I have an unusually busy day, so although I’ll be back to the blog later today, this post and the one below it will be short.
But here’s a thread to discuss tonight’s upcoming debate—or anything you want.
Hillary says the buck stops with her
Hillary Clinton throws herself under the bus, taking full responsibility for the Benghazi security lapses—except that she blames some underling.
Strange. My guess is that this is an attempt to secure a win for Obama while making herself look like a noble party loyalist. I don’t think it reflects well on Obama, though, in eye of the public. It makes her look like more of a grownup and a leader than he. After all, the president is supposed to be in charge of the Secretary of State, and responsible for things that happen on his watch in general.
Plus, this has nothing to do with the coverup, which remains a significant issue for most people who are aware of what transpired in Benghazi (not sure if that’s “most people,” though).
When there’s a screwup, people like presidents to take responsibility. At least, they used to like it, and I don’t think that’s changed in a major way—yet. Obama has set a new standard in buck-passing already, and this is just another episode in a long line of his trying to evade blame for anything that happens during his administration. What a failure of leadership!
Reagan and the generations
Here’s a great moment from Reagan (hat tip: Dr. Sanity). The speech was given in 1961, over fifty years ago. But his words seem all too prescient, considering what’s going on today:
Political changer: Buzz Bissinger’s wake-up call continues apace, and in the usual fashion
I’ve already written about Buzz Bissinger’s “changer” experience here.
But there’s an addendum, and it’s just as all of us would imagine: he’s been excoriated and shunned by those liberals he used to think were so—well, so liberal.
I don’t want to mock Bissinger’s naivete, because I once shared it. Until it happens to you, it’s not something a person of the liberal persuasion would tend to notice. I certainly didn’t. Neither did Bissinger. And the experience is quite an eye-opener, as Bissinger says:
I would say between the Daily Beast comments, Twitter comments, Facebook comments”“ roughly”¦4,000 comments”“ I ran about 6-1 against. And it wasn’t just, you know, “I disagree with you.” It was the f-word, it was “you’re a baby killer.”
It was even friends, [but] among friends it wasn’t as vitriolic. There was this sense of, “How dare you, you’re traitor. You’re a writer. You’re a journalist. How can you possibly come out in favor of this man?”
”¦You could feel the anguish, you could feel the sense of perhaps traitorship. I am a lifelong Democrat”¦
I thought liberals were supposed to be “open-minded.” I thought they were supposed to accept divergent viewpoints to at least say, “hey, everyone in America has a right to an opinion.” But it’s really about”“ “I love free speech as long as it’s the free speech that I want” ”¦ Liberals have this sense of themselves, but 90% are as nasty, as vitriolic, as vicious as the conservatives they say are”¦
There’s a sameness to these changer stories that is both tedious and fascinating at the same time. There’s a reason I gave the title “Leaving the circle: political apostasy” to the blog category related to this aspect of political change. It’s another cliche, but liberalism is much more like a religion than conservatism is, and “apostasy” is pretty much how liberals view the change process, even though liberals often mock conservatives for their supposed religious fundamentalism (which only some conservatives exhibit, anyway—but liberals are not interesting in learning the truth about conservative thought, they are interested in setting up conservative straw men and knocking them down over and over).
In one of my earliest posts on the subject I quoted from Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. I think the following quote from Kundera bears repeating:
Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.
And I’ll add to that my observation from that same post:
We all want to dance in a ring, to a certain extent. It’s wonderful to be part of a coherent movement, a whole that makes sense, joined with others working for the same goal and sharing the same beliefs. But there’s a price to pay when something challenges the tenets of that movement. When that happens, there are two kinds of people: those who change their ideas to fit the new facts, even if it means leaving the fold, and those who distort and twist the facts and logic to maintain the circle dance.
Bissinger is finding out the price of stepping out of the circle, a price that’s probably been steeper than he expected.
Obama says no more Mr. Debate Nice Guy
Obama’s post-first-debate assessment was that he was just too darn nice. So in their pep talks for the second debate, his spokespeople offer us a different prospect: the Obama team promises more aggressive president in second debate.”
I wonder what form this will take. Will he jab his finger at Romney? Give him a cold hard stare? Bare his teeth and guffaw like a stoned lunatic, a la VP Biden?
Perhaps he’ll give him the finger, or brush the Romney dirt off his shoulder; the creative possibilities are almost endless.
Or he could finally attempt to muster some arguments to justify and explain the abysmal failure of his 4-year presidency. His 2012 candidacy has so far been based almost entirely on attacking Romney and Ryan, and the attack has been mainly ad hominem. The fact that so many people still consider Obama a nice guy remains a deep puzzlement to me.
Now I’m dreaming about politics
The other night I dreamt that I saw a poll reporting that only 8% of Americans care about the Benghazi coverup.
So now I’m having political nightmares. A first.
And it’s no surprise that the nightmare was about Benghazi, which seems to crystallize all that’s been going wrong lately. The incompetence. The callous disregard for what happened. The coverup. The blatant lies about the coverup. The collusion of much of the MSM. The indifference or ignorance of so many Americans. And the feeling of impotence on the part of those who are outraged by it all.
The ubiquitous blue jean
Commenter Promethea recently wrote of women’s fashion:
Thank goodness for blue jeans. If the right size, they look good on almost everybody.
Almost everybody? I agree that some women look absolutely fantastic in blue jeans, especially if young and fit. And models who look good in anything look really, really, really good in blue jeans.
But I think most women look bad in them, or at best mediocre.
Yes, I know I’ll get flak for saying that. It’s almost un-American, isn’t it? But I’ll stand my ground.
And blue jeans are bor-ing. Everybody wears them almost all the time, like Mao jackets in China during the Cultural Revolution. I am heartily sick of them. What’s more, they’re not especially comfortable, either, especially tight ones. Everybody says they are, but I don’t see it.
Take a look at the photos here on how to choose the correct pair of jeans. The complexity of the decisions involved re pocket placement, pants leg width and shape, darkness of wash, stitching, feathering vs. fading, and more, sound so daunting that it’s no surprise that so many people just wear their favorite old jeans till they disintegrate.
Although I studied all the photos at that site and read which jeans are supposed to be undeniably superior to the other jeans on the same women in the side-by-side pictures, most of the time the difference was not all that apparent to me.
Here’s a single example. Which pair of jeans do you think is supposed to be best? Well, I know you know, because the caption above the photos tell you—but seriously, do you think the pair on the right is so very much more flattering than the pair on the left? I think vice versa:
And that’s a person who looks relatively good in both jeans, although she’s certainly no fashion model. Here is a more typical sight; and believe me, I’m not trying to make fun of these women. They’re more or less normal-looking, and would look a lot better in the right pants:
In case you wonder—yes, I’ve got some jeans. They’re dark, and wide-legged, and they look pretty much like this, only without the contrasting stitching:
In other words, they look pretty much like slacks. And that’s why I like them.
It’s a race between the Clintons and Obama…
…to see who can throw who under the bus first, according to Ed Klein.
According to me as well, even though I have no insider info. It’s been rather obvious that Obama has been planning to blame Hillary, as SoS, for the disaster in Benghazi. It’s just as obvious that she and her husband would try to protect themselves.
I say you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas. I also assume the truth is even more Byzantine than described in the article.
The motive
Commenter “effess” asks:
Is it possible that the Obama-Biden campaign wanted Biden to behave this way during the debate? If so, why? Was Biden trying to win the clown vote?
My answer is: sort of.
I believe the campaign wanted Biden to be aggressive, and to mock Ryan as a liar. After all, the charge “liar” was almost the entire thrust of Biden’s strange antics. Furthermore, “liar” accusations have been a huge part of the Obama campaign against Ryan from the moment his candidacy was declared, and particularly since his speech at the Republican Convention. Much of the MSM has been complicit, so much so that till now if you asked most low-information voters what they think of Ryan they just might have said “liar.”
Biden was also appealing to the base, which is hostile and juvenile. He certainly accomplished his goal in that. What the Obama campaign may not have counted on is how Joe’s behavior would play to the middle. Obama also probably did not expect Joe to overplay his role in such strange and offputting fashion.
Romney family photos
The Nobel Peace Prize Committee…
…proves it has a sense of humor.
[NOTE: And by the way, lest you start to badmouth the Swedes, remember that the Peace Prize is awarded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee.]
In case you haven’t seen it yet…
…watch this ad. It’s devastating, capturing the disturbing (and disturbed) nature of Joe Biden’s odd behavior during last night’s debate:
Biden made me think of the Joker:
…[I]nterpretations and incarnations of the Joker have taken two forms. The original and currently dominant image is of a highly intelligent psychopath with a warped, sadistic sense of humor. The other interpretation of the character, popular in the late 1940s through 1960s comic books as well as the 1960s television series, is that of an eccentric but harmless prankster.
Biden’s laughter is derisive laughter, in keeping with the Obama campaign theme of contempt for the opposition. There is no actual humor in his guffawing, and his grin looks forced, as though he’s made a decision to laugh as a technique, perhaps to goad Ryan to anger. Most pundits agree the behavior was a way to rev up the base. But what does it say about the Democratic base if this is the sort of thing that gets its members’ juices flowing?
But it’s Clint Eastwood who’s come out way ahead in both these debates. His “empty chair” metaphor for Obama seemed amazingly prescient. And listen to what he said at the Republican Convention about Joe Biden:
“Kind of a grin with a body behind it.” Is Eastwood clairvoyant?