The dumbest thing I expect to see today...

... and I expect to see it over and over as various lefties post it on Facebook.

Is the video dumb? Probably. Given that it features Fauxcahontas, I have no reason to think that time spent watching it would constitute time well spent. But the dumbness - really epic dumbness - is in the description from the person that posted it.

A Senator Gets Mad About The Shutdown And Starts Naming Names. About Time.

Since the media seems to think this whole thing is a bipartisan mess, I thought I'd get a second opinion. Take it away, Senator. (At 4:00, she nails it.) And the name she names? It's a party. Not a person.

I don't know what media he's talking about, but, as we discussed yesterday, they seem to be largely in "it's not really bipartisan - it's all the Republicans' fault" mode. So that's a pretty dumb comment. What really elevates it is what follows. To get the real scoop, this guy thinks that the media is too even-handed, so you've got to go to a partisan, elected and not-particularly bright (skin-tone excepted) Democrat to get the blame correctly attributed to Republicans.

Yeah, there's a compelling argument.  That'll really elevate the discussion...

Going negative, and getting a laugh at the same time...

Elizabeth Warren’s Birthday Gift From GOP: An Ancestry.com Account

Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren turns 63 today, and among her birthday gifts is one she probably won’t appreciate very much. She’s in a tight race against the GOP incumbent, Scott Brown. The state’s Republican party announced this morning that it is gifting Warren, a Harvard Law professor, with a complimentary account at ancestry.com.

“Since Professor Warren has failed to come up with any evidence supporting her claims to Native American ancestry, we thought this Ancestry.com account would make the perfect birthday gift,” said Massachusetts Republican Party executive director Nate Little in a statement.

Perfect!

Explicitly racial group: "Everyone who doesn't agree with us is a racist."

One of the adages I like when talking about confirmation bias is, "when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." In other words, there's a strong tendency in all human beings to see what we're looking for, what we want to see. If our only tool for interpreting society is racism, we're going to see racism in every societal interaction.  So it should come as no surprise that an explicitly racial group, a group based on skin color, taking its name from the skin color of its members, looks at the opposition to President Obama's policies and sees ... racism.

Congressional Black Caucas staff: Opposition to Obama is racist

"This is probably the toughest presidential term in my lifetime," Rye said during CSPAN's Q&A yesterday. "I think that a lot of what the president has experienced is because he's black. You know, whether it's questioning his intellect or whether or not he's Ivy League. It's always either he's not educated enough or he's too educated; or he's too black or he's not black enough; he's too Christian or not Christian enough. There are all these things where he has to walk this very fine line to even be successful."

Sigh...

Honestly, isn't everyone tired of this schtick yet? Let's be brutally frank for a minute: if Barack Obama were white, we would be talking about whether Mitt Romney could defeat Hillary Clinton's re-election bid. Barack Obama, in 2008, was the black John Edwards. Barack Obama is President, and John Edwards is not, because the vast majority of Americans abhor racism and go out of their way not to practice racist behaviors, or behaviors that they might perceive as racist. Barack Obama had absolutely nothing in his background to qualify him for the Presidency over a John Edwards. Barack Obama had absolutely nothing in his background to qualify him for the Presidency, period. He won because of his skin color, because enough media-Americans and Democrat-Americans decided it was time for an African-American President instead of a Woman-American, and enough independents and Republicans were appalled by the profligacy of the second Bush administration to go along.

And now he's being opposed for his policies. His health care proposals are loathed by the same people that loathed "Hillarycare" in 1994. His economic proposals are to the left of Al Gore's and John Kerry's, so he's got all of the opposition that they had, plus more of the "middle," who thought that Gore's and Kerry's policies were ok, but any further was bad. He's got the same kind of support that the equally disastrous, but much whiter, Jimmy Carter had, coming down the stretch in his own failed administration.

In other words, there's not a scintilla of evidence to support the idea that opposition to Obama's policies and re-election campaign, for other than a trivial minority, is based on skin color.

None.

Of course, Rye did try to provide some evidence and, in the process, demonstrated how racist her worldview is, while saying nothing about Obama's opposition.

She said that "a lot" of conservative opposition is racially-charged, citing the use of the word "cool" in an attack ad launched by Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS superPAC.

"There's an ad, talking about [how] the president is too cool, [asking] is he too cool? And there's this music that reminds me of, you know, some of the blaxploitation films from the 70s playing in the background, him with his sunglasses," Rye said. "And to me it was just very racially-charged. They weren't asking if Bush was too cool, but, yet, people say that that's the number one person they'd love to have a beer with. So, if that's not cool I dont know what is.

So "cool" is now a racial slur. Right. Let's conduct a little experiment here: close your eyes, count to 10, and then say the name of the person you most associate with the term, "cool."

If you're over 65, I'm guessing that you said "Elvis Presley" or "Marlon Brando" or "Frank Sinatra." If you're between 45 and 65, you like came up with "Arthur Fonzarelli" (or just "the Fonz"). I'll confess that I don't know who you came up with if you're younger than that, but you're in the Obama demographic anyway.

Q: What do those men all have in common?
A: They are all nearly as white as Elizabeth "Fauxcahontas" Warren.

Claiming that "cool" is a racist term is obviously nonsense to anyone not steeped in the racial grievance industry. To one who is, anything is a racist term, if applied in a pejorative way to a black man. But that makes her position explicitly non-falsifiable. Any evidence that can be offered to her that Obama's opposition is not race-based can be explained away with ad hoc special pleadings. "Cool" is racist. "Proud" means "uppity" so it's racist. "Obama Isn't Working" apparently evokes "the stereotype of the 'lazy,' 'shiftless' black man" and is therefore racist. (Notice that it's the "unbiased" left that thinks about black men as "lazy...shiftless" and assumes racism on the part of those who don't think about black men that way.) Calling him by his full name is racist. Wondering whether he was born in Africa (a claim that he himself made for 17 years) is racist. Opposition to tax hikes is racist. Opposition to the individual mandate is racist. Commenting on how much time he spends golfing is racist. Calling him the "food stamp President" (because the number of Americans receiving food stamps is at an all time high) is racist.

Essentially, in the eyes of those who see the world through the eyes of the CBC, any criticism of a black man is inherently racist.

And I ask again, isn't everyone tired of this schtick yet?

The always brilliant Mark Steyn...

...with the line of the day.

Breaking! The House of Windsor is One of the Five Tribes

Actually, that last line quoted above briefly made me wonder if writing about American liberalism isn’t a threat to one’s sanity. Some societies are racist, some societies work hard to be anti-racist, but only in America does the nation’s most prestigious law school hire a 100 per cent white female as its first “woman of color” on the basis that she once mailed in the Duke of Windsor’s favorite crab dish to a tribal cookbook.

Identity politics

There are two things that I want to be very clear about as I start this one, because people are likely to see the topic and make assumptions that I'm raising an issue that I'm not, or that I'm concerned about things that I'm not concerned about.

1. I believe that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.
2. Even if he weren't, I do not, at this point, care. He ran for the office and was elected. For the last four years he has legitimately been the President of the United States.

And there are two points that I do want to make.

1. The system of identity politics promulgated and promoted by the American left is ultimately corrosive and destructive, so much so that even those who promote recognize the need to "game the system."
2. The United States media's performance in its coverage of Barack Obama before his election to the Presidency was nonfeasance amounting to malfeasance.

OK?  Everyone got that?

That said, this is fascinating. At Breitbart's site, they've published an Obama bio published in 1991 by his literary agent as he was shopping book proposals.

"Born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii..."

There's been a lot of hot air over the last few years over the "birthers," people who were skeptical that Obama was constitutionally eligible for the office that he holds.  Some of that undoubtedly came from people who didn't want a black President, or that hoped the election of President Obama could be annulled or retroactively overturned. But that doesn't mean that a) a majority held those positions or b) that there are not legitimate Constitutional concerns involved or c) that there weren't legitimate reasons to ask the questions. (For what it's worth, many of those on the left who loved the issue because it allowed them to pretend that all Republicans were racists just ignored the fact that the issue was initially raised by Democratic supporters of Hillary Clinton during the primary campaign.) As the above bio demonstrates, not only was his father Kenyan, there was information in the public record for years stating that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. So it was absolutely legitimate to ask whether he was constitutionally eligible for the office he sought.

If he was not born in Kenya, why would his bio say that he was? Not having been there at the time, I can't prove it, but the likeliest reason seems to me that he thought the kind of book he was selling would benefit from having the "street cred" of being born in Africa. Much like I believe that the Democratic Senate candidate from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, knew that checking the "native American" box, despite the absence of any evidence other than family rumors about an ancestor five generations back that may have been part-Cherokee, would benefit her in hiring decisions made at the various Universities at which she taught. Once she reached the pinnacle of her profession, Harvard Law, there was no need to keep checking it. (I'm not sure who first came up with it, but I love that Warren is now referred to in many circles as "Fauxcahontas."  Harvard, of course, has advertised her as a "minority" for the benefit of their "diversity" statistics, despite the fact that she's a blonde, blue-eyed, plainly caucasian woman who'd be an albino if she were any whiter. Stories this week reveal that "a 1997 Fordham Law Review piece described her as Harvard Law School's 'first woman of color.'" Well, pink is a color, I suppose...)

So Warren and Obama were, and are, just taking advantage of the spoils system that they themselves, and others of like mind, put in place. If you're a 60s radical, steeped in the leftist cant about American imperialism, you advertise yourself as having been born in Kenya. If you want to give yourself every advantage in the climb through the ranks of the American professoriate, you claim native American ancestry, if you think you can get away with it (and if you're a woman and they want to increase their "diversity" numbers, no one's going to check).

As to the press, it was obvious at the time that it was in the tank for Barack Obama in 2008. The members of the media made their collective decision in the Obama vs. Clinton primary, and steadfastly refused to cover anything that might reflect poorly on their chosen candidate. Did the media cover his relationship with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn? No, the only mentions of Ayers in the mainstream press tended to whitewash his past and question the McCain effort to raise questions about their relationship. The same pattern held for Jeremiah Wright and Tony Rezko. The press blithely ignored his "present" vote on the born-alive infants bill in Illinois.   Barack Obama was elected to the Presidency with less media "vetting" than a typical Republican Congressional candidate gets.  The media formed a protective cocoon around him, and every character or background issue that made it into the mainstream press, made it in the context of "the McCain campaign tries, again, to go negative" or "what does this latest attack say about McCain."

Did reporters have this literary bio in 2008 and never bother to print it?  Or did they not ever see it?  It's got to be one or the other.  And more importantly, which is more damning for the media as a whole, the incompetence of the latter case or the corruption of the former?





 I was amused by Jim Treacher's take...

Either Obama was born in Kenya or he wasn’t. I remain skeptical that he was. The question is, then: Why did he claim to be? What advantage did he think it gave him at the time?

Maybe Elizabeth Warren can tell us…