Fireflies and other childish pleasures

The New Neo Posted on by

I saw some fireflies the other evening while I was taking a walk at dusk, the first time I’d seen any in many years.

Ah, fireflies! One of the wonders of my youth. On warm summer nights—which are very common in New York, heavy and humid and sultry—as dusk arrived and night fell, the magic would begin. All the neighborhood kids stayed outside as long as we could, returning home only when our parents forced us back inside to go to bed.

It’s hard to believe, because it’s so rare nowadays in surburbia, but we kids generally spent an enormous amount of time outside of the house, roaming around and doing nothing special. Organized activities were almost unheard of; we made our own fun.

Sometimes it was the sort of thing our parents didn’t know about and wouldn’t have appreciated at all had they known, like playing in the unstable structure of a half-built house where we had to be on the lookout for the owners or the workmen who would chase us away with scary threats. Sometimes it was just the languid pleasure of sitting on the curb, pointy rock in hand, rhythmically hitting a roll of caps, listening to the resultant “pow!” and watching the small spark (it smelled wonderful, too). Continue reading →

The race card timeline and accusations of racism

The New Neo Posted on by

Some people have pointed out that Obama’s remark suggesting that the McCain campaign would attack him by saying “he doesn’t look like all those other Presidents on the dollar bills” was preceded by a John McCain ad entitled “Seal” that placed Obama’s face on a dollar bill, and therefore it wasn’t Obama who dealt the race card, since he was just responding to the McCain ad.

The ad can’t be found among the ads on the McCain website, but until proven otherwise I’ll take You Tube’s word for it that it was an official offering from the McCain campaign. Here it is:

So here we do indeed have an ad putting Obama’s face on a bill, as well as on Mt. Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty. Continue reading →

A plea to the closet Republicans of Marin: come out, come out, wherever you are

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not that I’m unsympathetic to the plight of those such as Bookworm who are Republicans (or Independents, or at the very least non-liberals) living in mega-blue areas such as Marin County, and who choose to keep their mouths firmly shut about their politics for fear of social rifts.

The temptation to “pass” for liberal is very great. I understand; I do. I even feel your pain.

But I have come to believe that the costs of keeping silent are much greater than the costs of speaking up—both for Bookworm and her fellow closet Republicans, and for our country. And yes, even for her liberal friends. Continue reading →

Obama’s paper trail in Illinois

The New Neo Posted on by

For many years Obama has carefully cultivated his history to assure that he remains a blank screen on which people can project whatever they want to see. For example, he is unique in being a Harvard Law Review President and later a University of Chicago law professor whose published works number exactly zero (see this and this). His record in the US Senate is so scant as to be nearly nonexistent.

But Stanley Kurtz has done some fine work for the Weekly Standard, delving into what he calls Obama’s “lost years”—the job he held the longest of any in his life so far, Illinois State Senator. Kurtz unearths a surprising amount of information that belies Obama’s new post-racial, nonliberal incarnation. Continue reading →

Stop me before I change my mind!

The New Neo Posted on by

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Here’s another story of political change (second part here).

It’s of interest to me not only because writer/changer Lissa cites me as inspiration, but because of the description of her reaction when she first realized she was going in the direction of Left-to-Right political change:

At this point I was severely uncomfortable. As I’ve mentioned before and can’t emphasize enough, my family is very left-leaning. (As I’ve also mentioned before, they are also intelligent, loving and caring, so think twice if you’re planning on dissing them in the comments.) What if, God forbid, I became a conservative? That would be unconscionable. I’d gotten into enough passionate arguments over whether the United States had the *right* to invade Iraq; I could only imagine the difficulty it would create if I started advocating gun rights and the like.

I sent out a cry for help. I emailed my liberal, politics-following friends (good, intelligent people all) and asked for assistance. I explained that I was starting to lean toward the conservative side and asked for blogs, articles, arguments ”” anything that would help keep me firmly in the liberal camp. I received back a few variations of “Bush is an idiot” and “Bush is a horse’s ass.”

Lissa was asking for the equivalent of an intervention to “save” her. Continue reading →

You can’t make this stuff up

The New Neo Posted on by

The Onion could. But it doesn’t need to. Obama obliges by saying it himself. The subject matter is his recent trip abroad:

I was puzzled by this notion that somehow what we were doing was in any way different from what Sen. McCain or a lot of presidential candidates have done in the past,” Obama said Sunday, speaking about his trip at a conference of minority journalists. “Now, I admit we did it really well. But that shouldn’t be a strike against me.”

The man is tone deaf. In the first sentence, he doesn’t get the difference between a rock star tour and a fact-finding trip. In the second, he doesn’t understand how arrogant he sounds. And in the third, he whines.