Joe Lieberman really does seem to warrant the description “independent.” Well worth reading.
Noonan on Obama and Afghanistan
Yes, I’m back to critiquing Peggy Noonan’s columns.
But please forgive me; there’s a personal reason this time. As vanderleun has pointed out, she seems to have stolen my meme:
After the president announced his plan he seemed to slip in, “After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.” Then came the reference to July 2011 as the date departure begins. It was startling to hear a compelling case for our presence followed so quickly by an abrupt announcement of our leaving. It sounded like a strategy based on the song Groucho Marx used to sing, “Hello, I must be going.”
Oh, I know; she probably doesn’t read me. It’s one of those independent parallel observations. And another reason I think she doesn’t read me is that in her very first sentence, Noonan writes:
A deep and perhaps the deepest benefit of the speech was that a Democratic president asserted compellingly, and with a high degree of certitude and conviction, that the United States is and has been immersed in a long struggle with intractable enemies.
Au contraire. I was looking for Obama to use the “e” word and call the enemy an enemy, and he most assuredly did not. This omission was hardly accidental; it takes work to write a speech like that without it. Noonan ought to know something about writing speeches.
But she still seems caught in the snare of Obama Arrangement Syndrome. And although she notices the “hello I must be going” message, she fails to draw any conclusion from it, or to recognize its importance as a communication of lack of resolve—one that the world, enemy and ally alike, will hear.
Jones and the Climategate data: when was it destroyed?
The blog Wattsupwiththat makes an excellent point (hat tip: commeter “huxley”)—one that the press might have pointed out as well, had its members been the least bit interested in doing their jobs: if the raw data was actually destroyed back in the 80s, why do all of Jones’ subsequent emails indicate it still existed, that he was loathe to release it, and that he would even prefer to destroy it rather than have it fall into enemy hands?
These are the possibilities: either it existed all those intervening years and he destroyed it more recently, or it was destroyed back in the 80s and he didn’t want to admit that fact and leave CRU open to criticism. In other words, either he was lying then, or he’s lying now.
[NOTE: And yes, I know that “data” is plural. But in common usage in the US, it’s usually treated as singular, which I’ve done here.]
The Sunmaid maiden gets a makeover
I don’t know about you, but I think this is an utter outrage.
Why mess with an icon that has stood the test of time? Oh, I know she’s been spruced up periodically in the past, but she’s always remained recognizably the same person (a person with whom, I might add, I identified—long dark curly hair, for example)—till now.
Here are the traditional Sunmaid raisin maidens:
And here is the new Disneyfied version, her folksy blouse replaced by something that looks like spandex, her hair lightened from deep brunette to a honey brown and worked on slightly by one of those ceramic straightening devices, and the grape basket gone, the better to show off the attractions of her new streamlined torso:
[NOTE: When I was a child, I used to gaze at the Sunmaid raisin box and contemplate infinity. She carried that basket of grapes, after all, and for some reason I always imagined there was a box of Sunmaid raisins displayed there, too. On that raisin box there would be a drawing of the Sunmaid raisin girl carrying a platter of grapes and another Sunmaid box, and on that box there would be…….]
Palin and the birthers: “it’s a fair question”
The blogs are all over the fact that, when pressed about Obama’s birth certificate, Sarah Palin said that it’s a fair question. You know what? It is. But to the Palin-haters (and their numbers are legion), this is just another example of her dimwitted nutjobby flat-earther mentality.
Let’s hear what else Palin had to say:
Palin suggested that the questions were fair play because of “the weird conspiracy theory freaky thing that people talk about that Trig isn’t my real son — ‘You need to produce his birth certificate, you need to prove that he’s your kid,’ which we have done.”
Palin doesn’t sound so crazy to me—especially as compared to certain British-born journalists who write for the Atlantic. And saying it’s a fair question hardly means she thinks the answer would be that Obama is not a citizen. It means that she thinks the papers Obama has produced are still insufficient to completely disprove the accusations, and so he therefore needs to provide the long form of the birth certificate to lay suspicions at rest.
Palin has also made it clear that she puts the birth certificate question in the category of a “stupid conspiracy,” and that she herself isn’t interested in asking it. But she thinks it fair that since some voters want the proof, Obama should have to respond:
Voters have every right to ask candidates for information if they so choose. I’ve pointed out that it was seemingly fair game during the 2008 election for many on the left to badger my doctor and lawyer for proof that Trig is in fact my child. Conspiracy-minded reporters and voters had a right to ask… which they have repeatedly. But at no point ”“ not during the campaign, and not during recent interviews ”“ have I asked the president to produce his birth certificate or suggested that he was not born in the United States.
Clear enough? Palin isn’t a birther. But she defends their right to ask the question, and the duty of candidates to respond fully. Of course, that won’t stop her critics—but what will?
And let’s see, what else would be a fair question about Obama? One that springs to mind is “how about producing those college and law school transcripts?” The issue, as with the birth certificate, is transparency; I have gone on record as saying that I think Obama was born in Hawaii and did well at Harvard Law, although I’m not all that sure about his undergraduate grades.
Why is Obama holding back? Because yes, he can.
Is Obama his own worst enemy?
It is interesting that two analyses of Obama’s newly-announced Afghan policy conclude with essentially the same thought. In the WSJ, Eliot A. Cohen ends his essay with these words:
As a wartime leader [Obama] will tend many wounds, but the most grievous thus far are those he has inflicted on himself.
And in yesterday’s Spiegel article, Gabor Steingart closed with:
The American president doesn’t need any opponents at the moment. He’s already got himself.
So, is Obama his own worst enemy (despite the fact that he hates using that word to describe our actual enemies)? I think so. Even if Obama is the Leftist ideologue he appears to be, he could have pursued a slightly more moderate course and kept that fact hidden. He might have thrown a few more bones to the Right and to the cause of bi-partisanship, and not seemed to be so radical nor such a hypocrite.
This would have alienated—and alerted—far fewer people. And certainly, there seems to be no reason why he couldn’t have come up with the content of his recent Afghan speech many months earlier, and avoided worrying much of the American public (and avoided giving Dick Cheney a perfect rhetorical opportunity) when he appeared to be dithering while soldiers died.
Many observers of Obama’s West Point speech (I was not one of them; I read it rather than watched it) found Obama’s delivery stilted, cold, and lackluster. Perhaps there are limits to Obama’s acting ability; even he can’t seem to feign support for this particular policy, with its split personality.
But perhaps there’s even more going on to cause Obama to lose some of his positive energy. My guess is that, for the first time in his life, he feels the heat because he can’t get out of the kitchen, nor talk his way into making it any cooler. The press is still treating him with kid gloves compared to almost any other president, but compared to the media treatment Obama has been used to getting (fawning idolatry), they’re being tough on him, and he must not like it at all. And the unaccustomed scrutiny means that more and more people are connecting the dots and finding the Obama picture less than pretty. This may be a first for him.
Even an egotist like Obama may now be beginning to recognize things are not going well. When the very liberal New York Magazine runs an article that states, “You’d have to be stone deaf not to hear the air hissing out of the Obama balloon,” you know something’s up—or down. The article also features the following description of the Obama White House:
After 300-plus days in office, the president remains, for many of his supporters, a worryingly indistinct figure. One whose pragmatic sensibility is crystal clear but bedrock convictions are still blurry. And whose White House has proved less than fully adept at the marriage of politics and policy, preferring all too often to fall back on their boss’s charm and dazzle to advance the ball upfield.
“I have no idea what they believe,” a leading House Democrat and Obama ally told me recently when I asked if he could define the administration’s governing philosophy. “I know that their governing strategy seems to be, ”˜Don’t worry, the big guy will make it all right in the end.’ They have the sublime sense that they don’t have to do all that much to plan events, or to come up with the message for what they’re doing, or to line up support, because whenever they need to, they can just put Mike Tyson in the ring. And I think (a) it’s wrong, and (b) it’s a bad way to run a White House.”
It’s odd that Obama’s supporters seem to still find him ideologically vague whereas his opponents—present company included—find him much less so. But both sides are more and more in agreement that this is a White House and a president filled with an unusually high level of hubris and arrogance, even in a profession not known for humility.
Did I say hubris? It seems that Obama may be entering nemesis time.
Climategate: using the tried and true Madoff approach
Commenter “BumperStickerist” at Ace’s makes the following observation about Climategate:
What the CRU is doing is identical to what Bernie Madoff did.
Bernie asserted that his investment scheme was legit.
Bernie didn’t share his raw data.
There were skeptics who doubted that Bernie’s investment strategy was legit.
But …
The statements put out by Bernie Madoff’s company were “peer reviewed” by a government regulatory agency. So the skeptics were simply kooks who didn’t understand investing – despite many of the skeptics having expertise in the area of finances and regulations.
Nice analogy. But Madoff was a relative piker compared to the masterminds of Climategate. This is not to make light of the substantial suffering of Madoff’s victims, nor the magnitude of the evil of Madoff as perpetrator.
But Madoff was a single person. Although he was in a position of trust to his investors and he grossly violated that duty, scientists hold an even higher obligation to be truthful. In a sense, their investors are the entire population of earth. And the researchers at the CRU, as well as several other climate scientists who were their colleagues, co-conspired to elevate their own belief system above the facts, in order to advance a political agenda (as well as their own careers) that would (and still could) negatively affect the economy of the whole world.
For a very long time they got away with it, even though (much like Madoff) they would not show their work. At least Madoff is now in prison. Will Jones and Mann ever follow?
[ADDENDUM: Daniel Henninger has a must-read column in today’s WSJ. He makes some points similar to the ones I made in one of my first posts on Climategate, when I said:
The foundation of science, as well as our trust in it, rests on the idea that facts are sacred, and that they come before theories. If the facts don’t fit, you must acquit. In science, there is no principle of allowing lies in the service of “a higher truth.” There can only be truth.
Henninger writes:
If the new ethos is that “close-enough” science is now sufficient to achieve political goals, serious scientists should be under no illusion that politicians will press-gang them into service for future agendas. Everyone working in science, no matter their politics, has an [sic] stake in cleaning up the mess revealed by the East Anglia emails. Science is on the credibility bubble. If it pops, centuries of what we understand to be the role of science go with it.
Climategate is a matter of extraordinary and nearly unprecedented seriousness. Science itself is threatened.
(Hat tip: “Tom.”)]
Republicans up, Democrats down—for now
A new Rasmussan poll indicates that the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as Democrats has gone down to 36% (a shift of minus-five since the beginning of 2009). Two percent of that drop has been this November alone. The percentage calling themselves Republicans has gone up to 33.1%, an increase of 1.2% in November, although there has been less growth in general in the Republican Party during the past year.
What has made up the difference is an increase in the number of Independents. That’s hardly surprising; disaffection with both parties is high. I’m an Independent myself, and likely to remain so in the foreseeable future. I don’t really think I could affiliate with a party again, except for the narrow purpose of voting in a primary.
So, are pollsters going to re-adjust their samplings of Democrats vs. Republicans accordingly when they do surveys? That’s one of the most difficult aspects of polls anyway—getting the proper proportions of respondents—and under- or over-representing certain groups is one of the easiest ways to skew things.
And about that 18-month exit date in Afghanistan…
It is clear that the only reason for Obama to publicly disclose that 18-month exit date in Afghanistan was to address his own Leftist base and say to them: “please don’t hate me too much; this distasteful war thingee won’t last very long.”
It is also clear that the world also happens to be listening to his communication, including the enemy, the Afghans, and our allies and potential allies. The inescapable conclusion they must all reach is that Obama does not mean business. In strategic terms, that is a very bad thing for them to actually know, even if true.
So why telegraph it in this way? Because Obama puts his own political future before the good of the nation, the Afghan people, and the world. Funny thing is, I don’t believe it will work. If the chatter on the Leftist blogs today is any indication, his base is spitting mad at him.
[NOTE: This German wasn’t impressed by Obama’s speech, to say the least:
One didn’t have to be a cadet on Tuesday to feel a bit of nausea upon hearing Obama’s speech. It was the least truthful address that he has ever held. He spoke of responsibility, but almost every sentence smelled of party tactics. He demanded sacrifice, but he was unable to say what it was for exactly.]
Anne Frank: are people good at heart?
I’m currently reading Francine Prose’s Anne Frank: the book, the life, the afterlife. It’s about the process by which Anne Frank wrote and then rewrote her diary, with an eye to its ultimate publication, and how her father edited her two versions into a third, the one the world ended up knowing. Then Broadway and Hollywood got into the act, as well as writers such as Philip Roth, until the diary and its message had morphed quite a bit from the original (or, more properly, originals).
Most of us have read Anne Frank’s diary, or at least parts of it, in some form or other, and even those of us who did not are probably familiar with at least a few of its quotes, the most famous of which may be Anne’s observation: “in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
It’s instructive to look at the quote once again, embedded in its original context. When we do, we find it to be far more complex and dark than it appears when as a single famous sentence standing alone, just as Anne Frank’s achievements as a writer and thinker are far more complex than the simplifications popular culture have worked on her diary. Remember as you read the following that she was only fifteen years old when she wrote it [emphasis mine]:
Anyone who claims that the older ones have a more difficult time here certainly doesn’t realize to what extent our problems weigh down on us, problems for which we are probably much too young, but which thrust themselves upon us continually, until, after a long time, we think we’ve found a solution, but the solution doesn’t seem able to resist the facts which reduce it to nothing again. That’s the difficulty in these times: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to meet the horrible truth and be shattered.
It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually turning into a wilderness, I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too. I can feel the sufferings of millions, and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.
Anne Frank seems to take the long view. Hers is a consciously willed optimism that takes into account some of the greatest horrors the world has ever known, and includes her own untimely death, which she correctly foresees. Whether the peace and tranquility she ultimately envisions are temporary or permanent, and whether they are of this earth or beyond it, her message has nothing of the innocence or simplicity of a trusting child, although it has often been portrayed that way.
Climategate reading
Obama faces the enemy at West Point: a day late and a dollar short
In Obama’s long-awaited “hello I must be going” speech on Afghanistan, delivered at West Point, there were no real surprises.
We knew he would take the opportunity to bash the previous administration, ignore the influence of the surge on Iraq, and praise himself. We knew he would call up approximately 30,000 more troops while simultaneously emphasizing how quickly they would be withdrawn—an un-clever attempt to please both sides while actually pleasing no one, simultaneously conveying to ally and enemy alike his utter lack of resolve.
Did I say “enemy?” Obama didn’t. I read every single word of his speech but didn’t find that one. Actually, the only person who used the word “enemy” in the context of the speech was Chris Matthews, although he was referring—shockingly enough—to the cadets of West Point, who obstinately refused to feel the requisite leg-tingling Obamalove.
And lest you think that “hello, I must be going” was not a fair description of the president’s message, let me offer the following un-edited passage from his address:
And as commander-in-chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan.
After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.
A great deal of Obama’s speech was dedicated to the idea that (a) this is a war in which our security is at stake; and (b) we need to save money for our domestic programs so we must fight it on the cheap. Now, I’m sure that financial considerations play a part in every war, but I cannot recall any previous Commander-in-Chief conveying this attitude so publicly and openly. All previous Commanders-in-Chief would have understood what a pernicious message it is, and how much weakness it conveys.
As Ace writes, “Obama to Troops: I Promise You I Will Furnish You With Every Resource You Need, So Long As What You Need Is Reasonably-Priced and Available as a Factory-Irregular from Marshall’s.” Not exactly “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty,” is it?
Obama’s emphasis on fiscal responsibility might be more convincing if his administration hadn’t been marked so far by a gargantuan spending spree, including a $787 stimulus bill that consisted mostly of pork for friends and supporters, and which failed to stimulate much of anything related to the economy. If the Afghan war is in our vital national interest and our national security is at stake, isn’t it odd that the heretofore spendthrift Obama shows such miserly reluctance to fund it?
[NOTE: For three excellent and more detailed commentaries on Obama’s speech, see this, this, and this.]