President Obama publicly decried “shameful” bonuses for Wall Street execs. But in private with the execs he remained mum. (He was trolling for support for his stimulus.) Whatever happened to speaking truth to power?
Gerald Selb describes the choice for President Obama as one between the Reagan (big bipartisan majorities) and Clinton (narrow party-line victories) models. The bigger problem is that Obama has lost control over the contents and the narrative surrounding the stimulus, which is now “being defined more as spending on new sod for the National Mall and cars for government agencies.”
Matt Continetti explains: “What the Democrats have done is write down every single item on their liberal wish list, append dollar amounts next to the items seemingly at random, and call it ‘stimulus.’ The president wanted the bill to be free of pet projects and include business tax cuts. But no one told Pelosi’s appopriators. They are using the current troubles to push through a decades-old domestic policy agenda. The spending–$50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, $400 million for global warming studies–demonstrates that the bill has no overarching logic.”
Joe Biden is trying not to be irrelevant. But get a look at that creepy body-language with Hillary. He’s literally all over her back — and she’s in full cackle (“Joe, you expect me to listen to this all day long!?”)
With the advantage of experience, John McCain says it’s silly for the President to take on Rush Limbaugh.
Another Obama administration tax problem — this one for Tom Daschle. This is the problem with letting a Tim Geithner slide through. What’s to keep the next guy — with a $128,000 tax bill – from being confirmed? Once you start lowering standards, is there any way to reverse the trend?
J. Peter Freire thinks in electing Michael Steele over Ken Blackwell and Mike Duncan, the GOP rejected the “conservative movement.” Actually, the Republican committeemen demonstrated that certain self-appointed representatives of the conservative movement – who had their heyday twenty years ago – carry very little weight, even with party regulars. But Freire is right that the party dodged a PR bullet.
As Jim Geraghty noted, at the end of the RNC chairman race “it was no longer a contest between two men; it was a contest between an African-American, who had been endorsed by the other African-American in the contest, calling for the GOP to remain ‘the party of Lincoln,’ against the guy whose membership in a country club ensured that his name would always appear in the same sentence as ‘whites-only charter.’”
Politico says its reporter didn’t mean to imply that George Stephanopoulos abandoned his professional demeanor in daily conference calls with his former Clintonite pals. Sounds like everyone wishes the story would just go away.
The Los Angeles Times cuts 70 newsroom jobs. Given the paucity of actual reporting from the Times it surprised me there were more than 70 people working there.
Josh Gerstein reports: “President Obama’s first major White House event aimed at wooing organized labor came and went Friday without any mention of the union’s movement’s top priority: so-called card check legislation pending on Capitol Hill.” In a separate interview, Joe Biden sounded wishy-washy on the timing of bringing up card check. Perhaps the “I won” attitude only gets the Obama team and its liberal wish list so far.
TNR’s attempt to paint a lovable portrait of Terry McAuliffe in his Virginian gubernatorial race winds up making him out to be a lunatic with tidbits like this: “In the style of Julius Caesar, who bequeathed his private arbors and 75 drachmas each to the people, McAuliffe spontaneously offered last week to donate his gubernatorial salary to build the economically depressed town of Martinsville a high school gym.” If this were Hardball or a presidential year race all of this might excite the base, but the sort of voters who turn out for an off year gubernatorial election will likely view all this as, well, downright embarrassing.
Forget the pundits’ reviews, the markets are giving a thumbs down on the stimulus plan: “After an end of year rally, stocks have slid again in January, despite a rush of hope and goodwill for the new Obama Administration. To the extent equities are a vote of confidence in future policy, this is discouraging. The Dow is down nearly 9% since the New Year began, the S&P 500 about 8.6%. One problem is that the ‘stimulus’ bill has devolved into a political spending free-for-all that has little to do with incentives for growth. President Obama is missing an opportunity to use his 70% job approval to prod Capitol Hill to focus the $819 billion on growth rather than social-welfare policy. He is abdicating to his party’s Congressional wing, and investors can see the main result will be more debt and higher taxes down the road.”
In other words a wimp.
The guy who doesn’t want to get beat up for being a Jew by laughing at some “Jew” jokes.
But then again – maybe that’s what the Obama “Smart Diplomacy” is all about.
Go along with the bullies, laugh at their jokes, look the other way when they knock your friend’s books out of their hands.
We know how this story ends – and its never to the advantage of the appeasers.
Yes, Cohen represents nothing new here.
“I seem to smell the stench of appeasement in the air.” Margaret Thatcher
Moral cowardice… by any other name, stinks just as much.
Roger is just an “around the bend” Leftie, where progressivism meets anti-Americanism. He is no Jewish “self-hater”, just thoroughly Pink in his politics and sympathies. If he kisses up to our enemies, its for the anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism ideology. He could care less for the religious or racial issues.
He recently became a US citizen, btw.
Very good remarks nacl. I always find people like Cohen and other jews alike more damaging and
dangerous than non-jews with similar attitudes because they serve anti-semitism in a plate for
a much larger audience with a smile and a seal of approval. Their shame of being jewish utterly disgusting and weak. They are the ones who anger me the most.
But you are correct that the only way to deal with them is by deconstructing them with intelligence and using them right back as examples of what’s so despicable.
We live in difficult times; I think the election unveiled an anti-semitic sentiment that hasn’t been (at least no so so openly) expressed in many decades. And to my chagrin many jews have enabled it.
We live at times when people like Charlie Rose interviews not once but twice Rashid Khalid in the past month and receives him with full honors and walking on a red carpet into the show. Sure, he is a faculty at Columbia. But where is the opposing view being expressed, who does Mr. Rose interviews that has a different take. And why is it that the American people are deprived from the right to view an existing video of our current PBO “celebrating” such a “prominent faculty” in a farewell party?
What’s wrong with this picture? Something doesn’t jibe here and the media is doing it on purpose and with the blessing of “journalists” like Roger Cohen.
This post is an absolute disgrace. Those of us that support Israel have a knee-jerk tendency to tag all of our ideological opponents with the “anti-Semite” label. It’s an embarrassment, and it should stop. Every time we do this, we cede the argument, and it sets back the debate years.
Jeremy, the accusations of antisemitism are often on the mark. People who want us dead and gone go beyond being ideological opponents.
As for Cohen, though, he may be too assimilated by upbringing and education to know what a Jewish position would be or to have a real perspective on the Jewish experience. Yet he has a Jewish name, which could be making him uncomfortable.
#5 Jeremy
You write”
You seem at first to be including yourself in: Those of us who support Israel… .
But you don’t really include yourself, since you can’t mean that you are among those who also have that deplorable, “knee-jerk” reaction. So if you are not in the second half of that sentence, are you actually in the first? Please clarify.
In any case, you think it wrong to wildly throw the anti-Semite blame game on anyone with a different opinion. You think that is unfair, a hatched job. I agree.
But sensitive as you are to slander, why do you suggest that that is why I do? On what basis do you accuse me of that “knee jerk reaction”? Show me three examples of where I have called an opponent, an anti-Semite, show me one. I almost never call anyone an anti-Semite, even when I am pretty sure I am dealing with one. In short, you are badmouthing me.
Israel clearly has critics whose motivation is not Jew hatred. I don’t dispute that. It is not in my interest to call someone a racist who is not. That is not the way to change anyone’s mind.
At the same time there are plenty of naked bigots debating the Israel Palestine conflict. Anti-Semitism has been around for millennia. It may have stopped being Politically Correct but it surely hasn’t disappeared. That sentiment has found an easy host in anti-Zionism or sympathy for the Palestinian cause. Only a fool can’t see how often arguments turn into sneers, about the Chosen People, Jewish spies, Jewish Wall Street crooks, the cruelty of Kosher butchering, the trauma of circumcision, etc. In Venezuela there are demands that Jews in the streets disown Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Anti-Zionists who support Hamas as it blows up crowded city buses, shoots rockets into peaceful villages, and denies Israel the right to exist are not motivated by their sense of justice, reasonableness and fairness. Those criteria should make them supporters of Israel. They are unadulterated bigots and Jews like Roger Cohen and Robert Dreyfuss, etc., help shield them.