Pigs are flying: sympathetic Palin piece in the Times

The New Neo Posted on by

Amazingly enough, a long and almost entirely positive piece about Sarah Palin has appeared in the NY Times Magazine.

A few sample facts learned from it, some of which I’d already suspected:

She’s got the energy of a dynamo and hardly sleeps.

She’s intelligent and a quick study.

She goes her own way.

She writes a great deal of her own stuff.

She loves to read.

Here’s a quote from the article, which was written by Robert Draper:

In truth, few are underestimating Sarah Palin anymore.

And Draper is certainly not one of them. It’s hard to know what he thought of Palin when he started out, but it’s clear she’d earned his respect by the time he was ready to write about her:

One evening in late October, I sat in the Anchorage apartment of Palin’s onetime communications director Bill McAllister, watching old TV footage of his ex-boss during her campaign for governor in 2006. McAllister, a former reporter with the Anchorage NBC affiliate who worked for Palin in 2008 and 2009, wanted me to see with my own eyes the Sarah Palin he knew ”” bright and easygoing, exceedingly popular with the local press ”” before the national media had grossly mischaracterized her in a way he found “frustrating and maddening.”

The Palin I watched on McAllister’s DVD lived up to his billing. She cut a competent, reasoned, disciplined figure…

And have you noticed how much Sarah Palin has been in the news since the mid-term election?

One person’s junk is another person’s family jewels

The New Neo Posted on by

John Tyner has become a YouTube folk hero for declining a TSA patdown in no uncertain terms when he told the screener, “If you touch my junk, I’m going to have you arrested.”

The usually astute Charles Krauthammer demonstrates that he didn’t exactly have his finger on the nation’s—uh, pulse—when he said [emphasis mine]:

It doesn’t have the elegance of “Don’t tread on me,” but that was the age of the musket. This is the age of Twitter. It’s got a directness that I really like.

And over the ages people have come up with hundreds of words to describe the private parts. This guy just invented a new one. It’s quite remarkable.

Charles, even I know that the term’s been in use for quite some time before Tyner made it more famous.

And in fact, it would be difficult to think of a term that hasn’t been used by somebody somewhere sometime for that portion of the male anatomy. Human ingenuity knows no bounds.

Pre-holiday reminder: please use neo-neocon for your Amazon purchases

The New Neo Posted on by

The holidays are coming, the holidays are coming!

And what better way to give the gifts that keep on giving than to use neo-neocon as the portal for your Amazon purchases. If you click on any of the widgets in the right sidebar, anything you buy during that visit will send a tiny bit of money my way, and it won’t cost you an extra cent.

Sounds like a win-win situation to me.

amazon.jpg

(NOTE: Do you think I have a future writing advertising copy? I don’t think so, either.]

Those TSA body scans

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t written much about this yet, but I know it’s a hot topic.

I’m all for airport security. The problem is that what used to just be a minor hassle for the average passenger is becoming more than that. These scans and pat-downs may have crossed a line of diminishing returns.

There is no perfect approach to thwarting terrorists, but we seem to be escalating our defenses by annoying and even invading the rights of passengers in ways that don’t clearly provide any benefit. What’s more, it still appears that it’s all at the expense of profiling.

I was especially struck with this passage in the AP story I linked in the first line of this post:

But compared to security in some other countries, Schwieterman [a Chicago-based transportation expert] argued, procedures in the U.S. are far from intrusive.

In Israel, where Palestinians attacked planes in the 1970s, passengers face tough questioning and multiple inspections. Single women who are not Israeli citizens are sometimes inspected more intensely because militants have tried to use them as couriers.

What is not spelled out in that quote is that the entire Israeli system is based on rigorous profiling. That’s too non-PC for us. It seems the government considers it okay to subject passengers to all sorts of inconveniences and even invade their body privacy, as long as the offenses are borne by everyone equally and no demographic is singled out, even if it would be reasonable to do so. Is prevention of profiling worth the cost?

Why keep Pelosi?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a piece in Politico that purports to explain why the Democrats are refusing to ditch Pelosi.

Before I read it, my own opinion was that the biggest motivator is that they’re scared of her. And that happens to be reason number three in the article, which refers to it as “the fear factor:”

There’s a hangover effect, described to POLITICO by one senior Democratic aide this way: “People woke up the day after the election as afraid of Nancy Pelosi as they were the Monday before. And they shouldn’t be.” Of course, that aide, fearing retribution from the speaker, asked to be quoted without attribution.

The fear may not only reflect the fact (as the article emphasizes) that Pelosi could dole out both rewards and punishments to those who toe the line and those who defy her. Because doesn’t that depend on her retaining power, whether as Speaker or as Minority Leader? If she’s voted out, what can she do to harm them?

To answer my own question: in order to defy her and not be frightened about it, a Representative must have the conviction that there are enough votes to actually defeat her (as Machievelli said, if you strike at a king, strike to kill). And, since the Democrats in Congress are now more dominated then before by ultra-liberals in Pelosi’s camp, those who are against Pelosi probably perceive themselves as too small a group to prevail. And if they can’t win, they’d better shut up if they know what’s good for them. So the majority of them are doing just that, at least in public.

Another source of Pelosi-fear could be that she’s got the goods on them in other ways. Pelosi probably knows where all the skeletons are buried, and her revenge could take a number of forms, some of them independent of whether she holds onto formal power or not.

It’s also true, as the article points out, that there’s really no one else up for the job. What that says about the depth of the Democratic bench is self-evident.

Pelosi’s other skills—such as, for example, her tried-and-true ability to raise big bucks—would be an advantage to the Democrats, all else being equal. But all else is not equal. Her negatives are sky-high. Her continuation as head of Democrats in the House would send a huge f-you message to the American people, one that probably will not go unnoticed and is unlikely to be appreciated.

[ADDENDUM: Pelosi won. No surprise there.]

There’s nothing Freudian about these Obama slips

The New Neo Posted on by

Keith Koffler’s opinion piece at Politico discusses the fact that Obama has made a number of unguarded, unscripted, and therefore very revealing comments that seem to indicate he is both an extreme leftist tilt and a man who demonizes the opposition.

However, it’s puzzling that Koffler refers to these remarks of Obama’s as “Freudian slips,” and compares them to Reagan’s jokes that were intended to be off-mike but were broadcast by error, or Bush unintentionally reading his note cards aloud. Those are slips, although not Freudian; they are errors in which the meant-to-be-private inadvertently becomes public.

Obama’s remarks were very different. They were purposeful and extemporaneous, but he certainly meant to say them and to have them be heard. They were not errors, except perhaps errors of judgment that he later regretted because of the furor they caused.

A Freudian slip, on the other hand, is an actual slip of the tongue that can be revealing. For example, when a husband calls his wife by the name of an ex-girlfriend, that’s a Freudian slip. Or this one from Wiki:

She: ‘What would you like — bread and butter, or cake?’ He: ‘Bed and butter… Whoops!’

Obama’s “bitter clingers” and “enemies” are nothing like that. He said what he meant and he meant what he said.

No other president in my memory has been caught in this particular type of slip-up, as far as I can recall. The reason it keeps happening to Obama is that he’s the first president who appears to be hiding who he actually is, politically speaking, and what he intends and thinks in general.

Therefore when he is unscripted, when he lets down his guard and speaks his mind, he often speaks the truth, and it is often at variance with the persona he is trying to present to the public. It’s happened enough times now that the mask is at least half off, if not fully removed.

Obama: to quit or not to quit

The New Neo Posted on by

Despite Cadell and Schoen’s recent column suggesting to Obama that he announce he won’t run in 2012, Byron York doesn’t think Obama will listen, and neither do I. It’s not in his nature, nor is it to his advantage.

And since when has Obama ever followed any advice Caddell and Schoen have ever given him?

On the other hand, the events of the last few months and especially November have dealt many blows to Obama’s substantial ego. And just because an ego is substantial doesn’t mean it’s not brittle at the same time. Too many blows and it might shatter.

This would not be a good thing. Until now, I have thought Obama impervious to setbacks. And perhaps he is. But the terrible week he just had on the international scene is a different story; it may have hit him where it hurts.

[NOTE: It should not escape notice that Schoen has been an adviser to both Bill and Hillary Clinton in their campaigns.]

I think Lisa Murkowski is at least partly right

The New Neo Posted on by

I think Lisa Murkowski is correct when she says that Sarah Palin isn’t big on “intellectual curiosity:”

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowki told CBS News’ Katie Couric today that she would not support Sarah Palin for president because Palin lacks the …”intellectual curiosity” to craft great policy.

Of course, I’ve never seen a shred of evidence that Murkowski herself exhibits that trait. And wherever did she get the notion that intellectual curiosity is a necessary—or even a good—qualification for a president or for crafting policy?

And I say that as a person with a fair amount of intellectual curiosity myself. But I know it’s not synonymous with action, or good decision-making, and is rarely a needed qualification for holding office. In fact, it can be counter-productive.

What types of jobs require or are at least enhanced by intellectual curiosity? Professor or teacher, especially in the humanities and the sciences. Writer, perhaps. Inventor (although that’s not “intellectual” curiosity, necessarily; it’s curiosity about how things work in the real world, and how to make them work better). And those are about the only things I can come up with.

Not that intellectual curiosity’s bad, mind you. It can make for fun conversations, if you like that sort of thing. I happen to like that sort of thing, a lot. But your mileage may differ. And it’s hardly the only road to good conversations. I’d love to have a heart-to-heart with the un-intellectually curious Sarah Palin.

[NOTE: If you care to read more about the perils of intellectuals running things, read this from that superbly curious intellectual, Thomas Sowell.]

They left tried to refudiate it…

The New Neo Posted on by

…but Sarah Palin’s “refudiate” wins the title “word of the year” from the New Oxford American Dictionary.

And to top it all off, her new reality show about Alaska gets TLC’s highest ever ratings for a program’s premiere.

[NOTE: This lady is probably not all that pleased. In a piece that came out today in the Boston Herald before the other news stories appeared, she says the show is downright embarrassing, and ridicules Palin’s use of the word “refudiate.” It’s probably easier for her to discount the TLC audience’s choice, though, than to ridicule the decision of the dictionary doyens.]

Inside Sasha Abramsky’s brain: believing in Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

Sasha Abramsky is the author of a book called Inside Obama’s Brain. Maybe he’s spent too much time there, because he’s emerged befuddled.

In this Salon piece, Abramsky starts promisingly:

In 2008, candidate Barack Obama fashioned an appeal to independent voters and young adults based in large part not on specific policy pledges but on his promise to end the culture of hyper-partisan hyper-bickering that was poisoning the country’s political well.

Implicit in that promise was the assumption that through rational, consensus-building rhetoric and pragmatic policy solutions to America’s serious, and growing, social and economic problems he could reforge broken bonds of trust between the citizenry and its governing institutions.

No quarrel with that. It describes the “promise” of Obama quite nicely. And Abramsky even goes on to state with clarity one of the major flaws of Obama’s presidency so far:

In office, Obama’s failure to reestablish those bonds of trust, without which no major social policy reforms can command long-term, stable majority support, is the greatest calamity of his presidency.

How does Abramsky then segue to the rest of his article? His argument goes something like this:

(1) It is self-evident that only big government can cure what ails us.

(2) Obama made the mistake of thinking most people are smart and insightful enough to agree with him (and Abramsky) on that.

(3) His failure was therefore a failure (you know what’s coming) to properly communicate this to the American people.

(4) Those nasty Republicans finished the job by blocking his efforts (no mention of the overwhelming majorities Obama had in Congress, and the fact that he was actually stymied by Democrats who wouldn’t come along for the Big Government ride).

Abramsky’s article has a title that says a great deal about this mode of thinking: “Obama’s toughest task: make us believe again.”

As though “belief” were the answer, and as though it is disconnected from results. But Obama can’t ride on his early promise anymore; he can’t ask us to believe in him by the mere power of his rhetoric. Results are what counts, and his toughest task is to actually produce some that aren’t disastrous.

Bush and Clinton are buddies

The New Neo Posted on by

This amused me:

“Listen, [Bill] Clinton and I are buddies,” the former president [Bush II] said. “First of all, we’re born one month apart. We’re now members of the former presidents club. We have done speaking engagements together. And I generally like him.”

I don’t think it’s BS either; I think it’s true. Their values in their personal life may be worlds apart, but here’s what they have in common, in addition to the things Bush mentioned: a background in the South, a connection to Yale, a genuine conviviality and gregariousness—and even (this was a great surprise to me, because Bush was a jock and Clinton decidedly not) experience as rugby players, a sport known for its toughness.

I can actually imagine them being “buddies”—although not drinking buddies, not anymore. Contrast that to the White House’s present occupant. I can’t really imagine him being “buddies” with anyone.

[NOTE: If you don’t believe me about Clinton and the rugby, take a look at this

Upon graduation, he won a Rhodes Scholarship to University College, Oxford where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics, though as a result of switching programs and leaving early for Yale, he did not obtain a degree there. He developed an interest in rugby union, playing at Oxford and later for the Little Rock Rugby club in Arkansas.

As for Bush:

Bush attended Yale University from 1964 to 1968, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history. During this time, he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon, being elected the fraternity’s president during his senior year. Bush also became a member of the Skull and Bones society as a senior. Bush was a keen rugby union player, and was on Yale’s 1st XV.]