The Bookworm Beat 1/14/15 — The interesting odds and ends edition

Woman writingI’m not sure I can discern any common threads in this edition of the Bookworm Beat, other than the fact that each link is to something interesting.

History will eviscerate Obama

New York Magazine had an encomium to the wonders of the Obama presidency. It then invited Christopher Caldwell to do a rebuttal — and rebut he did:

These [healthcare reform and gay marriage] are, however, typical Obama achievements. They are triumphs of tactics, not consensus-building. Obamacare involved quid pro quos (the “Cornhusker Kickback,” the “Louisiana Purchase,” etc.) that passed into Capitol Hill lore, accounting and parliamentary tricks to render the bill unfilibusterable, and a pure party-line vote in the Senate. You can call it normal politics, but Medicare did not pass that way. Gay marriage has meant Cultural Revolution–style bullying of dissenters (notoriously, Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty and the Mozilla founder Brendan Eich). You can call this normal politics, too, but the 1964 Civil Rights Act did not pass that way.

Read the rest here.

Will the real Barack Obama please stand up?

Andrew McCarthy thinks it’s great that Obama didn’t go to Paris. Aside from the sham of a peace march involving Erdogan and Abbas, Obama’s non-appearance helps reveal his true colors: He doesn’t like free speech any more than the next dictator, and he’s pretty tight with the Muslims. As far as McCarthy is concerned, anything that strips away the Obama mask is a good thing.

Don’t believe everything you read in the papers

Claire Berlinski corrects some myths about Paris.

The squeaky pig gets greased

Oxford University Press is purging its books of all references to anything pig related, citing Muslim and Jewish sensibilities. Apropos those “Jewish sensibilities,” please remind me of the last time Jews complained about the inclusion of pig related references of any sort in any type of writing. I’ll give you a few minutes.

1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . .

Yeah, I couldn’t think of anything other. No complaints, let alone any beheadings. OUP is dressing up cowardice as ecumenicalism. At the very least, OUP should just say “We’re doing this because we don’t want to become the next Charlie Hebdo and we’re too cheap to hire armed guards.”

Cute: a conservative prodigy

Maybe this 12-year-old’s conservative fervor will convert his parents, both of whom are Democrats.

Duke goes dhimmi

Duke is proud that it’s going to have the Muslim call to prayer sounding out from its chapel’s Bell Tower on Friday. To me, this is the camel’s nose in the tent. The rest will soon follow. Don’t be surprised if a few years from now, the campus gets that call to prayer five times a day, seven days a week.

We’re losing the war

The short war is a war of weapons, and we’re not winning because we’re afraid to fight. And it’s this fear of fighting that’s causing us to lose the long war. You only fight if you believe in your cause, and the West no longer believes in itself.

Apropos, on a Facebook page dedicated to people who reminisce about growing up in San Francisco, people got to talking about St. Mary’s Cathedral, which got its nickname “The Washing Machine” for obvious reasons:

St. Mary's Cathedral

One of the people in the thread commented that he’d gone there for Sunday mass and the place was practically empty. Despite the Jihadists’ best efforts to have Western culture end with a bang, it’s actually going to end with a self-inflicted whimper.

Scott Walker — the drop-out president?

Noemie Emery suggests that Scott Walker, rather than hiding his failure to complete college, should capitalize on it. People are getting less amused by colleges lately. Barring the self-referential Ivy Leaguers, everyone else is begin to recognize there’s something rotten in the academic version Denmark.

Leftists — hiding behind numbers

Don Surber has assembled five liberal lies that hide behind pseudo-mathematics. He asks his readers for more examples, but they haven’t stepped up. Do you have any ideas?

Responsi-damn-bility

The only bad thing about this video is that I suspect he’s preaching to the already converted. I doubt it’s reaching the ears of those who need to hear it most:

The Beach Boys re-imagined in the war against illegal immigration

It’s tacky, but it’s funny: