See also, "Obama Reaps Whirlwind of Positive Coverage In Iraq."As Barack Obama prepares to visit the city of Ramallah in the West Bank, a Palestinian artist sketches Obama among his other portraits of Jesus, “martyred” Hamas terrorist Abdel Aziz Rantisi (“The Pediatrician of Death”), and Che Guevara.
With a peace dove, of course. You couldn’t make this up.
When Barack Obama arrives in Europe this week, the senator will be greeted as a president-elect. His election in November is regarded as a mere formality — and in Europe it would be one. Obama’s margin of victory over John McCain in opinion polls is 51 percent in France, 49 percent in Germany, and 30 percent in Britain. What some skeptical European governments call “Obamania” is sweeping the continent.There's more at the link.
Two factors largely explain this opinion tsunami: race and George W. Bush.
Taking their cue from America’s Obamaniacs, Europeans see the Illinois senator as a healer bringing absolution for the Republic’s original sin of racism. He shall overcome. But that blinding confidence is as far as the argument goes. How Obama will overcome is largely left unstated. Obama’s election, achieved in part by white votes, would itself mark a defeat for what remains of anti-black racism. But once an attempt is made to take the argument further, doubts set in.
If Obama follows the sort of race-conscious policies he has faithfully supported for the last quarter century — racial preferences and set-asides, now made more burdensome and complex by immigration — then racial divisions will continue and perhaps sharpen. If he is true to the “post-racial” rhetoric of his campaign, however, and seeks healing indirectly by helping the poor lift themselves out of poverty, then he would have better chances of long-term success. Short-term, though, he would invite noisy denunciations of betrayal from the Jacksons and Sharptons of this world.
In either event, healing would be postponed — and after a while, the failure of America to recreate itself as a post-racial utopia of universal goodwill would be held up as evidence of an unshakable racism. Disappointment on two continents is inherent in the current enthusiasm.
George W. Bush presents Obama with an even more tangled problem. Europeans regard Bush, his America, and his foreign policy as little short of diabolical. They see Obama as the Fifth Cavalry riding in to save them from such dangerous folly. But while they were demonstrating against “Bushitler,” his foreign policy changed sharply on a range of issues — North Korea, Iran, European defense — in a “European” direction. Since the primaries ended and the Iraq surge succeeded, moreover, Obama has hedged his position on Iraq withdrawal (among other things). And Sen. McCain was already closer than President Bush to the European allies on most foreign-policy issues, including climate change.
So, as European governments (but not European peoples) see it, Obama differs only modestly with both McCain and Bush on the foreign-policy matters about which they care most. What distinguishes him is his lack of experience.
Obama is uneasily aware of this. He is also usually too shrewd to flatter European prejudices at the cost (paid by Sen. John Kerry) of seeming either anti-American or nationally ambivalent. He is likely therefore to play it safe in three ways. To the Europeans he will offer a strong and eloquent defense of the Atlantic alliance. To the Americans watching on television, he will stress that Europe must play a stronger part in NATO and in such alliance ventures as Afghanistan both by contributing more troops and resources and by actually fighting the enemy. And to both sides, he will avoid taking on contentious issues: Would he stand up to the Russians, for instance, and install missile defenses in central Europe?
The new newspaper trend - even extending to boring old AP - of encouraging reporters to not merely report but opine in their "news" pieces reared its ugly head again this morning by way of a front page story in the Austin American-Statesman on Saturday's Netroots Nation events.
Patrick Beach, a feature writer at the paper who once described himself as a "raging moderate," repeatedly described the gathering in stereotypes that better fit the aging Old Left of years ago than the much younger Netroots of today. I mean, how many of you have ever read much of Chomsky...?
What was Beach's sin? Hitting a little too close to home, I'd say. Here's a sample:
Perhaps the piece is a bit satirical, but it's not unlike what's published routinely on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, which includes an offbeat news story at the bottom of column three every morning, or the Los Angeles Times, which features "Column One" daily, with many of the feature stories comprising fun-loving takes on the quirks of life.Name-dropping Al Gore and his call for a switch to clean, renewable energy within 10 years was enough to pull whoops of approval from the 2,000 or 3,000 marauding liberals gathered for Netroots Nation at the Austin Convention Center on Saturday morning.
So when the former vice president and Nobel Prize co-winner made a surprise — and cleverly scripted — appearance during U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's talk, it looked like the conference might turn into a faint-in.
Talk that Pelosi (who is arguably so left-leaning that her parenthetical should be D-Beijing) would have a Very Special Guest had been buzzing about the conference of liberal bloggers, pols and media types since it began Thursday (it concludes today). But it wasn't clear to attendees that something was afoot until a schedule change handed out Saturday morning indicated the speaker's talk would last 45 minutes longer than previously indicated.
Not that Gore's appearance was necessary to whip up the troops.
From the beginning, it was clear these people were convinced the electoral map would be repainted with a brush sopping with blue paint come November.
Readers expect front-page stories to speak directly and clearly about events and issues. Eliminating the possibility of misunderstanding from our work is a critical part of our daily newsroom routine. When we communicate in a way that could be misinterpreted, we fail to meet our standards.I guess that's it then. No more room for irony in serious journalism. I somehow doubt Jonathan Swift would be amused.
Our front-page story Sunday about the Netroots Nation convention included doses of irony and exaggeration. It made assertions (that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi might find herself at home politically in Beijing, for example) and characterizations ("marauding liberals" was one) meant to amuse. For many readers, we failed.
In trying for a humorous take on the Netroots phenomenon without labeling it something other than a straightforward news story, we compromised our standards.
Back in the early 1990s, with the rise of talk radio, conservative commentators derisively dubbed newspapers, magazines and broadcast television as the “mainstream media.” More recently, with the run-up to the Iraq war, liberal bloggers joined in, abbreviating the term to MSM.Seelye notes, thankfully, that Moulitsas' megalomania hasn't gone unnoticed:
But now the Internet has overtaken most newspapers and broadcasts as a source of news, and some on the left say the lingo ought to reflect that.
Markos Moulitsas, founder of the DailyKos Web site, the biggest liberal hub online, wrote on Monday that the heretofore “mainstream media” should be called the “traditional media.” Calling it mainstream implies that the Internet is fringe, he said, when in fact liberal bloggers, at least, are “representatives of the mainstream, and the country is embracing what we’re selling.”
As you might imagine, not everyone agrees that Kos now represents the mainstream, and some have been mocking him (“If Moulitsas’s netroots were truly the mainstream, why would they attack a MODERATE Democrat who rarely strayed from the party line?” one asked, in reference to his debate Friday with Harold Ford, chairman of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.)That's fine, although leftist hopes are indeed high that the long-awaited proletarian revolution's coming in November.
The Sixties are over and the rules of power have been transformed. In order to change the world one needs to know how to manipulate the media, not just march in the streets. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, otherwise known as "Kos," is today's symbol of digital activism, giving a voice to everyday people. In "Taking on the System," Kos has taken a cue from his revolutionary predecessor's doctrine, Saul Alinksy's Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, and places this epic hand-book in today's digital era, empowering every American to make a difference in the 21st century.
There's some sheer hypocrisy - if not irony - inherent in this blurb.
Markos Moulitsas, who proclaims himself a digital revolutionary in his new book, sponsors attacks on news coverage of the very radicalism of his own movement - with the desired result achieved in the capitulation of the Austin American-Statesman to the left's totalitarian thought police.
But lest readers forget: Daily Kos is the blogosphere's top portal for the left's secular demonology of hate. Not only are moderate Democratic Party officials savagely attacked, the most extreme racist, anti-Semitic essays are published regularly on the blog.
Moulitsas himself is not above attacking John McCain for his teeth. As I've noted before:
I think people really need to step back and think about this.The Kos page still hosts the rabidly anti-Semitic entry, "Eulogy before the Inevitability of Self-Destruction: The Decline and Death of Israel."
Kos himself recently attacked John McCain's physical appearance, ridiculing the Arizona Senator in a post entitled "McCain's Teeth."The "teeth" post is particularly egregious, considering that the McCain's teeth were broken off at the gumline by his North Vietnamese captors in 1968.
The reduction in violence, political reconciliation, the decimation of al Qaeda in Iraq, and the freedom of the Iraqi people--these are the fruits of the surge strategy that Barack Obama opposed and that John McCain advocated. The American people want their troops to come home, but the premise of this campaign is that they want the troops to come home with honor, having won the victory they've earned, and having left behind a stable and democratic Iraq that will be an ally in the war against radical Islamic extremism.Barack Obama's been wrong on Iraq from the beginning.
While Barack Obama promises to bring the troops home within 16 months, an unconditional timeline we reject not only as being dangerous but infeasible, John McCain promises to bring the troops home with victory secured. If there is a "growing consensus" to withdraw American troops, that consensus only exists because the American people now recognize that victory is at hand and our presence will not be required in Iraq for much longer. But Barack Obama has always supported withdrawing troops, regardless of the consequences for Iraq, the region, and American national security. At some point, we will be 16 months away from leaving Iraq, and then Obama will be claiming he was right all along. But even a broken clock is right twice a day.
The Journal editors argue that these data show the dynamism of the economy amid lower tax rates, and they suggest that the increasing shifts in the ranks of high income earners is predicted by supply-side economic theory.Washington is teeing up "the rich" for a big tax hike next year, as a way to make them "pay their fair share." Well, the latest IRS data have arrived on who paid what share of income taxes in 2006, and it's going to be hard for the rich to pay any more than they already do. The data show that the 2003 Bush tax cuts caused what may be the biggest increase in tax payments by the rich in American history.
The nearby chart shows that the top 1% of taxpayers, those who earn above $388,806, paid 40% of all income taxes in 2006, the highest share in at least 40 years. The top 10% in income, those earning more than $108,904, paid 71%. Barack Obama says he's going to cut taxes for those at the bottom, but that's also going to be a challenge because Americans with an income below the median paid a record low 2.9% of all income taxes, while the top 50% paid 97.1%. Perhaps he thinks half the country should pay all the taxes to support the other half.
Aha, we are told: The rich paid more taxes because they made a greater share of the money. That is true. The top 1% earned 22% of all reported income. But they also paid a share of taxes not far from double their share of income. In other words, the tax code is already steeply progressive.
We also know from income mobility data that a very large percentage in the top 1% are "new rich," not inheritors of fortunes. There is rapid turnover in the ranks of the highest income earners, so much so that people who started in the top 1% of income in the 1980s and 1990s suffered the largest declines in earnings of any income group over the subsequent decade, according to Treasury Department studies of actual tax returns. It's hard to stay king of the hill in America for long.
The most amazing part of this story is the leap in the number of Americans who declared adjusted gross income of more than $1 million from 2003 to 2006. The ranks of U.S. millionaires nearly doubled to 354,000 from 181,000 in a mere three years after the tax cuts.
John McCain's senior foreign policy adviser is a close business associate of Stephen Payne, the lobbyist caught on tape offering access to top administration officials in exchange for donations to the Bush Library.Presumably, Beyerstein's looking to expand Congress' Stephen Payne/Worldwide Strategic Partners cash-for-access probe of the Bush administration to the McCain campaign. As Beyerstein notes, emphatically:
This is explosive news because Payne's company's entire business model is international influence peddling in exchange for oil and gas leases from politically unstable and dictatorial regimes.
Scheunemann, is listed as a member of Worldwide Strategic Energy's executive team...Interesting, neither Beyerstein nor other contingents in the leftosphere are chumming the scandal waters this morning over the Wall Street Journal's report that Penny Pritzker, the national campaign finance chair of the Obama presidential campaign, is a former director of Superior Bank, an Illinois subprime institution half-owned by the Pritzker family. The bank's collapse resulted in the loss of savings for 1,400 depositors, and the institution was subject to a FDIC reorganization plan costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars:
If we use the same logic that Beyestein employs to suggest "explosive" implications for Scheunemann ties to Worldwide Strategic Energy, we should see similar outrage regarding Ms. Pritzker's background as subprime banking predator.For the Pritzker family of Chicago, the 2001 collapse of subprime-mortgage lender Superior Bank was an embarrassing failure in a corner of their giant business empire.
Billionaire Penny Pritzker helped run Hinsdale, Ill.-based Superior, overseeing her family's 50% ownership stake. She now serves as Barack Obama's national campaign-finance chairwoman, which means her banking past could prove to be an embarrassment to her - and perhaps to the campaign.
Superior was seized in 2001 and later closed by federal regulators. Government investigators and consumer advocates have contended that Superior engaged in unsound financial activities and predatory lending practices. Ms. Pritzker, a longtime friend and supporter of Sen. Obama, served for a time as Superior's chairman, and later sat on the board of its holding company.
Sen. Obama has long criticized predatory subprime mortgage lenders and urged strong actions against them.
In a prepared statement, the Obama campaign noted that Ms. Pritzker was never accused of wrongdoing by regulators in connection with Superior, and that her family agreed to pay $460 million to help defray the costs of Superior's collapse.
In a written response to questions, Ms. Pritzker said the reasons for Superior's fall "were complex. They include changes in accounting practices, auditing failures, reversals in regulatory positions and general economic conditions." During her tenure at the thrift, she said, she believed it followed "ethical business practices" and complied with "fair lending laws." For years, she said, Superior's financial statements were found to be acceptable by regulators.
The Obama campaign recently faced a controversy related to mortgage lending. A member of Sen. Obama's vice-presidential selection committee resigned after a Wall Street Journal story said he received favorable treatment on personal loans from Countrywide Financial Corp., a major subprime lender.
Ms. Pritzker's connection to Superior dates to the late 1980s, when the late Jay Pritzker, her uncle and then the family patriarch, moved to buy from federal regulators a troubled Illinois savings and loan. Ms. Pritzker, who has law and business degrees from Stanford, was to be the venture's chairman, said Mr. Pritzker's partner on the deal, New York real-estate developer Alvin Dworman, in a December 2006 deposition. "Jay bought the bank for her," he said in the deposition, taken in connection with litigation in Illinois state court related to the collapse. Mr. Dworman declined a recent interview request. Ms. Pritzker, in her statement, said she never heard her uncle mention her as a reason for the purchase.
Ms. Pritzker served as Superior chairman until 1994. During that period, Superior "embarked on a business strategy of significant growth into subprime home mortgages," which were then packaged into securities and sold to investors, according to a 2002 report by the Treasury Department's Inspector General.
"Superior was at the forefront of the securitizing of subprime mortgages," says Timothy Anderson, a retired bank consultant who has studied Superior and other failed thrifts.
I took my boys to see "The Dark Knight" on Friday, and my younger son's been playing with his "Stealth Launch Batmobile" all weekend (the inevitable mass market toystore tie-in).A record-shattering opening for Warner Bros.'s Batman movie "The Dark Knight" ushered in the biggest domestic box-office weekend in history, showcasing the film industry's ability to rally during times of economic turbulence when it has the right product.
Director Christopher Nolan's brooding sequel to his 2005 "Batman Begins" topped already-high expectations and sold an estimated $155.3 million worth of tickets since opening early Friday, according to studio figures released on Sunday. That's the biggest opening for a film in motion-picture history, unadjusted for inflation, beating the previous record held by "Spider-Man 3," which grossed $151.1 million during its opening weekend in May 2007.
The outsized box-office take came as a surprise, even to film-industry insiders, during a year when movie attendance has dropped slightly, continuing the trend of recent years.
As of early last week, some studio executives in Hollywood were expecting the film, which cost an estimated $180 million to make, to sell about $110 million worth of U.S. tickets in its opening weekend. The surprise upside is owing to a variety of factors that helped expand the audience. Those included top-notch reviews and curiosity that has been growing for months about the acclaimed performance of Heath Ledger, who died of an accidental prescription-drug overdose earlier this year after completing his role as the Joker.
"Yep, the way it's looking, we might actually win this thing . . ."Moulitsas is modest about Netroots influence, and while Barack Obama snubbed the group this summer, the presumptive Democratic nominee, while not always appreciative, is well integrated with the left-wing bloggers:
That's Markos Moulitsas talking, a.k.a. "Kos" to everyone here at Netroots Nation, the four-day liberal blogapalooza that ended Sunday at the Austin Convention Center. He's got a head cold, which explains his hoarse, strained voice, and by "we," he means the Netroots and their candidate of choice, Sen. Barack Obama. If the Netroots can be compared to high school -- still maturing, somewhat cliquish but definitely a community -- then Obama, as the presumptive nominee, had been voted Most Likely to Succeed.
Hardest Worker and Best Dressed honors went to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who kicked off Saturday morning's program with a freewheeling 40-minute "Ask the Speaker" session. ("Damn, Nancy looks grrreat in that pantsuit," a blogger was overheard saying.) Most Popular would go to Al Gore, who brought the crowd of more than 2,000 conventioneers to its feet with his surprise appearance, repeatedly asking bloggers to visit WeCanSolveIt.org, home to his new group, the Alliance for Climate Protection.
But Obama, who leads Sen. John McCain in recent national polls, is Topic A among the Netroots, his fate somewhat married to theirs. Five years ago liberal bloggers made a name for themselves at a time of defeat; Republicans controlled not just the White House but both houses in Congress. They craved a fight, and President Bush was their punching bag.
But these are changing times, and Obama, in his calls for getting past blue vs. red America, and in his recent positions on issues such as telecom immunity, is somewhat of an enigma. With the Dems taking back Congress in 2006 and the prospect of an Obama victory come November, many in the influential Netroots are left in a precarious, ambiguous position. The question is, who needs whom: Does Obama need the Netroots, or vice versa?
If Obama has a problem, it's not with the people who attended Netroots Nation, it's with the PUMA folks, are are intensely organized against Obama's nomination as the Democratic Party nominee, and perhaps the Illinois Senator's election in November.Obama's standing here, especially with big-name bloggers such as Matt Stoller of OpenLeft, has proved complicated. Two years ago, frustrated by bloggers' reaction to two Democratic senators who voted to confirm John Roberts as chief justice, Obama wrote a posting on Daily Kos:
"According to the storyline that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic activists -- a storyline often reflected in comments on this blog -- we are up against a sharply partisan, radically conservative, take-no-prisoners Republican party," wrote Obama, who voted no on the Roberts confirmation.
Last year, at the height of the primary campaign, Obama often placed second behind former senator John Edwards in the monthly and unscientific Daily Kos straw polls. In October, he fell third behind Edwards and Sen. Chris Dodd. When Obama examined former president Ronald Reagan's legacy earlier this year and said it "changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not," a blizzard of comments hit blogs, many of them critical.
A few weeks ago, after Obama's upcoming vote for the FISA bill provoked angry comments on his own social networking site, My.BarackObama.com, Obama posted an explanation on his blog. "Democracy cannot exist without strong differences. And going forward, some of you may decide that my FISA position is a deal breaker," Obama wrote.
"Think about it: Netroots was born at a time when the Democrats were in opposition, and it's learning how to be a force of good when the Democrats are in power -- and could have more power next year," says Simon Rosenberg of the New Democrat Network. A speaker at the confab, Rosenberg is a bridge of sorts between Official Washington (he worked in the first Clinton White House) and New Washington (he wrote the foreword to "Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics," which Kos co-authored).
Adds Andrew Rasiej, also a speaker at the convention and founder of Personal Democracy Forum, an online think tank that analyzes how the Internet affects politics: "For most everyone in the Netroots, the main goal right now is get Obama elected. Period. Now how the Netroots and Obama move forward after November, if he is elected, is another issue."
Related: "Obama's Website: Agent for Vile, Filthy Change."
Photo Credit: Washington Post
**********
UPDATE: See the New York Observer's perceptive essay, "Netroots Nation Reckons With Life After the Revolution."
After receiving a hailstorm of criticism for considering Brandenburg Gate for a public speech, as well as official German dissuasion, Barack Obama moved the venue to the Siegessäule monument. Obama will speak about “historic” US-German relations, but once again, Obama’s own grasp of history has been proven deficient. Not only does the site contain a monument to Prussian victories over other American allies in Europe, its placement was decided by Adolf Hitler — in order to impress crowds in his idealized version of Berlin called Germania:Still, even as the issue of his speech’s location has now been settled, a number of politicians in Berlin are still dissatisfied with the site. The Siegessäule — or Victory Column — was erected in memory of Prussia’s victories over Denmark (1864), Austria (1866) and France (1870/71). The column originally stood in front of the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament building, but was moved by Adolf Hitler to its current location in 1939 to make way for his planned transformation of Berlin into the Nazi capital “Germania.”
“The Siegessäule in Berlin was moved to where it is now by Adolf Hitler. He saw it as a symbol of German superiority and of the victorious wars against Denmark, Austria and France,” the deputy leader of the Free Democrats, Rainer Brüderle, told Bild am Sonntag. He raised the question as to “whether Barack Obama was advised correctly in his choice of the Siegessäule as the site to hold a speech on his vision for a more cooperative world”....
Hitler didn’t just move the monument to its more central location. He had a taller column built for it as well, to emphasize its message of German military domination over Europe. He saw it as a message to Germans of their destiny — as well as to other Europeans as their destiny as well. It was never meant as a symbol of peaceful, multicultural co-existence.
Captain Ed goes on to speculate why Barack Obama's even making a campaign speech in Germany: "In his rush to look impressive for no one’s purposes but his own, Obama has made himself look ignorant and arrogant all over again."
Image Credit: The People's Cube
It is irrefutable, empirical evidence - Obama's birth certificate is a forgery...The expose's been picked up by Israeli Insider:
Note, however, AJ Strata, who has done a good deal on research this, calls out the Atlas Shrugs report as perpetuating a "myth."Barack Obama may be on a world tour surrounded by a fawning media, but Sunday an expert in electronic document forensics released a detailed report on the purported birth certificate - actually a "Certification of Live Birth" or COLB - claimed as genuine by his campaign. The expert concludes with 100% certainty that it is a crudely forged fake: "a horribly forgery," according to the analysis published on the popular right-wing Atlas Shrugs blog.
The purported birth certificate was published by the left wing Daily Kos blog on June 12 in response to unconfirmed reports that Obama was not in fact born in the United States (Canada and Kenya were suggested as the possible locations of his actual birth). Since he would in that case not be a natural born US citizen (his mother was not present in the US sufficiently long as an adult to pass American citizenship on to him automatically), he would not be eligible to be president. Israel Insider has followed the story in five previous articles (the previous one here) and uncovered evidence, most recently, of admitted forgery among Daily Kos bloggers, tolerance of electronic forgeries on the blog site, as well as efforts by a blog administrator to conceal the admission of forgery.
The latest examinaton of the purported documents is by far the most detailed and technically sophisticated to date.
Atlas Shrugs publisher Pamela Geller reports that the expert analyst, who goes by the screen name "Techdude", is "an active member of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, American College of Forensic Examiners, The International Society of Forensic Computer Examiners, International Information Systems Forensics Association -- the list goes on. He also a board certified as a forensic computer examiner, a certificated legal investigator, and a licensed private investigator. He has been performing computer-based forensic investigations since 1993 (although back then it did not even have a formal name yet) and he has performed countless investigations since then"....
After more than a month of controversy and demands that the Obama campaign produce a paper birth certificate for analysis, this damning new evidence raises the stakes for the democratic party and its front-runner.
Will Obama and his people continue to stonewall in the facing of the mounting evidence of forgery, and provide paper proof of an authentic, original birth certificate or even a genuine secondary Certificate of Live Birth? And will the mass media and mainstream pundits -- which so far have hesitated to touch the hot potato -- finally address the loaded issue of his possible unfitness to meet the basic Constitutional requirement for a President?
Perhaps the outspoken Israeli press corps will be able to do what their fawning American counterparts have failed to do so far. Obama's visit this week to Israel will be an opportunity to begin asking the tough questions -- however unpolitically correct -- about his apparently forged birth certificate and what that means for his citizenship status and Constitutional fitness to be the next leader of the free world.
ALMOST anything can happen in an election year, but among conservatives, almost everyone seems to agree that no matter who captures the White House in November, the movement that has ruled the Republican Party since the 1960s and mostly dominated American politics since 1980 has lost its way. Across the spectrum of the right, writers and thinkers have turned their relentless analysis inward, a kind of political EST seminar aimed at self-transformation.The next few passages review changes at the American Enterprise Institute (with the obligatory reference that President Bush killed the movement), but later down the piece looks at where conservatism might go:
For some on the right, the conservative decline is simply the result of veering away from the golden age of Ronald Reagan....It's probably going to take a combination of those factors: good ideas and strong leadership.
For others, however, the nub of the problem is not deviance from the 1980s agenda but worshipful adherence to it. Mr. [David] Frum is one of those who has undergone a conversion (or two). His book “Dead Right,” published in 1994, was a brisk catalog of Reagan’s failures (especially his failure to reduce the size of government). Then, after writing speeches for President Bush, Mr. Frum wrote “The Right Man,” in which he characterized President Bush’s leadership as “nothing short of superb.” But in his newest book, “Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again,” Mr. Frum confesses that his former boss has “led his party to the brink of disaster.”
Mr. Frum’s transformation has caused him to rethink the role of government. Not only does he now promote an idea that has long been conservative heresy — that tax rates have gone as low as they can — he also calls for new taxes on consumption and energy. Taxing “those forms of energy that present political and environmental risks,” he writes, “would look exactly like the carbon tax advocated by global-warming crusaders.”
Mr. Frum also departs from the smaller-government-is-always-better-government dogma and concedes that there are some areas where government has to step in — for instance, prison reform. His list here includes “opportunities for education and self-improvement; conjugal visits; mentoring and support for prisoners’ children.”
Many of Mr. Frum’s allies in this debate come from a group of younger conservatives who were born more than 15 years after he was and came of age after Reagan. “The world is different, the priorities are different,” said Yuval Levin, 31, who is at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and recently edited a book with Mr. DeMuth. “In 1985, the big issues were the cold war, crime, welfare reform, taxes and social issues. Now, most of those are no longer on the list.”
Social issues are still a priority, he said, but they are joined by others that have floated to the top of the agenda, including energy, the environment, immigration, health care and expensive entitlements....
Another new-generation conservative, Ross Douthat, argues that “Reagan was right for his time, but now it’s a different time.” Mr. Douthat, 28, and Reihan Salam are the authors of a new book, “The Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.” Mr. Douthat says that social conservatives have gotten stuck and need to move beyond their focus on gay marriage and abortion — a focus, he said, that does nothing to help a single African-American mother trying to raise a family. Instead, conservatives need to “figure out a way to talk about the problem of family breakdown and the extent to which that’s linked to social mobility, economic troubles.”
In his eyes, while the network of research groups and journals helped build conservatism, it has also contributed to its stagnation. “Conservatives have always criticized the liberal establishment” — universities, magazines, organizations — for a “tendency toward cocooning,” Mr. Douthat said. Now, it is conservatives who are cocooning, talking only to each other and not looking around for new ideas.
“There was this tremendous generation of intellectuals who came of age in the ’70s and ’80s, but I think there’s been some difficulty in establishing a new generation,” Mr. Douthat said. “On the right, a lot of them did their best work 20 years ago.”
Election day would seem to be the pivotal moment in this debate. Adam Bellow, a conservative book editor, recently argued that “the G.O.P. will not be revived through the efforts of intellectuals but by a talented politician who can build a new majority coalition. When that happens, as eventually it will, the intellectuals will be there to translate his or her political instincts into a new conservative ideology.” But as Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor at National Review, long a flagship of the right, said: “Whether or not McCain wins, there is going to be a lot of rethinking among conservatives.”
Kevin Hassett, an economist at A.E.I. who is advising Senator McCain, went out of his way to emphasize his own lack of partisanship. “I’m thrilled that John McCain has proposed a big reduction in the corporate tax rate,” he said, but he added that similar ideas have also been adopted by Democrats, including Senator John Kerry during his 2004 presidential run. “If we do our job really, really well, then we don’t help one political side or the other,” Mr. Hassett said.
Meanwhile, Megan McArdle, a libertarian writer, thinks conservative organizations will actually have a tougher time influencing policy if Senator McCain is elected. “He doesn’t have an ideological framework,” she said. “He has a superhero view of politics. There are good guys and bad guys and you’ve got to elect the good guys to kick the butts of the bad guys.”
With Democrats actively recruiting conservative candidates, it's no longer good enough for the GOP names to fall back on cultural credentials, to demagogue immigration, or to simply promise lower taxes. Voters care about the size of government, but they are equally worried about the cost of doctor visits and gas prices. The winners will be those who explain the merits of a private health-care reform, who talk about vouchers, who push for energy production. And given its reputation on ethics, it's clear the GOP has to recruit Mr. Cleans, who also make voters believe they are more interested in solving problems than bringing home pork.On leadership, I don't think Megan McArdle's making much sense about John McCain's "superhero view" of politics. McCain is a genuine war hero, and frankly, it's his largest electoral asset.
In the humorless, pathological personality cult that is the Obama campaign, all supporters had to to do was reverse the mechanism to morph satire and caricature - in fact all criticism of the Obama couple - into something morally equivalent to blasphemy.Here's more on that moral equivalence:
Relativism is an ideological hell-hole ... made acceptable and fashionable in speculative-philosophical circles by the anti-modernists Kant and Hegel (see also the Introduction to "The Dialectics"). Further investigations produce a host of other infestations: discrepancies, inconsistencies, as well as paradoxymora lurking under every stone; realivori, and objectiraptors pouncing at every turn.See also (and perhaps as a case study), the New York Times, "We’re Not Laughing at You, or With You."
Relativism is an oxymoron that causes serious cognitive as well as psychological damage. Those affected confuse fact with opinion, people with ideas, public opinion with truth, religion with parliamentary democracy, it undermines self-esteem, crushes morality, causes tolerance of the intolerant and turns tolerance into intolerance, confuses criticism with offences against etiquette (and now blasphemy and racism), reality with myth, truth with delusion, and equal with identical; it polarizes, and leads to making moral choices on the basis of other people's opinions; it leads to malignant Narcissism and severe egocentrism, but other than that, it's perfectly rational ...
The sources of Islamic resentment against the West are complex and multi-faceted. Our lofty ideals about democracy were always viewed with suspicion when our actions in the region were to make common cause with oppressive kings and tyrants. The issue of Palestinian statehood and the perceived injustices of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank smolder in hearts throughout the umma, but there is little hope for real compromise when too many Palestinians cherish the dream of destroying their Israeli “peace partners” in detail rather than coming to any form of accomodation with their existence. Even if some way were found to bridge that gap, the al Qaeda jihadis that dream of re-establishing the caliphate seek also to undo the Spanish reconquista along the way - a goal that is probably not worth serious consideration in Spain.
So where are we now?
Tactically. In Iraq we have taken a battle that al Qaeda called a “must-win” and made them lose. When we leave - and leave we will - we will have left behind the nearest approximation to a liberal democracy that the region’s culture will currently support, while demonstrating our capacity to take a blow and return it severalfold. The rats are fleeing the sinking ship:
Al-Qaeda may be considering shifting its focus from Iraq to Afghanistan, the top US commander in Iraq has said.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Gen David Petraeus said there was evidence that foreign fighters were being diverted away from Iraq…
He said there were signs that foreign fighters recruited by al-Qaeda to do battle in Iraq were being diverted to the largely ungoverned areas on the Afghan-Pakistan border.
While Jihad, inc. has not entirely abandoned making mayhem in Iraq, weak governments in both Afghanistan and Pakistan leaves the Pakistani FATA as a much more congenial place from whence to plan and execute terroristic savageries. The Iraqi people have seen the Qaeda vision up close and - ultimately choosing to believe that it could be defeated in an alliance of convenience with a coalition unwilling to cut and run - rejected it, opening up for themselves a brighter, more prosperous future. No matter how deeply the current of anti-westernism and anti-Americanism runs in the middle east, it has not escaped local notice that the Iraqi people - faced with the choice between violent and autocratically imposed sharia law and democratic self-determination informed by their cultural character chose the latter, often at hideous personal cost.
More at the link.
See also, Max Boot, "Are We Winning the War on Terror?"
Nearly seven years after 19 Islamic jihadists took control of four commercial airliners with the intention of raining death and destruction on America, the flight crews who were first to die that day have finally been appropriately honored.The conclusion's at the link.
The 9/11 Flight Crew Memorial dedication in Grapevine, Texas, host city to Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport, took place on Independence Day.
What a fitting day to remember the 33 individuals who were the first first responders and the only uniformed service members to confront the faces of evil up close, in hand-to-hand battle. From the pilots in the cockpit and the forward flight attendants who were attacked with folding knives and box cutters, to the crew members who alerted the world, to those who joined with passengers using whatever was at hand to mount a do-or-die resistance and successfully stopping the suicide killers from reaching the nation’s capital, these 33 men and women should be remembered for their bravery, dedication to duty, and shared humanity as they faced what they knew to be the last moments of their lives.
What is immediately noticeable about this glorious memorial is that it was entirely conceived and built by individuals who come from, or are closely connected to, the aviation community. Too often, memorials become mired in controversy because they stray too far from their intended purpose, which is to mark an historic event, honor the individuals whose lives shaped or were personally touched by that event, and to inspire those of us who live on, today and tomorrow, to lead our lives in a way that gives meaning to those values which we hold dear as a people.
Men and women for whom the attack on airplanes was deeply and intensely personal built this memorial. It was the vision of Valerie Thompson, an American Airlines flight attendant with 20 years seniority, for whom the 9/11 attacks were a call to action to build a permanent remembrance to her colleagues and to honor all those aviation professionals whose lives changed forever on September 11. Her husband, Dean Thompson, sculpted the one-and-a-half-life-sized bronze figures adapted from an original design by Bryce Cameron Liston. The 18-foot structure is situated on the outskirts of Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport, where a steady flow of commercial jetliners in their final landing approach can be seen in the distance, adding a living reminder of what we lost and what continues to be an object of terrorist obsession.
Obama should welcome an expression of support, since he's long been wrong on Iraq, and he's jonesing for some positive press on his war policy, which has become increasingly irrelevant to facts on the ground (recall the Obama camp went so far as to scrub its criticism of the surge from the campaign's official page).Comments made by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in an interview with SPIEGEL (more...) published on Saturday have stirred up the campaign teams of both Barack Obama and John McCain this weekend. And late on Saturday, Maliki tried to distance himself from the statements, saying his comments were misunderstood.
In the interview, Maliki expressed support of Obama's plan to withdraw US troops from Iraq within 16 months. "That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of changes."
Maliki was quick to back away from an outright endorsement of Obama, saying "who they choose as their president is the Americans' business." But he then went on to say: "But it's the business of Iraqis to say what they want. And that's where the people and the government are in general agreement: The tenure of the coalition troops in Iraq should be limited"....
SPIEGEL sticks to its version of the conversation.
Maliki's comments immediately hit the headlines of US papers and Web sites across the country, partly the result of a White House employee inadvertently sending out a news alert to its full media distribution list. The White House said it was an error and that it was meant to be sent internally only.
The Obama campaign was quick to welcome Maliki's expression of support, with his top foreign policy advisor, Susan Rice, saying "Senator Obama welcomes Prime Minister Maliki's support for a 16 month timeline for the redeployment of US combat brigades. This presents an important opportunity to transition to Iraqi responsibility, while restoring our military and increasing our commitment to finish the fight in Afghanistan."
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Der SPIEGEL is the most important and reputable news magazine in Germany, and it also offers the biggest news website in German. It is majority-owned by the employees, which means that there's no big shareholder in the background pulling the strings and influencing the reporting. Spiegel's _factual statements_ are regarded with utmost credibility in Germany, even when the commentaries and editorials can be controversial.One more data-point of evidence of the left's hope for a shift to socialism in the U.S.
The probability that Der SPIEGEL not only mistranslated the same things multiple times AND having Maliki fail to recognize this when his interview was signed off (standard practice) is so low that you need to be literally BRAINDEAD to believe it.
Well, that describes CNN, for example.
Sorry, but America has no free credible mass media left.
Earlier this week Professors Moshe Sharon and Benny Morris both opined solemnly about an inevitable Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. These two respected Israeli academicians, despite holding very disparate political views, also concurred on the moral justification for such pre-emptive action -- the annihilationist threat to Israel posed by a Shi'ite Iranian regime gripped with an apocalyptic, Jew-hating fervor. The pillars of this continuous modern campaign of annihilationist antisemitism are the motifs from traditional Islamic Jew hatred, including, most significantly, Islamic eschatology. These deep-seated Islamic theological motifs are further conjoined to Holocaust denial, and the development of a nuclear weapons program intended expressly for Israel's eradication.There's lots more at the link, plus Bostom's got the whole series available at his blog.
