing when weak tea such as Ignatius’ column becomes praiseworthy, but that’s the way it is with the MSM these days—the propaganda wing of the Obama campaign. As big as the Benghazi story is (or should be), at the moment the story of the press coverage (or lack thereof) of it is bigger.

How to peel eggs

The New Neo Posted on by

I love deviled eggs. They’re easy to make except for one thing: you have to peel them successfully for them to look right. If that pesky little membrane adheres to the white, you’ll get a pock-marked egg that is completely unpresentable.

I’ve read all the instructions about how to insure that the membrane will separate nicely; for example they can’t be super-fresh, but that’s not ordinarily a problem since I buy them at the supermarket and not the farm, and don’t cook them right away.

But every now and then I get a batch that just will not cooperate no matter what. This has always puzzled me until I read this, which explains that a certain percentage of eggs are processed in a manner that means their membranes will never be free.

By the way, when I make deviled eggs I don’t use one of those fancy implements to make the yolks all swirly:

No, the old-fashioned stuff-with-a-spoon method is good enough for me:

So, why was I making deviled eggs the other day? I figured it was good power-outage food—an already-cooked protein source that doesn’t have to be heated up. And who needs an excuse, anyway?

The watershed election

The New Neo Posted on by

I think Stanley Kurtz is spot-on:

…Obama and his advisors never abandoned their quest to shape a permanent leftist majority, a coalition that would forever put an end to Clintonian triangulation and usher in unfettered leftist Obamaism instead. Obama’s frantic efforts to gin up the women’s vote and the youth vote aren’t only desperate attempts to secure his base. They flow from a deliberate decision not to fight for the center, but to build an independent majority on what is supposedly the “demographically ascendent” left.

Kurtz goes on to analyze Obama’s campaign decisions, some of which have seemed so dumb and could be summed up as “going small.” Dumb like a fox. As I’ve indicated before, Obama is smart (or, if you prefer, clever) about elections. The fact that he may lose this one doesn’t mean he hasn’t played it about as well as it could have been played with the material at hand, and the proof of this is that the election is still very close and he might pull it out after all.

So many of us (including me) have been asking: why does Obama still have so much support? Kurtz’s article spells it out: Obama has carefully appealed to a coalition of special interest groups who, together, might even form the majority. If so, they would liberate the left from ever having to cater to anyone in a flyover state of mind again.

If that works out, Obama could drop the pretense of moderation. I’ve long felt that is what would happen in an Obama second term. It is one of the many reasons this election is of such vital importance.

But my nervousness come next Tuesday will not be just about the prospect of four more years of Obama. Even if Romney wins, if his margin of victory is of anything less than landslide proportions I will be only somewhat placated; I think we will only have bought a bit of time. This is because of the Gramscian march through our institutions—especially education—the takeover that already occurred while most of us were looking the other way.

Obama is merely the person who benefited from that march, the One who came to the fore because of the long and careful preparation. If the ground had not been properly laid, someone so far to the left (with his voting record, community organizing/Alinsky background, Ayers and Wright connections, and plans to “spread the wealth” and “bankrupt” coal plants) could never have been elected in the first place. Furthermore, someone who had presided over such troubled years as the last four—featuring a stagnant economy, Obamacare and the way it was passed, Benghazi, Honduras (remember that?), and the smallness, nastiness, and class warfare of his campaign—would never have come so close to re-election without an MSM hopelessly compromised and in the tank, a school system dedicated to leftist indoctrination, and arts so degraded and propagandist.

We will have our work cut out for us no matter what.

Sandy report

The New Neo Posted on by

In my neck of the woods all’s well so far (knock wood vigorously). I still have power—which is nothing short of a miracle, considering how easily we lose it here. It’s been gloomy, mostly rainy, and windy, but there have even been moments of calm amidst the storm.

Those photos of New York are upsetting to me. New York’s been through worse, though, a lot worse, and I bet it will recover fairly quickly.

Hope you’re all doing well, too.

Carter/Obama, Tehran/Benghazi, 1980/2012

The New Neo Posted on by

A comment by “RickZ” about the failed Iran hostage rescue attempt in the waning days of the Carter administration prompted this reply from me, referring to a post I wrote several years ago on the anniversary of Operation Eagle Claw (the name of the doomed rescue effort).

In that post of mine I discussed an article from The Atlantic about the rescue, and now I’m going to quote a portion of that article that I think especially relevant to what happened (or failed to happen) on September 11, 2012 in Benghazi. The Iran rescue mission was famous for a series of disasters that aborted it before the rescuers ever got to Tehran, but reading the following information about it makes me wonder whether things might actually have gone worse (although it’s hard to believe that could be possible) if the forces had had a chance to fulfill the mission as planned—and limited—by then-President Carter.

Compare and contrast to Benghazi:

Another presidential directive concerned the use of nonlethal riot-control agents. Given that the shah’s occasionally violent riot control during the revolution was now Exhibit A in Iran’s human-rights case against the former regime and America, Carter wanted to avoid killing Iranians, so he had insisted that if a hostile crowd formed during the raid, Delta should attempt to control it without shooting people. Burruss considered this ridiculous. He and his men were going to assault a guarded compound in the middle of a city of more than 5 million people, most of them presumed to be aggressively hostile. It was unbelievably risky; everyone on the mission knew there was a very good chance they would not get home alive. Wade Ishmoto, a Delta captain who worked with the unit’s intelligence division, had joked, “The only difference between this and the Alamo is that Davy Crockett didn’t have to fight his way in.” And Carter had the idea that this vastly outnumbered force was first going to try holding off the city with nonviolent crowd control? Burruss understood the president’s thinking on this, but with their hides so nakedly on the line, shouldn’t they be free to decide how best to defend themselves? He had complained about the directive to General Jones, who had said he would look into it, but the answer had come back “No, the president insists.” So Burruss had made his own peace with it. He had with him one tear-gas grenade””one””which he intended to throw as soon as necessary; he would then use its smoke as a marker to call in devastatingly lethal 40 mm AC-130 gunship fire.

Both incidents involved violence against American diplomats in a country that had recently seen a revolution against forces previously friendly to the US and now Islamicist and hostile. The Iranian hostages had been in captivity for quite some time when the rescue was attempted; in Benghazi the incident happened in a single less-than-24-hour period, and involved a firefight and deaths. The Benghazi violence was apparently viewed in real time by the administration; Carter had no such capabilities. Carter approved a rescue mission; Obama failed to do so.

But the similarity—at least as far as I can determine, trying to fill in the blanks—was that the motivation to appear peaceful and friendly resulted in a decision to not fire on the citizens of the host country, even if the situation warranted it, and even at the risk of American lives. The idée fixe remains.

The race card never gets old

The New Neo Posted on by

Frank Bruni’s latest column is sort of interesting.

Bruni can’t stand Romney, and spends at least half of his piece making that fact crystal clear, just so his readers won’t get the wrong impression. But he’s also disappointed in Obama, and is starting to think it’s even within the realm of possibility that Obama might lose.

Bruni says that with huge regret. But he thinks the mean-spiritedness of Obama’s campaign—a truculence that Bruni believes Obama was forced to display in order to make up for his relative lack of energy in the first debate—has soured the moderate voter on the president:

The miracle ended at the first debate, in Denver, and the problem with that face-off went beyond Obama’s sleepwalking to the kinds of subsequent debates it forced on him. To shake off what happened, he had to turn truculent, and while that technically “won” him his second and third meetings with Romney, he lost something in the bargain. He undercut his high-minded, big-vision brand, whole stanzas of doggerel intruding on the poetry.

His “bayonets” line was clever all right, and plenty fair in its way, but it had a schoolyard nastiness to it, the same nastiness in one of his campaign’s most prominent ads, which showcases Romney’s off-key rendition of “America the Beautiful.” I wonder how that line, that ad and the overall atmospherics register with voters in the middle, some of whom are no doubt asking themselves where “hope and change” went and hid.

Bruni never pauses to recall that the “America the Beautiful” ad was put out way before the first debate ever happened. But never mind. Bruni’s point that something has soured in Obama’s presentation this go-round is well-taken.

But what interests me most about the column is its comments section, which I would imagine is loaded with NY Times regulars. Over and over and over quite a few of them state that, if worst comes to worst and Obama loses, it will be because of racism.

Are they really saying that a country that elected Obama by a large margin in 2008 has become too racist to re-elect him in the intervening four years? That there is no logic to their position—that the majority don’t even try to explain how or why such a thing could be—is a fact that seems to escape them. An Obama loss would equal racism, QED. To them, there is still no other explanation for not voting for Obama—certainly not any possible failings in Obama himself, either of policy or of character.

So if the voters of America decide to do to Obama what they did to Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George Herbert Walker Bush in 1992, it won’t be for the same reasons. Couldn’t be. It will be because we suddenly have become too racist to stomach the wonderful guy who deigned, out of the goodness of his heart, to be our president.