09.30.2011 - 12:46 PM
Dissatisfaction with the other candidates and his own strong performances in the debates has lifted Herman Cain from who-do-these-guys-think-they-are territory to a-long-shot-but-who-knows land. Certainly a mark of that new status is yesterday’s Wall Street Journal column by Daniel Henninger.
The main objection to Cain is that he has never held public office. Given the fact that Barack Obama has never held anything but, I’m not sure that that is such a disqualifying attribute.
David Petraeus developed a reputation for preaching a softer-side of counterinsurgency but it is important to remember that in Iraq and Afghanistan he was responsible for the deaths of vast numbers of Islamist militants—more than any other American, I would wager. Now in his new capacity as CIA director he has notched another important kill: A CIA drone fired a Hellfire missile in Yemen which blew up Anwar al-Awlaki, the head of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
It is very much to President Obama’s credit that he authorized the dispatch, without any legal proceedings, of the American-born Awlaki—something that the ACLU no doubt deplores and that a fainter-hearted president would have shied away from. And it is very much to the CIA’s credit that it managed to track him down and kill him.
09.30.2011 - 10:00 AM
ABC News reports that Muammar Qaddafi’s surface-to-air missile stockpiles have gone missing without much of a trace. This nightmare cuts to the most dangerous problem with Barack Obama’s lead-from-behind Libya strategy: it’s bad.
The word “triumphalism” came to be synonymous with the Bush administration and the Iraq war. But Tripoli had barely fallen when Obama supporters like Fareed Zakaria declared the effort, literally, a model victory: “The Libyan intervention offers a new model for the West,” he wrote in Time, explaining that it was “a new model in that it involved an America that insisted on legitimacy and burden sharing, that allowed the locals to own their revolution.” And to own about 20,000 of their dictator’s missiles.
09.30.2011 - 10:00 AM
I wanted to add to Alana’s comments on the postby a major finanacer supporter of President Obama, Ted Leonsis, in which he takes the president to task for Mr. Obama’s repeated appeal to class warfare.
“I say this as I read all of the rhetoric about Class Warfare, the rift that is being created between economic middle and lower class and as the President said ‘those millionaires and billionaires,’” according to Leonsis. “The real rift in philosophy though is do you want the Government to create jobs and stimulate the economy or do you want America’s small business to be the engine of growth?”
09.29.2011 - 4:00 PM
Oh, my.
According to Rasmussen Reports, President Obama leads GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain by only five points. In addition, the president is drawing less than 40 percent support from those polled (39 percent v. 34 percent). And in a new Harris poll, Mr. Obama trails Representative Ron Paul by two points.
What this suggests is that Mr. Obama’s slide in the polls in accelerating, and it’s not clear just where the floor for him is. What we are witnessing is an Obama Meltdown, with the public turning hard and in overwhelming numbers against the president. We may soon get to the point where anyone short of a deceased person – Mel Gibson, Barry Bonds, Lady Gaga — may be within single digits of Mr. Obama in any given poll.
The Obama presidency is being crushed by events. So is Mr. Obama’s party. An open revolt among Democrats is getting closer by the day.
09.29.2011 - 1:00 PM
If free speech and religious tolerance–even tolerance toward those who renounce religion–is the mark of a liberal, free society, then Turkey is moving headlong into Islamic Republic of Iran territory. A cartoonist who questioned religious devotion and the existence of God in a cartoon will be tried in Turkey. According to Hurriyet, “The Istanbul chief public prosecutor’s office charged cartoonist Bahadır Baruter with ”insulting the religious values adopted by a part of the population’ and requested his imprisonment for up to one year.”
If Turkey’s Jews were the canary in the coal mine, then Turkey today has become the Centralia mine fire. No longer can Turkey be said to enjoy freedom of religion, a free press, or the trappings of any other modern, European society.
09.29.2011 - 10:00 AM
As a general rule, my view is the less said about Sarah Palin these days, the better. But she gave an interview to Fox’s Greta van Susteren that did catch my eye. Governor Palin, in discussing whether or not she would run for the presidency, said this:
Does a title shackle a person? Are they, someone like me who’s maverick – you know I do go rogue and I call it like I see it and I don’t mind stirring it up in order to get people to think and debate aggressively and to find solutions to the problems that our country is facing – somebody like me, is a title and is a campaign too shackling? Does that prohibit me from being out there, out of the box, not allowing handlers to shape me and to force my message to be what donors or what contributors or what political pundits want it to be. Does a title take away my freedom to call it like I see it and to affect positive change that we need in this country? That’s the biggest contemplation piece in my process.
Where to begin?
09.29.2011 - 8:00 AM
Health and Human Services has just released a revised media policy, which forbids staffers from talking to journalists without first getting authorization from the HHS press office. The policy also bans employees from speaking off-the-record with reporters, rules that could significantly hinder investigative journalism.
Health-focused trade publications, which are dependent on confidential sources in agencies like the HHS, are already blasting the policy. Jim Dickinson, editor of FDA Webview and FDA Review called them a “Soviet-style power grab” and warned that the “existing [trade] media will likely die out” because of them:
The new formal HHS Guidelines on the Provision of Information to the News Media represent, to this 36-year veteran of reporting FDA news, a Soviet-style power-grab. By requiring all HHS employees to arrange their information-sharing with news media through their agency press office, HHS has formalized a creeping information-control mechanism that informally began during the Clinton Administration and was accelerated by the Bush and Obama administrations.
Consider how impossible these guidelines make the acquisition by a journalist of confidential internal sources in an agency like FDA. The existence of such confidential sources gave an economic foundation to and made possible the foundation of my own media, and the founding of earlier trade media such as The Pink Sheet and Food Chemical News, among many others.
The rules will make accurate coverage of the HHS much more difficult. Banning HHS staffers from talking off-the-record could have a chilling effect, and requiring them to get their conversations with journalists authorized by the media relations office means that the public will get less truth and more spin.
And as Cato’s Michael Cannon points out, the policy changes come at a noteworthy time:
Since this came on the heels of an HHS official announcing that the agency is scuttling ObamaCare‘s long-term care entitlement, a.k.a. the “CLASS Act,” one wonders if there is a connection. Or maybe HHS is just motivated by a general fear that the more the public learns about ObamaCare, the less we will like it.
It sounds like the changes have been happening slowly for some time, but the agency’s decision might have been prompted by an embarrassing email leak from the CLASS Act office last week. The major concern now is that if HHS gets away with this new policy, other government agencies could end up following suit.
09.28.2011 - 5:31 PM
Sundown tonight marks the start of the Jewish New Year that begins with the celebration of Rosh Hashanah. The ten days from the start of that holiday until the end of Yom Kippur next week are known as the Days of Awe in Judaism. During this period, Jews reflect on their deeds in the past year and seek to account for them to their Creator as well as their fellow human beings. This period of introspection should cause all of us to think about what we have done in the past 12 months and work to improve ourselves.
It would also be good advice for many world leaders as we observe the circus at the United Nations where nations line up to cheer dictators and to single out Israel for discriminatory treatment. As Jews around the globe take note of their shortcomings, perhaps those who have done so much to encourage hatred of the Jewish state and the Jewish people should take a few moments and own up to their policies that have done so much harm and which have made peace even more unlikely.
Though we refer to Jewish tradition, the notion of accountability is something that speaks directly to the problems of any democracy which is based on the concept that elected leaders are judged by the voters. For those in both parties who have sought to demonize their political opponents, the dawn of the New Year represents an opportunity to step back and realize that attempts to brand leaders, parties and movements as being beyond the pale or even questioning the wisdom of democracy itself — that is to say, questioning the right of the voters to override the dictates of the politicians and the intellectuals — has done much to undermine any hope for a resolution of our national problems.
The passage of the calendar also reminds us at COMMENTARY of the urgency of our four-fold task to speak up in defense of Zionism and Israel; to bear witness against the scourge of anti-Semitism; to support the United States as well as the best of Western civilization. Our work is, as our editor John Podhoretz wrote back in February 2009, an act of faith in the power of ideas as well as in our own nation and as we take inventory of our personal lives we also seek to rededicate ourselves to the causes to which our magazine is devoted.
Jewish liturgy tells us that the fate of all human beings is decided during these Days of Awe but it also says that teshuva (repentance), tefilla (prayer) and tzedaka (acts of justice and charity) may avert the severe decree. In that spirit of reflection and dedication to carrying on our task of informing and educating our readers in the coming year, we at COMMENTARY wish you all a happy, healthy and peaceful New Year.
09.28.2011 - 1:38 PM
Earlier this week, a crazed heckler with a reputation for yelling nutty things at L.A.-area events called President Obama the “Antichrist” at a political fundraiser, before being dragged screaming out of the room by the Secret Service. Normally this heckler would be dismissed as a lunatic. Instead, some media outlets are wondering whether he’s part of a growing right-wing movement that believes Obama is the Antichrist:
Ironically, the remark about Obama as the Antichrist came the same day that The New York Times ran an op-ed arguing that the Antichrist is assuming a bigger place in the public discourse, as evangelical Christian ideas about the end times gain traction.
09.28.2011 - 12:43 PM
By asking the United Nations to recognize Palestinian independence, Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority have abandoned the peace process in the hope the international community will give them what they want without having to make peace with Israel. That puts Abbas’ Western cheering section in a bind, because it is impossible to look at his strategy or his UN speech without understanding the fundamental disconnect between their position and any hope for peace. But that hasn’t stopped many of them from attempting to turn the facts on their head by blaming the whole mess on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Netanyahu is an easy target among the foreign policy establishment and other members of the chattering classes because he refuses to play along with the myth of Palestinian reasonableness that is such an integral part of the peace process mindset. William Saletan provided an excellent example of this willful blindness in a piece published this week in Slate. In it, he preposterously claims the standoff is all a clever plot by Netanyahu to obfuscate the truth about Abbas’ desperate search for peace that is every bit as disingenuous as the Palestinian’s hate-filled speech to the General Assembly.
09.28.2011 - 12:15 PM
President Obama’s jobs plan hasn’t helped boost his favorability in two key swing states, according to the latest Quinnipiac poll. The majority of voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania say he doesn’t deserve reelection. In Pennsylvania, Obama is in a statistical dead-heat with Mitt Romney for the 2012 election, while in Ohio he ties both Romney and Perry.
In other words, Obama’s taxpayer-bankrolled visits to swing states have had little impact on voters. Fox News reports:
09.28.2011 - 11:10 AM
Two years ago, in “How to Pick a Nobel Winner,” I suggested that the literature prize is “apparently awarded by much the same method that the chairmanship of the UN Human Rights Commission is determined — on a rotating basis, as long as Israel and (increasingly) the United States are excluded.” The last American to be selected was Toni Morrison, 18 years ago. An Israeli has been honored only once, when Sh. Y. Agnon shared the 1966 prize with the German Jewish poet Nelly Sachs.
The numbers are very much to the point, since the Nobel committee prefers not to allow too much time to elapse between awards to the same country, the same linguistic sphere. And in recent years, even the gender imbalance has begun to be corrected. Since 1991, women have won six of the 20 prizes. Still, while women have never captured the prize in back-to-back years, men often have; and the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, a contributor to COMMENTARY, won last year. He was the first man of the right to take home the award since V. S. Naipaul was recognized in 2001. Two prizes in a decade — the literary right is doing only slightly worse than women.
The obvious omission from the winners’ list in recent years has been poets. Since the inception of the literature prize in 1944, poets have been selected for 18 out of 69 prizes, more than a quarter of them or an average of one poet every three-and-two-thirds years. Yet no poet has won the Nobel Prize in literature since 1995 and 1996 when Wislawa Szymborska of Poland and Seamus Heaney of Ireland were “decorated” in consecutive years.
And finally there is language to consider. English-language writers have been named to 18 prizes; Spanish writers to 9; French, 8; German, 6. The other European languages — Russian, Italian, Swedish, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Yiddish — have shared 19 prizes among them. Writers in non-European languages have only won the prize five times.
As of this morning, the betting odds favor the Syrian poet Ali Ahmad Said Asbar, who writes under the pen name Adonis, at four to one. And for once the oddsmakers seem to be on target. Only one 
Arabic-language writer has ever been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature — the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz in 1988 — and Adonis is the best-known Arabic poet. If this is the Palestinians’ year at the UN, though, it may also be the Palestinians’ turn for the Nobel. Remember where you first heard the name of Samih al-Qasim (pictured at right), an Israeli Druze who celebrates the Nakba in Arabic verse. His PEN biography is here. A PBS interview with him is here. And here is a characteristic poem, entitled “End of Discussion with a Jailer”:
From the window of my small cell
I can see trees smiling at me,
Roofs filled with my people,
Windows weeping and praying for me.
From the window of my small cell
I can see your large cell.
One guess who is being addressed here. Awarding the prize to Samih al-Qasim would be a masterstroke: the Nobel Committee could recognize Israel and shame it at the same time. Qasim is not as well-known as Adonis, he is not even on the betting boards that Adonis currently tops, but he is more political — he is a voice of the Palestinian resistance to Israeli “occupation” — and the Nobel Prize dearly loves writers from the left.
09.28.2011 - 10:25 AM
The effort by Michele Bachmann to make hay out of Rick Perry’s executive order to mandate the vaccination of girls for the HPV virus may wind up hurting her more than him because of her bizarre decision to repeat an unsubstantiated claim the vaccine caused mental retardation. Nevertheless, the attempt to portray him as a big government health care tyrant put the Texas governor on the defensive. Even worse, her claim the only reason he did it was as a payoff to the Merck pharmaceutical company for campaign contributions stuck to him. That served as the excuse for the repetition of accusations from Texas liberals that he has been a pay-to-play governor.
Of course, if this were Perry’s biggest problem he’d be in good shape, because far more damage has been done by his terrible debate performances and his refusal to bow to anti-immigrant sentiment on the right. The feeling lately among pundits has been Perry’s candidacy won’t last long enough for him to recover the ground he has lost, but a story in today’s New York Times about Perry’s wife may undermine the narrative about Perry that Bachmann’s attack generated. In it we learn it was Anita Thigpen Perry, a nurse and a leading Texas advocate for the victims of sexual assault, not Merck or its lobbyists, who was probably the driving force behind Perry’s HPV decision.
09.28.2011 - 10:20 AM
Washington Wizards owner Ted Leonsis, one of President Obama’s major supporters, summed up the hypocrisy of the president’s class warfare rhetoric in a blog post the other day:
Economic success has somehow become the new boogie man; some in the Democratic party are now casting about for enemies and business leaders, and anyone who has achieved success in terms of rank or fiscal success is being cast as a bad guy in a black hat. …
09.28.2011 - 9:40 AM
The run-up to the Quartet’s latest bid to restart Israeli-Palestinian talks is far more revealing than the talks themselves are likely to be, even if they ever take place. The U.S., UN, EU and Russia tried frantically to draft “terms of reference” for the talks, meaning broad parameters for what an agreement should look like. But in the end, they had to scrap the effort, because they couldn’t even reach agreement among themselves on these parameters.
In other words, contrary to the shopworn claim that “There is no mystery to what a final deal would look like” (as a New York Times editorial asserted just last week), there is so little agreement that four mediators – all of whom care much less about the issues concerned than the parties themselves – couldn’t even strike a deal on the broad outlines, much less all the pesky details.
09.28.2011 - 9:18 AM
One of the most interesting but under-reported stories at the United Nations General Assembly this past week was the brawl which developed between Turkish security agents escorting Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and UN security officers. Colum Lynch at Foreign Policy has been all over the story, not only breaking it, but now he has supplied amateur video of the melee. Short synopsis: Erdoğan and his detail tried to force their way through a secured door and resorted to fisticuffs when they didn’t get their way. Two UN employees were injured, one of whom had to go to the hospital.
Interestingly, Turkey—a country where press freedom has tumbled under the leadership of Erdoğan—did not initially report the incident. A Turkish journalist, however, did say that United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon subsequently apologized to Erdoğan for the incident. This in turn infuriated UN security officials who appear to have done nothing wrong.
09.28.2011 - 7:31 AM
I don’t understand exactly what Chris Christie is up to—or, rather, what the people around him might be up to, since they would probably be well-advised to stop issuing statements that don’t reflect the reality of what he is or is not willing to say—but that sure was one interesting performance he put on last night, as I write in today’s New York Post:
Christie certainly laid out an interesting course for a presidential bid — one that would seek to appeal to those primary voters who want a government that can function, not just the most ideologically conservative government imaginable.
Were Christie to run, therefore, he wouldn’t be running to fill the hardline-conservative slot now held so shakily by Rick Perry. He would be running on his own star power and with his own message to conservatives: I get things done, and I would agree with you most of the time … pretty much.
He can’t go on like this much longer; among other things, if he is going to run, he has to get himself on the Michigan ballot and he needs signatures by the middle of October. Also, his teasing is going to get the people who are interested in his candidacy more than a little angry if he doesn’t quit it.
09.28.2011 - 6:58 AM
He didn’t say “yes” last night. But then again, he didn’t explicitly say “no.” And judging from the reactions on Twitter, Chris Christie’s answer on whether he’ll run for president is open to interpretation:
“I saw something great today on the Politico website. They put a minute and 53 seconds of my answers strung back to back to back together on the question of running for the presidency,” he said. “Everyone go to Politico.com, it’s right on the front page. Those are the answers.”
The most provocative article I’ve read on Russia in recent days is this Washington Post op-ed by the always interesting Ralph Peters, a military intelligence officer turned novelist and strategic analyst. I don’t always agree with Peters, but I always find him worth reading. In this article, he takes the typically unconventional position that while Vladimir Putin may be a bad man but a great czar—a leader who, like Peter the Great, has managed to maximize the power, wealth and influence of his country.
Peters is deft, and accurate, in exposing how Putin rules not with a Stalinist reign of terror but by forging an implicit social contract that Russians are free to grumble about the government in private as long as they don’t do anything to try to change it politically. Those who violate this unwritten rule are either killed or thrown in jail—and most Russians either ignore or applaud the punishment meted out to these “troublemakers.” I suspect Peters is particularly on the money when he writes:
