…a rash of articles lately saying Obama is riding high, and will be hard to beat in 2012?
Palin and the battle for feminism
Kay Hymowitz has written an excellent piece for City Journal explaining one of the linchpins of female rage at Palin from the left: she is seen as a traitor to feminism. Although this may seem paradoxical, since Palin is a powerful female, she’s not their powerful female.
I’ve written a lot about woman-on-woman hatred of Palin. I have long believed it’s multiply-determined; there’s an embarrassment of riches there. But lately I have come to think that what Kymowitz calls the battle for feminism is at least a large part of it. I have a draft for a post on that very subject that I wrote a few days ago; unfortunately, it’s not ready for prime time yet and I’m very busy today, so it will have to wait. In the meantime, Hymowitz’s article is quite fine.
[NOTE: And although I’m not familiar with it, this about-to-be-released book by Hymowitz sounds fascinating.]
Rahm…
Terrorist attack at Moscow’s airport
Although no one is officially saying it yet, today’s bombing at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport that killed 35 people and wounded scores of others was almost certainly the work of terrorist suicide bombers from the northern Causcasus region of Chechnya and/or its environs.
Any other origin would be a big surprise. That area has been the source of most (if not all?) of the terrorism in Russia, including the horrific Beslan school massacre. In an especially chilling detail, many such bombers are female. They perpetrated a subway suicide bombing last March.
Here’s a timeline of the last 15 years of terrorist attacks on Russia; you can see there have been a large number with heavy casualties, including a previous one involving this same airport:
Aug. 24, 2004: Two female suicide bombers bring down two Russian airliners that took off from Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, killing 90 people.
It is no surprise, either, that the Reuters article on the current bombing manages to use about 700 words to describe it, but the only time it says either “terrorist” or “terrorism” is when directly quoting a Russian official using the word. ABC News is hardly any better, employing scare quotes around the terms.
I can understand being reluctant to finger the perpetrators’ identity. Even though it is easy to guess, newspapers shouldn’t be guessing (although they often do—in this country, the default position is that it’s someone on the right). But the fact that this is terrorism is obvious beyond any possible argument.
Words matter. If the words “terrorist” and “terrorism” must be censored by much of the press, as they have been for years, we are in an enormous pack of trouble, and it’s not just from the terrorists themselves.
Oh. and one more unmentionable thing: the Chechnyan region is Sufi Muslim. Religion is certainly not the complete motivation for the bombings, which are separatist in nature, part of the area’s arsenal in a long and bloody war against Russia. But the particular form it takes in these attacks—suicide terrorism of the most vicious kind—is almost solely the province of Islamic “militants.” This is no accident, despite attempts to whitewash the situation.
RIP Jack Lalanne
Here’s the proof (as if we needed any) that death comes to all: Jack Lalanne, pioneering fitness guru, has died at 96 of pneumonia.
Jack in his youth, at the age of 94:
“The good old days are this second.”
The obligatory Keith Olbermann buh-bye post
Yes, Olbermann’s leaving MSNBC, and the announcement was precipitous.
And no, I’ve never watched his show, except for a couple of YouTube excerpts. I have written very few posts that even mention his name. So in honor of his going I could say, “Keith, I hardly knew ya—and really had no desire to do so, from the little I do know.”
I’m not sure why it’s such a big story, except that it has the added element of mystery. Why did he go? (Dunno.) Was he fired or did he quit? (My guess is “fired.”) And will it matter? (Not one little bit.)
I think this is the most probable explanation:
Did Comcast”“as many Countdown viewers seem to suspect”“order Olbermann out? It appears that the end of the Olbermann era at MSNBC was not “ordered” by Comcast, nor was it a move to tone down the network’s politics. Instead, sources inside the network say it came down to the more mundane world of office politics”“Olbermann was a difficult employee, who clashed with bosses, colleagues and underlings alike, and with the Comcast-related departure of Jeff Zucker, and the rise of Maddow and O’Donnell, the landscape shifted, making an Olbermann exit suddenly seem well-timed.
A humorous note is this statement of Olbermann’s in his farewell speech, reflecting his view of himself as an iconoclastic rebel:
Mr. Olbermann thanked his viewers for their enthusiastic support of a show that had “gradually established its position as antiestablishment.”
Keith Olbermann, anti-establishment hero.
And in honor of his departure, let’s have a little traveling music:
Nope, no haters on the left
Commenter Teri Pittman offers some quotes from someone named Mark in something called the “Kalimba Magic Newsletter,” to the effect that it’s only on the right that violent rhetoric occurs: “I don’t remember anyone joking about killing president Bush.”
Well, either Mark has a very selective memory, or he’s been in another world for the last ten years. But Mark is an ordinary citizen. What’s Joan Walsh’s excuse?
Joan Walsh is a liberal columnist and editor at Salon. She was recently accused by blogger Ace of truncating an Obama quote in order to make it seem less critical of the left’s heated rhetoric as well as the right’s—or, as Ace puts it:
So it is with Obama and the high priests of the Worshipful Media. The high priests have decided that their hero-god is a bit potty lately, and so they must correct his spaketh-ings so they become inerrantly perfect, as they should be, as the Sacred Scrolls prophecized.
This is not just a post-Tucson crusade of Walsh’s. Back in April of 2010, she made these risible remarks on MSNBC [unfortunately the sound is a bit out of sync]:
My summing-up of Palin-hatred for today
I’ve noticed and noticed in the comments here and elsewhere that many people ascribe a lot of the hatred of Palin among women—especially liberal women—to envy. Palins beautiful, Palin’s got it all, her husband’s a hottie, and so forth.
I may not know a lot about some things, but I know liberal women. And my sample is rather large, too. Although I suppose that some sort of envy must enter into the equation for some, I think it’s very very low on the list and not anywhere near as common as one might think.
I’ll tell you the emotion most of the liberal women I know feel towards Palin: contempt. She embodies everything they despise about conservatives.
That is the overriding attitude, and it’s real and it goes deep. It’s not feigned, and it doesn’t seem to come from secret envy denied, although it does appear to be a woman-on-woman thing. It comes more from a sense of superiority, and shock that someone so (fill in the blank—stupid, uneducated, ignorant, declasse, trailer trashy) has managed to achieve the level of political prominence and influence Palin has.
If you want to conceptualize it another way, it’s as though Dolly Parton (or some simulacrum of Dolly) were in her forties, had reduced the size of her breast implants, dyed her hair brown, put on some glasses, and decided to go into politics.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Giuliani in 2012?
I’m really not sure how I feel about this.
I supported Giuliani initially in his 2008 run. But I would dearly love to see someone fresher and younger come forward to get some energy into the Republican Party’s presidential campaign. Giuliani will be close to 70 in 2012. He’s not the healthiest of men, and many of the same health/age objections mounted against McCain in 2008 could be leveled at him in 2012. His biggest strength is in national security against Islamicist terrorism, and while that is an important part of the presidency, other considerations such as economics are likely to be huge in 2012, and he’s somewhat untested in that sphere.
Guiliani has what you might call a messy marital history. He’s been in executive office, but only as mayor, and while in that position he was soft on illegal immigration. For the last couple of years, he’s been involved with a law firm that represents, among others, some large oil and pharmaceutical companies, a position tailor-made for criticism.
Come to think of it, no, Giuliani’s not my guy. It’s odd that although the Republican Party has a lot of up-and-comers, none of them seem well-positioned and willing to run in 2012—yet. I continue to believe that some relative unknown, perhaps a governor such as Mitch Daniels, might emerge from the background. But if that’s going to happen, he or she had better get cracking. It’s getting late.
That last sentence I just typed is a sobering one. Late? Didn’t we just finish a grueling election?
HCR: who “allows” you life?
I was intrigued by this comment, made in response to a WSJ Karl Rove article on the Republican plans to undo Obamacare. The comment is an excellent example of a certain type of leftist thought [I have corrected some spelling errors]:
People who think their salary or profits belong to them, that government taxes THEIR money, doubtless agree with you.
But that money is NOT YOURS. It is ours, on loan to you for good behavior.
Innovation and hard work not only should be rewarded, they are rewarded. Which is a good thing.
Fellow members of the same society that allows you life, deserve life also. Such as access to medical care.
Who is this “ours” the commenter refers to in the second paragraph? And who is “you?” Are they not the same people, and if so, who are the lenders and who the lendees?
But it is actually the last paragraph that interests me most, the one that attempts to argue in favor of a right to medical care (although the commenter refers to it as “access,” that is not what he means).
In the first sentence of that paragraph, the writer turns the Founders’ words at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence on their head. For the commenter, the truths that the Founders thought so “self-evident” are not evident at all.
Here’s the Declaration:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
So the right to life is a natural one that is provided by the Creator, not one “allowed” by a society of fellow humans. It seems that, just as the commenter believes money is on loan from that community, so is life itself.
Back in September, Obama addressed the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and quoted those words from the Declaration, leaving out the word “Creator.” It got a lot of attention. Much of the focus was on whether his act was a slip of the tongue or a very deliberate omission, and what either might say about the depth of his religious beliefs and/or the fact that mention of the deity has become non-PC in liberal circles. Here’s the excerpt:
I doubt it was a slip, although it might have been. Obama ordinarily chooses his words very carefully, and this is such a famous passage from the Declaration that it would be odd indeed if he weren’t familiar with it. But whether or not a person is a believer, atheist, or agnostic, if that word is left out of the quotation we lose a great deal. Once the power to “allow” life is vested in society—an aggregate of mere people—the way is paved for further encroachments on liberty for the good of all.
HCR repeal vote: symbolic and yet…
Yesterday I called the House vote to repeal HCR “merely symbolic.”
In retrospect, I realize the term I used may have been misleading, because many readers thought I meant “meaningless.” I did not.
There are many “mere symbols” that are fraught with meaning. In fact, that’s what a symbol is: something that in and of itself does not accomplish anything, but can stand for something else quite important. It was in that sense I used the term.
The vote means that, at least this time, the Republicans have kept their word. It means they listened to what the people have been saying as far back as the summer of 2009 when the previous Congress ignored the wishes of the people expressed in town meetings in many states.
Without follow-up, however, the vote will remain “merely” symbolic. Republicans campaigned on the cry not only of “repeal,” but of “replace.” One thing I hope the long fight over the HCR bill will have accomplished by the time it’s over is to spur action to truly reform health care insurance in this country in ways that actually help the situation rather than hurt it. I am an incrementalist in this regard; I don’t believe we have to destroy the system in order to save it.
It won’t be easy. The problems are weighty: health care of the high-tech type that we’ve developed over the last few decades is inherently expensive, and covering everyone on some basic level will be expensive, no matter how it’s done. Right now it’s already there for the majority of people, but in a piecemeal, haphazard, and probably not cost-effective way. There is no lack of ideas for how to streamline the system and make it more flexible as well (such as allowing catastrophic coverage to be more available), as well as to fill in the gaps and provide coverage for the non-covered. But none of them will come cheap, and the details are what’s important.
Replacement probably cannot be done until after the 2012 election, at the earliest. The president still has veto power, and the Senate is in Democratic hands. But in the meantime, there might be small parts of the bill that can be repealed, as well as work on defunding. Until then, these “symbolic” votes will show voters the direction in which the Republican Party intends to be headed if it does manage to win control of the Senate (and the presidency) in 2012.
Judge Roll: greater love hath no man
Amazingly, a video exists of the Tucson shootings, taken by a store security camera. It shows, among other things, that Judge Roll appears to have died trying to protect a fellow victim named Ronald Barber, who was on Giffords’ staff:
Describing the video, Mr. Kastigar [of the Pima County Sheriff’s Department] said the judge was “intentionally trying to help Mr. Barber,” adding, “It’s very clear to me the judge was thinking of his fellow human more than himself.”
The judge guides Mr. Barber to the ground, shields him with his body, and then tries to push himself and Mr. Barber away from the gunman, who was no more than three to four feet away as he fired, Mr. Kastigar said.
“He pushes Mr. Barber with his right hand and guides him with his left hand. The judge was on top of him and is covering up Mr. Barber, literally lying on top of him, and his back was exposed,” Mr. Kastigar said.
The judge was shot in the back.
Ronald Barber was shot twice but is alive and has been released from the hospital.
This statement from Barber’s family, issued before the news on Roll’s heroism was released, gives a clue as to an extra motive the judge may have had for his actions [emphasis mine]:
We would like to express our deepest sympathies to the families who lost love ones on Saturday. Dad [Mr. Barber] is so deeply saddened by the loss of his friend and fellow staff member Gabe Zimmerman and his long time friend Chief Judge John Roll.