The “nauseating” attack on Romney’s Bain record

The New Neo Posted on by

Cory Booker, mayor of Newark and Obama supporter, voices an opinion and then retracts it somewhat:

On NBC’s Meet the Press earlier on Sunday, Booker had strongly criticized an Obama campaign ad which attacked presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s tenure at private-equity firm Bain Capital.

“This kind of stuff is nauseating to me on both sides,” Booker said.

“It’s nauseating to the American public. Enough is enough. Stop attacking private equity. Stop attacking Jeremiah Wright,” he added, also referring to a proposal floated and quickly rejected by a pro-GOP super-PAC to attack Obama over his connection to his controversial former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

On Meet the Press, Booker went further, saying he would not “indict private equity.” “It’s just we’re getting to a ridiculous point in America, especially that I know I live in a state where pension funds, unions and other people are investing in companies like Bain Capital. If you look at the totality of Bain Capital’s record, they’ve done a lot to support businesses, to grow businesses. And this to me, I’m very uncomfortable with.”

The Obama campaign ad in question, released last week, blamed Bain Capital for the closure of a steel plant and the loss of American jobs and accused Romney and other executives of profiting from the decision.

In his YouTube video, Booker backed away from those comments and said Romney’s business record at Bain was fair game.

If all of this is nauseating, then politics itself is nauseating (which it kind of is), because this sort of thing is ubiquitous. Politics isn’t a noble interplay of competing ideas, well-articulated by respectful rivals seeking the common good. In politics, virtually everything is fair game, although the word “fair” is often ignored. But why shouldn’t Romney talk about Obama’s years with Wright, and why shouldn’t Obama focus on Romney’s years at Bain, if either thinks that’s a winning approach?

Politics can be (and often is) a vicious slugfest full of distortions and even outright lies about the opponent, and the exchanges Booker references are by no means the worst we can expect in this campaign. These lies and distortions are the problem, not the subject matter itself (be it Wright or Bain), and it’s the function of the press to set us straight with the truth, although much of the MSM abdicated that effort long ago and joined in the mendacious festivities.

Nor is any of this anything new, going back to the early days of the Republic.

Al Megrahi…

The New Neo Posted on by

…died yesterday, a bit short of three years after he was released on compassionate grounds by Scottish authorities to die in three months.

The reactions of the Lockerbie victims’ families were varied, as expected, since there is a rather vocal subset who believe him innocent of the heinous 1988 bombing. Now that Qaddafi is gone, it doesn’t seem that more information will be forthcoming, either:

After Gadhafi’s fall, Britain asked Libya’s new rulers to help fully investigate but they put off any probe.

No surprise there.

[NOTE: My previous posts on al Megrahi can be found here.]

G-8 meets at Camp David

The New Neo Posted on by

In a move that should surprise no one, President Obama sides with the new French President and against Germany’s Merkel in the debate about the balance of growth vs. austerity for Europe.

British PM Cameron added that:

…he detected a “growing sense of urgency that action needs to be taken” on the euro zone crisis.

“Contingency plans need to be put in place and the strengthening of banks, governance, firewalls – all of those things need to take place very fast,” he told reporters.

What do you bet that action won’t be taken all that fast?

Metrosexuals of the world, unite

The New Neo Posted on by

The latest tiresome, minor, conjured-up brouhaha is that a Romney-supporting PAC sort of thought for a while about doing a clip talking about Obama and Reverend Wright. The memo features a description of Obama that has many on the left—including the Times’ Charles Blow—up in arms. It’s, “The metrosexual black Abe Lincoln has emerged as a hyper-partisan, hyper-liberal, elitist politician with more than a bit of the trimmer in him.”

We’ll skip the fact that it was Obama himself who’s been conjuring up the Lincoln comparisons, as well as all the evidence for considering him hyper-partisan as well as hyper-liberal and elitist (not sure what “more than a bit of the trimmer” refers to, actually). This post isn’t about politics, it’s about the word “metrosexual.”

Blow writes:

[Metrosexual] is usually defined as a man keenly interested in grooming and preening…But this term is rarely appropriately applied. On the contrary, it’s often delivered with a snicker to question sexuality and feminize the subject, and femininity in a misogynistic culture is the greatest of sins. Metrosexual has become a roundabout homophobic taunt.

First of all, the actual definition and derivation of the word includes the fact that the subject referred to is a heterosexual (note that it sort of rhymes with heterosexual), a combination of “metropolitan” and “heterosexual,” and a guy who (as Blow writes) spends a lot of time on his appearance. And I’d agree with Blow that it’s intended to imply that the man so designated isn’t a super macho guy; no Marlboro men need apply (although, come to think of it, they were pretty concerned with appearance, too, despite the macho exteriors). But the metrosexual is usually thought to be explicitly heterosexual despite all that.

So rather than being a homophobic taunt, it’s actually more of an anti-narcissistic taunt. The term “dandy” used to cover much the same territory (definition #1 here).

“Metrosexual” is also, I believe, sometimes used by men about themselves to indicate that they’re rather cultured and female-friendly, not troglodyte thugs who only want to watch football games (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). In other words, a guy you can take to the opera.

If you happen to want to go there.

Alan Dershowitz continues…

The New Neo Posted on by

…to take on the Zimmerman prosecutor. And he is a formidable foe:

A medical report by George Zimmerman’s doctor has disclosed that Zimmerman had a fractured nose, two black eyes, two lacerations on the back of his head and a back injury on the day after the fatal shooting. If this evidence turns out to be valid, the prosecutor will have no choice but to drop the second-degree murder charge against Zimmerman ”” if she wants to act ethically, lawfully and professionally.

There is, of course, no assurance that the special prosecutor handling the case, State Attorney Angela Corey, will do the right thing. Because until now, her actions have been anything but ethical, lawful and professional.

And Harrison Ford’s…

The New Neo Posted on by

…getting older too:

In case you missed the reference, it’s to this song (Stevie Nicks is getting older, too…although a whole lotta botox and cosmetic filler helps):

And by the way, Harrison Ford will turn 70 in July. Wow. He looks good. Of course, it probably helps to be married to 47-year-old Calista Flockhart.

One more thing–why does Ford look so much like Will Rogers in that AARP photo?

How did Obama become a black American?

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I actually wrote the draft of this post a couple of days ago, before the news that forms the subject matter of this came out. But it has interesting resonances with it.]

An absurd question, you might say.

And by the way, I’m not referring to the issue of Obama’s actual birth. I’m talking about a person’s concept of him/herself, and his/her presentation to the world. As the offspring of a black father he didn’t know, a white mother and grandparents he did know, and raised in the American and yet somehow exotic culture of Hawaii and then the indisputably foreign culture of Indonesia and then back again, it would be quite understandable if Obama’s identity were unusually fluid, confusing, and mutable.

A large portion of Obama’s memoir Dreams From My Father was about a quest for a more stable identity. But that identity was, as Byron York points out in this article, a story (or a “narrative”) shaped (or “constructed”, as the post-modernists would say) by Obama himself. David Maraniss’s new autobiography, which only deals with Obama’s life until the age of 27, sheds more objective light on the subject:

Obama had a lot of Pakistani friends; Maraniss writes that if Obama and his girlfriend socialized as a couple, “it was almost always with the Pakistanis.” Obama appeared to identify with his friends as fellow non-Americans. “For years when Barack was around them, he seemed to share their attitudes as sophisticated outsiders who looked at politics from an international perspective,” Maraniss writes. “He was one of them, in that sense.”

But Obama was ambitious. Appalled by the “dirty deeds” of “Reagan and his minions” (as he wrote in “Dreams from My Father”), Obama became increasingly interested in, as Maraniss writes, “gaining power in order to change things.” He couldn’t do that as an international guy hanging around with his Pakistani friends; he needed to become an American.

So he did. One of those Pakistani friends, Beenu Mahmood, saw a major change in Obama. Mahmood calls Obama “the most deliberate person I ever met in terms of constructing his own identity,” according to Maraniss. The time after college, Mahmood says, “was an important period for him, first the shift from not international but American, number one, and then not white, but black.”

Mahmood, Maraniss writes, “could see Obama slowly but carefully distancing himself as a necessary step in establishing his political identity as an American.”…Obama chose to become an American in part because that’s what he needed to be to accomplish his goals.

For quite a while, Obama has reminded me at least a little bit of the F. Scott Fitzgerald character Jay Gatsby—that is, not in the details, but in the fact of being a self-constructed man. And this essay by York seems to me to be one of the most insightful things I’ve ever read about Obama. My gut feeling is that it has the ring of truth.

Obama the Kenyan, Warren the Cherokee

The New Neo Posted on by

Now there’s a bit of a furor about a blurb from Obama’s literary agent in 1991 that listed him as Kenyan-born, as well as a 2004 AP article from the days of his Senate race against Jack Ryan that does the same.

Most of the pundits discussing this have made it clear that they’re not birthers; they think Obama was actually born in Hawaii. I agree, although I know some readers of this blog have a different opinion. But even if a person believes as I do, the subsidiary issues are quite fascinating, and the parallels with the case of Elizabeth Warren and her claims of Cherokee heritage are obvious.

Each incident raises the same issues: who initially made the claims, and why? Was it Warren herself, and Obama himself? What would have been the benefit to each of them at the time? Or—particularly in Obama’s case—was it a mere error by others (such as his literary agent, who claims to have been the unwitting culprit and to have been in error)? And if so, why was the mistake not corrected till recently?

Roger Simon and Ace both claim that such biographical notes are always vetted by the authors who are their subject matter, even when composed by others. So was Obama just sloppy in not making the correction, or was it to his advantage back in 1991 to have been thought of as interestingly exotic and foreign-born, and to his disadvantage once he decided to run for the presidency (the blurb was only corrected in 2007)?

Will this matter in the 2012 election? I’ll go out on a limb and say “don’t think so.” Only denizens of the blogosphere will deeply care. Nor will it change opinions, even among them. Those who already distrust Obama will continue to do so, and those who like him will go on liking him. But it’s an interesting demonstration of how often the “facts” released by the media are incorrect and yet go unchallenged, and it also reflects what an advantage it is in certain circles to be considered non-American or native American, until it becomes a disadvantage.

Black voters forgive Obama…

The New Neo Posted on by

…for his gay marriage stand.

As he of course knew they would.

It’s interesting, though, what some of the interviewees in the article said. They seem to think he’s just being pragmatic now in his support of gay marriage: i.e. lying.

As I wrote in the “NOTE” after this post, I think he was just being pragmatic before and lying, and that he’s telling the truth now.

No matter. As Obama himself wrote, “”I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

A sort of human TAT or Rorschach test.

Is coffee good for you?

The New Neo Posted on by

Oh, I know you love it. But is it good for you, healthwise?

These researchers say the answer is “yes.” But don’t go hog-wild on coffee (although I wonder whether hogs even like coffee); they could change their minds tomorrow and declare it Badforyou.

Or maybe that’s a reason to go hog-wild while you can, before the news reverses itself and guilt is attendant on every cup.

But the methodology in the study is really really suspect, IMHO. Initially, the results indicated that coffee drinkers live shorter lives, not longer ones. However, coffee drinkers also tend to smoke, drink alcohol, exercise less, and eat more red meat, so once those factors were “taken into account,” the results indicated they actually lived longer than their non-coffee-drinking peers.

Sounds a bit fishy to me. But then again, I don’t ever drink coffee, so what do I know?