Does Obama read Sowell?

The New Neo Posted on by

I wonder. Ann Althouse highlights a few hyprocrisies in what purports to be Obama’s leaked SOTU address, as well as this upbeat reference:

What we can do ”“ what America does better than anyone ”“ is spark the creativity and imagination of our people. We are the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook….

And here’s Thomas Sowell in Investors Business Daily, appearing early today in an essay that’s well worth reading in its entirety:

At one time, people like Rockefeller, Edison, Ford and the Wright brothers were regarded as heroes, for having opened vast new possibilities for other human beings. The fact that they got rich doing it was an incidental part of the story.

We still have people revolutionizing our lives. Just think of the computer and the pharmaceutical drugs that have not only lengthened our lives but made them more healthful, so that being 80 years old today is like being 60 years old in times past.

But today we seldom even know the names of those who have made these monumental contributions to human well-being. All we know is that some people have gotten “rich” and that this is to be regarded as some sort of grievance.

Many of the people we honor today are people who are skilled in the rhetoric of grievances and promises of new “rights” at someone else’s expense. But is that what is going to make a better America?

SOTU: Obama the centrist

The New Neo Posted on by

I have little doubt which Obama will be on display tonight in the SOTU speech.

Gone is the crusading leftist. He went as far as he could in that direction, and the American people wised up to his act. Now, another role’s in order.

It’s not a new role, either. It’s one we’ve already seen a great deal of, the one Obama first played for the American people, beginning with his speech at the Democratic convention in 2004, and then polished to a fine luster during the 2007 and 2008 campaign. It’s Obama the moderate conciliator, the bipartisan compromiser, the rational and capable one.

Deficit? Reduce it. Jobs? Focus like a laser on them. Compromise? His middle name. Spending? Never heard of it.

It will be a rhetorical performance. I’ve never been especially interested in rhetoric and performances from politicians, although I admire a fine phrase as well as the next person, perhaps more. I’m primarily interested in action, and as far as I’m concerned Obama has revealed his true self by his actions during the past two years.

He is not interested in any of these things or he would have shown us by now. But in fact he’s shown us the opposite. If he is now co-opting the Republican agenda to some extent it’s because the election of 2010 gave him no choice but to fight them tooth and nail and lose in 2012 (even to the dread Palin, should she be nominated), or to appear to capitulate and get that old-time fiscal restraint religion. After 2012, he can always pivot back again—this guy’s a regular corkscrew—if Congress should become more Democratic and favorable to his original agenda.

If the American people buy this current transformation—which they might—and re-elect him in 2012, well then it’ll just be too bad, won’t it. As DaTechGuy writes:

It’s clear that this is the template that the White House/Democratic Party/MSM has embraced to prepare the ground for 2012 but in a world where social networks allow us to bypass these sources, can they convince the public to buy it?

If we do, or if we don’t, we will get the government we deserve.

I can’t predict what the public will do in 2012. It’s too far away, and way too many things can and will happen. But I do believe the answer to the question of whether the public will buy it depends on what will actually happen (especially economically), not the narrative du jour—and on who the public decides to blame or credit for those events: the Republicans in the House, or Obama in the White House.

Palin and the battle for feminism

The New Neo Posted on by

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.]

Terrorist attack at Moscow’s airport

The New Neo Posted on by

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.

The obligatory Keith Olbermann buh-bye post

The New Neo Posted on by

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

The New Neo Posted on by

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

The New Neo Posted on by

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?

The New Neo Posted on by

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?