Then listen now, to what I say. Just get an HD handicam, then take some time and learn how to tape:

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And with your hair combed right, and the memory hole screwed tight, it’s gonna be all right.

Then it’s time to go downtown, where the editor and ombudsman won’t let you down. Sell your soul to the company, who are waiting there to sell plastic ware.

And in a week or two, if you make the charts, the girls’ll tear you apart.

The price you paid for your riches and fame, was it all a strange game, you’re a little insane. The money that came and the public acclaim, don’t forget what you are, you’re an MSM star.

Related: “Anatomy of a Blog Post with the Naming of Parts.” But — and I can’t believe they left this part out (I mean, can you? I certainly can’t — Ed) — where are the nested parentheticals…?

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As we’ve mentioned recently, someone like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times can praise centrally-planned totalitarian China as if it was the greatest innovation in government since the days of Hammurabi, while ignoring its founding in original sin. But that sort of doublethink was pioneered almost a century ago by the original bourgeois-bohemians, to borrow from David Brooks’ epochal 2000 book. They could look to the Soviet Union, and later Communist China as models of the future, all the while enjoying the wealth, luxuries and freedom of the west.

The Uncommon Sense blog round-up numerous quotes from “Scary Progressives/Socialists” that most would have preferred been consigned to the ash heap history (see also: title of 1932 lecture to Oxford by H.G. Wells).

During the 1980s, there was a brief moment when even the American MSM would report on the efforts of the Fabian Socialists to disrupt and atomize society, but that day is long past, with the exception of one lone cable TV channel.

And to focus on one leftwing elite in particular, the latest edition of City Journal contains Theodore Dalrymple’s must-read essay on John Kenneth Galbraith.  Here’s but a sample:

Sometimes he sounds like a mouthpiece of Maoist propaganda, accepting its categories uncritically. In the 1920s and 30s, sheeplike Western travelers in Stalinist Russia had accepted its category of “kulak,” or rich peasant, to describe a peasant who owned a pig or a cow and was therefore a class enemy deserving the supreme penalty. Similarly, Galbraith can write about a factory that “had been partially disrupted until the People’s Liberation Army moved in to restore order. The union I gather to have been one of the reactionary elements that . . . aroused the antipathy of the Red Guards. It was disestablished.” This use of the phrase “reactionary elements” betrays a startling lack of awareness that visitors to the Communist world had been gulled before. Nor was Galbraith interested in who the Red Guards were or what they actually did. The fate of individual people was far beneath his notice, which explains why his anecdotes are so rarely interesting, let alone illuminating. His is a humanitarianism without a human face.

Later, Galbraith tells a story about how the Chinese farmed areas of low fertility: “We were told how one production brigade had transported soil for many miles to make one peculiarly rocky spread slightly productive.” According to Galbraith, the decline in agriculture in New England would not have taken place if politicians rather than market forces had been in charge. The moral of the story for Galbraith? “The market can be ruthless as politicians cannot.” That market relations can sometimes exact a human price is no doubt true; but to have lived through the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, and to suggest that there is any cruelty and depravity of which politicians are not capable, requires a capacity for incomprehension amounting almost to genius.

Let it not be said, however, that Galbraith was entirely uncritical of China during the Cultural Revolution. “At the close of almost every meeting one is asked for ‘your criticisms’ of the institution or the New China,” he recounts. “I’ve found one that is true, irrefutable and well-received. ‘You are smoking far too many cigarettes.’ ” Millions of people beaten, tortured, and humiliated, the remains of a millennial civilization wantonly smashed, and Galbraith bravely takes up the antismoking cause!

Of course, it would have been rude to criticize those who looked after Galbraith and his modest wants. “I have a bedroom, sitting room, bathroom and air conditioning,” he discovers when he arrives at the Nanking Hotel. “But that,” he adds with touching simplicity and modesty, “is sufficient”; until, that is, he arrives in Paris, having suffered such deprivation in Nanking. “I was two days at the Ritz with no grievous sense of social guilt, no insuperable problem of culture shock,” he writes.

Galbraith has come back into fashion: not only his ideas, which imply the need for a huge and expanding class of redemptory politicians and bureaucrats to save people from a fate that would be wretched without them, but his aristocratic assumption of unchallengeable moral superiority, written in his prose as it appears to be written on President Obama’s face. How delightful to be so generous, so very right all the time, and yet make a fortune and stay at the Ritz!

So how will all that play out once again, as we go Barack to the Future? Pretty much like this:

Related: And speaking of bourgeois-bohemians living in the lap of luxury while attempting to undermine the wealth-producing power of capitalism, Nancy Pelosi and her children and grandchildren “Used Military Jets As Private Cross-Country Shuttle Service So They Could Avoid Dealing With the Rabble.”

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That quote, which sums up the tone of President Obama’s State of the Union address perfectly, comes from former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institute. Robinson is interviewed, alongside Mark Steyn, in the first edition of former Cheers producer/writer Rob Long’s new Ricochet podcast. Tune in here to listen.

(You can hear my interview with Rob recorded onboard the National Review cruise immediately after the 2008 presidential election here.)

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I still miss C-Span’s Booknotes, which was must-watch viewing for me in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but this is the next best thing. As Orrin Judd writes, “Brian Lamb, Terry Teachout and Louis Armstrong…what more could you ask?”

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At AOL’s Daily Finance page, liberal TV analyst Jeff Bercovici asks, “Is America Getting Over Keith Olbermann?”

Keith Olbermann was already a renowned sportscaster when he rose to prominence as a political commentator. This was during the Bush Administration, when the left was badly in need of a forceful voice to rally around. [Beyond Al Gore, John Kerry, Michael Moore, Bill Moyers, the Daily Kos, the Nation, the New Republic, the New York Times op-ed page, Air America, etc. -- Ed] Such was his popularity that MSNBC reoriented its entire primetime lineup around it.

But now the Democrats control Congress and the White House, and there are creeping indications that the world may not have quite as much need of — or patience for — Olbermann and his shtick as it once did.

Not that the world, let alone American cable viewers, had too much need or patience for Olbermann’s shtick to begin with:

Meanwhile, O’Reilly’s boss gets accused of impoliteness by — wait for it — the titular proprietress of the Huffington Post on ABC this morning:

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Aren’t you concerned about the language that Glenn Beck is using, which is, after all, inciting the American people? There is a lot of suffering out there, as you know, and when he talks about people being slaughtered, about who is going to be the next in the killing spree…

(CROSSTALK)

AILES: Well, he was talking about Hitler and Stalin slaughtering people. So I think he was probably accurate. Also, I’m a little….

HUFFINGTON: No, no, he was talking about this administration.

AILES: I don’t — I think he speaks English. I don’t know, but I mean, I don’t misinterpret any of his words. He did say one unfortunate thing, which he apologized for, but that happens in live television. So I don’t think it’s — I think if we start going around as the word police in this business, it will be…

HUFFINGTON: It’s not about the word police. It’s about something deeper. It’s about the fact that there is a tradition as the historian Richard Hofstetter said, in American politics, of the paranoid style. And the paranoid style is dangerous when there is real pain out there. [It sure is, Arianna -- Ed] I mean, with…

AILES: I agree with you. I read something on your blog that said I looked like J. Edgar Hoover, I had a face like a fist, and I was essentially a malignant tumor…

HUFFINGTON: Well, that’s…

AILES: And I thought — and then it got nasty after that…

HUFFINGTON: … that was never by anybody that we had…

(CROSSTALK)

AILES: Then it really went nasty, and I thought, gee, maybe Arianna ought to cut this out, but…

Heh.™

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“Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.”

– President Calvin Coolidge, shortly after handing over the White House to what would be a succession of busybodies.

Which leads us to this question for the current president’s press secretary:

Here are two (related) questions some reporter should ask Robert Gibbs at the next press briefing: “Is there any aspect of our lives that the President will say is off-limits to federal regulation? Is there anything that he will unequivocally promise not to try to control?”

If they try to control how much sugar I drink in sodas and how college football is played, I can’t think of anything they would not try to control.

And, Orrin Hatch is equally to blame. His role lends credence to the idea that the “old guard” Republicans are equally unprincipled.

But remember, the president isn’t an ideologue! In Commentary, Peter Wehner writes:

Barack Obama’s claim to the GOP lawmakers today — “I am not an ideologue” — calls to mind Richard Nixon’s famous claim, “I am not a crook.” Unfortunately both Messrs. Obama and Nixon were what they claimed they were not. Now being a crook is much worse than being an ideologue; but being an ideologue, especially a liberal one, can have its own high costs, as our 44th president is discovering.

I rather doubt Obama considers himself an ideologue; he has probably convinced himself that he is what he wants to project: an empiricist, a pragmatist, and person who makes decisions based on evidence and reason instead of ideology. The fact that he has pursued an agenda blessed, in almost every instance, by Nancy Pelosi is the oddest of coincidences.

I happen to be glad that Obama met with House Republicans; and if this signals a new way of doing business, more power to him. We’ll see. He certainly deserves the chance to amend his ways. But because Obama is, himself, deeply ideological, I suspect he will be more resistant than most. Yet political reality and political defeats can quickly concentrate the minds of politicians.

I have heard sound bits of Obama in two post-State of the Union settings. There is an almost plaintive quality to the president’s words, at least at several points. He simply doesn’t seem able to process what is happening to him or to deal with the mounting problems he and his party face. For a man beginning his second year in office, he can’t understand why he is the most polarizing president we have seen. Or why his disapproval ratings are at a record high this soon into his presidency. Or why he has lost more support in his first year than any other president in our lifetime. Or why the public is rejecting his agenda almost across the board. Or why the public is rejecting his party in almost every possible case. Or why Democratic lawmakers, themselves, are beginning to break with him. (Hint: it has to do with the fact that the president is, at this stage at least, widely seen as a failure.)

One day, the president is defiant and petulant; the next day, he pleads to be understood and accepted. Barack Obama, a man of limitless self-regard, appears to be struggling with what to say and how to find his way out of the dark and deep woods he finds himself in. Such things can be almost poignant to watch.

But rather painful for the nation to have to live through.

Update: And of course, it’s worth flashing back to FDR’s comments in January of 1944 — when he paradoxically threatened Congress that a postwar return to the era of the comparatively laissez-faire federal government of the 1920s would the equivalent of yielding to “the spirit of fascism here at home.”

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Kyle Smith writes:

Variety’s Todd McCarthy says the same things I said in my post on this subject a few days ago:

I must hasten to point out that, given the dogmatic leftism/tree-hugging/granola-chewing/global warming alarmism, et al., the festival has always embraced, the only real act of rebellion within a Sundance context would be to present a smart film that questioned any of these positions. I honestly cannot remember ever seeing what could remotely be described as a conservative documentary at Sundance. Granted, not many are made, and I would frankly be amazed if any would be accepted if submitted. But I, for one, would love to see a genuinely critical examination of the many blunders and chicken-hearted actions of the United Nations; a documentary holding up for scrutiny the many wild prophecies of the esteemed Paul Ehrlich, whose doom-ridden predictions about population growth were the first words I heard out of any professor’s mouth as a university freshman, or a film that looked with unbiased clear eyes into the extent of Soviet communist infiltration and financing of American unions, academia, social organizations and other institutions from the 1930s onward.

McCarthy goes on to praise Davis Guggenheim’s so-called “An Inconvenient Truth for Republicans,” the anti teacher-union documentary “Waiting for Superman.”

I’m not sure why anyone would be surprised that something like Sundance is one-sided. It’s a safe, plush venue for Hollywood to launch what it thinks of as “edgy” movies about about topics its peers have long since stopped debating in the legacy media. Or as Mark Steyn wrote in 2006:

Say what you like about those Hollywood guys in the Thirties but they were serious about their leftism. Say what you like about those Hollywood guys in the Seventies but they were serious about their outrage at what was done to the lefties in the McCarthy era — though they might have been better directing their anger at the movie-industry muscle that enforced the blacklist. By comparison, [George Clooney via his film Good Night and Good Luck] is no more than a pose — he’s acting at activism, new Hollywood mimicking old Hollywood’s robust defense of even older Hollywood. He’s more taken by the idea of “speaking truth to power” than by the footling question of whether the truth he’s speaking to power is actually true.That’s why Hollywood prefers to make “controversial” films about controversies that are settled, rousing itself to fight battles long won. Go back to USA Today’s approving list of Hollywood’s willingness to “broach the tough issues”: “Brokeback and Capote for their portrayal of gay characters; Crash for its examination of racial tension . . .” That might have been “bold” “courageous” movie-making half-a-century ago. Ever seen the Dirk Bogarde film Victim? He plays a respectable married barrister whose latest case threatens to expose his homosexuality. That was 1961, when homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom and Bogarde was the British movie industry’s matinee idol and every schoolgirl’s pinup: That’s brave. Doing it at a time when your typical conservative politician gets denounced as “homophobic” because he’s only in favor of civil unions is just an exercise in moral self-congratulation. And, unlike the media, most of the American people are savvy enough to conclude that by definition that doesn’t require their participation.

Emmett Tyrell of the American Spectator once described what he called the Kultursmog – a mass media that eventually closed most of its doors to conservatives and libertarians, something that Hollywood effectively did in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Why would its film festivals change such sclerotic practices, especially since the people who founded them are in their dotage?

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Byron York writes in the Washington Examiner that the New York Times, via Frank Rich, and the editors who approved his column, have dubbed former POW and moderate Republican John McCain the “unpatriotic opposition:”

From columnist Frank Rich:

If Reid can serve as the face of Democratic fecklessness in the Senate, then John McCain epitomizes the unpatriotic opposition.

The rest of Rich’s column is here.

In the past, Rich has bristled at Republicans who, in his eyes, sought to cast Democrats as unpatriotic. In June 2008, Rich blasted McCain for trying “to create a smoke screen by smearing Barack Obama as unpatriotic.” In August 2007, he hit “the right’s vigilantes” who Rich said “branded [as] unpatriotic” a program on ABC listing the names of American servicemembers who died in Iraq. In June 2006, Rich slammed President George W. Bush for “implying that his critics are unpatriotic, if not outright treasonous.” In November 2005, he criticized Bush for giving a “Veteran’s Day speech smearing the war’s critics as unpatriotic.” And in October 2005, he smacked Karl Rove for creating “the rhetoric that would be used habitually to smear any war critics as unpatriotic.”

There are more examples, if you care to look. But it’s clear that Frank Rich used to become quite upset when he felt a Republican was branding a Democrat as unpatriotic. But that was then. This is now.

At the end of last October, Rich rather paradoxically described the conservative Republicans who wanted a smaller government-oriented candidate Doug Hoffman over RINO Dede Scozzafava as the biggest government types there are: “Stalinists”, to quote from the headline of Rich’s column.

Of course, as we’ve noted in a recent edition of our Silicon Graffiti videoblog, for much of the 20th century, being a Stalinist was a pretty cool thing at the New York Times, whose Walter Duranty copped a Pulitzer by airbrushing out all of the horrors of Stalin’s terror famine. The Times later gushed at the rest of Uncle Joe’s accomplishments in their fawning obituary in 1953. In the late 1950s, Timesman Herbert Matthew helped to launch Fidel Castro. A decade or so later, the once and future publishers of the paper would have this conversation, as described by the New Yorker:

“He had been something of a political activist in high school — he had been suspended briefly from Browning for trying to organize a shutdown of the school following the National Guard’s shooting of students at Kent State — and at Tufts he eagerly embraced the antiwar movement. His first arrest for civil disobedience took place outside the Raytheon Comapny, a defense and space contractor; there, dressed in an old Marine jacket of Punch’s, he joined other demonstrators who were blocking the entrance to the company’s gates. He was soon arrested again, in an antiwar sit-in at the J.F.K. Federal Building in Boston.”

Punch had shown little reaction after the first arrest, but when he got word of the second one he flew to Boston. Over dinner, he asked his son why he was involved with the protests and what kind of behavior the family might expect of him in the future. Arthur assured his father he was not planning on a career of getting himself arrested. After dinner, as the two men walked in the Boston Common, Punch asked what his son later characterized as ‘the dumbest question I’ve ever heard in my life’: ‘If a young American soldier comes upon a young North Vietnamese soldier, which one do you want to see get shot?’ Arthur answered, ‘I would want to see the American get shot. It’s the other guy’s country; we shouldn’t be there.’ To the elder Sulzberger, this bordered on traitor’s talk. ‘How can you say that?’ he yelled. Years later, Arthur said of the incident, ‘It’s the closest he’s ever come to hitting me.’”

And six years ago, the Times and his subsidiary paper the Boston Globe endorsed Sen John Kerry (D-MA) for the presidency, who was unrepentant over his own unpatriotic transgressions during the Vietnam War. In 2007, the Times would give a sweetheart ad rate deal to Moveon.org, for their infamous “General Paetraus or General Betray Us?” Ad. Last fall, Thomas Friedman wrote that he prefers China’s one-party government over messy American democracy.

So to paraphrase the question I asked in the video back in November, for Rich, Pinch, Friedman, and the rest of the Timesmen, why is being the “unpatriotic opposition” suddenly a bad thing in their eyes?

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Remember the Mattel V-RROOM! from the early to mid ’60s…

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…It’s still just as silly, but it’s not just for bicycles anymore:

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Somewhere, P.J. O’Rourke weeps.

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Duuuude: 78 year old actor Rip Torn “arrested, charged with breaking into local bank with loaded gun.”

Related: Tim Graham on “Actor/Activists Who Need a PR Guru”:

For those who remember Susan Sarandon’s didactic Haiti lecture at the Oscars years ago, the earnest celebrity aura is getting a little clouded. This year, she’s sponsoring models playing ping-pong for Haiti — when she’s not spanking a man-pig with a ruler on the stage of a rock concert.

This doesn’t look like a coordinated public-relations strategy.

Fortunately,  ManBearPig remains safe.

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The latest edition of PJM Political is now online:

• “She” is obviously no John Galt, but PJTV’s Trifecta asks who is “Ellie Light”, and what does it say about the president when his last diehard supporter just might be a cyberbot?
• Steve, Bill Whittle and Scott Ott postmortem President Obama’s State of the Union address, with plenty of soundbites from the president, and plenty of snark from the gang.
• In a segment from PJTV.com’s  Middle East Update, Whittle asks Caroline Glick, deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post how well the SOTU played in Israel.
• PJM Political then takes a break from the horrors of the real world to debate the blood-soaked fantasies of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, via PJTV’s Poliwood, with Pajamas Media CEO Roger L. Simon, and his fellow Academy Award-winning screenwriter, Lionel Chetwynd.
• While Basterds at least knows who the good guys and bad guys were in World War II, that isn’t always the case with Hollywood. As Andrew Klavan explains, culture in Hollywood has become a place where the conservative facts of life are magically turned into liberal fantasies. From JFK conspiracy theories to murderous evangelical Christians, can you spot the difference between “culture” and reality? Andrew can.
• Produced by your humble sherpa to the blobularly, zeitgeisty thickets of the Blogosphere.

Tune in here to listen!

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A. Barton Hinkle of the Richmond Times-Dispatch writes:

This is a complex issue, and the longer it was debated, the more skeptical people became. I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people.

–Barack Obama, State of the Union.

There’s a lot in the bill that people are going to like. It’s just a question of understanding it.

–ABC’s Cokie Roberts, Dec. 20.

What are the immediate plans for recalibrating the message or intensifying the message to explain better to the American people what you’re trying to do?

–Question to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, Jan. 20.

It mighty big of man with nice voice to take blame like that. Him not need to. Head honchos not often take blame. Most times after big screw-up, head honchos say they have “full confidence” in someone who work for them — right before pushing someone off edge of cliff, or letting someone twist “slowly, slowly” in wind, like tricky Nixon guy did with man who ran FBI.

Man with nice voice not like those other head honchos. Him bring change to Washington already, see?

But him right. Him not explain health care good. Use too many big words. Say too many compound-complex sentences. Confuse American people. American people not want that. American people want simple explanation. Simpler the better.

Me feel kind of sorry. It must really get on nerves for man with nice voice and people on his side, like lady on TV and cheerleaders in White House press pool. Why can’t lamebrain American people get idea through thick skulls? Them not know how to make choices in own best interests! Need enlightened leaders to make choices for them. (Enlightened = smart. Me look this up in thing called “dictionary.” Dictionary good! Try sometime!)

Want example? Take mammogram fight. (Mammogram is thing where doctor squish tender woman part really hard and take picture. Owie!) Last year U.S. Preventive Services Task Force say women not need mammogram until age 50. Say squishing younger women not very clinically effective, so not save many lives. Say sometimes “false positives” scare women. This not good. Smart people must protect silly women, make sure they not get scared!

Experts say, from cruising altitude of 32,000 feet saving 12,000 lives over course of 10 years just not worth it. Country should not waste money like that. (Can hardly see someone from that far up anyway.) But crazy right-wing TeaParty people go around saying things like: Well, if it my life or my daughter’s life, maybe me feel different. Maybe me should be one to decide to get squished or not. This just show crazy right-wing Tea-Party people always thinking about themselves.

There so many things man with nice voice need to explain gooder. Like, if some people still need health insurance, why not just give them insurance voucher, like housing voucher or food stamps? Why put entire U.S. medical system in Cuisinart and set on Liquefy?

And if verbal communication fails, you can always silently bridge the inter-party gap via what the crew of the USS Pueblo presciently dubbed the Hawaiian Good Luck Gesture.

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And now for news of fresh disaster, via Kate of Small Dead Animals:

Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose:

• BBC – California ‘protects’ Apollo 11 landing site on Moon.

• Mercury News – California controller: State will run out of cash before April.

• Bonus link.

Fortunately, all of California’s fiscal woes may soon be solved in fell swoop by this novel revenue generating plan.

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Found via the Brothers Judd, in the the far left (I mean, even further to the left than Newsweek) Website In These Times, David Sirota explores “Our Addiction to Disaster Porn:”

[T]housands of miles from the San Fernando Valley’s seedy studios, the adult entertainment business is alive and panting in Haiti. This year’s luminaries aren’t the industry’s typical muscle-bound mustaches of machismo—they are NBC’s Brian Williams pillow-talking to the camera in his Indiana Jones garb, CNN’s Sanjay Gupta playing doctor and, of course, CNN’s Anderson Cooper in that two-sizes-too-small t-shirt “rarely missing an opportunity to showcase his buff physique,” as The New York Times gushed. They are all the disaster porn stars in the media with visions of Peabodys and Pulitzers dancing in their heads.

And We the Ogling People drink it in.

Like any X-rated content, this smut is all flesh and no substantive plot. The lens flits between body parts and journalists pulling perverse Cronkite-in-Vietnam impressions (at one point, CNN showed Cooper and his t-shirt saving a child). But there is little discussion of how western Hispaniola was a man-made disaster before an earthquake made it a natural one.

What, and get talking heads fired from liberal TV networks for committing thoughtcrime?

Related: “Let’s Talk About Political Correctness!”

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President Obama, meeting with the GOP today: “nobody’s been a bigger promoter of clean coal technology than I am.”

Here are some earlier promotions from the president, his vice president, and his party’s Senate Majority Leader:

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Related: “Shameless Liar: Actually Those Health Care Talks Really Were on CSPAN (Video)”

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As Peggy Noonan writes, Obama’s State of the Union address is built around two themes, that “Washington is sick and broken—and it can solve all our problems”:

The central fact of the speech was the contradiction at its heart. It repeatedly asserted that Washington is the answer to everything. At the same time it painted a picture of Washington as a sick and broken place. It was a speech that argued against itself: You need us to heal you. Don’t trust us, we think of no one but ourselves.

The people are good but need guidance—from Washington. The middle class is anxious, and its fears can be soothed—by Washington. Washington can “make sure consumers . . . have the information they need to make financial decisions.” Washington must “make investments,” “create” jobs, increase “production” and “efficiency.”

At the same time Washington is a place “where every day is Election Day,” where all is a “perpetual campaign” and the great sport is to “embarrass your opponents” and lob “schoolyard taunts.”

Why would anyone have faith in that thing to help anyone do anything?

Update: Further thoughts from Mark Steyn in his weekly op-ed:

As President Obama sees it, whatever the problem, the solution is more Washington.Simply as a matter of internal logic, this is somewhat perplexing. After all, when he isn’t blaming George W. Bush, Mr. Obama blames “Washington” – a Washington mired in “partisanship” and “pettiness” and “the same tired battles” and “Washington gimmicks” that do nothing but ensure that our “problems have grown worse.” Washington, Mr. Obama tells us, is “unable or unwilling to solve any of our problems.”

So let’s have more Washington! That raises the question: Does even Mr. Obama listen to his speeches?

The public does – at least to this extent: They understand that when he’s attacking the tired old Washington games, he’s just playing the game, but when he’s proposing the tired old Washington solutions, he means it. That’s the only Barack Obama on offer. And everything the president proposes means more debt, which at the level this guy is spending means higher taxes.

Functioning societies depend on agreed rules. If you want to open a business, you do it in Singapore or Ireland because the rules are known to all parties. You don’t go to Sudan or Zimbabwe, where the rules are whatever the state’s whims happen to be that morning.

That’s why Mr. Obama is such a job-killer. Why would a small business take on a new employee? The president is proposing a soak-the-banks tax that could impact access to credit. The House has passed a cap-and-trade bill that could impose potentially unlimited regulatory costs. The Senate is in favor of health care reform that would allow the IRS to seize your assets if you and your employees’ health arrangements do not meet the approval of the federal government. Some of these things will pass into law; some of them won’t. But all of them send a consistent, cumulative message: There are no rules.

In such an environment, would you hire anyone? Mr. Obama can bury it in half a ton of leaden telepromptered sludge, but the message is clear: more Washington, more regulation, more spending and no rules.

If that isn’t a huge opportunity for the GOP to use the president’s rhetoric against him, I don’t know what is.

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At the Volokh Conspiracy, Randy Barnett writes:

Jack Balkin thinks FDR’s lengthy analysis of the Constitution in his address to Congress is equivalent to President Obama’s drive-by 72 word inaccurate polemic about Citizen’s United. But Jack is a master of appreciating context–not to mention modern media–and the context here makes all the difference. In addition to being a substantive constitutional critique, which the President Obama’s remarks assuredly were not:

FDR did not launch the attack on live national television, with the justices there under the glare of cameras, having given them no advanced warning of the impending attack on the Court. (I sincerely doubt Supreme Court justices attended state of the union addresses in those days.)

FDR did not foment the Democrats in Congress who surrounded the six seated justices–and the Attorney General a few feet away–to spring to their feet applauding his critique of the Court (note Harry Reid and Dick Durban enjoying themselves directly behind the justices).

FDR did not even mention the “Supreme Court” but referred to “The Judicial Branch” many paragraphs in.

But when it comes to State of the Union addresses, Roosevelt wasn’t above adding a certain amount of polemics when it suited his mood. From 1944′s SOTU:

One of the great American industrialists of our day—a man who has rendered yeoman service to his country in this crisis—recently emphasized the grave dangers of “rightist reaction” in this nation. Any clear-thinking business men share that concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called “normalcy” of the 1920s—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home.

As Jonah Goldberg wrote the day after President Obama’s State of the Union address this week:

Somehow that line didn’t make it into my book, but it’s a great illustration of many of my arguments. First of all, the argument is wrong and disgusting and the whole speech marked one of the great low-points of FDR’s presidency and his war leadership (contrary to many contemporary liberals like Cass Sunstein who think it was among FDR’s finest moments). It should also reassure those who think today’s politics are uglier and nastier than ever.

Second, it’s a good reminder that for generations of liberals,  the “return to normalcy” in the 1920s was America’s real moment of fascist temptation.   But the “return to normalcy” slogan was actually a rebuke against the fascistic regime and policies of Woodrow Wilson (the thought crimes, the propaganda ministry, censorship, the economic rationing, the corporatism etc.) FDR, a Wilson retread, shared the view that all it took for fascism to succeed is for progressives like him to lose control of the state. That idea endures to this day.

Hey, at least he didn’t hand out Iron Crosses to Republicans in Congress. (Including those pesky neoconservatives whom Tina Brown wrote in 2003 were so vexing to Roosevelt…)

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And it’s long overdue. At Newsreal, “Jenn Q. Public” writes, “For too long, extraordinary feats of feminist moral blindness have gone unrecognized.  But now, those dark days are finally over:”

Today, I am pleased to introduce The Naomi Wolf Award, known affectionately as The Howler.

The award bears the name of author Naomi Wolf, a third wave feminist who provoked a blogospheric kerfuffle last year with her impassioned paean to the Muslim veil.  After frolicking through a Moroccan bazaar in a headscarf she was under no obligation to wear, Wolf declared, “I felt a novel sense of calm and serenity. I felt, yes, in certain ways, free.”

The Naomi Wolf Award recognizes the failure of feminist commentators to identify Muslim veils, particularly the burqa and the niqab, as powerful symbols of extremist ideology and instruments of subjugation.  Nominees will be judged on their use of the rhetoric of freedom and choice to justify these emblems of Islamic gender apartheid.

So without further ado, the inaugural Howler goes to … Jill Filipovic, editor of Feministe, for her analysis of the French parliament’s proposed ban on veils:

Summary: I think it’s silly, an affront to basic freedoms, and ultimately more damaging to the women it claims to protect. Now France is at it again, trying to ban the wearing in public of any item of clothing that covers your face. The law is clearly targeted at French Muslims and Muslim immigrants.

I understand that many people perceive the burqa, or any full-body covering, as a symbol of female submission. Heck, I perceive the stereotypical conservative Christian floor-length denim or flowery dress the same way, so I get it. I don’t have much love lost for any religious tradition that insists the female body is inherently sinful and must be covered.

But my personal opinions on fashion and the female form, and which religious (or irreligious) path I choose to follow? Not great foundations for legally limiting the rights of others.

Jill’s observations are the depraved spawn of cultural relativism and moral equivalence. There is no parallel between the dehumanizing burqa and a modest “flowery dress.”

She flippantly crams the burqa into the “freedom of choice” category, treating it as a mere article of clothing rather than a prison spun from the threads of tyranny, coercion, and oppression.  Implicit in her writing is the question, “”But what about women who choose to wear the burqa?”

As long as the status quo on Islamic gender roles remains in place, as long as the fear of death and disfigurement looms large, there can be no meaningful choice for women.  The burqa represents the very antithesis of liberty, free will, and equality, a fact Jill willfully neglects as she pays lip service to freedom and rights.

And so, in recognition of the convoluted mental gymnastics required to twist a partial burqa ban into something more harmful to women than the burqa itself, I hereby present Jill Filipovic with her first Howler award.

Congratulations, Jill, it’s well-deserved.

Of course, it’s worth noting the moral equivocating of the the award’s namesake stretches far beyond the Islamic World.

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Whoops:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan called Hurricane Katrina “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans” because it forced the community to take steps to improve low-performing public schools, according to excerpts from the transcript of a television interview made public Friday afternoon. 

Start from zero, the Big Easy edition! James Wolcott and Michael Moore could not be reached for comment.

Update: And speaking of New Orleans, Moe Lane presents, “The standard by which all future attack ads must be judged.” It’ll tear your heart out — literally!

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From AP: “Bin Laden blasts US for climate change.”

Fortunately, this time at least, it’s merely a rhetorical explosion:

Osama bin Laden sought to draw a wider public into his fight against the United States in a new message Friday, dropping his usual talk of religion and holy war and focusing instead on an unexpected topic: global warming.The al-Qaida leader blamed the United States and other industrialized nations for climate change and said the only way to prevent disaster was to break the American economy, calling on the world to boycott U.S. goods and stop using the dollar.

“The effects of global warming have touched every continent. Drought and deserts are spreading, while from the other floods and hurricanes unseen before the previous decades have now become frequent,” bin Laden said in the audiotape, aired on the Arab TV network Al-Jazeera.

Remember back in the late 1990s, when numerous wags noted how similar Al Gore’s rhetoric sounded to the writings of the equally anti-technology Unabomber? As El Rushbo notes*, “Bin Laden Joins Algore’s Team, Becomes an Environmentalist”, adding, “I wonder who’s gonna break to the news to the guy that it’s water vapor?”

Mackubin Thomas Owens wrote on September 11th, 2003,  “9/11 revealed an emerging geopolitical reality: that the world’s most important fault line is not between the rich and the poor, but between those who accept modernity and those who reject it.”

“Freud called it displacement,” Julia Gorin wrote three years later:

It’s a peculiar thing that as the threat of global terrorism reaches a crescendo, so apparently does the threat of global warming – at least that’s what some would have us believe.

Tough language is borrowed from the war on terror and applied to the war on weather. “I really consider this a national security issue,” says celebrity activist and “An Inconvenient Truth” producer Laurie David. “Truth” star Al Gore calls global warming a “planetary emergency.” Bill Clinton’s first worry is climate change: “It’s the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it.”

Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can’t deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV. Forget the Patriot Act, it’s Kyoto that’ll save you.

And just like that, the circle is squared: Global Warming: it’s the moral equivalent of terrorism — ask the terrorists themselves!

Update: Such desperate pandering to western leftists leads Allahpundit (trackbacks be upon him) to believe that al Qaeda has jumped the shark. I’d like to think that it also bespeaks similarly of the global warming brigade as well.

(more…)

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