Bret Stephens observes: “President Obama’s Iran policy is incoherent and obsolete. . . Bottom line from Mr. [David]Axelrod, and presumably Mr. Obama, too: ‘We are going to continue to work through . . . the multilateral group of nations that are engaging Iran, and they have to make a decision, George [Stephanopoulos], whether they want to further isolate themselves in every way from the community of nations, or whether they are going to embrace that.’ Translation: People of Iran — best of luck!”
The Romney buzz continues. Some deft moves since the 2008 election (e.g., talking like a grown-up, making impressive TV outings) and the Wylie Coyote-like ability of potential rivals to blow themselves up have worked to his benefit. But it is of course only 2009.
Another example of the perils of early polling: In the Florida GOP primary race Charlie Crist leads Marco Rubio 51-23% but only 52% have heard of Rubio – and among those, it is a dead heat.
The punditocracy has just discovered Lindsay Graham is effective on TV. In fact, he was one of the best advocates for the surge and one of John McCain’s strongest surrogates during the campaign. It remains a mystery how the conventional wisdom suddenly “discovers” these things.
Claire McCaskill is not thrilled by cap-and-trade: “I hope we can fix cap and trade so it doesn’t unfairly punish businesses and families in coal dependent states like Missouri.” Is she one of those fear-mongers the president is picking on? Oh — no, she’s Democrat.
Sen. Sherrod Brown doesn’t like it either. “They don’t have my vote yet . . In the Senate this bill will not pass unless Midwestern Democratic senators support it in large numbers.” Wonder how Ohio Democratic Reps. John Boccierri and Mary Jo Kilroy (who got roped into voting for it) feel about that.
The three New Jersey Republicans who voted for cap-and-trade face a backlash.
Here is a head-scratcher: “A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 50% of U.S. voters at least somewhat favor the Democrats’ health care reform plan, while 45% are at least somewhat opposed.” What healthcare plan? The public option one, which moderate and conservative Democrats oppose and the president now says is not a dealbreaker? If asked to tell us what the Democrats are actually proposing — or any of the variations on what they were proposing — I doubt 5% would come close.
The pledge about not raising taxes on people earning less than $250,000 appears to have gone the way of “read my lips…”
John McCain is still providing straight talk: “Organized labor is dictating a large portion of the Obama administration’s work, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) alleged Monday.’The unions are running a lot of this administration,’ McCain said during an appearance on the Mike Broomhead show on local radio station KFYI. ‘Look what just happened with Chrysler and General Motors,’ McCain added.”
So will the Democrats go up against Big Labor on healthcare reform – or just carve out specail tax treatment for union negotiated health benefits? “The Laborers’ International Union of North America is targeting Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) with a television ad urging the two Senators to resist taxing health insurance benefits as a means to pay for health care reform. ”
Ilya Shapiro is on the money: “Ricci is a victory for merit over racial politics—which is appropriate given that the ruling overturns a lower court panel that included Sonia Sotomayor. . .This ruling is the latest in a series of steps the Court has taken to strike down race-conscious actions that violate individual rights—and thus is a blow both to the Obama administration (which sided with the city in Ricci) and to the nomination of Judge Sotomayor.” Ouch.
The Ninth Circuit is reversed 94% of the time by the Supreme Court. Could they get it wrong more often if they tried?
The Senate has 45 “yes” votes for cap-and-trade. They need to get to 60. The “no” camp has 32 solid votes. Looks like the “fear mongering” crowd may carry the day.
We need a president as erudite and well-read as George W. Bush is what we need!!!!!!!!!!!
I would like a mildly competent, at-least-of-average-intellect, guy who has a clue, non-poseur president.
2012 awaits.
Mark Steyn: Maybe it takes a foreigner to see it. The Ottawa Citizen’s David Warren puts it this way:
Beautiful. Is there any doubt that Jennifer Rubin would always find fault with the president’s deameanor? When he was realistic, she was critical. When he is optimistic, she is critical.
Whatever Obama is, or says, or does, she is against it. No principle leavens her partisan hoecakes. You’d think, with so many passing on her unappealing baked goods, she’d find a new recipe.
Bob you post is a joke, right? The One could be anything you want him to be as long as he’s sincere. The fact is this guy is a poseur, which means he is nothing. In your neighbour that might be funny, in a president it’s a disaster looking to happen. The quicker America is rid of this a$$ the better.
Yes, dangle trolls with few bones they will sell their souls in an instant. Easy gratification and stupidity goes hand in hand. Obama embodies what america is now affirmative action, entitlement mentality, racial guilt and basically just lazy.
Obama cracks jokes, dow rises 300 points. Only the neocons are glum. They need America to fail.
From David McCullough’s bio of Truman:
“If a man is acquainted with what other people have experienced at this desk,” Truman would say sitting in the Oval Office, “it will be easier for him to go through a similar experience. It is ignorance that causes most mistakes. The man who sits here ought to know his American history, at least.” When Truman talked of Presidents past – Jackson, Polk, Lincoln – it was as if he knew them personally. If ever there was a “clean break from all that had gone before,” he would say, the result would be chaos.
Ol’ Harry was prescient. On the campaign stump, Obama displayed the shallowest knowledge of history, as his Berlin speech failed to give credit to the U.S. military for breaking the back of the Soviet blockade during the airlift. Chaos is a fair description of what we are seeing in DC.
Don H — I think it’s more than a lack of knowledge, with Obama. It’s s deliberately cultivated, one-sided perspective. I’m a contemporary of Obama, and I can aver that would have been pretty hard to grow up in the US — even in Hawaii — and not know about the US military’s role in the Berlin Airlift, at least in a generic way. But Obama comes from the world of the academic and activist left, one that simply dismisses and distorts the role of armed force in the affairs of men, and emphasizes that of the collective aspirations imputed to suffering peoples.
People with this mindset WANT to believe that collective activism achieves great and positive goals, so they go around attributing to activism what in reality was the achievement of force. Obama’s words in the Berlin speech show that is exactly what he was doing.
Such people also attribute to activism the successes produced by individuals, acting freely and on their own. And when they find themselves unable to do the latter — as with the achievement by individuals of the American Dream — they find fault with the goal instead, or make an elaborate case that too many obstacles are being set in our way as we try — desperately — to seek it. They will simply say whatever serves their objective of promoting collectivist activism, with them in the leadership positions.
J.E. – insightful take, thank you!!
J. E. Dyer for post of the day (or month)!
Bob – you still don’t get it do you.
More from Steyn – and I think the real killer:
“The first two months of the Age of the Hopeychange have been an eye-opener. I expected it to be ideologically distasteful to me, but I didn’t expect it to be so inept. Not because I had any expectations of President Obama’s executive skills. But I assumed he’d have folks around him who could take care of details like governing, while he pranced around as the smiley-face hopeychange frontman. But the bench is still empty save for a handful of mediocrities. And the disconnect between the smoothly scripted mush and what’s actually happening makes the telepromptered cool look even more ridiculous.”
Answer that.
It would have been gracious of JED to remind us that he was, in effect, echoing Orwell (the essays, not the novels, which take us to the conclusion of the process).
Heck, just when I thought conservatism was out of ideas. Cutting edge policy from the party of Bush and Rush:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123777413372910705.html
The Texas Board of Education will vote this week on a new science curriculum designed to challenge the guiding principle of evolution, a step that could influence what is taught in biology classes across the nation.
The proposed curriculum change would prompt teachers to raise doubts that all life on Earth is descended from common ancestry. Texas is such a huge textbook market that many publishers write to the state’s standards, then market those books nationwide.
“This is the most specific assault I’ve seen against evolution and modern science,” said Steven Newton, a project director at the National Center for Science Education, which promotes teaching of evolution.
Texas school board chairman Don McLeroy also sees the curriculum as a landmark — but a positive one.
Dr. McLeroy believes that God created the earth less than 10,000 years ago. If the new curriculum passes, he says he will insist that high-school biology textbooks point out specific aspects of the fossil record that, in his view, undermine the theory that all life on Earth is descended from primitive scraps of genetic material that first emerged in the primordial muck about 3.9 billion years ago.
He also wants the texts to make the case that individual cells are far too complex to have evolved by chance mutation and natural selection, an argument popular with those who believe an intelligent designer created the universe.
The textbooks will “have to say that there’s a problem with evolution — because there is,” said Dr. McLeroy, a dentist. “We need to be honest with the kids.”
The vast majority of scientists accept evolution as the best explanation for the diversity of life on earth.
Yes, they say, there are unanswered questions — transitional fossils yet to be unearthed, biological processes still to be discovered. There is lively scientific debate about some aspects of evolution’s winding, four-billion-year path. But when critics talk about exposing students to the “weaknesses” or “insufficiencies” in evolutionary theory, many mainstream scientists cringe.
The fossil record clearly supports evolution, they say, and students shouldn’t be exposed to creationist critiques in the name of “critical thinking.”
“We will be teaching nonsense in the science classroom,” said David Hillis, a biology professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
“I expected it to be ideologically distasteful to me, but I didn’t expect it to be so inept.”
Take Steyn with a BIG grain of salt – Here’s his brilliant take on harriet Miers:
“Well, you know, I think we can all ease up on the insults of Harriet Miers now, because I think she did…I must say, I think she did the right thing. I know you disagree on this, Hugh, and I think this is a day when we should remember the qualities about Harriet Miers that people are agreed on, that she’s a loyal, kind, considerate, dutiful person, and I hope she continues to serve the Bush administration in various ways for the next three years. ”
And Iraq circa 2003: “let me go out on a limb here: the Anglo-Aussie-American forces will win. And the way they win will have tremendous implications for the years ahead. ”
Talk about Inept! The while right wing is blind to it’s foolishness – they still think people look to them for ideas or smarts…
Steyn is sorta like John Stewart – expcet nobody has really ever heard of him…
and he’s candian…
During the campaign, I waited in vain for some tangible proof of that nearly universally touted first-class intellect and first-class temperament. What I found was a shallow and narrow, incurious, poorly-read and, sans teleprompter, poorly-spoken intellect and a dismissive, humorless bordering on nasty, self-involved and often sophomoric temperament. Since he’s been president, those impressions have been reinforced rather than disabused. Maturity, I gather, is not Obama’s strong point.
Warp, off you go, and the moon isn’t even full yet.
Mark Steyn makes an accurate and prescient prediction about Iraq, and is gentleman enough to compliment Harriet Miers as “loyal, kind, considerate and dutiful”, again perfectly true as far as I know the record, and you “talk about inept?” Do you happen to know the meaning of the word?
I know you dems prefer to insult and have been wrong on Iraq since day one (remember the “quagmire” on the road to Baghdad?). So that may be what you expect. But let me clue you, warp, being right and courteous is not being “inept” to most of us.
#15 provides the opportunity to point out something that never seems to be acknowledged. The war in Iraq was OVER in May 2003. Iraqi armed forces defeated, Iraqi government discombobulated. Coalition forces victorious, mission accomplished.
Whatever else has occurred in Iraq since that time may be unpleasant or dangerous or potentially fatal, but, by definition, it hasn’t been a war. Unless you use the political lexicon that includes a “War on Poverty” or a “War on Drugs”. By the way, how long has it been since those were over? Anyway, significant numbers of fanatical or maybe just financially motivated or both jihadis setting up lethal roadside booby traps and blowing themselves up outside police stations isn’t a war. It’s something, there must be a name for it, but war isn’t the name.