The Bookworm Beat 6/10/16 — the “escape from the family” edition
I wasn’t an empty nester to begin with, but now I am a super full nester — hence my difficulties blogging this week. Here it is, 9:30 on a Friday night, and I finally have a minute to sit down and write:
A unified theory of Obama. David Hazony has written a masterpiece. Using statements from Samuels’s interview with Ben Rhodes and Goldberg’s interview with Obama himself, Hazony comes up with a unified theory of everything Obama when it comes to foreign policy. It is a terrifying tale of a president who kept carefully hidden from view his dangerously utopian view of the world, one that sees his calm, Spockian reason preside over the withdrawal of the Pax Americana to force the world to join him in reason and peace. It’s a story of lies, manipulation, duplicity, and an insanity that promises to escalate before he leaves office.
Neither Trump nor Hillary shares Obama’s world view. The question for voters is, given the chaos into which Obama has pitched the entire world, which of these two candidates is best suited to lead the America and her allies to some semblance of safety.
Oh, and one other thing: While it’s clear from the article that Obama has an absolute horror of exercising American power abroad, except when it comes to pushing global warming, he sadly has no problem whatsoever exercising government power against his own people. A deadly pacifist abroad; a monstrous tyrant at home.
One other little aside. when I read Goldberg’s interview with Obama after it originally came out, I passed without thinking over a specific phrase that Obama used in that interview. Here’s the quotation, with that specific phrase bolded:
[The purpose of Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo, he told Goldberg, was to] trigger a discussion, [to] create space for Muslims to address the real problems they are confronting—problems of governance, and the fact that some currents of Islam have not gone through a reformation that would help people adapt their religious doctrines to modernity. My thought was, I would communicate that the U.S. is not standing in the way of this progress, that we would help, in whatever way possible, to advance the goals of a practical, successful Arab agenda that provided a better life for ordinary people.
Just today, Jonah Goldberg published a piece noting how Progressives love to “trigger a discussion” or “start a conversation,” something that, as often as not, they do using hoaxes or other crude deceptions (e.g., Katie Couric’s deceptively edited gun video). Here’s what Goldberg says those triggered discussions are really about:
As the Washington Examiner’s Ashe Schow recently chronicled, this sort of thing is common on college campuses. Students and professors initiate or exacerbate a hate-crime hoax or a false rape accusation. The orchestrators are perfectly happy to pretend the fraud is real and demonize anyone who casts doubt on the claims.
Then, when the facts come to light, instead of apologies we’re saturated with a fog of pomposity and self-justification: We were just trying to start a conversation. Raising awareness of the larger issue is more important than the mere facts.
[snip]
We’ve heard similar prattling about the University of Virginia rape hoax and many other fabricated events on college campuses (and off) going back decades. I started writing about such instances of “lying for justice” 20 years ago, and it has only gotten worse.
I don’t think people appreciate how pernicious and widespread this crowdsourced totalitarianism really is. Routine lies in the service of left-wing narratives are justified in the name of “larger truths,” while actual truth-telling in the other direction is denounced as hate speech or “triggering.”
Even when liberals call for an “honest conversation” about this, that, or the other thing, what they really mean is they want everyone who disagrees with the prevailing progressive view to fall in line.
Obama fits perfectly into that Progressive paradigm, doesn’t he?
For more on the Iran deal, a deal that works well for Iran and its satellites, but is a disaster for everyone else in the region, as well as Europe and, eventually, America, Raymond Tanter provides a primer explaining how things how going one year in.
Trump and the “Mexican” judge. I do believe I was early in line to point out that Trump was acting perfectly validly to argue that a Hispanic judge (yes, Trump said “Mexican” but we all know what he meant) was biased against him, and I said this without knowing all about the judge’s La Raza connections. A whole lot of people are saying the same thing now. Patrick Buchanan may not be one of my favorite people (I always detect a whiff of antisemitism about him, which makes Taki’s a good venue for him), but I nevertheless recommend his rundown about Trump’s complaints. To put it simply, once again the university class of Republicans had a knee-jerk Leftist response and they all started competing with each other to be the first to denounce him, without first determining whether, under all the crude rhetoric, he was absolutely right.
What’s really funny is the fact that, crude rhetoric notwithstanding, Trump is starting to make inroads into the Hispanic voting bloc. My theory is that honest Hispanics are exactly like me — they don’t hate immigration and they certainly don’t hate Hispanics. What they hate are cheaters. Those who, like my parents in the 1950s, came here the honest way, don’t feel well-inclined towards the line jumpers.
Nice little company ya got here; shame if anything happened to it. Will you be surprised to learn that the Obama Injustice Department has made a business of shaking down American corporations on flimsy or nonexistent grounds? No, I wasn’t surprised either.
Trump’s attacks on the press. Andrew Klavan points out that Trump’s attacks on the press are appealing in no small part because they expose the media’s disgusting hypocrisy.
Hillary is one damn scary candidate. As Scott Adams points out, Hillary is trying to pick up on Trump’s tactic of “branding” people by essentially calling him a Goldwater reboot, circa 2016. Trump, she says, is dangerous and can’t be trusted. As the New York Post editorial board points out, this is projection:
Clinton tried to portray Trump as “dangerous.” But what do you call it when a secretary of state, to shield herself from accountability, stores classified emails (some beyond “top secret”) on her private, unsecured server, leaving them vulnerable to hackers the world over?
Or who goes home for the night with a US consulate besieged by al Qaeda-linked terrorists — then later lies to the victims’ families about how a YouTube video was to blame?
Clinton called Trump “temperamentally unfit” to be commander-in-chief. But how would you describe an ex-top official who continually lies to the public and holds herself above the law?
Trump “doesn’t understand” the world, she said — but then denied that the world has laughed at President Obama’s weakness. She even claimed we’re “safer” with Obama’s deal with Iran, which gives the mullahs a clear path to nuclear weapons and hundreds of billions to fund terrorism.
Who doesn’t understand the world?
Late now and I’m tired. More tomorrow, when I know my life will be a little more peaceful.
