Let the games begin

The New Neo Posted on by

With the withdrawal of Newt Gingrich, what we’ve known for weeks—that Mitt Romney will be the nominee—becomes undeniable. If Mitt’s victory speech last night is any indication, he’s on his game and will bring the fight to Obama.

That means that the left and its MSM allies can focus on attacking Romney rather than spreading out their critiques among the other Republican candidates. And so accordingly, looking around at today’s articles, we see the usual assortment from the usual suspects.

For example, there’s this one by Jonathan Chait about how Romney is now starting his Etch-A-Sketch campaign, containing the truly risible comment, “It is certainly remarkable how little ridicule or scrutiny Romney has attracted in his rather brazen reversals.”

I was going to spend a lot of time doing research, documenting a bunch of the other things that are being said and how openly the media is carrying Obama’s water. But then I thought, why? It’s obvious at this point, and the exercise has become truly tiring.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve blogged so long. Perhaps it’s just that I’ve read so much and noticed essentially the same things over and over. I really wouldn’t mind if periodicals and writers openly defined themselves as biased to one side or the other. And some do, but many still profess an objectivity that they don’t demonstrate.

So I’d rather just say that I didn’t watch Romney’s speech (I’m not a speech person), but on reading it I was very impressed. The tone was confident but not cocky, eloquent but not flowery, aggressive but not nasty, and about as Reaganesque as possible without being an impersonation.

The conservative alternatives

The New Neo Posted on by

Delaware notwithstanding, it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that Newt Gingrich’s days as a candidate are numbered. The only question now is when he’ll drop out.

For some, that’s a relief. For others, it’s the death knell of the chances for a conservative candidate to be nominated for the presidency in 2012. One of the post-mortems on the 2012 campaign will probably be that Gingrich and Santorum hurt the conservative cause by splitting the conservative vote, but I actually don’t think that was the problem. The problem was there was no “truly conservative” candidate who was also a good candidate.

It’s not that those two things are oxymorons. I’m convinced that there are quite a few politicians with more conservative records than Romney who could have beaten Obama, but they didn’t run (and, by the way, IMHO, Sarah Palin was not one of those people). Either Gingrich or Santorum—or any of the other conservative candidates in 2012, such as Bachmann—could have united the conservative vote and been the nominee, except that none of them were strong candidates and conservatives were torn among them and then between them.

The same thing happened in 2008, only back then one of those conservative candidates who wasn’t strong enough was Mitt Romney. So those of you who despise him now can do so for at least two reasons: he paved the way for McCain’s nomination in 2008 because he was one of the not-strong conservative candidates back then, and now that he’s almost undoubtedly the 2012 nominee you can hate him because he’s a RINO and only a faux conservative.

You could ask me why, if Romney was a weak candidate in 2008, do I think he’s stronger now? It’s a good question, and I have an answer, one you may either accept or reject as you see fit. It may be hard to look back and remember it, but one of the major issues in the 2008 campaign was not the economy (that is, not till the last few weeks, and by then McCain was already the candidate), an area of weakness for McCain and strength for Romney, but the war on terror and the war in Iraq, That’s where McCain was stronger, and that was a good part of the reason that people voted for him in the primaries—which, after all, occur earlier in the year. By the time of the election, that had already faded quite a bit from view in people’s minds and been replaced by “it’s the economy, stupid,” which remains true today.

Another thing to remember is that the Barack Obama of 2008 was not the Barack Obama of 2012. In 2008 the nation was ready to turn to someone new and untried, a young man who promised all sorts of things, including an end to the divisiveness and rancor of the Bush era. We’ve seen how that worked out, and now the nation might just be longing for a stable, somewhat dull guy—older but not old, and seasoned as an executive—who can fix things.

Singing the blogroll blues

The New Neo Posted on by

You may or may not have noticed that a couple of years ago my blogroll disappeared.

To the reader, blogrolls are a convenience, a shorthand way to find blogs the writer considers worth looking at for one reason or other. For bloggers, they’re a way to tip the hat to other bloggers and send a few readers their way. When I first began to blog seven (7!!) years ago, I drew up a blogroll and added to it every now and then, but I’d never really gone back to clean it up and delete the blogs that had closed down in the intervening time.

Then it disappeared rather suddenly, because blogrolling.com, a tool I’d used to set up my blogroll, disappeared as well. Fortunately, I had previously made a copy of my blogroll. I always meant to reinstall it, but it wasn’t exactly a top priority, and knowing how way leads on to way, I didn’t actually take a look at it till yesterday.

I hadn’t expected that updating my blogroll would be an emotional experience, but it was. I was surprised to find that at least half the blogs were gone. Many of the disappeared ones were written by people I’d actually met in person, back in the heady formative days of the blogosphere, when there was a lot more networking, and wonderful mass meetups like this one hosted by PJ. It was, in short, an exciting and fun time.

Now the political blogosphere is far more entrenched, and that wonderful early energy has settled down. Group blogs like Huffington Post are traffic leaders, the big blogs like Instapundit still endure, but a lot of the smaller and middling-traffic ones have dropped out, and there’s not much up and down movement in the remnants (well, maybe down, but not so much up). As I deleted blogs on the list, I wondered where bloggers were whom I’d not thought of in many years (like the wonderful Vietpundit, whose blog itself has also disappeared from the web and even the wayback machine, so there’s no point in giving you the URL).

So many are gone, and although I know what some of them are doing, I don’t know about most. The ones I do know about are mostly happily ensconced with jobs, family, hobbies; what is otherwise known as “real life.”

But some—the ones that made me saddest of all—have been lost to death. Dean Barnett is the most glaring example, a wonderful blogger and a personal friend whom I met through blogging. And naturally that got me to thinking about FredHJr, beloved commenter here, who died suddenly in June, 2009.

Three years ago. Can it be? Of course; time accelerates lately, doesn’t it? I often wish we had the irreplaceable FredHJr’s opinion on so many things that are happening today.

[NOTE: One of these days the blogroll will actually reappear on this blog, instead of my just talking about it.]

Obama and executive power: it goes without saying…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that this is the plan [emphasis mine]:

…[I]ncreasingly in recent months, the administration has been seeking ways to act without Congress. Branding its unilateral efforts “We Can’t Wait,” a slogan that aides said Mr. Obama coined at that strategy meeting, the White House has rolled out dozens of new policies ”” on creating jobs for veterans, preventing drug shortages, raising fuel economy standards, curbing domestic violence and more.

Each time, Mr. Obama has emphasized the fact that he is bypassing lawmakers. When he announced a cut in refinancing fees for federally insured mortgages last month, for example, he said: “If Congress refuses to act, I’ve said that I’ll continue to do everything in my power to act without them.”

Aides say many more such moves are coming. Not just a short-term shift in governing style and a re-election strategy, Mr. Obama’s increasingly assertive use of executive action could foreshadow pitched battles over the separation of powers in his second term, should he win and Republicans consolidate their power in Congress.

How could anyone have expected otherwise? Obama has never made a secret of the fact that he’s not exactly a small-federal-government kind of guy. And without a Democratic Congress, it’s “the federal government, c’est moi.”

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.