Obama: the only thing we have to fear is…

The New Neo Posted on by

…fear itself. Oh, and frustration:

Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared,” Obama said Saturday evening in remarks at a small Democratic fundraiser Saturday evening. “And the country’s scared.”…

He faulted the economic downturn for Americans’ inability to “think clearly” and said the burden is on Democrats “to break through the fear and the frustration people are feeling.”

Obama really doesn’t learn. His above-it-all condescension, his tendency to play the social-worker-in-chief, his suggestion that he and his supporters are fact-driven and his detractors are emotion-driven, all come across worse as time goes on. And when he speaks at fundraisers in front of moneyed supporters, these repellent traits tend to come out in especially sharp relief. Bitter clingers and all that.

So let me respond. Yes, Mr. President, many people are afraid and frustrated, but not just about the economy in general. A great many of us have become afraid of the damage that can be done by you and your fellow Democrats remaining in power. We have become afraid of (and highly frustrated by) the attempts of you and your party to jerk us by the too-tight collar and lead us much further to the left than we think best. We have felt those twin emotions, fear and frustration, as well as others such as anger and a sense of betrayal, as we’ve watched over the last two years as you and/or Congress have passed one counterproductive and unpopular bill after another, ignored our clearly stated opinions and wishes, sucked up to dictators and apologized for this country, and broken promise after promise and then lied about it.

Who’s thinking clearly, and who is not?

[NOTE: And don’t think Obama is planning to abandon his agenda if he and his party do manage to bitterly cling to power. At this meeting and other recent ones, he’s made it clear that he will persevere:

He said he needs Democrats in the Senate “because every bit of progress that we need to make is going be a matter of grinding it out.”

“Grinding” is a word Obama returned to several times Saturday as he tried to empathize with Democrats who are frustrated with his administration and leaders in Congress.

“Now we’re in the midst of not just advocating for change, not just calling for change ”“ we’re doing the grinding, sometimes frustrating work of delivering change ”” inch by inch, day by day,” Obama said.]

Bill Maher’s Christine O’Donnell clips

The New Neo Posted on by

What does this video reveal?

(1) O’Donnell annoys liberals no end, and has been doing so for quite some time.

(2) She has a lot of experience being in the line of rhetorical fire.

(3) She’s pretty charming, which doesn’t hurt.

(4) She’s no dummy.

(5) Bill Maher doesn’t have quite the ammunition he suggested he did.

Take a look:

Funny that one of the clips features our senator-to-be from Minnesota, Al Franken himself.

[Hat tip: Althouse.]

Survival lessons from Chile: leadership and faith

The New Neo Posted on by

[Bumped up.]

My new piece is up at RightNetwork. In it, I compare the leaders who emerged under two extreme survival situations in South America: the recent Chilean mine accident, and the Andes plane crash of 1972 that inspired the book Alive.

[NOTE: And if you’re interested in watching a fascinating documentary about the Andes plane crash—much better than the dreadful Hollywood movie made on the subject—please take a look at this.]

Obama appeals to blacks to save him

The New Neo Posted on by

Charles Blow of the NY Times writes that Obama is now trying to rally the black vote to come out for him, based not on his record, but on racial solidarity:

…[A]ds, on black radio and in black newspapers, simply extol their audiences to “stand with President Obama.”

These ads aren’t about policy. They’re personal appeals on behalf of the president. You don’t have to be engaged to get it. This November you’re voting for Obama, again.

Blow himself is black and an Obama supporter, so I assume he’s not just trying to smear Obama or accuse him of racial pandering. And he thinks the strategy just might work. As Obama told a largely black audience at Bowie State University, a historically black college: “Don’t make me look bad, now.”

Ah, how the “post-racial” president has fallen. It makes political sense, however, for him to use one of his strongest assets, the strength of his continuing support among black voters, to try to motivate that group to get to the polls.

Note, also, that Blow begins his column with the usual knee-jerk assertion about racist Republicans:

The president and fellow Democrats have taken a page from the Republican playbook. They’re unabashedly using racial-solidarity politics to animate voters.

The racist Republicans—it’s a meme that won’t die.

From the start, Obama has carefully used accusations of racism to explain those who oppose him. I first noticed it during his presidential campaign, and I wrote posts about it in June and then again in August of 2008. Here’s what I wrote in June:

Barack Obama, the candidate who wants to end divisiveness, and who wants to run a clean and honorable campaign without negativity, said the following in a recent campaign speech at a Florida fund-raising reception:

It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy. We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

We have here a truly masterful attempt to flames of paranoia on the part of his followers and adopt the mantle of victimization for himself, thus raising rather than lowering the amount of divisiveness and vitriol in the campaign. Pretty good for just a couple of sentences.

Obama is correct in saying that there have been racist remarks against him. These have originated from fringe elements and/or commenters in the blogosphere and/or anonymous email campaigns. They focus on his “funny name,” for example, or the fact that he’s black.

But in this speech he appears to attribute””or to encourage his supporters to attribute””these charges to the entire Republican Party, couched as a threatening “they.”

It’s easy to forget some of these details of Obama’s campaign behavior, since so many dramatically distracting events have transpired since. But when he was running for president, Obama used the “Republicans are racist” accusation early and effectively and purposefully and explicity. Later, he was content to let proxies (including the compliant journalists of JournoList) carry on the torch.

Charles Blow and other Democrats in the press are still doing it, and Obama is looking to blacks to save the party in 2010. Why? Because it’s almost all they’ve got now.

And speaking of ignorance…

The New Neo Posted on by

…Joe Klein shows quite a bit of it himself in his hit piece on ignorant commoners like Christine O’Donnell:

[O’Donnell] is attractive, to some, because she doesn’t know anything. She couldn’t name a Supreme Court decision she disagreed with, not even Roe v. Wade. There is no way she could ever be confused with a member of the elites; there is no way she could be confused with an above average high school student.

Only problem with what he’s written (well actually, it’s hardly the only problem, but it’s the one that initially leapt out at me) is that he is misstating the question O’Donnell was answering. She was asked to name a SCOTUS decision “of late” with which she disagreed. When she couldn’t think of one, Wolf Blitzer “helpfully” suggested Roe v. Wade, but O’Donnell corrected him by saying that Roe is not a recent SCOTUS decision (the date was 1973, in case you’re interested).

Perhaps O’Donnell’s difficulty in naming a recent case with which she disagreed might be due to the fact that—as Cornell law professor William A. Jacobson noted:

The question of dissatisfaction with Supreme Court decisions “of late” was particularly bad. For conservatives, decisions by the Roberts Court “of late” have been, for the most part, acceptable. The Kelo case, from 2005 (pre-Roberts), is being cited as something O’Donnell should have known, but that really is inside the law stuff. Coons didn’t exactly exhibit legal scholarship by citing the Citizens United case, considering that for the last several months the case has been the rallying cry of the left.

Klein doesn’t appear to understand the irony of his calling O’Donnell ignorant as he simultaneously displays his own ignorance.

What Obama has[n’t] learned

The New Neo Posted on by

Peter Baker’s interview with President Obama in the NY Times Sunday magazine is entitled “Education of a President.”

It is a curious document. It purports to tell what the president and his advisers have learned from their first two years in office. The short answer seems to be: nothing, except perhaps that they aren’t the miracle workers they thought they were. Duh.

For instance, after Baker reads back to Obama his famous “the rise of the oceans will begin to slow and the planet heal yada yada yada” excerpt, and then asks him how that high-flying rhetoric sounds now, he replies: “It sounds ambitious. Buy you know what? We’ve made progress on each of those fronts.”

I suppose it should not be a surprise that Obama refuses to say the truth, which is that his rhetoric was ridiculously overblown and phenomenally narcissistic. Presidents in general are loathe to own up to mistakes, and Obama is no different.

What is different is Obama’s stubborn refusal—shot through the entire interview—to admit to any real problem other than not selling himself enough. His policies are fine, rock solid. The fact that people don’t accept them is a mere public relations and communication oversight, which would have been rectified by better spin.

Does Obama truly believe that? And if so, is it because he believes his policies are correct? Or is it because he believes he could sell ice to the Eskimos? And if the latter, does he believe it because he thinks people are just that stupid, or because he’s so powerfully persuasive, or both?

And how can he still believe it at this point? Hasn’t he at least been shown that his persuasive powers are not all that strong? Is it just that it’s easier to believe he hasn’t tried hard enough to convince? Easier than to believe that one of his greatest gifts has somehow deserted him, or that the Peter principle has triumphed?

If all he hears are statements like this one from his staff (or former staff), I suppose it wouldn’t be so hard for him to hold onto his old ideas of himself. These people are enablers:

“There is an anti-establishment mood,” Rahm Emanuel, the former Clinton aide who served as Obama’s first White House chief of staff, told me before he stepped down this month. “We just happen to be here when the music is stopping.”

It’s true that correlation doesn’t prove causation. But c’mon guys, this is big-time denial.

Here is the prevailing wisdom that Obama hears:

The view from inside the administration starts with a basic mantra: Obama inherited the worst problems of any president in years. Or in generations. Or in American history. He prevented another Great Depression while putting in place the foundation for a more stable future. But it required him to do unpopular things that would inevitably cost him.

If this is believed, it isn’t just arrogance. It’s delusion. And that’s never good for a president. And then there’s this:

“He’s opaque even to us,” an aide told me. “Except maybe for a few people in the inner circle, he’s a closed book.”

Not a good sign at all, and said by too many people to not be true. In addition, there’s this:

One prominent Democratic lawmaker told me Obama’s problem is that he is not insecure ”” he always believes he is the smartest person in any room and never feels the sense of panic that makes a good politician run scared all the time, frenetically wooing lawmakers, power brokers, adversaries and voters as if the next election were a week away.

Okay, I’ll go on record here: anyone who believes that he or she is always the smartest person in the room is both arrogant and a fool, and that’s not too smart at all.

The lost art of the physical exam

The New Neo Posted on by

The NY Times has an article about how the latest crop of doctors has forgotten—or really, never learned—how to perform a physical exam.

Oh, they can take measurements, and they can order tests. But they have come to rely on those things to diagnose a patient, rather than their eyes and ears and hands. Traditionally, those were doctors’ primary tools, and their skills in using them needed to be sharply honed. Now much of the skill seems to belong to the MRI machine and the sonogram, which give doctors a false sense of security and protection from lawsuits.

I’m not knocking those diagnostic tests; they’re important. But they should be adjuncts to a proper examination, which can tell a doctor a great deal about health rather than body parts. With an MRI and other exquisitely sensitive imaging, you can get into the trap of Too Much Information. For example, the back MRI of a person over forty without back pain often looks almost as abnormal as an MRI of one who does. What does it all mean?

One of the most impressive bits of hands-on diagnosis I’ve ever seen was performed by a man I consider a medical genius, the shoulder and elbow orthopedist Dr. Frank Jobe. The patient was my seventeen-year-old son. He had experienced multiple and repetitive shoulder dislocations, and all the doctors he’d seen on the east coast had agreed that he needed shoulder surgery of the anterior (in the front of the shoulder) type.

Dr. Jobe is the famous surgeon who invented the Tommy John elbow surgery in 1974. He’s elderly and doesn’t operate any more, but back when he saw my son he still did. He’s a genial, low-key guy, despite his fame, and he laid his hands gently on my son’s shoulder and wiggled it a little.

“Oh, my,” he said in surprise. “He’s got anterior and posterior dislocations. That’s highly unusual.”

Almost all shoulder dislocations are anterior. A few are posterior. Only a tiny percentage of shoulder dislocation patients have both, and they usually are people who have hyper-flexible connective tissue, which does not describe my son. All the doctors had missed this, except Jobe.

He went on. “And it’s the posterior dislocation that’s done the most damage.” He explained that he would do two surgeries at once, an arthroscopic one for the anterior problem, and an open surgery for the posterior. And that’s what happened (successful so far; knock wood).

But at that appointment another thing impressed me. There was a younger doctor in the room at the same time, watching. He had done the initial workup of my son and had only felt the anterior dislocation. Jobe called him over and asked him to touch my son’s shoulder again, while he showed him what he had found, “Feel this?” he asked. “Feel that little movement underneath there when I go like that?” he said, jiggling the shoulder ever so slightly. “That’s it.”

The younger doctor tried and tried, but he shook his head. He couldn’t feel it.

I had my own experience with Dr. Jobe. By the time I had my elbow surgery for an ulnar nerve problem, about a decade ago, Dr. Jobe was phasing out the surgical part of his life. I had been to countless doctors, almost all of whom had pronounced my case impossible to diagnose, because the EMG findings (that’s an electrical test for nerve conduction) were ambiguous. So I went back to Los Angeles and Dr. Jobe.

He studied all the findings; I had about eight sets of EMGs to show him. He did his own exam. And in the end he said he thought I was a candidate for surgery. “I can’t give you a guarantee,” he said. “But despite what the EMGs say, I think that, from your symptoms and my examination, this surgery will help you.”

And so it did, rather dramatically, although it took a few years for me to recover. Jobe assisted at my surgery, and I was very glad he did, because it turned out that my case was unusually complex.

I still remember what Dr. Jobe said to me in the recovery room, “We were surprised at how much damage we saw when we opened you up. Your ulnar nerve was very inflamed, and it was pinned down by a large amount of scar tissue that we had to dissect off the nerve. Other nerves had been recruited into the mess, and we had to sever them. Then we moved the ulnar nerve the way we usually do. I can’t guarantee what will happen or how long it will take to heal, because your case is unusual, but I will tell you this: you needed this surgery. Without it, you were never going to get better.”

Without Jobe and his skills, I probably would never have been able to have had that surgery, and I wonder what would have happened to me. And I wonder whether he’s been able to pass those skills on to a significant number of doctors. And I wonder whether they are able to take the time and trouble to use them. I certainly hope so.

Voting

The New Neo Posted on by

I voted by absentee ballot yesterday.

I’m not one to do that, ordinarily. I like going to the polls on voting day. I like the atmosphere of civic duty. I like the people standing around (even in the rain) with posters, hoping vainly to influence somebody at the last minute, or just drinking in the attention. I like the fact that I often meet people I know there from the community, since it’s one of the few things we do as a group any more.

I like the solemnity of going into the booth and drawing the curtain to maintain my privacy. I like to stand there for a moment and savor what I’m about to do, and the fact that I have the right to do it. I’m such a sentimental sap that sometimes there are even tears in my eyes, and not just if my candidate is likely to lose.

I remember noticing as a young child that school was closed on election day because our building was used as a polling place. This gave me a warm feeling about elections right from the start, since I disliked school rather intensely. They’d haul the machines in the day before, with their arcane levers and apparatus that looked a bit like the insides of a piano. It all seemed very adult to me, and I looked forward to the day when I, too, would be a grownup and voting.

But this year I’m going to be out of town on Tuesday, November 2. So yesterday I got an absentee ballot. I felt a grim satisfaction in marking that long row of Republican names, although a couple of the Democrats running are my friends. Straight Republican ticket this year, for obvious reasons.

I’m hoping for a Republican landslide. And then I’m hoping the winners do right by the hope we have invested in them. I say “hope,” because it’s certainly not trust.

Judge says multi-state anti-HRC lawsuit can proceed

The New Neo Posted on by

Federal Judge Roger Vinson has just announced that the anti-HRC lawsuit mounted by 20 states will be allowed to proceed.

An excellent decision, IMHO:

The judge questioned whether the administration was correct in arguing that all Americans are active participants in the health care system regardless of whether they choose to have health insurance and are therefore subject to penalties under the government’s authority to regulate commerce.

This case is potentially huge, and whatever the verdict is, it will almost undoubtedly end up in the Supreme Court, where it rightly belongs.

James Fallows: O’Donnell more dangerous than Palin

The New Neo Posted on by

Two-thirds of the way into O’Donnell’s debate with Coons last night, it occurred to James Fallows that she could be more dangerous than Sarah Palin. Why? Because:

…she has the idiot bravado of the talk show regular.

To echo Bob Schieffer in another context, is that the best Fallows can do to critique her performance? If so, she must have been pretty articulate.

The holidays are coming: click through neo-neocon to Amazon

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember those Amazon widgets on the ride sidebar (four—count ’em, four)? Please use any of them to click through and buy your holiday gifts. Or use them any time you want to purchase books or any of the other gazillion things Amazon now sells.

I believe that I may be performing a real public service (other than obvious and shameless self-promotion) by reminding you in mid-October that it’s only a little over two months until Christmas and about six weeks till Chanukah, which begins extremely early this year on the evening of December 1.

I have always been a procrastinator, the sort of person who remembers a mere week before the holidays that, oh yes, it’s all almost here, and I need to buy some gifts pronto. I then race out and scramble madly. So if I can save you from a similar fate, I will have done some good in this cold cruel world.

[WARNING: I may run this again at least once more before the holidays.]