Little Brother is watching you

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems a person can’t say a word these days without someone recording it or writing about it.

For example, the San Francisco fundraiser at which Obama described the bitter clingers of Pennsylvania was meant to be a very private affair, no press allowed. But merely keeping the press out no longer keeps the media out, because we are all media (or potential media) now.

It used to be that candidates could feel safe from prying eyes and ears at these events. They were among friends. Continue reading →

Algebra according to Obama: Ayers = Coburn; Wright = Granny

The New Neo Posted on by

The Obama/Ayers connection had been floating around the perimeter of the blogosphere for a while. But when it surfaced in the debate two days ago it became bigger news, in part because Obama compounded the problem by making a bizarre equation.

It was a bit like when he compared Reverend Wright and his own grandmother. Only this time it was Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, who was the target of Obama’s attempt at balancing two things that cannot be weighed equally, not on any scale that partakes of logical thought.

In his famous race speech, Obama tried to counter his pastor’s racist remarks by saying he could no more disown him than he could disown his own grandmother, who once admitted to fear of a black man who had accosted her at a bus stop. These things have no equivalence, moral or otherwise. But this obvious fact didn’t seem to occur to Obama, so intent was he on defending his allegiance to Wright.

And the other night he did the same thing in attempting to defend his relationship with Ayers. Continue reading →

Italian food—for thought

The New Neo Posted on by

Is the Italian election a portent of things to come in our own? The Obamalike candidate defeated by a 71-year-old on the right?

Hmmm.

The Italian political scene and ours are very different, to be sure. But there are also signs that Italy is edging towards a two-bloc system rather than a mishmosh of small shifting coalitions. The center right that Berlusconi heads now also has a Parliamentary majority, and the Communists have lost all legislative representation for the first time since the 1940s.

Berlusconi himself is certainly a controversial figure, a man of the right and a millionaire media tycoon who in his most recent term headed the first Italian government in the last fifty years to fill its allotted five years. Continue reading →

Obama serenades the folks of Pennsylvania: “Doin’ What Comes Naturally”

The New Neo Posted on by

Obama’s mockery of Hillary as Annie Oakley reminds me that I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for Annie for a long time. One of my favorite childhood songs was “Doin What Comes Naturally” from “Annie Get Your Gun,” which I used to sing aloud as a three-year old clueless to its mild sexual innuendos, to the amusement of the adults around me.

And so I’ve been moved to compose this updated version. I hereby offer it to Barack Obama to warble to the good people of Pennsylvania:

Folks are dumb where you come from,
They ain’t had any learning.
Still they’re bitter as can be
Doin’ what comes naturally (doin’ what comes naturally).
Folks like us will always fuss
With schools and books and learning.
Still we condescend with glee,
Doin’ what comes naturally (doin’ what comes naturally)
If you really knew how to read or write
You’d vote for Obama cause you’d see the light
You’d no longer cling to your church or guns
And you’d know all’s the fault of the Republicans.
That comes naturally (that comes naturally).
You voters out in Scranton can’t even write my name
But ballots just need “x’s”
And they count ’em just the same.
That gal Hill she tried to swill
A beer and shot of whiskey
That ain’t no epiphany
Doin’ what comes naturally (doin’ what comes naturally)

The other Taxman

The New Neo Posted on by

Today is April 15th. This means that, along with millions of others, I’ll be making my way to the copy machine and then on to the post office so that my filled-out tax forms will have the proper postmark.

Ah, paying taxes. What fun! Along with close to 100% of Americans, I hate the process. Continue reading →

They don’t call him “Dhimmi Carter” for nothing, but perhaps they should call him Neville

The New Neo Posted on by

Jimmy Carter is planning a dialogue with Hamas.

And he’s remarkably unapologetic about it, despite requests from both Washington and Israel to cease and desist:

Former President Carter said he feels “quite at ease” about meeting Hamas militants over the objections of Washington because the Palestinian group is essential to a future peace with Israel.

Carter seems never to have heard of William Lloyd Garrison’s handy guide to the art of negotiation:

With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter…”

Carter’s faith that unrepentant terrorists such as the leaders of Hamas can be persuaded by the tools of reason or pleading, and that any positive responses they might come up with are truthful and not a form of strategic playacting for the gullible, is certainly nothing new. He has been one of Hamas’ biggest Western boosters for quite some time. Continue reading →

Rhetoric unmasked

The New Neo Posted on by

Dr. Sanity deconstructs (love that word!) the emphasis of the postmodern Left—and its current well-known incarnation, Obama—on rhetoric.

That’s postmodern rhetoric, as in, “[P]ersuasion in the absence of cognition… truth or falsity is not the issue: what matters primarily is the language’s effectiveness.”

Language thus used may sometimes sound casual, but it is hardly that. Dr. Sanity quotes a wonderful piece by Victor Davis Hanson detailing the cleverly Orwellian rhetorical turns of Obama’s latest efforts to detangle his own words by twisting them still further.

A primer in how not to apologize (or how to not apologize), by Barack Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

Ever the eager teacher of Life Lessons for America, Obama obliges us by offering a classic example of the non-apology masquerading as an apology.

The rules:

(1) Start with a conditional. “If” is usually best. This reduces the “apology” to meaninglessness at the outset: perhaps an offense occurred, perhaps it did not. It’s all in the eye of the beholder—or the ear of the listener. If the speaker has an opinion on whether he/she erred, he/she is certainly keeping it to him/herself.

(2) Place the locus of the wrongdoing firmly in the perception of the offendee, not the act of the (possible) offender. Never say, “What I said was deeply offensive.” That’s too objective; remember there is no objective truth. The fact that someone took offense is not evidence that what was said was actually offensive.

(3) Reiterate, if necessary, and defend the content of the remarks while suggesting it was only semantics that caused any possible offense. When you do so, be careful to keep to the conditional so that you are actually saying nothing at all: “I may not have worded it properly…” (see Rule 1).

Class dismissed.

And speaking of “Apollonian”….

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve got that blogger tendency towards rampant free-association. So when I described Jefferson as “Apollonian” in an earlier post today, that started a little drumbeat in my brain which led me to the following—a photo of Balanchine’s ballet “Apollo,” a lovely physical manifestation of Apollonian characteristics:

apollo2.jpg

And here are some Apollonian circles. They’re called “Apollonian” after their mathematician founder, Apollonius of Perga. But don’t they show the same qualities?:

apollonian_circles.png