I have long lamented the decline of the teaching of history and of critical thinking. One can be a highly intelligent intellectual today and know almost nothing about either.
This is where it’s led us. A Democratic nominee this ignorant, and a populace who can’t tell the difference.
Obama is the least qualified serious contender for the Presidency from either party that I can recall in my lifetime. And that includes Ross Perot.
Last week a proposal to lift the moratorium on shale oil extraction was narrowly defeated in a Senate committee. The vote was along strictly party lines, Republicans for lifting the ban and Democrats against. What a surprise.
All of this despite the fact that everyone pays lip service to the idea that we need to get closer to that dream of energy independence. And this despite the fact that oil prices have gone through the roof and then some, raising the motivation (and cost-effectiveness) of developing our own reserves.
Many people have come to distrust oil companies, and think everything they do is suspect and perhaps even evil. And many people—especially of the Democrat persuasion—would like nothing better than to for us to go back to some golden age of low energy needs, although how this would happen without a huge culling of the present population I can’t quite imagine. Short of that, they would prefer us to do without oil entirely, to develop alternative energy sources that are clean and have the blessing of environmentalists, although none of these promise to be any more than slight adjuncts to the task of meeting our current and future energy demands (and why alternative energy companies, if successful, would be any less profit-motivated or venal in the end than the oil companies are perceived to be is anybody’s guess. Maybe because they’d be run by Democrats? [/sarcasm]) Continue reading →
Others have observed that the Carly Simon song “You’re So Vain” is an excellent description of Obama’s reaction to Bush’s Knesset speech.
But they haven’t gone far enough with the lyrics. I have attempted to fill that need: Continue reading →
…and completely in the tank for the glass–jawed Obama.
According to the outraged Times, Bush’s “shameful” and “damaging” “slash-and-burn politics” were demonstrated by his mentioning in front of the Knesset that appeasement of terrorists is a bad thing, although some people advocate it. Oh, the horror!
And what’s more to the point, this statement of Bush’s constitutes a “barely veiled attack” (there’s that “a” word again!) against wunderkind Obama and therefore is the equivalent of a stab in the back. Or the front. Or somewhere. Continue reading →
It may be a “distraction,” and no doubt the word “silly” could be said to apply, but I think it’s important to inject a bit of levity—and jello (preferably jello mold)—into life every now and then.
Not to mention beauty and creativity. And I have found a photo that fits the bill in every way.
What does it represent? The city of San Francisco made of jello, part of an installation at that city’s Exploratorium appearing in the spring of 2006.
Feast your eyes:
It has now become a low blow to strike any blow at Obama. It has now become officially an “attack” to campaign at all against him—or even to suggest opposition to something he may have done or may have said, whether you mention him or not.
Case in point: President Bush is not allowed to allude to appeasement as a bad thing without Obama (and many Democrats) getting into an outraged hissy fit about it. Continue reading →
There’s an old Jewish joke that goes something like this:
A Jewish grandmother walks down the street proudly pushing her new grandchild in a baby carriage [that’s how old this joke is; a carriage rather than the $1000 stroller that I hear is now de rigueur in Manhattan]. She stops near another elderly woman, who looks into the carriage and admires the baby.
“What a beautiful baby!” the other woman says dutifully.
“You think that’s beautiful? That’s nothing,” says the grandma. “You should see the pictures!”
And since life imitates art—as art (and artifice) gets further and further from life—I refer you to this Newsweek piece about airbrushing in fashion layouts. Continue reading →
Sent in by a reader:
I guess you can’t accuse someone of copying what you’ve already stolen, though, can you?
In a piece by Cinque Henderson (an African-American supporter of Hillary Clinton) appearing in TNR, we find the following bit of insider information, which so far as I know has not been pointed out before: Continue reading →
Hillary won big yesterday in West Virginia. Really, really big.
And it couldn’t matter less.
Once again, the press is filled with pleas for her to go. Now. Clean out her desk and her locker and turn in her keys, and quit ruining the fun for everybody else.
The math is clear; she is about to be eliminated. Nothing can save her short of a host of superdelegates charging over to her side, and why would they? Everybody loves a winner, a frontrunner, and in this case that’s the younger and more charismatic and even more politically correct (race trumping gender in the victim sweepstakes every time) Obama. Continue reading →
[This is a slightly edited version of a piece that I wrote very early in my blogging career about the tsunami of January 2005. It occurred to me to reprint it in light of the horrific earthquake in China.]
We hardly hear about the tsunami anymore, although for a while it dominated the news. The tsunami was videotaped in a staggering variety of manifestations: from the tall towering waves of Japanese art, to rolling swells that almost resembled a normal tide coming in—except for the fact that this particular tide just kept coming and coming and coming. We viewed forlorn beaches where villages had once stood, and saw keening mourners whose anguish was almost unbearable to watch even on the small screen.
Over and over, newspeople, relief workers, politicians, and officials declared this to be an unprecedented catastrophe. Continue reading →
Today’s post can be found here.