Congressman-D - I won't say he lied, but it clearly wasn't true...

So, one of the things that's fun to watch right now is Democratic elected officials playing "choose a euphemism for lying" in order to discuss the President's patently untrue Obamacare sales pitch.

I think the president was grossly misleading to the American public. I know right away as a veterinarian, I have my own business, that my policies got cancelled even before the Affordable Care Act. I know that I would change policies on a regular basis, trying to find the best deal for myself and my employees. But a lot of Americans, a lot of Oregonians, have stayed with the same policy for a number of years and are shocked that their policy got cancelled.

- Rep. Kurt Schrader, D-Oregon

No, Congressman - the President lied. Period.

Of course, as it was obviously a lie right from the start, the only people who were "misled" were people who believed him. Everyone was lied to; only about half were "misled."

Palin and the Left’s Status-Anxiety

Excellent Shannon Love piece on Palin and the Left’s Status-Anxiety.

That is why leftists see Palin as a genuine and significant threat of unusual magnitude. In the emotional thinking of leftists, she is a personal threat to everything each individual leftist has attained in life. They feel a sincere, visceral sense of danger about her because she attacks the very core of their egos. They feel the same hatred towards Palin that the European upper classes felt towards the upstart middle-class. They feel the same hatred that poor whites felt towards non-whites. They feel that way for the same reasons. If she succeeds, worse, if she is right, then they become nobodies.

As long as she is viewed as a significant political figure, the left’s obsession with Palin will never wane because it does not spring from rational roots. She threatens something too deep and too profound in a political subculture built around the belief that a small percentage of human beings have a vastly superior understanding of the world compared to all the rest.

Read the whole thing. It explains a lot.

And there were a lot of the same factors in play in the left's dislike for Ronald Reagan, too...

"Those Voices Don't Speak for the Rest of Us"

I miss the Gipper...

"Obama Shrinks America"

Kathryn Jean Lopez is quoting Bill Kristol this morning on the President's response to the proposed ground zero mosque.

For Obama, 9/11 was a “deeply traumatic event for our country.” Traumatic events invite characteristic reactions and over-reactions–fearfulness, anger, even hysteria. That’s how Obama understands the source of objections to the Ground Zero mosque. It’s all emotional. The arguments don’t have to be taken seriously. The criticisms of the mosque are the emotional reactions of a traumatized people...Obama (like Bloomberg) doesn’t feel he even has to engage the arguments against the mosque–because he regards his fellow citizens as emotionally traumatized victims, not citizens who might have a reasonable point of view.

Kristol's absolutely right, of course, as far as he goes. But he could go much further. Obama's approach to this is the very archetype of the Liberal "Progressive" response to every concern of American citizens with which the left differs.

Gun control? We don't have to respond to their arguments, because they're just "bitter, clinging to God and guns..."

Abortion? We don't have to respond to their arguments, because they're just misogynists.

Affirmative Action? We don't have respond to their arguments, because they're just racists.

Gay Marriage? We don't have to respond to their arguments, because they're just bigots.

Illegal immigration? We don't have to respond to their arguments, because they're just racist bigots.

Deficit spending? We don't have to respond to their arguments, because they're just greedy and heartless.

(And, oh yes, the President is black and they're racists and bigots.)

Health care reform? We don't have to respond to their arguments because they're just greedy and heartless racist bigots.

Taxes? We don't have to respond to their arguments because "taxes" is a racial code word and they're just greedy and heartless racists.

If your political opponent is a racist or a bigot or a misogynist, you don't need to explain yourself - his point of view is worthless by default, so you don't have listen to it, never mind address it. Nearly every "argument" from nearly every Democratic politician is a linear descendant of Teddy Kennedy's inane, insane, but unfortunately effective Robert Bork statement.

It's easy to understand the appeal, of course. If all of your arguments are ad hominems, well, you always win! And, of course, winning the ad hominem argument automatically makes you the better person, and relieves you of actually having to construct logical and intellectual arguments. As Andrew Klavan put it, the liberal argument reduces to "shut up." And if the interface between you and the American people - the media - agrees with you, well, you never, ever get called on it.

Chicago Boyz » Blog Archive » Brooding

At the Chicago Boyz blog, Lexington Green is brooding on the cultural confidence of the American cultural elite (i.e., leftists). And he has an excellent question.

But I go back to my initial question. Why does an elite that is actually not admirable in what it does, and not effective or productive, that has added little or nothing of value to the civilizational stock, that cannot possibly do the things it claims it can do, that services rent-seekers and the well-connected, that believes in an incoherent mishmash of politically correct platitudes, that is parasitic, have such an elevated view of itself?

Read it all...

Failure of Liberal Governance

There's a great editorial in the Wall Street Journal this morning about the failure of liberal policies.

The central contradiction in modern liberal politics is that Otto von Bismarck's entitlement state for cradle to grave financial security is no longer affordable. The model has reached the limit of its ability to tax private income and still allow enough economic growth to finance its transfer payments.

You can see this in bankrupt Greece, where government spends 52% of GDP; or in California and New York, where the government-employee unions have pushed tax rates to punishing levels and the states still can't pay their bills. Americans can see that this is where Mr. Obama's agenda is also taking Washington, and this is why they are rejecting it.

The instigation for the piece was the retirement of Evan Bayh, but that's not the focus. Instead, it addresses the fact that "for the fourth time since the 1960s, American voters in 2008 gave Democrats overwhelming control of both Congress and the White House...Yet once again, Democratic leaders have tried to govern the country from the left, only to find that their policies have hit a wall of practical and popular resistance." It's an excellent piece - read it all...

"Our guess is that it will take one more repudiation in November before Democrats relearn that you can't govern America successfully from the political left."

Campaign Obama vs. President Obama

David Corn is the latest liberal to suggest that there's no problem with the Obama administration that "message discipline" can't fix. Jim Geraghty correctly identifies that as nonsense.

This past year has also seen a lot of controversial and unpopular policies and ideas that this president didn’t campaign on, because campaigning on them would have meant he would have gotten shellacked.

Ideas like giving Khalid Sheik Mohammad a civilian trial in New York City. Ideas like lowering the tax deduction for charitable contributions. Ensuring that bonuses for AIG employees are federally protected. An unlimited bailout for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Having the federal government take over GM. Bowing to foreign monarchs. Unannounced low-altitude flybys of lower Manhattan for a photo op. Ideas like loudly announcing that you’ll close Guantanamo Bay within one year, and then later announcing that you won’t make the deadline because it turns out there aren’t good alternatives.

Obama didn’t campaign on any of this, and if he had, he probably would have lost by a landslide.

Message? Message? The problem is not the message. The problem is the decisions of the messenger.

Exactly right. Obama's a radical leftist who ran as a moderate in an essentially conservative country. There's no amount of "message discipline" that can reconcile the reality of Obama with the illusion projected (and enhanced by the media) during the campaign.

Playing politics

Michael Goldfarb:

While the Democrats appease Senator Lieberman, they still have to worry about other recalcitrant Democrats including Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson. Though Lieberman has been out front in the fight against the public option and the Medicare buy-in, Nelson was critical of both. Now that those provisions appear to have been stripped from the bill, Lieberman may get on board, but Nelson's demand that taxpayer money not be used to fund abortion has still not been met. According to a Senate aide, the White House is now threatening to put Nebraska's Offutt Air Force Base on the BRAC list if Nelson doesn't fall into line.

Offutt Air Force Base employs some 10,000 military and federal employees in Southeastern Nebraska. As our source put it, this is a "naked effort by Rahm Emanuel and the White House to extort Nelson's vote." They are "threatening to close a base vital to national security for what?" asked the Senate staffer.

Because doing the right thing for America is what Obama's all about...

This is NOT what the Founders intended...

This piece of art is horribly disturbing.



There's an excellent illustration of the death of the spirit that made America. How it is possible for someone to visualize Washington, DC, as the beating heart of America, pumping blood to all of the rest of the country, and still speak of "Liberty" is beyond me. It's actually hard to imagine a more appropriate iconic image for the cradle-to-grave, "Washington's my mommy and daddy and should take care of me" mindset of the modern left.

But horribly disturbing...

"...then be angry and fight."

Bill Bennett, thought-provoking as usual...

President Obama is going to Ft. Hood today for a memorial service there. We will all be sorrowful and our hearts and minds and souls will be with everyone at Ft. Hood. My worry about these services now is that they are a) not angry enough and b) that they are the end and not the beginning. Ever since the week after 9/11/2001, anger has eluded memorial services (with the exception of Paul Wellstone’s memorial—that, somehow, was a moment of anger for the left). It is an American thing to pray, to be sorrowful, and then to be angry and fight. I hope we still have the stuff for the last two parts.

Read it all.

"Nanny state" used to be figurative. Not any more, apparently...

Great Britain was a more-or-less free country at one point, right?

A council has banned parents from supervising their children in public playgrounds until they have undergone criminal record checks.

Adults have been excluded from two adventure play areas in Watford, apart from a handful of council-vetted 'play rangers' who will assist youngsters, it emerged today.

Parents will be forced to watch their children from outside the perimeter fence.

I say again, Please, God, spare me from well-meaning liberals. Protect me from those who want to take from all to help my kids. Spare me the cries of "it's for the children..."

"It's like no one's even serious about anything anymore..."

A commenter (Balfegor) at Ann Althouse's blog has an excellent comment on the world in which we find ourselves living.

This just reinforces my ongoing impression that we've been living out a satire for the past year or two. We elected a callow nobody as President on the strength of a few vacuous speeches. The healthcare debate -- driving trillions of dollars in anticipated future expenditures -- got turned around by comments someone scrawled on Facebook, and now the Nobel Peace Prize committee has decided to award prizes for good intentions. It's like no one's even serious about anything anymore. None of it matters. It's the Society of the Spectacle.

O Brave New World...

Please, God, spare me from well-meaning liberals. Protect me from those who want to take from all to help my kids. Spare me the cries of "it's for the children." Because that way lies madness. That way lies stories like
this.

In a locally unprecedented move, the School District of Philadelphia will hold principals accountable for the number of students eating breakfast in their schools.

Breakfast participation will be part of the report card that rates principals each year, along with categories such as attendance and math and reading performance.

All 165,000 students in Philadelphia public schools, regardless of income, are eligible for free breakfasts. But just 54,000 ate breakfast last year, district figures show.

...

"Making principals accountable for breakfast is critical," said Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, a Washington nonprofit that works to eradicate hunger. "School breakfast is so important that it makes sense to hold people in the system responsible."

This is insane. How long until the principals are made accountable for the increase in weight among the kids (who WILL be encouraged to eat at school, regardless of whether they've eaten already at home)? How long after that until mandatory physical activities are instituted after the academic days ends? How long after that until the school day includes both breakfast and dinner (because some of those kids won't have hot meals to go home to)? How long after that until going home to sleep is discouraged? (Try to tell me that we won't have some well-meaning busybody saying "some of these kids don't have good blankets, or warm apartments, or their own bedrooms." Just don't expect me to believe it.)

This is part and parcel of the creeping (well, it used to be creeping - it appears to be galloping now) cradle-to-grave nanny state. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and we're on that road right now like, well, a bat out of hell.

This is not, I think, an original observation, and I may have made it before, and I don't have any idea where I might have first heard it, but this is a problem of utopianism. So many of the issues that we, as a country, face right now are the result of people who believe, really, truly believe, in the perfectability of the human condition. And the driving mindset is the delusional belief that if we could just, somehow, someway, pass the right laws, institute the right government programs, then everything would be perfect. The nonsensical belief that we can do away with violence, hunger, disease, thirst, war, accidents, illiteracy, animal attacks, dandruff, undercooked burritos, global warming, hemorrhoids and the heartbreak of psoriasis if only we could institute the right government programs. There are no inherent problems with humanity that lead to problems, at least none that can't be legislated away, and with enough of the right kind of laws, humanity can achieve perfection, where everyone is smart and educated, has equal wealth and no disputes with his neighbors, a Lake Wobegone world where everyone's above average.

It's public policy from the John Lennon ("imagine all the people living life in peace") school, and it requires government policies from the Vladimir Lenin school. Because you can't perfect human behavior in a free society. (You can't perfect it in a totalitarian society, either, but there are always going to be some who believe that, if they only had a little more control, if the could only institute a few more restrictions, they could make everything perfect.)

"This is a con job on the scale of Madoff”

Newt Gingrich, speaking "truth to power"...

Obama, Gingrich adds, “is a radical in the sense that the victory of those values would mean the end of American civilization as we know it.”

...

In 2008, Americans, says Gingrich, “were voting for the end of Bush. They were voting to have no taxes raised on anybody making under $250,000 and they were voting for a tax cut for 95 percent of the American people. Go back and read what Obama campaigned on. This is a con job on the scale of Madoff.” . . .

"Come and take it"

Some bits of political theater are a lot more enjoyable and entertaining than others. Here, blogger Keli Carender¹ challenges Norm Dicks (D-WA) to do to her face what he's generally happy to do behind her back - take her money in order to give it to someone else.


Dicks' response is a lame joke. At least, I think it's a joke. But really, what could he say?

(H/T: Ace of Spades)

¹ - The name comes from the YouTube description. I've seen comments elsewhere indicating that it may not be accurate - I don't know for sure.

Yes we can! (if we prevent everyone else from speaking...)

By the way, if you haven't seen this yet, well, you should.



One of the things that's been informative over the past six months is the insistence by those on the left that the Tea Parties and the demonstrations against Obamacare at town meetings has all been "ginned up," organized by the Republican Party¹. They can't conceive of "organic" or spontaneous citizen uprisings because they're entire political existence is based on artificially created citizen uprisings. We saw it last year, and we're seeing it clearly now - the Democrats are definitely the community organizing party.

¹ - No explanation seems to be forthcoming as to why, if the Republicans are capable of organizing that many people that effectively, they lost so badly last November.

I suppose we should be thankful that it isn't larger...

Curious how big the hard-core left is in this country?

If they could vote to keep or replace the entire Congress, just 25% of voters nationwide would keep the current batch of legislators. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 57% would vote to replace the entire Congress and start all over again. Eighteen percent (18%) are not sure how they would vote.

The figure of 25% for the hard left seems to be pretty consistent. Which is both a) a frighteningly large group of people and b) a good indicator of how badly the Republicans had to screw things politically to give that group both houses of Congress as well as the White House at the same time.

And that 18% probably understates the quantity of truly oblivious...

Shut up!

Andrew Klavan has examined the debating tactics of the left, which can be summarized in two words - Shut Up!