Too much information — all of which I cheerfully share with you *UPDATED*
This is my narrow but deep survey of this morning’s offerings. (Aack! Will this phone never stop ringing? I wrote that first sentence more than half an hour ago and have been dealing with that devil’s instrument ever since. Nor does that half hour include the time I’ve spent on the phone this morning before even getting to my blog. If only all the people calling me weren’t such nice people, people with whom I really enjoy speaking. But back to blogging essentials.)
Anyway, the offering below is narrow, because I went only to my usual twenty or so “first thing in the morning” sites, but it’s deep, because those sites are deep. They are broadly and well informed, and I get to piggy back off of their rich offerings. From them, to me, to you:
Robert Weissberg may have figured out why Obama is so exercised about Arizona’s efforts to protest itself from the depredations of the illegal aliens flooding its borders — in his own way, Obama too is an alien, insofar as he is a stranger to everything that is traditionally American in values, beliefs and practices.
(Riiinngg. There goes that phone again!)
I’m back. Let’s try again:
Yeah, reporters may not personally like Obama now that they’ve tried to get to know the guy, but please don’t let yourself be deluded into thinking that, just because they don’t like the man, they’re also parting ways with the agenda. Even if he was a drooling, fanged, child-eating monster, when push comes to shove, they’ll cover for him to enable him to do what he does best: change America’s fundamental fabric and dangerously weaken her standing in the world. VDH, by the way, has a little on one of the major passes Obama gets for being a war president, something the same media found intolerable in Bush.
Does anyone know how the riot police feel when they’re called out to guard against smiling grannies? I appreciate that some grannies can be aggressively violent, but the Tea Parties have distinguished themselves by their geniality.
What’s a PC City to do when one victim class starts preying on another victim class? My sympathies in this case are entirely with the Asians who are being victimized in bloody and brutal ways by completely uncontrolled black teenagers. What’s being described in this heart-rending article shouldn’t be unexpected to those of us who have been trying to stand against identity politics. There are two ways to run a country: a rule of law, that is applied, as best as possible, equally to all citizens (i.e., the constitutional approach); or a victim-based, touchy-feely rule of nothing at all, that gives carte blanche to designated thugs to prey on anyone in their path (i.e., the socialist, class warfare approach).
(Darn. That phone. Again. Oh, it’s my mom. I’ll be right back.)
Never ignore a phone call from your mother. You’ll all be happy to know that she’s doing well. Let me resume:
I’ve mentioned a few times at this website that the Left’s current darling, Elizabeth Warren, while a very nice lady in personal conversation, is one of the muddiest thinkers I’ve ever had the displeasure of seeing in the front of a classroom. While she may have learned something in the ensuing years, twenty years ago, she was incoherent, speaking in elliptical phrases that never reached a conclusion. Nevertheless, at least one person on the Left is excited about her as a potential Supreme Court justice, in no insignificant part because she’s a girl. Blech.
The little papers can still get by with saying what the big papers no longer will. While a larger paper, especially a European paper, would have a neutral headline along the lines of “Youth shot and killed,” or “Teenager slain,” the Marin IJ let one slip by (and this despite its overwhelmingly liberal orientation): “Teen gang member slain in San Rafael.” In other words, sometimes some of those “youths” aren’t just coincidentally on the receiving end of a bullet.
Obama and Co. are selling, but Americans aren’t buying. Almost two-thirds of them know that the stimulus was a giant boondoggle that will burden America for generations to come. They still have faith in America, though, which is either heartening, or a sign that, to borrow Al Gore’s analogy, they don’t realize that they’re just a pot of slow-boiling frogs.
Speaking of Al Gore, I’m sure you’re very interested to learn that he’s adding yet again to his vast real estate holdings. I can’t be clever. All I’ve got is opprobrious nouns populating my brain: scammer, hypocrite, con man, demagogue.
Starting in 2007, I started blogging about the fact that Obama is not a nice man. This is not about his politics. This is about his personality. While the media, the Democrats, the Bush-weary independents, and the “sophisticated” Republicans were ooh-ing and aah-ing about his smoothness, his calm demeanor, his “cool,” I was saying he’s a mean bully. He’s a ghetto talker. He doesn’t like women. This is a mean, angry person. People are catching on, with Daniel Henninger being the latest to opine elegantly about Obama’s deep seated nastiness. American’s are tolerant of so many things, but they don’t like dour presidents. This personality trait, more than his destructive politics, may spell the end of the Obama era.
When it comes to Obama, there’s also the little problem of do as I say, not as I do. The hot house flower who keeps the White House at toasty Hawaiian temperatures, is now lecturing Americans on cuts. I’m all for cuts. If there’s no money, there’s no money. However, as news trickles out that the health care bill, rather than saving the economy, will burden it even more, people are going to be resistant to Obama’s hectoring.
In the midst of the deeply depressing news that daily emanates from and because of Washington, here’s something that will make you feel better about how essentially good most Americans, and especially those Americans who serve, are.
The burqa: Talk about a hot button issue in Europe, where it appears more and more frequently on the streets and in the post-mortems after suicide bombs. Phyllis Chesler does talk about it and what she writes is well worth reading. When I first started thinking about the burqa, I couldn’t help analogizing it to ultra-orthodox Jewish women who cover their flesh from the neck down, and who wear wigs and head covering. But as is so often the case when one compares to superficially similar things, there’s really nothing similar about them at all. Most significantly, the orthodox do not try to impose their clothing requirements on others. The orthodox do not blow people up. The orthodox are not waging jihad against the world. The orthodox women do not hide their faces entirely, which is a tremendous danger in any free society. And the orthodox women are not routinely exposed to the horrors of life for women in sharia countries. So there’s no comparison and, given that there’s no doctrinal reason for the veil or the burqa, I don’t have a problem with bans on them in public areas.
I have greatly admired Laura Bush. Her behavior has consistently, without fail, indicated that she is a lady to the bone. Her steadfast love for her husband was itself a stellar recommendation for the man. Her biography seems to bear witness to her core decency.
(Again with the phone. I’ll publish this now and update it soon.)
UPDATE: I’m back — again. (Heaving big sigh, although I had a nice chat with my sister.) Let’s see how much I can get done before the next trilling summons:
Speaking of hypocrisy (and you will see me speaking of hypocrisy a few paragraphs up in my note on Al Gore), Soccer Dad caught Jesse Jackson in a hypocritic moment. Jackson illustrates the problem of identity politics, which is that your victim classes keep changing, and it’s hard to steer a straight course rhetorically.
My husband is very excited about the HBO biodrama about Jack Kevorkian, which resides like a little time bomb on our TiVo. I wonder if reading Mary Eberstadt’s review will change his mind? I knew before reading her review that I didn’t want to watch a show celebrating a necrophiliac, but I’m really sure now.
Obama rudely, really rudely, insulted the Court during his State of the Union address. (Have I mentioned that he is a genuinely mean human being?) Randy Barnett thinks that the Left is giving away the secret about the health care bill’s constitutional flaws, and I’m thinking that a ticked-off Supreme Court might take those flaws seriously.
Dammit! There goes the phone again. I’ll be back. (Imagine that in Ah-nuld’s thick accent.)
UPDATE II: Phone call resolved, plus a timely intervention in what might have been a tea crisis for my husband. (By the way, if you drink loose tea, I highly recommend (a) the Adagio Teas Ingenuitea Teapot
I hate Power Point. That’s not hyperbole, although I’m given to that rhetorical sin. Nope. I really, really hate Power Point. As far as I’m concerned, it forces people into a linear way of thinking that is antithetical to creativity and inspiration. It’s also staggeringly dull to be on the receiving end of a Power Point presentation. If there’s too much text, I can read it myself, thank you very much, and don’t need the speaker to stand there and read it to me. Conversely, if there are mere cryptic notations, I find them pointless and, often, distracting. Give me an old-fashioned slide show any day. The military, incidentally, has also learned that Power Point is as useful for obfuscation as it is for clarification.
I mentioned necrophilia in connection with HBO and Jack Kevorkian. This artist, too, seems to veer into that territory, and that’s despite the subject’s willingness to pose (so to speak). From my point of view, this is too creepy to be art.
You recall Barack Obama holding fast against legislation that would have provided aid and comfort to babies that survived late-term abortion. (Have a mentioned that he is a truly, deeply, nasty piece of work?) Italy, once a bastion of anti-abortion Catholicism is facing a very public debate about one such baby, abandoned by doctors, who took two days to die. Whether or not you’re for abortion, can you really be for what amounts of infanticide? What happened to this little boy is no different from the Spartans exposing defective infants on hillsides.
Earlier this week, I did a post suggesting that the characterization of Tea Parties as “racist” ignores entirely the fact that it’s not the Tea Parties that are rebuffing the blacks; it’s that the blacks are rebuffing the tea parties. I thought of that as I read about the Obama administration boasting about how its outreach . . . .
(Pardon, I’ve got to answer the phone. Business calls. Nice client, too. )
Where was I? Ah, the bit about whose refusing to socialize with whom. Let me resume:
I thought of that (blacks rebuffing Tea Partiers, not vice versa) as I read about the Obama administration boasting about how its outreach to the Muslim world is making the latter feel less like the “other.” That is horse pucky. As a religious principle, Muslims view us with profound disdain. They don’t want to be included in our club. They want to destroy our club entirely, sow salt in the ground, and exercise control over us. Sure there are all-American, assimilated Muslims who like America and Americans, but I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about the ones who are on the receiving end of this PC, misguided outreach. Oh, and speaking of otherness, what about the fact that the main arrow in the Obami quiver to effectuate this reconciliation with Islam is to turn the Jews into the “other.” How else to account for the Obami’s relentless demonization and isolation of the Jewish state?
Every time I drive to So Cal (which I do frequently, because of family), I mourn as I drive through the dust bowl in Central California. What’s worse is that this is a government created dust bowl, resulting because of the nexus between environmentalists and Leftists. It doesn’t have to be that way, people don’t have to be unemployed, businesses destroyed, food prices increased, and food supplies lowered — or, maybe, in Leftist world, it does have to be that way.
(Gosh darn it! There goes the phone again. Oh, it’s Don Quixote. I love talking to him. I’ll get back to all of you in a minute.)
Here I am. Almost done too. I’ve only got a handful more of things I wanted to talk about today:
If you want to be totally grossed out and deeply disturbed, please read about the way in which Planned Parenthood urges HIV carriers to conceal their status from their partners.
On an optimistic note, Gary Andres suggest that, despite the Obami’s efforts, there might be smaller government in America’s future, if only the center will hold.
Trust Bill Clinton to imply that those Americans who are anti-illegal immigration are merely anti-immigration. I think I can say that, without exception, when I’ve read or heard conservatives on the subject of illegal immigration, they’ve been careful to explain that they believe legal immigration is healthy for America. The fact is, though, that a sovereign nation should be allowed to control its borders and to decide about immigration rates that are healthy and humane.
Now I’m done. No more updates. Thank you for your patience.
UPDATE III: My dear friend and proofreader Earl finally got a gander at this post, and found that I was trying to type simultaneously in Venutian and English. Some can multitask. I apparently cannot.
