Interesting. It seems to be concentrated in just a few large and populous liberal states. Take a look.
Krauthammer on Obama’s “fatuous” summit
He does not mince words:
NOTE: here are some definitions for “fatuous:”
# asinine: devoid of intelligence
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn# Stupidity, lack of intelligence, understanding, reason, wit, or sense.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatuous# Obnoxiously stupid, vacantly silly, content in one’s foolishness
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fatuous# fatuously – vacuously or complacently and unconsciously foolish
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn# fatuousness – absurdity: a ludicrous folly; “the crowd laughed at the absurdity of the clown’s behavior”
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn# fatuousness – The characteristic of being fatuous
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fatuousness# fatuously – With smug stupidity or vacuous silliness; idiotically
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fatuously
The voices behind the Simpsons
This video is fun (hat tip: Ace of Spades). In such company, even the insufferable James Lipton becomes almost bearable:
I guess America is starting to miss Bush
Here are some poll results that ought to set Obama’s teeth on edge:
Americans are now pretty evenly divided about whether they would rather have Barack Obama or George W. Bush in the White House. 48% prefer Obama while 46% say they would rather have the old President back.
But never fear. Here’s the suggestion for Obama’s campaign:
Figuring out a way to make voters change their minds about the current President would be a much more effective strategy for Democrats than continuing to try to score points off the former one.
“Figuring out a way” is an interesting phrase. Why not just do things that people will like and that make sense rather than outraging them? It’s not rocket science.
But left-wing ideologues can’t do that, so “figuring out a way” to spin things is the approach. But when Americans have begun to figure you out, and don’t like what they see, it becomes more difficult (although hardly impossible) to fool them.
And remember, Bush’s numbers were with the “assistance” of a vehemently hostile press. Obama’s have been achieved with the press firmly behind him to a degree unprecedented in memory.
And in other and somewhat-related polling news, there’s this from Rasmussen:
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of likely voters finds Obama with 42% support and Paul with 41% of the vote. Eleven percent (11%) prefer some other candidate, and six percent (6%) are undecided.
That is shocking. I wonder whether people who are answering “Ron Paul” know much about him, or whether they are just at the “anyone but Obama” stage.
[ADDENDUM: Drew at Ace’s has some related observations.]
Robin of Berkeley says a funny thing happened to her on the way to the revolution
Robin of Berkeley tells her change story in this superb essay. Please read the whole thing.
Robin’s tale is somewhat different from mine. For one thing, she was a leftist, and I a mere liberal (and fairly middle-of-the-road as liberals go). For another, her conversion seems to have come, like that of Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus, all at once and almost like a lightening bolt. Mine was much slower, taking place over a period of two to three post-9/11 years. And she’s managed to write about hers in one compact and graceful essay, while I’m stalled on mine after about 100,000 or so verbose words (I don’t know exactly, but who’s counting?).
It takes courage to change your mind about something so fundamental and important, and to face how wrong you have been in the past. Robin of Berkeley has found that courage, as well as the humility that goes along with it. Robin writes “astonishingly, I became a conservative.” That is really the correct word. It is astonishing to think there was something about you that was settled and would never change, and then to find yourself on the other side of the divide, never to return.
Because there’s no going back, you know; you can only go forward.
Oh, and about Obama’s nuclear summit…
It should come as no surprise that:
(1) Nothing was accomplished; except that…
(2) Obama took the opportunity to snub a few allies; as well as…
(3) “[P]utting on a clinic for some of the world’s greatest dictators in how to circumvent a free press” (note that’s in quotation marks; I didn’t write it, Dana Milbank of the WaPo did).
Milibank has more—a lot more:
Reporters for foreign outlets, many operating in repressive countries, got the impression that the vaunted American freedoms are not all they’re cracked up to be.
Yasmeen Alamiri from the Saudi Press Agency got this lesson in press freedom when trying to cover Obama’s opening remarks as part of a limited press “pool”: “The foreign reporters/cameramen were escorted out in under two minutes, just as the leaders were about to begin, and Obama was going to make remarks. . . . Sorry, it is what it is.”
Alamiri’s counterparts from around the world had similar experiences. Arabic-language MBC TV’s Nadia Bilbassy had this to say of Obama’s meeting with the Jordanian king: “We were there for around 30 seconds, not enough even to notice the color of tie of both presidents. I think blue for the king.”
President Obama promised to be a uniter, not a divider. And so he has—united Republicans, Independents, and even some Democrats in fierce opposition to him. And now he’s working on unifying the world—at least, the world press:
Lalit K. Jha of the Press Trust of India, at Obama’s meeting with the Pakistani prime minister, reported, “In less than a minute, the pool was asked to leave.” The Yomiuri Shimbun correspondent found that she was “ushered out about 30 seconds” after arriving for Obama’s meeting with the Malaysian prime minister. Emel Bayrak of Turkey’s TRT-Turk went to Obama’s meeting with the president of Armenia but “we had to leave the room again after less than 40 seconds.”
“When you only see the president for 15 or 20 seconds without him asking if you have any questions, it’s very frustrating,” said Laura Haim of France’s Canal+, which persuaded the White House to include foreign outlets in the press pool. “It’s very important for this president, who wants to restore the image of the United States, to have more access.”
Obama’s official schedule for Tuesday would have pleased China’s Central Committee. Excerpts: “The President will attend the Heads of Delegation working lunch. This lunch is closed press . . . The President will meet with Prime Minster Erdogan of Turkey. This meeting is closed press. . . . The President will attend Plenary Session II of the Nuclear Security Summit. This session is closed press.”
And here’s a nice tie-in to my post of earlier today:
Reporters, even those on the White House beat for two decades, said it was the most restrictive set of meetings they had ever seen in Washington. They complained to both the administration and White House Correspondents’ Association, which will discuss the matter Thursday with White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.
I’m sure Gibbs will be every bit as responsive and courteous as usual in his reply to them. The sad thing is that most of them are still so heavily in the tank for Obama that it probably won’t matter.
And what of Milbank? His piece is certainly not the usual fawning Obama lovefest. Milbank also wrote this recent article praising Rahm Emanuel as the only person in the Obama White House trying to keep the president from being a complete failure. So it’s clear that Milbank has not drunk all the Kool Aid.
But Milbank is no conservative, either (see this, for example). In addition:
Milbank covered the 2000 US Presidential election and the 2004 US Presidential election. He also covered US President George W. Bush’s first term in office. After Bush won the 2000 election, Karl Rove asked the Washington Post not to assign Milbank to cover White House news. In 2001, a pool report penned by Milbank which covered a Bush visit to the US Capitol generated controversy within conservative circles. According to Milbank, the nickname given to him by the president is “not printable in a family publication.
But Milbank also ran afoul of the Obamaphiles quite some time ago, back in July of 2008:
Milbank was criticized for a July 30, 2008 article in which, in part by using snippets of quotations, he portrayed Barack Obama as being presumptuous. A few days later MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann stated that Milbank would not be allowed back onto his show, which Milbank had appeared on since 2004, until Milbank submitted “a correction or an explanation.” However, Milbank had apparently already left Olbermann’s show for another show on CNN. Milbank stated that he has been dissatisfied since he was criticized by Olbermann’s staff over making a positive comment about Charlie Black, a McCain senior advisor, and as a result had already been negotiating with CNN.
Apparently there was something about Obama’s manner that rubbed Milbank the wrong way right from the start. And now a great many other people in the press are agreeing. In this piece, Milbank gets to tell them “I told you so.”
But “presumptuous,” although correct, doesn’t begin to cover it as a descriptor for Obama. Arrogant and condescending, yes. But this is a man who no longer tries to hide it any more. This is the power trip of an egomaniac who knows the press has rendered itself toothless and impotent in his wake, and who assumes that its members will never strike back no matter how he treats them—or, if one or two do, he intends to hit them back twice as hard.
Lots of presidents haven’t liked the press. But usually that’s been because the press has been hostile to them. Obama reverses this—he’s hostile because the press has been so obsequious to him, and because he’s secretive, and because he has contempt for them and thinks he can quite literally get away with anything. That’s what happens when the press abdicates its responsibility to tell the truth in as objective a manner as possible. A power-mad thug gets elected, and if he acts thuggish to them, they can hardly complain.
Robert Gibbs and Obama: no more Mr. nice guy
The curious and troubling tendency of President Obama to use his communications and political aides as advisers on everything under the sun, including foreign policy, has been documented before. That wouldn’t be so bad if any of them had expertise on these subjects, but for the most part they are strictly political creatures.
Robert Gibbs is a case in point. One of the least appealing of Obama’s inner circle (and that’s saying something), he is also one of the most visible in his role as Obama’s press secretary. Look at his bio and tell me whether you can see anything there that would qualify him to give advice to fellow-neophyte Barack Obama in any policy field, much less foreign affairs. He is a political animal, specializing in campaigns and communications.
Nevertheless here’s a piece from the WaPo about his tremendous and growing influence on policy in this administration [emphasis mine]:
…Anita Dunn, the Obama administration’s former communications director, [says,] “[Gibbs] is one of the very few people who can sit in on anything he wants to sit in on.“…Much of Gibbs’s day is spent sitting in on a broad swath of policy meetings in the Oval Office, educating himself for his public performances, but also for the greater private role to come. Some policy advisers have wondered why the administration’s flack is so often in attendance, but insiders fluent in the administration’s power dynamics know Obama values his views…
Gibbs is also a regular at foreign policy meetings. He volunteered that he attended all 33 hours of the Afghanistan briefings, though he noted that he never said a word. He did chime in during last month’s escalating tensions with Israel, if only to make sure the president understood the “conventional wisdom” promoted in the media, that Obama’s toughness with Likud hard-liners would potentially erode his domestic Jewish support. “For a lot of reasons, he would discount that,” Gibbs said, referring to the president.
So it appears that all of Obama’s foreign policy decisions are vetted at the outset by Gibbs for their potential political repercussions. If so, he seems to be doing an abominable job; Obama’s polls continue to fall. Or perhaps Obama just doesn’t take Gibbs’s advice, although he certainly solicits it.
What’s more, the abrasive and condescending Gibbs appears to have alienated virtually the entire Washington press corps, not an easy feat in that formerly Obamaphilic crowd [emphasis mine]:
There are a few things about Gibbs that irritate even the least excitable reporters in the briefing room, though none of them would speak for the record out of fear of retaliation. One reporter expressed frustration with the way Gibbs has compared reporters — and even Sen. John McCain — to his 6-year-old son because he didn’t approve of the way they were behaving…Unlike press secretaries past, who would make rounds of calls to reporters as they neared deadlines, Gibbs is notoriously tough to get on the phone. His soliloquies are full of “first and foremost” and “I will say this,” and he relies on escape-hatch promises to “check and get back to you.”
Initially it seemed surprising that the supposedly charismatic, calm, and likeable Obama would surround himself with so many downright unpleasant people. But that aspect of Obama is a mere facade, and he selects his aides very carefully. The pattern that emerges is that they are amoral thugs who insult, intimidate, and lie, while providing an increasingly thin cover for the very same aspects in Obama’s personality and methodry.
The pattern was apparent even before the election to anyone who cared to look at Obama’s history. Taken separately and looked at by the naive, Rezko and Ayers and Wright seemed to be curious anomolies. But one would be hard-pressed at this point to find any close friend or adviser of Obama who doesn’t fit this mold.
On David Remnick, Jack Cashill, and the authorship of “Dreams From My Father”
I happened to catch David Remnick on television the other day pluggng his new biography of President Obama, The Bridge. It was the first time I’d ever seen New Yorker editor Remnick, and I was transfixed by the hushed and awed NPR-ish tones in which he spoke almost worshipfully of Obama.
We were used to hearing that sort of Obama veneration during the campaign. But it’s extraordinary that Remnick has managed to hold onto it so long, in the face of so much evidence that would tend to topple the pedestal on which anyone but a man who had long ago abandoned any pretense of objective critical thinking might have placed Obama.
For example, take the title of Remnick’s book, which, according to a review in the New York Times:
…refers to the bridge in Selma, Ala., where civil rights demonstrators were violently attacked by state troopers on March 7, 1965…[and] the observation made by one of the leaders of that march, John Lewis, that “Barack Obama is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma”…[and] the hope voiced by many of the president’s supporters that he would be a bridge between the races, between red states and blue states, between conservatives and liberals, between the generations who remember the bitter days of segregation and those who have grown up in a new, increasingly multicultural America.
This reference to the racial-healing promise of Obama doesn’t appear to have been meant in an ironic, wistful, looking-back sort of way. According to the Times review of the book, Remnick seems to believe that Obama is still a bring-us-all-together kind of guy, whose ” impulse was to try to reconcile or synthesize opposing views. Perhaps it’s also an inclination that explains why he made such a concerted effort last year to try to get Republican support on a health care bill.”
Yes indeed; some “bridge.” The only reconciling effort that occurred there was the use of reconciliation to pass that one-sided monstrosity.
Jack Cashill has a different take on Remnick’s book. Cashill is the man who’s been asserting for quite some time that Bill Ayers ghost-wrote Dreams From My Father for Obama, and he thinks that Remnick’s research has unwittingly supplied more support for Cashill’s case, as well as adding some other interesting information about Obama’s academic history.
First, just to let you know how Remnick operates, here’s Cashill on Remnick’s presentation in The Bridge of Cashill’s credentials:
In the way of credentials, Remnick allows me no discernible Ph.D. in American studies, no Fulbright, no articles in Fortune or the Wall Street Journal, no well-received book on intellectual fraud, no books at all.
Remnick describes me a “little-known conservative writer, magazine editor, and a former talk-radio-show host.” The “little-known” stands in obvious contrast to the well-known, Princeton-educated, Washington Post-groomed New Yorker editor Remnick. The “talk-radio” I did as a sideline more than ten years ago. Remnick intends the reference as a slight.
More damning still, I have done my writing for “right-wing Web sites, including American Thinker and World Net Daily,” obscure dwarf stars in the “Web’s farthest lunatic orbit.” (FYI, the American Thinker editors have better credentials than Remnick or I.)
Next, we have from Remnick the first news of Obama’s undergraduate academic record that I’ve ever come across. And remember, the information Cashill cites here hails from a book written by an Obama admirer:
At Columbia, Remnick tells us, Obama was an “unspectacular” student. Northwestern University communications professor John McKnight reinforces the point, telling Remnick, “I don’t think [Obama] did too well in college.”
McKnight, a Chicago friend, wrote a letter of reference for Obama to attend Harvard Law School. Remnick assures us that Obama was a “serious” student at Columbia, just not a particularly good one. Still, Obama finessed his way into a law school that chooses its 500 new students each year from 7,000 applicants whose LSAT scores generally chart in the 98th to 99th percentile range and whose GPAs average between 3.80 and 3.95…Obama certainly did not write well when he was at Columbia. Remnick charitably describes the one article Obama wrote for Columbia’s weekly news magazine, Sundial, as “muddled,” and he is referring only to the content.
But Cashill is especially interested in this:
Unfortunately, as Jerry Kellman, the organizer who recruited Obama to Chicago, informed Remnick, “[Obama] told me that he had trouble writing, he had to force himself to write.”…[and] Still, for all of Obama’s presumed literary talents, it strikes even Remnick a bit strange that “he never published a single academic article.”
The plot (to coin a phrase) thickens even more when we come to Remnick’s treatment of the writing of Dreams From My Father (which he believes was most definitely written by Obama). Here’s Cashill referring back to Remnick’s book and the information contained therein:
In 1991, Obama also began to work in earnest on the book that he had contracted to write for Poseidon, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. “The advance was reportedly over a $100,000,” Remnick writes. “Obama received half of that amount on signing the contract.”
By 1991, Obama had met Michelle, and the two indulged in a social life that would have left Scarlett O’Hara dizzy. Writes Remnick, “He and Michelle accepted countless invitations to lunches, dinners, cocktail parties, barbecues, and receptions for right minded charities.” Obama also joined the East Bank Club, a combined gym and urban country club, and served on at least a few charitable boards.
Obama’s obligations were taking their toll. “Obama had missed deadlines and handed in bloated, yet incomplete drafts,” Remnick tells us. Simon & Schuster lost patience. In late 1992, weeks after the Obamas’ marriage, the firm canceled the contract…
At the time, the Obamas, still childless, were making well into six figures between them as they partied their way through progressive Chicago’s frenzied social life. According to Remnick, Bill Ayers and weatherwoman bride Bernadine Dohrn played a highly visible role in that life. Remnick calls them collectively the “Elsa Maxwell of Hyde Park.”
After his agent secured Obama a smaller contract with the Times Books division of Random House, Barack decamped to Bali — Bali? — in early 1993 in the hope that he would be able to finish the book without interruption. The sojourn proved fruitless. He still could not produce.
Remnick papers over the two years between Bali and the book’s 1995 publication. He quotes Henry Ferris, the Times Book editor, to bolster Obama’s claim to authorship. Ferris “worked directly with Obama,” Remnick tells us, but Ferris edited in New York while Obama wrote in Chicago. Ferris would have had no way of knowing just how much of the editing or writing Obama was doing himself.
In late 1994, Obama finally submitted his manuscript for publication. Remnick expects the faithful to believe that a mediocre student who had nothing in print save for the occasional “muddled” essay, who blew a huge contract after more than two futile years, who wrote no legal articles, and who turned in bloated drafts when he did start writing, somehow found the time and inspiration during an absurdly busy period of his life to write what Time Magazine would call “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.”
Cashill (with the assistance of Remnick) reports. You decide.
Spambot of the day
Help-seeking spambot who has has attempted to master the American vernacular:
Dang
I just spent ages typing a long comment, and when I tried to send it my FireFox freaked out. Did you get it or is it lost and I have to do it again?
The Democratic brand…
…is at an all-time low since Gallup has been recording such things.
Good. And it better stay there till election day 2010, and beyond.
Next on Obama’s hit list: small contractors
It may have slipped under your radar screen, as it almost did mine. But I was talking to a friend who owns a small home remodeling business and he reminded me that on April 22 (Earth Day!) new EPA regulations go into effect that could take down many a small contractor.
It’s all about the rules on lead paint removal, which heretofore had been enforced only for work on homes that were old enough to have lead paint and in which small children or pregnant women (the populations at risk) resided. But that’s not good enough for our nanny state; oh no. Now the rules will apply to work done on any home built before 1978, eliminating the previous sensible escape hatch whereby a homeowner could opt out of the regulations if there were no at-risk individuals living in the house.
You might ask why it is that a homeowner contemplating a remodeling job should be deprived of the ability to refuse to pay for costly lead protection procedures that are not needed. Well, here’s your answer: “this option (the opt-out) was ripe for abuse.” In other words, the government can’t trust people to do what’s in the best interest of their own children or pregnancies, and so we all must suffer.
And suffer we will, especially the contractors. To be in compliance by April 22 would mean that every contractor contemplating a job that would disturb more than six square feet of a home’s area (and this includes not just carpentry but plumbing, window installation, and heating and AC installation) would need to have completed a one-day course in the matter, necessitating taking a day off and spending about two hundred dollars. But since there are nowhere near enough certified teachers, therefore the vast majority of America’s contractors could not possibly comply by April 22 even if they wanted to.
But that’s relatively minor compared to larger problems connected with the new rules, such as the fact that they will increase the costs of renovation for both contractor and homeowner just at a time when the industry and the consumer can least handle it. And lest you think there aren’t so many homes built before 1978 (and there sure are in my neck of the woods, New England), the statistics are that this will affect two-thirds of US homes and apartments nationwide.
As this article states, pre-1978 homes being renovated will be turned into the equivalent of hazmat sites. Some contractors will decide it isn’t worth the hassle—and the risk of lawsuit—to work on older homes. As it is, fines for contractors who violate the rules could run up to $37,500 per day. Tons of paperwork will be required of the contractor to document every step of the process.
In addition, my informant filled me in on a few more details that aren’t in the articles. He said that on such a job, a great deal of the work of sawing would now be required to be done outside, which will necessitate a lot of time-consuming back and forth to and from a protected outdoor workplace to the inside of the home, increasing the expense. The plastic coverings, with all the supposed lead-paint dust they contain, will be sealed up and deposited in landfills (will the lead never leach down into the water supply thereafter?). Prior to that, the plastic cannot sit outside the home in a dumpster for more than 48 hours, a rule that will require many more dump runs and the fees that go with them. A black market in under-the-table construction will no doubt spring up—populated by the more libertarian, plus the more unscrupulous and less law-abiding.
Perhaps, as with specialists and/or health insurance companies under Obamacare, this will drive a lot of small contractors right out of business. Just what the doctor ordered..
But hey, who needs renovations, anyway? They’re for the rich capitalist pigs—although I don’t think it’s the rich this will hurt the most (and it will be a nice cash cow for the lawyers).
Oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
Obama’s no Reagan on nuclear issues
One of the memes the left is currently employing in response to criticism of Obama’s nuclear policies is some variation on the theme: “But Reagan wanted a nuclear-free world too.”
Sure he did. Doesn’t everybody? But just because the two men wanted the same distant (and probably unobtainable) goal doesn’t not equate them, as James Carafano points out today in the Washington Examiner:
Like Reagan, Obama believes America must lead the way to nuclear disarmament. Unlike Reagan, he believes this requires an assertion of “moral” leadership, to be demonstrated simply by reducing our nuclear stockpile and refusing to modernize the U.S. arsenal. It’s a false premise…
Reagan recognized that the ultimate goal of arms negotiations is to make the world safer, more stable and more free. To eliminate the need for large nuclear arsenals, he went about eliminating the dependence — both ours and others’ — on massive nuclear attack as the guarantor of security.
Thus, the first items on Reagan’s agenda were building up U.S. conventional forces and introducing missile defenses. That allowed his negotiators to approach arms control agreements from a position of strength.
Obama has it backward. He started with cutting back on defense — especially in acquisition programs. Bye-bye, F-22.
He also cut missile defense, starting with systems to protect the homeland. But even that wasn’t enough to make the Russians happy.
“The problem is our America partners are developing missile defenses,” objected Prime Minister Vladimir Putin last December. “Our partners may come to feel completely safe.” That sounds like a leader who still thinks that maintaining the threat of nuclear attack is a good idea. If not, why is it a “problem” for Americans to feel safe?
Reagan understood his adversaries. Obama does not.
Russia remains our adversary, although not in exactly the same way as before. To the problem of Iran and North Korea, two countries that were already adversaries back when Reagan was president but which have now become (or are about to become) nuclear adversaries of ours as well, Obama has no answer. Bush had no good answer either, but at least he did not telegraph a posture of appeasement and weakness, as Obama has.
Of course, it depends what you think Obama’s goal is. I believe that Obama wants to weaken our standing in the world vis a vis other nations, but even I don’t believe he wants us annihilated in the process. Following that logic, his stance on the subject appears to be the combination of knave and fool we’ve come to expect from the man.