Gaius identifies Obama's case of "inappropriate affect” : "Emotional responses that are out of context, such as laughter when hearing sad news."
Everything's funny to this president.
Full interview transcript, here.
Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education - from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
Gaius identifies Obama's case of "inappropriate affect” : "Emotional responses that are out of context, such as laughter when hearing sad news."
Everything's funny to this president.
Full interview transcript, here.
"I can have sex three or four times a night if the guys have the stamina, but in the morning I won’t know anything about it ..."Hat Tip: Glenn Reynolds.
I should say I regret nothing about my blogging about Sarah Palin last year and would do it again - with feeling - if such a duplicitous farce of an apparatchik were to be advanced as a possible leader for the US in the future. None of the crucial factual evidence for her constant fabulisms was ever provided and the MSM, as uninterested in the truth as they are eager for their own reputations, curled up into a little ball of deference. As for my use of the term Christianist, here's my defense of the word, from 2006 ...Andrew Sullivan's in his own clinical world. If folks missed it during the election, the best response to Sullivan's paranoid psychosis is AOSHQ, "Don't Go Over There, But Sullivan Is Pushing (of Course!) Trig Trutherism Now":
He's gone fucking bananas, due to AIDS or steroids or other reasons, and if we're not observing a minimum level of politeness and civility anymore - if innocent 16 year old girls are now valid targets - I see no reason to continue extending the courtesy of polite silence to Sullivan ... Let's see a brain scan, buddy. Let's get some answers to these questions. Medical fucking answers.What's especially interesting in Sullivan's pathetic self-defense, is how he's responding to another pathetic self-defense, this time at the home of the Extraordinary Gentlemen, where the gang's reduced to calling off accusations of "Sullivan Group Think." That's right, you can't make this stuff up! For example, here:
I’m disinclined to place much stock in those folks who feel like epitheting via Andrew’s name is a damning criticism of anyone’s writing or thought process ... Look, the fact of the matter is that it is a rare (perhaps non-existent) human being who isn’t influenced by someone’s body of work and thought, and the beauty of our modern polities is that we have free rein to decide for ourselves who it is that we choose to be influenced by. The “group think” meme seems to assume that those of us who respect and even — dare I say it? — admire Andrew Sullivan, do so without any speck of criticism for what Andrew says or how he says it. Of course, that simply isn’t true of 99% of the cases, and it certainly isn’t true of this site, where as much criticism gets layed at Andrew’s feet as does praise.Oh. My. God! You have got to be kidding me!
"Layed" at Andrew's feet? Yo, there's got to be a double entendre in there somewhere! And calling Mr. Webster!
And don't forget to check the Sitemeter folks. Oh, say wot you Ordinary Gentlemen! It's all Sullivan! Thy up to a bit of "bareback" blogging, eh mates? NTTAWWT!
The Sitemeter's spinning Andrew's gold right now, Sunday night, but pretty soon you'll see Ross Douthat, Daniel Larison, Will Wilkinson over there as well. They'll be chanting: "Oh, Great Sully!" Palin-bashing "liberaltarians" of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your "National Greatness"!
The greater Indian Ocean region encompasses the entire arc of Islam, from the Sahara Desert to the Indonesian archipelago. Although the Arabs and the Persians are known to Westerners primarily as desert peoples, they have also been great seafarers. In the Middle Ages, they sailed from Arabia to China; proselytizing along the way, they spread their faith through sea-based commerce. Today, the western reaches of the Indian Ocean include the tinderboxes of Somalia, Yemen, Iran, and Pakistan -- constituting a network of dynamic trade as well as a network of global terrorism, piracy, and drug smuggling. Hundreds of millions of Muslims -- the legacy of those medieval conversions -- live along the Indian Ocean's eastern edges, in India and Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia.Readers can access the full article at Foreign Affairs, but they've revamped their website, and free articles require registration (especially recommended for regulars of American Power). I rarely post subscription-only essays, but if I do, I'll make the key sections of articles available at my posts.
The Indian Ocean is dominated by two immense bays, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, near the top of which are two of the least stable countries in the world: Pakistan and Myanmar (also known as Burma). State collapse or regime change in Pakistan would affect its neighbors by empowering Baluchi and Sindhi separatists seeking closer links to India and Iran. Likewise, the collapse of the junta in Myanmar -- where competition over energy and natural resources between China and India looms -- would threaten economies nearby and require a massive seaborne humanitarian intervention. On the other hand, the advent of a more liberal regime in Myanmar would undermine China's dominant position there, boost Indian influence, and quicken regional economic integration.
In other words, more than just a geographic feature, the Indian Ocean is also an idea. It combines the centrality of Islam with global energy politics and the rise of India and China to reveal a multilayered, multipolar world. The dramatic economic growth of India and China has been duly noted, but the equally dramatic military ramifications of this development have not. India's and China's great-power aspirations, as well as their quests for energy security, have compelled the two countries "to redirect their gazes from land to the seas," according to James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, associate professors of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College. And the very fact that they are focusing on their sea power indicates how much more self-confident they feel on land. And so a map of the Indian Ocean exposes the contours of power politics in the twenty-first century.
Yet this is still an environment in which the United States will have to keep the peace and help guard the global commons -- interdicting terrorists, pirates, and smugglers; providing humanitarian assistance; managing the competition between India and China. It will have to do so not, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, as a land-based, in-your-face meddler, leaning on far-flung army divisions at risk of getting caught up in sectarian conflict, but as a sea-based balancer lurking just over the horizon. Sea power has always been less threatening than land power: as the cliché goes, navies make port visits, and armies invade. Ships take a long time to get to a war zone, allowing diplomacy to work its magic. And as the U.S. response to the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean showed, with most sailors and marines returning to their ships each night, navies can exert great influence on shore while leaving a small footprint. The more the United States becomes a maritime hegemon, as opposed to a land-based one, the less threatening it will seem to others.
Moreover, precisely because India and China are emphasizing their sea power, the job of managing their peaceful rise will fall on the U.S. Navy to a significant extent. There will surely be tensions between the three navies, especially as the gaps in their relative strength begin to close. But even if the comparative size of the U.S. Navy decreases in the decades ahead, the United States will remain the one great power from outside the Indian Ocean region with a major presence there - a unique position that will give it the leverage to act as a broker between India and China in their own backyard. To understand this dynamic, one must look at the region from a maritime perspective.
An intense, six-month campaign of Predator strikes in Pakistan has taken such a toll on Al Qaeda that militants have begun turning violently on one another out of confusion and distrust, U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism officials say.I'm also a little surprised that President Obama is actually willing to carry on with a robust antiterror policy of his reviled predecessor.
The pace of the Predator attacks has accelerated dramatically since August, when the Bush administration made a previously undisclosed decision to abandon the practice of obtaining permission from the Pakistani government before launching missiles from the unmanned aircraft.
Since Aug. 31, the CIA has carried out at least 38 Predator strikes in northwest Pakistan, compared with 10 reported attacks in 2006 and 2007 combined, in what has become the CIA's most expansive targeted killing program since the Vietnam War.
Because of its success, the Obama administration is set to continue the accelerated campaign despite civilian casualties that have fueled anti-U.S. sentiment and prompted protests from the Pakistani government.
I can’t imagine that an American president ever would or should completely disavow the right to launch this sort of attack. But still, I think people should be concerned about our government’s growing enthusiasm for this tactic and the possibility that the Obama administration will start to rely on it even more heavily. Simply put, there’s little evidence to suggest that this kind of thing can achieve a strategic victory over al-Qaeda, though it may or may not reduce short-term vulnerabilities ... The impact of these strikes on public opinion in the Muslim world writ large, and specifically on political dynamics inside Pakistan, can easily outweigh the gains from killing even a bona fide bad guy.Yeah. Right.
The folks on the antiwar left are just awful people. As I've written previously, Matthew Yglesias has never met a policy of appeasement he didn't like.
Photo Credit: "The Radical Foreign Policy of Matthew Yglesias."
**********
UPDATE: I just found Daniel Byman's, "Taliban vs. Predator: Are Targeted Killings Inside Pakistan a Good Idea?" Here's a key nugget:
What the Obama administration’s reliance on Predator strikes ultimately shows is just how flummoxed U.S. policymakers are when it comes to Pakistan. Stopping al Qaeda from using Pakistan as a base will depend on strengthening the government of Pakistan and stiffening its will to go after its own homegrown jihadis - a tall order indeed. The current political leadership is weak and not fully committed to democracy and true reform. Civilian control over the military is nonexistent, and, in addition to the jihadist problem, bitter ethnic, sectarian, and political divisions threaten Pakistan’s unity. As the Obama administration begins the slow process of addressing these issues, the sad truth is that relying on bolts from the blue to keep al Qaeda and the Taliban weak and off balance is a sensible course to follow.
It is striking that the major postmodernists - Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Richard Rorty - are of the far left politically. And it is striking that all four are Philosophy Ph.D.s who reached deeply skeptical conclusions about our ability to come to know reality. So one of my four theses about postmodernism is that it develops from a double crisis - a crisis within philosophy about knowledge and a crisis within left politics about socialism.If you read all the way through the interview, Hicks evinces optimism that postmodernism, after a counter-movement in the academy, is "on the defensive."
The issue of Islamic/Islamist gender apartheid is one of epidemic and global proportions. Although it has reached American shores, the feminist establishment here remains tragically ambivalent about how to deal with forced veiling, arranged marriage, separatism, and honor-related violence, including honor killings. Many feminists fear that, were they to tie the subordination of women to a particular religion or culture, especially to Islam, that they would be perceived as “racists,” or “Islamophobes.” This fear trumps their sincere concern for womens’ rights and womens’ lives.There's more at the link.
The issue, quite simply, is whether or not non-Muslim white folks can discuss Muslim-on-Muslim crime or black-on-black crime or whether only people who share the same faith and skin-color are allowed to raise this issue.
The issue is also whether American feminists really support an American foreign policy, which both President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton have indicated can or should be tied to womens’ rights. Feminists viewed President Bush’s post 9/11 invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq as morally outrageous and as far more hurtful to Afghan and Iraqi women than was their pre-existing subjugation. Some feminists believed that women had been better off, at least, in Iraq, before the American invasion. We may disagree with this analysis but, nevertheless, why would American feminists hesitate to condemn crimes against women which are being committed on American soil by immigrants, including Muslims, from Third World countries?
Every once in a while I come across published material that makes an attempt to defend the state and standard of women in Islam. Such material compares the clothed and cloaked women of the Islamic world to the undressed vixen-like women of the West, exposing all the ills of the Western views on women, their exploitation of women and the miserable state of such women. The material then goes on and states how Muslim women are not oppressed, but liberated; that they are dressed in liberation of not conforming to the degradation of the Western world’s sexual standards and lack of values and lack of modesty. The rhetoric shouts out in the voice of all Muslim women, that the veil is the choice of the modest, the choice of moral beauty and the standard of chaise and respected women.Read the whole thing, at the link.
But somehow all the rhetoric out there written in defense of the veil and defense of the cloaked women of Islam and of Arabia, strike an odd chord of wounded faith in me. I cannot seem to find such usual irate tirade against the sinful, immodest and unchaste women of the West, to be appealing let alone material to be accepted and treated with respected discourse. Somehow demonizing one party just to prove that the other side is better doesn’t bode too well for logical reasoning and discourse. Instead, it is quite distasteful and demeaning to not only the non-Muslims but to Muslims as well.
I was always an advocate of informality, of casualness, but now when on a plane, in a restaurant, at Starbucks, I am struck by the rare well-dressed person who does not crowd. How odd the extra-polite woman, who conducts herself with charm and grace at the counter, or the gentleman who opens doors, says excuse me, and whose intelligent conversation I enjoy listening in on—like a dew drop to someone thirsting in the desert. In contrast, when the punk walks by, with radio blaring, mumbling obscenities, flashing the ‘I’ll kill you’ stare,” it all leaves me in depression.That's makes for a pretty good line: "The Folsom cell block national culture." Indeed, I was thinking about that cell block culture this morning.
Worse still, on the opposite end of the scale, is the master of the universe who elbows his way onto a plane while he blares on the telephone and blocks the aisle. I feel creepy after walking through an electronics store and seeing some of the video game titles and covers.
In short, I don’t want to hear any more Viagra or Cialis ads, no more douche commercials—please no more talking heads about penises that are enlarging, hardening, stimulated on the public air waves.
The sum of these foul parts is smothering us. I don’t want to know that there is a new sex clinic opening in Fresno, or hear another ad about how I can skip out on my credit card debt, or that some sort of food is stuck to my intestinal walls like spackle and paste unless I buy some gut cleansing product.
At some point, we need to say enough is enough, and try to find some sense of honor and decorum in these times of crisis. My god, the entire country has become some sort of Rousseauian nightmare, as if the Berkeley Free Speech Area circa 1970 is now the public domain, as if the culture of the Folsom cell block is now the national ethos.
For a tweet, it's pretty normal to mention an association that pops into your head, while for a post one would want to conduct some research." Asks Ben Masel.I say to Ann, "Welcome to the blog wars," or, "welcome back," since Althouse needs no introduction (remember "Let's take a closer look at those breasts"?).
So Twitter is a special place for bullshit and lies?
The problem with Ann's blog in general, and her commenters, is "how can you tell the dancer from the dance?" Its fucking morons all the way down. Sure, some sane people head over there to comment, and some liberals troll her comments, and some people are anti semites and some are just your typical crappy right wing racists who get off on having a woman law professor on their side and can't be bothered to see she needs to be drunk out of her mind and not very bright in order to be there.But read the whole thread. Althouse jumps in there calling out Klein for his "unattactive weaseling." I could say the same thing about Yglesias, but I want to focus on the larger point. Why do we want to be such good buddies with hardline leftists bloggers? They hate us, they really do. They'll put on a mask in person, but they show no class in a quick Twitter post designed to deflect attention away from their real Machiavelllian inside game. I mean, if Klein's got the a source at the West Wing, who's to say JournoList doesn't get play among top White House staffers? Klein throws out the red herring of Althousian anti-Semitism, chums up the right wing waters, and even get conservative bloggers to defend him, like TigerHawk (with all due respect) in the comments to my post yesterday, "Ezra Klein Does Not Deserve to Be Treated Fairly."
I am an enthusiastic reader who has checked in with Instapundit nearly daily for almost six years. I thoroughly enjoy your perceptive comments and your quirky and often witty selection of stories and links, and I have cited you to my two sons often. One of them, Walker, is home for Spring Break from Stanford, where he is a junior. He is a libertarian, and he often finds himself philosophically isolated and lonely in Palo Alto. He and I attended the Orlando Tea Party this afternoon, and I have attached a photo of Walker there. While I am an inveterate issues nerd, always eager to read about and discuss political/economic/social issues, I have not been very active politically, so today was a rare treat for Walker and me. The crowd at the rally was friendly, enthusiastic, and good-natured, and we heard few comments directed towards the President or Congress that were nasty or personally derogatory.Via Nice Deb, Central Florida News 13 has a report, "Thousands Rally Against Stimulus Plan at ‘Orlando Tea Party’."
More seriously, This Ain't Hell reports on the "ANSWER March on the Pentagon."
Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General; Cindy Sheehan; Ron Kovic, Born on the 4th of July; Paul Haggis, Academy-Award winning director and screenwriter; Edward Asner, actor; ActiAstLA, Addicted to War, After Downing Street, Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition (Los Angeles, Orange County, Riverside, San Bernardino Chapters), Alliance for Global Justice, American Friends Service Committee, Los Angeles, ANSWER Orange County, ANSWER South Bay, ANSWER Ventura County, Be Love, Campaign to End Israeli Apartheid-Southern California, Citizens Awareness Network, Las Vegas, Coalition for Equal Marriage Rights-LA, Coalition for World Peace, Code Pink, Cuauhtemoc Mexica, DAMAYAN Migrant Workers Association, Echo Park Community Coalition, Equality Network,Free Iraq Now, Frente Amplio Progresista en Los Angeles, Frente IndÃgena de Organizaciones Binacionales (FIOB), Frente Unido de Los Pueblos Americanos, Fullerton Junior College Invisible Children, Global Resistance Network, Granada Hills Peace Vigil, Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, International Socialist Organization, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Islamic Shura Council of Southern California, KmB Pro-People Youth, Labor Community Strategy Center, LGBT Greens, Middle East Children's Alliance, Minjok-Tongshin, Montrose Peace Vigil, Mount St. Mary's College-Amnesty International Club, Muslim American Society Freedom, National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations, National Committee to Free the Cuban Five, National Council of Arab Americans, Nicaragua Network, Office of the Americas, Orange County KPFK Support Group, Out Against War: LGBT & Friends Coalition for Peace & Justice, Palisadians for Peace, Partnership for Civil Justice, Peace Bakersfield, Progressive Democrats of America, Riverside Area Peace and Justice Action, Santa Monica College Feminist Alliance, Tendencia Revolucionaria de El Salvador, The People's Coalition, The People's Party, Topanga Peace Alliance, U.S. Labor Against War, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), Venezuela Solidarity Network, Veterans C.A.R.E., Veterans for Peace, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Voters for Peace - U.S., WeAreChangeLA, World Can't Wait-LA, Youth Speak! Collective Point Loma Nazarene University; Jim Lafferty, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild-LA; Juan Jose Gutierrez, Director, Latino Movement USA; Mimi Kennedy, Actor and Activist; Elaine Johnson, Gold Star Mother; Tina Richards, Executive Director, Grassroots America; Angola 3 Defense Committee; Herman Wallace, Political Prisoner, Angola Prison, Louisiana; Albert Woodfox, Political Prisoner, Angola Prison; Raul Pacheco, guitarist, Ozomatli; David Swanson, After Downing Street; Heidi Boghosian, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild*; Michael Ratner, President, Center for Constitutional Rights*; Blase and Theresa Bonpane, Office of the Americas and so many others.The Los Angeles Times provided the group media coverage for the event, with a map listing road closures adjacent to Hollywood and Vine. Here's a description of the scheduled events:
Protesters will stop in front of the Kodak Theatre and participate in a 10-minute "die-in," where demonstrators will lie on the street as loudspeakers blare the sounds of dropping bombs. Marchers will then carry coffins draped with the U.S., Iraqi, Afghan and Palestinian flags toward an armed forces recruitment office at Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea Avenue. The march will finish off with a short rally about 3:30 p.m. there.
Ezra Klein deserves an honorable mention in this rogue's gallery of self-styled 1930s-appeasement look-alikes.Readers should check the original post for context, but Klein's extreme relativism is endlessly infuriating, and, frankly, I plain just don't like the guy. So readers can see my interest in the serious pushback against Klein's attack on Ann Althouse.
Ezra Klein, blogger for the "liberal" American Prospect, got caught by Politico coordinating his stories with other liberal bloggers and journalists. Exposed for being a journalistic fraud, Klein needed an enemy. He found Ann Althouse. Althouse, who has a very popular blog, could be considered "conservative" (as in, when a law professor doesn't kneel at the alter of Obama, she is a "conservative").Klein's attack on Althouse is pure "faux" outrage. The guy was raised Jewish but has confessed his agnosticism, and he apparently "hates" anything having to do with organized religion. That's perfectly in keeping with Klein's secular collectivist agenda, but check the comments at Althouse's follow-up post, "''Did Ezra Klein post anti-Semitic comments to set up Ann Althouse?'":
Althouse's crime? She linked to the Politico story in a post at 8:54 a.m. on March 19, 2009 under the title "The Journolist." Althouse's blog gets tons of comments, unlike mine, which only gets a lot of comments when there is an Instalanche. Apparently, some of the comments were hostile to Klein, so Klein decided to take out Althouse by smearing her as an anti-Semite.
Ezra is a hate-monger ... As such, everything is in play. He deserves nothing but contempt. And he certainly does not deserve to be treated fairly.
That's good stuff, no doubt, but if folks are escalating to fire-cracker hot videos, I'm laying down some jams with Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, a.k.a, Lady Gaga! I like the Lady's influences, but she's a bit too hot, in fact, although I'm still hankering for more bikini shots of Katy Perry!
Further, check out this passage on the Court's radical cultural rights:Judges belong to the class that John O'Sullivan first identified as "Olympians." The political philosopher Kenneth Minogue described the philosophy of this class:
Olympianism is the project of an intellectualFrom there the infection spread to other culture-shaping institutions, most notably the Supreme Court which was accused, justly in my opinion, with reasoning backwards from desired results to spurious rationales.
elite that believes that it enjoys superior enlightenment
and that its business is to spread
this benefit to those living on the lower slopes
of human achievement .... Olympianism
burrowed like a parasite into the most powerful
institution of the emerging knowledge
economy - the universities.
The Supreme Court is enacting a program of radical personal autonomy, indeed moral chaos, piece by piece, creating new and hitherto unsuspected constitutional rights: rights to abortion, homosexual sodomy (and, coming soon, homosexual marriage), freedom from religion in the public square, racial and sexual preferences. None of these is justified by the actual Bill of Rights.While searching for some of Bork's essays online this afternoon, I came across a Reason magazine book review of Bork's "Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline. Reading the piece provides some insight as to why libertarians are wont to form alliances with radical leftists, as we're seeing in the "liberaltarian" rage that's been going around online. If Bork's ideas are seen as "extreme" by some (especially as he apparently calls for censorship in Slouching Towards Gomorrah), there's actually not much a cultural conservative can quibble with, at least, if one's concerned about the very breakdown in radical licentiousness that leftist are determined to spread.I could easily multiply examples. But the underlying philosophy of the Olympians--if it deserves so dignified a name as "philosophy"--is wonderfully summed up in the famous "mystery passage" that Justice Anthony Kennedy first articulated in an opinion reaffirming the made-up constitutional right to abortion. "These matters," Justice Kennedy wrote for the Court,
involving the most intimate and personal
choices a person may make in a lifetime
[abortion, etc.], choices central to personal
dignity and autonomy, are central to the
liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.
At the heart of liberty is the right to define
one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the
universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs
about these matters could not define the attributes
of personhood were they formed under compulsion
of the State. [emphasis added]Although this passage instantly attracted some measure of the ridicule it deserved, Justice Kennedy chose to repeat it in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which pretends to discover a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy. What other practices, we may wonder, are now "at the heart of liberty"? Kennedy's aria about "the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning," etc., is not simply laughable intellectually; it also tells us something grim about our future, the Court, and a people that supinely accepts such judicial diktats.
I defend Ward Churchill because he was the first to write the obvious about the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on September 11, 2001. That the technocrats on the upper levels of the World Trade Center weren’t targeted because they provided some symbolically metaphysical representation of American power; they were targeted because they made their living on the bodies of Arab children. Yeah. Right.
All American Blogger has the link to Governor Palin's press release. See also, Conservatives for Sarah Palin, "Palin Looks Forward to Public Discussion on Stimulus Funds."
I've seen similar commentary to this elsewhere on the Right regarding Obama's Special Olympic's flap. Unfortunately, it pretty much convinces me that a lot of blog commentary on the Right today is relatively useless. And there are two reasons for that in this particular case ....Well, after blogging about Barack Obama and the Democrats continuously for almost a year, I feel readily able to testify to the utter obliteration of values, rectitude, and order in this administration. I remember very clearly, in 2001, when President George W. Bush took office, the New York Times ran a comparative analysis of the Clinton and Bush White Houses. Bill Clinton was very informal. He worked hard, sure, but his style was loose and unorganized. George W. Bush, by contrast, was at work by 7:00am. He stressed a code of punctuality for all meetings, and he ALWAYS dressed in a suit and tie (and formal dress was required of visitors to the Oval Office). G.W. Bush ran an even tigther ship than his own father's: "Many officials in the Bush White House said they were struck by how there seemed to be far less back-stabbing than there had been even in Mr. Bush's father's White House."
To start with, it isn't about the humor ... frankly, I don't see much wrong with that, as I'm not easily offended. But what was it Bush tried to do most when taking office post-Clinton? Do you even remember?
He tried to bring a little dignity back to the office, that's what. Because he respected the office. Guess what? Obama doesn't. Just as he doesn't really respect a lot of things that once warranted some respect in this Republic. It just amazes me to see so many allegedly informed Right-siders scream about how the Left wants to undermine American institutions, yet faced with a perfect example of it they can't even understand it's going on.
It's great to see Governor Palin in the news again. She's a good woman, a great mom, and she'll make a great president.
For stark contrast, see, "Obama Apologizes for Calling His Bad Bowling 'Like the Special Olympics'."
Hat Tip: Terry Frank.Ronald Radosh has this:
After 9/11, the social-democratic political philosopher, Michael Walzer, asked the readers of Dissent magazine a tough question: “Can there be a decent Left?” His essay was in reality an appeal for its creation, since Walzer was smart enough to realize that so many who spoke in the name of the Left that horrific year were anything but. But now, so many years later, little has changed. If anyone has any doubts about this, there is no better place to start than Jamie Glazov’s important new book, United in Hate.
Kathy Shaidle has published a great piece on the book last week at Pajamas Media, "Exposing the Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror." And World Net Daily discusses the critical acclaim for United in Hate:
Critical acclaim is mounting for the newly released "United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror," by Jamie Glazov, with President Reagan's national security adviser, Robert C. McFarlane, calling it a "must-read."Also blogging:
In his book, which assuredly will make so-called "progressives" see red, Glazov describes the unholy alliance between jihadists and people like Michael Moore, Sean Penn, Ted Turner and Noam Chomsky.
He uses the Leftists' own words to reveal their agenda of death, and now a flood of praise is pouring in.
McFarlane said it is "the redefining work for 21st Century readers of an eternal message."
* ACT! For America, "United in Hate."
* Phyllis Chesler, " “The Battle for Liberty, The Struggle Against Despotism.” An Interview with Author Jamie Glazov."
* Israpundit, "Shining the Light on Leftist and Islamic Hate."
* Saberpoint, "United In Hate: Why the Left Loves and Glorifies Tyranny."
"Feel It Still"
Flopping Aces, "Communist Defectors Warn About Four Stages Of Subversion — And America Is On The Last One ..."..."
View From the Beach, "‘Hail To Thee, My Alma Mater ..."