Humorist David Kahane has some good stuff on the Left’s rabid attitude toward Sarah Palin.
Kahane also nailed it quite some time ago, one of the first who did.
First, they came for the auto companies
Next, the airlines?:
Mr. Obama blabs about the evils of lobbying, but his administration is fast becoming the greatest fillip to lobbying ever seen. Ms. Varney has now horned in on the DOT’s action, forcing the airline business and all its camp followers to come and pay tribute. Her choice of targets is obviously designed for political effect. Airlines and mobile-phone operators both touch the public in ways that leave the public frequently annoyed.
What we’re seeing here and elsewhere from the new administration is not some rebirth of thoughtful liberalism, but a spastic descent into machine liberalism — government for the benefit of government officials and their hangers-on. Mr. Obama, however, may not be so pleased with the result if it means he must soon add the airlines to the collection of failed industries being run out of the White House.
To ponder
Some time ago I took note of the following offering in a comment thread. It’s a Talmudic saying that goes like this:
The truth is a heavy burden; only a few can carry it.
Yes, indeed.
When I did a search to find its origins I came up with a few more (they were under the heading “Hebrew proverbs”—but unfortunately I can’t seem to find the link right now) that seemed equally impressive, equally appropriate, equally wise, equally sad, and equally previously unknown to me.
Here they are for your contemplation:
The world is in the hands of fools.
Two farmers each claimed to own a certain cow. While one pulled on its head and the other pulled on its tail, the cow was milked by the lawyer.
The thief who has no opportunity to steal thinks he is an honest man.
Buttered bread always falls dry side up.
If someone is coming to kill you, get up early and kill him first.
This one’s a bit more cheery:
Whoever teaches his son teaches not only his son but also his son’s son, and so on to the end of generations.
This one may have guided Freud:
A dream which has not been interpreted is like a letter unread.
This one, however, I’d already heard:
To save one man is like saving a world
Only I know it in a more poetic form:
Whoever saves a single life it is as though he saved the universe.
Let’s hear it for the second stimulus
Let’s see if I’ve got this right: the first stimulus hasn’t worked. Whether that’s because it’s a fatally flawed concept or because—although it had to be passed so quickly that there was no time to debate it or read it—most of the money has not yet been spent, we really don’t know.
What’s the remedy, according to Obama adviser Laura Tyson? Let’s have another one, more or less like the other one.
It reminds me of the old outhouse joke.
What old outhouse joke, you ask? Well, you see, there’s this two-seater outhouse (and lest you think I’m making such a contrivance up, here’s a link to much more than you ever wanted to know about them). Two guys are using the facilities and, as one of them finishes and gets up, a dollar bill falls out of his pocket and drops into the opening of the seat he’s just vacated.
He swears and storms off. But a few minutes later he returns. As the other guy watches, the first guy holds a crisp new ten-dollar bill in his hand over the hole and then, to the astonishment of his companion, he releases it to fall where the dollar had disappeared just a few moments before. Then, before the observer can think of anything to say, the other man reaches into his pocket, brings out another ten-spot, and does the same thing with it.
Finally the stunned onlooker manages to find his voice. “Are you nuts? What are you doing, man?” he cries out in horror.
The answer: “Hey, you don’t think I’m gonna stick my hand in there for a measly dollar, do you?”
Obama says: you want meddling? I’ll give you meddling
Only I’ll make Hillary do it.
Obamamites say: bounces off me and sticks to you
Obama and his supporters have milked, squeezed, massaged, and wrung out the old meme “It’s all Bush’s fault.” Sensing the public is getting a bit sick of the refrain, another has come to the forefront.
It’s not exactly new, but suddenly I see it everywhere in comments sections in the blogosphere. It goes like this: “McCain would have been worse.” And then there’s its only slightly milder variant: “McCain would have done the same.”
McCain is no genius. But there is no question that his policies, whether domestic or international, would have been markedly different from Obama’s—and, unless a person happens to be on the far Left, he/she ought to agree (unless blinded by the irrational need to defend Obama no matter what) that McCain would have done better.
Would McCain have proposed the enormous stimulus bill that he voted against? Would he have pushed a radical overhaul of health care insurance in the middle of the crisis, especially a government option? Would he have cut missile defense funding? Would he have been in favor of cap and trade? Card check? Would he be trying his hardest to put Chavez’s lackey Zelaya back in power? Would he have failed to offer strong support for Iran’s demonstrators? Would he have given Moscow what it wanted and cut our ability to respond to international crises in order to gain—well, basically nothing?
Any thinking person knows the answers.
In fact, the only things McCain would have done that would have been the same as Obama are the cases in which Obama echoed Bush’s policies on terrorists, such as indefinite detention and warrantless wiretaps. Oh, and McCain probably would have banned waterboarding (which had ended de facto in 2003 anyway) just as Obama did.
I could list more differences, but why bother? The charge isn’t really a serious one to begin with. Like so many others on the Left it is merely a juvenile attempt at distraction, a sort of “and so’s your old man,” or “bounces off me and sticks to you,” a meaningless schoolyard taunt.
But that’s the way it is these days.
Dr. Sanity opts for sanity
My friend, Sanity Squad colleague, and blogger extraordinaire Dr. Sanity is taking a long and perhaps permanent break from blogging. Please stop by, smell the virtual roses, and wish her well!
Obligatory Palin thread of the day
This’ll be short: reading about the Palin interview today, it strikes me that Palin really is a maverick.
I work and I work and I work…
…writing posts full of research and facts and critical thinking and well-reasoned discourse. At least, I try to.
So where have a ton of hits come from today, according to my sitemeter? A search on Bing for images of “muffin top.”
In case you missed it first time round, here’s the post.
More on Palin-hate? [continued…and continued…]
I never expected to be writing so much about Sarah Palin at this point.
You’d think the subject had been more or less exhausted, but the hate goes on (and if you’ve missed my previous thoughts on the matter, and happen to want to read them, just go to the category “Palin” on the right sidebar and start clicking).
But this post at a feminist blog on the Left, defending Palin (yes, you read that right: defending Palin) is well worth reading, including its comments section, even if you think you’re getting sick of the subject. It offers a very different take.
Pseudonymous blogger and feminist Violet Socks isn’t in agreement with Palin on much of anything political. But she is outraged by the venom unleashed almost from the start in Palin’s direction, especially that spit out by women, and in particular feminist women (something I noticed and remarked on here and here).
Violet tries to explain it, and makes a valiant and impressive effort to do not only that, but to sort out the vicious lies from the truth (hint: it’s mostly the former that constitutes the bulk of the rumors about Palin). I’m always gratified to see someone on the other side try to be fair to Palin (or anybody, for that matter), and I think Violet gets a lot of it right. I won’t try to summarize what she says; read the whole thing to get the flavor of it. But her best (and already much-quoted line) is:
These people don’t hate Palin because of the lies; the lies exist to justify the hate.
Bingo.
If Violet ends up saying she still can’t really explain it all, and is feeling somewhat stumped by the phenomenon, I think that’s because Palin-hatred has a highly emotional and irrational aspect. This element was best summed up by comment #237 in the thread, which struck a big chord with me by comparing the process to the famous Shirley Jackson short story “The Lottery,” which describes but does not explain the ritual stoning of a woman by villagers.
Palin-hatred has mysterious irrational aspects, but it also has explicable and indentifiable ones. And although no single one of them is sufficient to account for the phenomenon, together they have a powerful synergistic effect. You might say that Palin-hated represents the perfect storm, the confluence of flashpoints regarding class, education, beauty, sexuality, Christianity (don’t discount the latter; it’s important to the hatred and comes with a whole set of assumptions, some of which Violet discusses at some length), and female ambition.
In a particular irony, Palin is indeed a feminist (as Violet also points out). She’s just not their kind of feminist, according to the predominantly Leftist and liberal feminist establishment. So she is especially infuriating to them, a sort of feminist Uncle Tom, who receives the sort of ire ordinarily reserved for people like Clarence Thomas, considered a traitor to his race for being a conservative Republican.
One thing I found especially interesting on reading the comments section at Violet’s post is that, as many of the liberal feminists there have observed with dismay the Palin hatred and the lies that fueled it, it seems to have stirred up a process of doubting and wondering for some of them. Their unease concerns the Left in general: they are wondering if they can continue to trust that it’s telling the truth about other things. Do I detect, perhaps, the beginning of a political change process?
[ADDENDUM: It has occurred to me that, although very different in perspective, focus, and scope, Palin-hatred is similar to anti-Semitism in its virulent irrationality, as well as the fact that “These people don’t hate Jews because of the lies; the lies exist to justify the hate.”]
Robert McNamara: he fought a war of attrition
The news comes today that Robert McNamara, famous as Kennedy and then Johnson’s Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, has died at the age of 93.
Those of us who are of a certain age remember him well, as one of those responsible for what I have since termed “the first act” (that is, the poorly run, poorly conceived, Johnson portion) of the Vietnam War. McNamara lived to later repudiate the war and his part in it, in a series of mea culpas that made the once-reviled man somewhat more popular among the antiwar Left, at least as an object lesson in repentance.
McNamara’s public life was defined by his failure on the war. But if he’d never been connected with Vietnam, he probably would have been considered a resounding success. He certainly was effective in his early years as a businessman with Ford; would that he’d stayed there. But Kennedy promoted him to the Cabinet (he was also offered Treasury—a post for which he’d have been far better suited—but unfortunately he turned that down) and he was kept on as Johnson’s Defense Secretary after the Kennedy assassination.
McNamara had served in World War II and done statistical analysis of bombers’ effectiveness, but his major expertise was in business. He used that business acumen to implement general changes in defense policy and weapons and organizational matters in the armed forces. But, faced with Vietnam, he met his match (or rather, mismatch), coming up with the idea of a deadly and misguided numbers game:
McNamara put in place a statistical strategy for victory in Vietnam. He concluded that there were a limited number of Viet Cong fighters in Vietnam and that a war of attrition would destroy them. He applied metrics (body counts) to determine how close to success his plan was.
I’m no military expert, and hindsight is 20/20, but on the face of it this makes no sense, when faced with a tenacious enemy motivated by an extreme and deeply held ideology and the support and largesse of Communist China. Quite early on, McNamara became convinced that the war was unwinnable, and he left office in 1968. Despite the fact that under Westmoreland’s successor General Creighton Abrams, the “second act” of Vietnam (see this and this) reversed some of McNamara’s errors, the attitude of the public and especially the press was set: it was McNamara’s war, and it could not be won.
The career of McNamara is a cautionary tale, wherein a man of great achievement and intelligence applied that brainpower to an area he did not sufficiently understand, and to which he was temperamentally unsuited. He spent much of the rest of his life trying to make up for it. I hope he’s found his peace at last.
Honduras in crisis
Will the rule of law and the constitution of Honduras win out against its enemies—which seem to include our current president, Barack Obama?
No need for me to write a post on this, as so many others have covered it well. Here are the links:
A hard-hitting article in the WSJ criticizes not only Obama re Honduras, but the Bush administration for its soft line on Chavez in 2004. However, it doesn’t mention 2002, when Bush was criticized for probably undercover tacit support of a short-lived coup against Chavez. Interesting comments to the WSJ article, as well.
More from Fausta, who continues, through her knowledge of Spanish and Latin American sources, to have her finger on the pulse of Honduras. She reminds us that the party working against Zelaya’s return is his own party, which is still in power there.
Query: how many people in America are aware of what’s happening in Honduras? How many believe Obamaspeak that it’s an ordinary military coup, and that reinstating Zelaya would be following the rule of law?