Morning reads *UPDATED*

Michelle Malkin takes on Michelle Obama’s endless flow of whining and bile. It’s not surprising. As I pointed out in my Anger on the Left post, Leftism once seemed logically congruent with anger because Leftism was the politics of the underclass. In recent years, though, Leftism has shifted to become the politics of the affluent class, yet the anger is still there. Mrs. Obama is emblematic of this paradigm shift.

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Speaking of whining, you’ve got to love the opening paragraph in just the most recent Israel bashing article in the New York Times:

As Israel toasts its 60th anniversary in the coming weeks, rejoicing in Jewish national rebirth and democratic values, the Arabs who make up 20 percent of its citizens will not be celebrating. Better off and better integrated than ever in their history, freer than a vast majority of other Arabs, Israel’s 1.3 million Arab citizens are still far less well off than Israeli Jews and feel increasingly unwanted. (Emphasis added.)

I didn’t bother with the rest of the article after that intro. My stomach can stand only so much upset this early in the morning. I will only add this ancient childhood chant for those poor, unappreciated citizens: “Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, think I’ll eat some worms.”

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Arianna Huffington burst on the scene as a biographer who probably plagiarized, then become the quintessential conservative politician’s wife, and is now the proprietor, public face of and spokesperson for the Huffington Post, a major liberal web presence. My sense of her — and I’ve been aware of her longer than most of you because she was already a celebrity when I was living in England — is that she is a bright woman whose only fixed principle is herself. A charming narcissistic, if you will. Because of her HuffPo power, John Stossel interviewed her for 20/20 last week. I don’t watch that show — in fact, I watch very little television at all — so I missed the interview. However, Stossel has been kind enough to provide the highlights, and they’re quite funny. Huffington proudly announces that, no doubt because she’s so brilliant, she ditched conservatism because “One of the problems with the Right is that they don’t believe in facts, and they don’t believe in evidence.” Then, for the rest of the interview, she tries vainly to bat away the actual facts Stossel throws at her, facts completely at odds with her casual pronouncements about how her newly acquired ultra-liberal policies are going to make everyone in America happy — in an angry Leftist kind of way, I suspect.

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I don’t know if I predicted it here, but I certainly predicted it in conversation (as DQ, Mr. Bookworm and my Mom can attest): Obama will be the Democratic nominee. Now my big hope is that, after the big hype, ordinary Americans will step back for a minute and ask themselves a few questions: In times of economic strife and national insecurity, do we want as our leader a young man who spent a few years doing nothing in a State Senate and four years doing less than that in the US Senate? Do we want as president a Senator whose voting record makes Teddy Kennedy and Barbara Boxer looking conservative? Do we want a President who continually lies and, despite the ease with which he’s caught in those lies, keep lying — something that shows either remarkable hubris or lack of judgment? Do we want a President who, for 20 years, cozied up to someone who routinely expresses a visceral hatred for America, Americans and, yes, white people; who claimed that he’d stick by this man to the bitter end; and who then threw him off the cliff (joining granny, already lying at the bottom), when he became a political liability? Do we want a man whose wife is the embodiment of bitterness (I recommend that she get some guns and God, since it might lighten her spirit)? Do we want a man who, whenever the going gets rough, hides from the Press? Do we want a man who strongly believes that Supreme Court justices should be chosen based on their willingness to decide cases on their emotional feelings? Do we want a man who thinks the Second Amendment is a waste of space in the Constitution? Do we want a man who is either stunningly ignorant about history or is willing, Big Brother-like, to twist it to suit his political ends? Do we want a man who blindly promises to pull American troops out of Iraq in 17 months, regardless of the facts on the ground or the (as Michael Yon said) “catastrophic” consequences? Would you like to add some questions voters should ask?

Anyway, Jennifer Rubin suggests that, demographically, Americans might not want this man. I hope she’s right. A lot is riding on McCain’s shoulders. He sure isn’t the perfect candidate, not by a long shot, but in politics, as in everything else, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Compared to Obama, McCain is a good candidate, and I sure hope he wins.

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Speaking of John McCain, National Review Online has a nice editorial about his judicial philosophy:

In his speech at Wake Forest University, McCain identified the battle over the proper role of the judiciary as “one of the defining issues of this presidential election.” Defending the Constitution’s separation of powers, he forcefully decried how the decades-long “common and systematic abuse of our federal courts” by judicial activists has usurped the power of the American people to address policy questions through the democratic process.

[snip]

The future direction of the Supreme Court is very much at stake in this November’s presidential election. The two or three justices most likely to depart the Court over the next four years — Justice Stevens, Justice Ginsburg, and possibly Justice Souter — are liberal judicial activists who routinely read their own policy preferences into the Constitution and who selectively regard their own favored precedents as sacrosanct. If a President Obama or a President Clinton names their successors, the slender operating majority on the Court for liberal activist results on most contentious political issues is likely to be preserved for at least another generation.

By contrast, a president committed to nominate, and fight for, justices who will practice judicial restraint offers real hope that the Court may soon be restored to its proper role in our constitutional system. In his speech today, John McCain has provided encouraging evidence that he would be that president.

The editorial acknowledges that a single speech is neither a whole campaign nor a Supreme Court nominating roster. Still it’s better than Obama’s bloviations about Supreme Court justices consulting their liberal navels and the elites in Europe, rather than the Constitution, American legal precedent, and US laws, when deciding cases.

UPDATE:  I noted above Obama’s disturbing tendency to rewrite history, both his own and America’s, something that is (as Orwell made clear back in 1948), a distinctly Leftist habit.  Two stories from Spiegel online, one about Russian propaganda at the end of WWII, and one about Chinese propaganda now, demonstrate how the Lefties see facts as objects to be manipulated to advance political ideology.