As the Weekly Standard notes, it wasn’t online for long — but still, that seems an odd message for a White House staffed with Goldman-Sachs retreads, and for an administration that Wall Street wildly supported in 2008, whose reelection bid is financed with plenty of Wall Street money this go-around as well.

But then, no matter how many left-leaning millionaires and billionaires there are, for the average leftist, the world will forever be viewed through the prism of a 19th century Thomas Nast cartoon.

Kabuki? They’re soaking in it.

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“Low blows, lower turnouts and low expectations: Four years after he was swept to victory, how Obama’s election campaign is a joyless slog,” Toby Harnden writes in the London Daily Mail. Obama’s base isn’t exactly fired up, ready to go, to coin a phrase, Harden writes. “There is a sullenness, even resentment, that was not present in 2008. Ask an Obama supporter about their man and as often as not you will get a few words about him and then a demeaning attack on Romney or Ryan.”

And Obama’s real core base* is brittle, surely and entirely predictable, which makes tweaking them so much fun for Mitt Romney. He had to know that his mild jape at Mr. Obama’s expense — “No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate” — would cause an enormous case of the vapors to breakout amongst the 21st century Marget Dumonts at MSNBC. It’s the “most despicable bigotry we can imagine!”

Bless their hearts. (And that was on top of Martin Bashir’s meltdown last night.)

As we just saw in the last post, the “liberal Bletchley Park” of the MSM views any criticism, no matter how mild, of Mr. Obama as raaaaaaaacism, and any wavering of support of Fearless Leader as a sign of Disloyality to the Cause, as Roger Kimball notes, regarding Niall Ferguson’s Newsweek cover story.

“There’s a word for people who see the world in such stark terms of good vs. evil: Manichaean,” James Taranto writes today in his Best of the Web column, with an assist from PJM regular contributor David Solway:

 As the capitalization suggests, it’s a proper noun, referring not just to a generic attitude but to a specific creed, founded by a man named Mani. “The religion disappeared from the West in 10th century, and from China in the 14th century, and today it is extinct,” according to an essay by Tore Kjeilen.

Can Mani help us explain The One and his acolytes? Perhaps. “Manichaeism is the largest and most important example of Gnosticism,” Kjeilen explains. “Central in the Manichaean teaching was dualism, that the world itself, and all creatures, was part of a battle between the good, represented by God, and the bad, the darkness, represented by a power driven by envy and lust.”

Gnosticism is a utopian philosophy. Its essential premises are that the world, not man, is fallen and the route to salvation lies in knowledge (gnosis in Greek), not faith. As poet David Solway explains in a PJMedia.com essay: “The world and all its customs, beliefs, norms, usages, and statutes was disavowed as a vast and perverse deception. The imperative was to restore a prior or potential, but shattered, harmony by whatever means necessary and thus to recreate the Creation.”

Solway argues that the psychology of contemporary left “is intrinsically a Gnostic one”:

All of the Left’s diverse manifestations, from radical communism to the more complaisant forms of soft-focus socialism, are actuated by the mystical lure of a harmonious society posited as the end-goal of History–a society in which the elements of conflict have been banished and sufficient wherewithal is assured for all its members. The Hegelian assumption–partially adopted by Marx–of the “end” toward which the forces of History are tending is the secular version of the Gnostic reverie of the benign blueprint that was somehow botched. The Leftist dream of ultimate “ends” mirrors the Gnostic illusion of first beginnings, of a pre-existent purpose. For this psychology, only the Ideal is Real, and the Real is recognized as something that is opposed to the actual, to what is presently the case.

This makes sense of the disconnect between Obama’s largely uplifting 2008 campaign and his unrelentingly vicious 2012 one. Then, he presented himself as “the Ideal,” the bringer of “hope and change” whose promise was “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

And speaking of unrelentingly vicious, it was be fascinating to see how the Democrats’ all-abortion, all-the-time convention will play, as Byron York writes in the Washington Examiner:

If you stand on the floor of a Democratic convention when a speaker is discussing abortion, you can feel the depth of the emotion that many Democrats feel on the issue. Conservatives like to say abortion is a liberal sacrament. Maybe that’s going too far, but it is very, very important. And when something means so much to a group of people, they can easily convince themselves that it means that much to others, too.

Meanwhile, the voters continue to say, overwhelmingly, that they want their president to focus on the economy and job creation. By choosing to spotlight abortion and gay marriage at their national convention, Democrats could give voters the impression that they’ve got their priorities all mixed up. Sandra Fluke may draw headlines, but does she really represent what voters think is most important?

Since we were just discussing leftwing Manichaeanism, a Power Line reader sees a Bizarro World repeat of Pat Buchanan’s Fire and Brimstone culture war speech at the 1992 Republican convention:

2012 for the Democrats is shaping up like 1992 for the Republicans, when Pat Buchanan’s famous “culture war” speech set the tone of the Bush 41 defeat. The Democrats appear to be jumping the shark on Akin and declaring a similar culture war against a straw enemy. Republican leadership has universally denounced the Akin moron, and the Democrats can’t run from the fact THEY funded his campaign, not the Republican establishment.

The tone of self-righteous indignation that is now going to storm the stage may temporarily fire up a narrow part of the base… but it will alienate swing voters and may well chase other parts of their base away from the voting booth.

Or as Ed Morrissey asks, “Will the Dem convention be Abortion-palooza?” Well, that would certainly suit Mr. Obama.

* As opposed to his zombie fake core base — or to paraphrase this USA Today article, man pretending to be president has millions of pretend Twitter followers.

Update: Video above via Small Dead Animals.

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In 1957, William DeVane, dean of Yale, made a casual statement that no one noticed at the time. But in retrospect it’s remarkable.

Our national leaders for the most part are men of integrity, idealism, and skill; our literary and artistic people command an international respect such as they never had before; our scientists and engineers, especially the latter, are the wonder and envy of other nations; our teachers in our colleges and universities are learned and devoted.

In 1957, Americans were pleased with America and proud of it. They had problems and knew it, but were undismayed.

Less than twenty years later, that proud confidence was gone, crumbled like mud-bricks into flyblown clouds of dust. “No one knows which way to turn and which way to go,” wrote the great essayist (and lifelong optimist, patriot, liberal) E. B. White in 1975. “Patriotism is unfashionable,” he wrote in 1976, “having picked up the taint of chauvinism, jingoism, and demagoguery. A man is not expected to love his country, lest he make an ass of himself.” The nation got over its low spirits, but Americans no longer speak about their country the way DeVane did back in 1957.

– From the opening of Chapter One of David Gelernter’s new book,  America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered In the Obamacrats).  Today, if an American academic expresses any pride at all in America, he does so by modifying his statement with some variation of “yes but.” Or as an academic-turned-president said shortly after taking office:

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

But what caused such a dramatic transformation? That’s the subject of the new book by Gelernter, who is also the professor of computer science at Yale University. During our 25-minute interview, David discusses:

• We all know of the isolationist right in America on the eve of World War II.  Why aren’t we as familiar with the numerous prominent liberal intellectuals who also opposed America’s entry into that war?
• The symbiotic relationship between the liberal intellectuals who dreamed up America’s role in the Vietnam War, and the liberal intellectuals who opposed it. And how opposition to Vietnam essentially predates the war itself, not the other way around.
• The role of what Gelernter dubs “self-hating WASPs,” and the changing role of Jewish intellectuals in the academy over the 20th century.
• How Barack Obama is “the perfect superhero of America-Lite.”
• How a video featuring David earned him 549 “likes” — and over five thousand dislikes from YouTube’ viewers.
• How the higher-education bubble (to coin a phrase) could be the opening for conservatives and other members of the non-Left to take back higher culture.

And much more. Click here to listen:

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(25 minutes long; 23 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 4.3 MB lo-fi edition.)

Since in the past, a few people have complained of difficulties with the Flash player above and/or downloading the audio, use the video player below, or click here to be taken to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip. Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.

For the rest of our podcasts, click here and just keep scrolling. The transcript of my interview with Gelernter begins on the next page.

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At the end of 2006, journalist Froma Harrop, whom five years later would beclown herself on the Daily Show when the show (surprisingly) called her on writing a piece arguing for civil discourse after comparing Tea Partiers to Al Qaeda, wrote a piece at Real Clear Politics titled, “Obama Scores as Exotic Who Says Nothing:”

What Obama really thinks should be done about health care and the terrorist threat remain secrets that his book does not unlock. His two years in the Senate certainly haven’t revealed any bold policy ideas.

This leave-them-guessing strategy slips out in the book’s prologue. “I serve as a blank screen,” Obama writes, “on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” He notifies readers that “my treatment of the issues is often partial and incomplete.” It takes some doing for a politician to write a 364-page book, his second volume, and skate past all controversy.

Two years later, at the end of a presidential campaign in which CNN would spend at least a year of being so deep in the tank for then-Preisdent Elect Barack Obama that the network gave itself a collective case of the bends, network contributor Jonathan Mann wrote a column with a remarkable ending:

Obama hasn’t taken office as president, only glimpsed the Oval Office as a visitor and won’t take over until January 20.

But already, he’s being compared to the most remarkable leaders the United States has ever had.

The way some Americans talk, they’re getting five presidents in one.

After comparing Obama to first JFK, FDR, Lincoln and Bill Clinton, Mann concluded, “The Americans who are comparing him to those remarkable predecessors are putting a lot of faith in a man they barely know.”

On the eve of the election in 2008 though, Tom Brokaw of NBC, and Charlie Rose, then with PBS, admitted that they knew very little about President Obama:

CHARLIE ROSE: I don’t know what Barack Obama’s worldview is.

TOM BROKAW: No, I don’t, either.

ROSE: I don’t know how he really sees where China is.

BROKAW: We don’t know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy.

ROSE: I don’t really know. And do we know anything about the people who are advising him?

BROKAW: Yeah, it’s an interesting question.

ROSE: He is principally known through his autobiography and through very aspirational (sic) speeches.

BROKAW: Two of them! I don’t know what books he’s read.

ROSE: What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama?

BROKAW: There’s a lot about him we don’t know.

And the mystery continues! “Even After 4 Years, Obama Remains a Mystery,” David Shribman wrote yesterday at Real Clear Politics:

George W. Bush was not an enigma. He had no hidden parts. His father was not mysterious. George H.W. Bush’s life was dedicated to achievement and service. Even Bill Clinton wasn’t unfathomable. Nothing in his presidency — the brilliant highs, the shocking lows — was a substantial, unpredictable departure from his past.

Barack Obama, though, is the most enigmatic president since Jimmy Carter, the most mysterious since Lyndon Johnson, the most unfathomable since Franklin Roosevelt. Political professionals sometimes say of public figures that what you see is what you get, more or less. But with Mr. Obama, what you see is both more and less than what you get. [...]

The gravest warning sign in Mr. Obama’s background wasn’t his spare record in the U.S. Senate (Johnson often ridiculed John F. Kennedy for having accomplished almost nothing in the Capitol), nor his limited experience in electoral office (Lincoln had but one term in the House). Instead, the most troubling aspect of Mr. Obama’s past were the 129 abstentions in his Illinois Senate career. They suggested that Mr. Obama was more interested in getting elected than in doing the work he had been elected to perform.

While much of Obama’s “mystery” can be written off to the reluctance of liberal networks and news agencies to investigate the most radical chic candidate to ever win election to the White House, Orrin Judd suggests that there’s a much more prosaic issue at work: “Having elected such an empty suit, we have a great need to believe that there is more to him than we’ve gotten.  But our need does not create substance.  Mr. Obama is a classic social climber who believes in nothing but his own advancement.”

But his pants were perfect, and he had a D in parentheses after his name on the ticket. What more did you need to know from the MSM about him?

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Biased? Moi? Soledad channels her inner Dan Rather:

“I don’t think I show bias in my TV show. I think I am aggressive with people about trying to find the facts behind what they say,” O’Brien told the Reporter’s Paul Bond. “Am I a liberal or conservative? I’m neither. Like most Americans, I find politics very frustrating. Like most Americans, I’d like to hear from politicians the facts. That is what drives me.”

At the American Interest Website, on Walter Russell Mead’s blog, John Ellis explores “The Collapse of CNN.” The quote above by Soledad O’Brien defines what happened perfectly.

The vast majority of Americans are self-aware enough to understand where they fit on the political spectrum, and seek out programming that reflects their worldview. The idea that a network anchorperson needs to be “neutral” in his or her politics more or less worked from the 1920s, when the first radio networks began, through the end of the 1970s. (Watch Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film Network if you need a refresher on the television news industry at the peak of the Big Three’s information monopoly.) Broadcast bandwidth was scarce, building a national radio and then television network was expensive, and the Fairness Doctrine stifled competition anyhow, as Nick Gillespie and George Mason University’s Thomas Hazlett discussed in a recent video at Reason TV. It also more or less fit within the consensus of the New Deal that dominated America during the middle of the 20th century. Which is why Cronkite, Dan Rather, and other news industry figures who date from this period reflexively pretended not to know what their politics were when asked in interviews, until after they vacated their network anchor chairs and revealed themselves as — shocker! — flaming liberals.

But beginning in the 1980s, cable and satellite TV held out the promise of hundreds of TV channels, making the Fairness Doctrine seem like a dinosaur from the bobbysoxer era. (Even more so, once the rise of the World Wide Web essentially made bandwidth free.)  In the 1990s, once first Rush Limbaugh and then Fox News and Drudge took off, the landscape of the media changed dramatically, finally returning to Americans choices of where to get their news and opinion, in a manner not seen since the days before the broadcast networks. Conservatives were thrilled; the left wanted — and finally got — outlets that matched their worldview as well. (There were loads of leftists in America prior to the rise of the Blogosphere and MSNBC who turned on the 6:30 evening news and thought that Peter, Dan, and Tom were waaaaay too conservative for their taste.)

Fox and MSNBC are open about their biases — if you’re on the right, you have a channel that matches your worldview. If you’re on the left, you have a channel that matches your worldview. Viewers at home on both sides of the aisle may grouse that their respective channels are too moderate. (I know plenty of conservative Fox viewers think that; I’m assuming there must be a certain number of leftists who would long to junk MSNBC for The Bill Ayers Network. And Al Gore’s Current TV is essentially trying to battle MSNBC from the left.)

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Tracy Quan, the author of the Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl series of books, concludes her obituary of Helen Gurley Brown for Australia’s ABC Website by writing, “Sometimes the most vicious, unsympathetic disagreements are those which occur between liberals and radicals.”

See also: The entire history of the 1960s, the bloodsports between Obama and Hillary supporters in 2008, or more recently, this.

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Stacy McCain: “Is it just me? Is there anyone else who has a hard time imagining Harry Truman doing a 1948 whistle-stop tour, proclaiming that Tom Dewey was hostile to ‘transgender Americans’?”

Oh I don’t know, Truman redlined the Godwin Meter against Dewey; he would have pulled out any other stops if they were available to him back then.

Yet another reminder that even if Obama does win in November, like Truman, he’ll be seriously damaged goods in his second term.

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One of the fun aspects of blogging about the latest hijinks from the far left is that we know that they don’t believe their own rhetoric. Al Gore compares global warming to Kristallnacht, and yet when asked in a Senate subcommittee hearing if he will rollback his lavish lifestyle and live the way he espouses to the rest of us (when he’s not hosting rock concerts), he immediately demurred.  Barack Obama tells us, “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,,” and every Earth Day — heck every day he’s campaigning for reelection — consumes tens of thousands of gallons of fuel jetting around the country to remind us of the importance of reducing our consumption. A generation ago, Jane Fonda sat on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun and told the world, “If you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would some day become communist.” Then she flew back to Los Angeles and a made a fortune in movies and exercise videotapes, before marrying broadcasting mogul Ted Turner. Avengers producer Joss Whedon is free to natter on about the joys of socialism, but as Zombie writes in response at the Tatler, “If you really look forward to a socialist America, Josh, put your money where your mouth is, and sign over your entire personal assets to the central government.” Don’t hold your breath waiting for Josh to implement that advice.

In contrast to all of the above leftwing poseurs, Oh Kil-nam is the rare man of the left who believed his own Barbra Streisand, with disastrous consequences to himself and his family, as Richard Fernandez writes at the Belmont Club: 

The BBC tells the melancholy story of Oh Kil-nam, a South Korean man who, convinced by his Marxist education that North Korea was a worker’s paradise, decided to defect there with his wife and two children in 1986. Oh, who had just completed his PhD in Germany in Marxist economics and who “had been active in left-wing groups” had no reason to doubt the beckoning invitation of North Korean officials who promised him free health care and a government job, like certain other people you may know.

He chose poorly.

Aged and broken, Oh now concludes that his “life was ruined by his decision to defect to North Korea. Seventy years old, he still does not know the fate of his wife and daughters – either dead or imprisoned in a labour camp.” His wife, who lacked the benefit of a European education, suspected something was amiss from the first. She was aghast when he told her of his plan to defect.

“Do you know what kind of place it is?” she asked. “You have not even been there once. How can you make such a reckless decision?”

But Oh replied that the Northerners were Koreans too – they “cannot be that brutal”, he told her.

Ha ha ha.

Hee, hee, ho, ha, ha ha! LOL. He thought they couldn’t be that brutal. Those are the famous last words.

But being the dutiful wife, she followed Oh with her two children. As soon as he arrived at the Pyongyang, Oh realized that he had not read the fine print. “Communist party officials and children clutching flowers were there to meet them. But despite the cold of a North Korean December, the children were not wearing socks and their traditional clothes were so thin that they shivered. Then he began to suspect that they didn’t have any warm clothes. “When I saw this I was really surprised and my wife even started to cry.”

But there was little time for that. Ignoring his questions about the promises of the  job or the government health care, Oh and his family were whisked to a guarded camp where he was drilled in the sayings of Kim Il-Sung. They were kept in privation, the better to make them fear losing what little they had. Soon  Oh was told that if he and his family planned to keep on eating he would accept an assignment to Europe where his task was to lure more South Koreans to the worker’s paradise the better to convince the sophisticated Europeans what a great place it was. He was ready to cooperate but was stopped by the courageous actions of his wife.

she was furious. “I remember the two of us talking about it softly under the blanket. I told my wife that by fulfilling this mission, we would preserve our livelihood in North Korea. But she slapped me in the face.” Shin said they would have to pay the price for his mistakes – he could not entrap others.

Damned herself, his wife did not want to damn others. So when Oh arrived in Copenhagen, he defected to the West. For Oh it meant going back to the place he left before.  But for his wife and two children it was a death sentence. He never saw them again.

Where would he get the notion that North Korea was a workers’ paradise? Who would espouse such claptrap?

Oh.

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What can CNN do to recapture their ratings, now at historic 20 year lows? Rush Limbaugh has a modest proposal for the flailing network:

With CNN firmly entrenched in the abyss of the ratings sewer, radio host Rush Limbaugh is predicting a shift in the political viewpoint of the cable news network.

“I think I figured out what CNN’s gonna do to try to recapture their lost glory,” Limbaugh said this afternoon on his top-rated program.

“I think they’re gonna move further to the left, try to even ‘out-left’ MSNBC. That’s based on a couple of things I’ve seen. It’s too early to know for certain. Too soon to tell right now. But it looks to me like that CNN is gonna move even further left in their valiant effort to recapture the 98 percent of their audience that they’ve lost since the 1980s.”

Rush prides himself on being “on the cutting edge of societal evolution,” but he may be arriving a bit too late to this story. Are we sure that CNN hasn’t already begun to implement the advice that Rush is preferring?

The following is a segment that aired on CNN in 2010. If the flailing network can go even more to the left than praising the glories of North Korea, that should be quite to sight to see indeed:

(H/T: 5′F)

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Louis Farrakhan comes full circle:

Farrakahn believes Elijah Muhammad, the (by all accounts deceased) former leader of the Nation of Islam, is living on a spaceship circling the planet. Also, a few years after Elijah “died,” the spaceship picked up Farrakhan and the two men had a nice chat with each other. Afterward, Farrakhan says the spaceship let him off near Washington, D.C.

The only major television journalist I’ve ever seen query Farrakhan about this stuff was Ted Koppel, host of ABCs “Nightline,” in 1996. Koppel asked him about the spaceship stuff, saying, “It sounds like gibberish, but maybe you can explain it.”

Farrakhan didn’t back off. The spiritual leader explained that the huge spaceship is “over the heads of us in North America, and soon you shall see these (spaceships) over the major cities of America.” This fact is being kept “above top-secret by the United States government.”

Farrakhan didn’t stop there. Offended at the “gibberish” remark, he fell back on some hard science: “And if it were gibberish, they made an awful lot of money, Mr. Koppel, on that movie called ‘Independence Day’ — it flooded the theaters.” Koppel conceded this point, but also alerted Farrakhan to the fact that “Independence Day” wasn’t a true story.

– Jonah Goldberg, Jewish World Review, “Treatment of Farrakhan glosses over odd issues,” October 20th, 2000.

Which is why this alliance isn’t all that much of a shock, come to think of it:

“Shock Alliance: Farrakhan Praises Integration of Scientology Into Nation of Islam Theology, Says Whites Should Use it to Become ‘Civilized’ & to Avoid Being ‘Devil Christians’ & ‘Satan Jews’”

– Headline at The Blaze today.

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Blair’s Law, the definition, according to the Urban Dictionary*:

Coined by Australian journalist, Tim Blair as “the ongoing process by which the world’s multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force.”

1. The alliance between the radical Left and extremist Islamists is an example of Blair’s Law.

2. The fact that white supremacists like David Duke supported ‘Mother’ Sheehan’s sit-in at Crawford, TX is an example of Blair’s law.

Blair’s Law in action, as defined by this Weekly Standard anecdote:

Senator John Kerry…is believed to be in the running for the secretary of state position should Barack Obama be reelected.

The Standard’s Daniel Halper quips, “Kerry likes to play foreign policy statesman, but his judgment on these issues is, well, not reliable.”

That can safely understood to be a given on all issues, but read Halper for the reason why in this specific incident.

(more…)

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As Jim Geraghty of National Review Online’s Campaign Spot writes in his latest Morning Jolt email, Fast and Furious is “One More Example of How Obama Is Exactly the Guy His Critics Said He Was:”

Anyway, if you think Bush using his Constitutional authority to replace U.S. Attorneys is a giant scandal, but shrug your shoulders at the federal government sending guns to Mexico, where drug cartels use them to kill a U.S. Border Patrol agent, then you are a hopeless partisan hack who is literally willing to overlook murder to advance your political agenda.

This weekend, our Michael Walsh took to the pages of the New York Post to lay out what we know about Fast & Furious, and what we need to know. A key point:

By embracing his doomed attorney general, Obama has now forfeited plausible deniability and tied Fast and Furious directly to the White House, a decision he’s likely to regret — especially since he continues to assert that nobody in the West Wing were aware of the operation. Indeed, back in March 2011, Obama claimed he’d first learned of Fast and Furious “on the news” and said that Holder knew nothing.

Yeah, right. A document dump in early December last year proved conclusively that Holder’s chain-of-command subordinates knew all about it. Indeed, that knowledge now lies at the center of the contempt citation and Obama’s executive privilege claim — and of the mystery: how high does this go?

Holder got slapped with a contempt charge by the House Oversight Committee owing to his refusal to turn over a tranche of subpoenaed documents relating to the now-notorious letter of Feb. 4, 2011, in which Justice categorically denied any knowledge of, or involvement with, Fast and Furious. This despite hair-raising whistleblower stories from brave ATF agents describing their feelings of helplessness as batches of weapons were transferred from the US to Mexico right under their noses — and being ordered not to interfere.

But that letter, by assistant attorney general Ronald Weich — who conveniently announced his sudden retirement earlier this month — was “withdrawn” last December. “Facts have come to light during the course of this investigation that indicate the Feb. 4 letter contains inaccuracies,” wrote a Justice bigwig, wiping the egg from his face.

Obama’s executive privilege declaration covers the documents that directly pertain to the aftermath of the Feb. 4 letter, as Justice internally debated — according to Holder — “how to respond to congressional and related media inquiries into that operation.”

How to deal with potential perjury or obstruction charges is more like it.

In his latest article at PJM, Victor Davis Hanson attempts to square the circle:

To Be or Not to Be a Fat Cat?

Culturally, Obama might at least have played the Jimmy Carter populist and eschewed the elite world that had so mesmerized Bill Clinton. Instead, Obama proved a counterfeit populist and became enthralled with the high life of rich friends, celebrities, high-priced fundraisers, and family getaways to Martha’s Vineyard or Costa del Sol. He somehow has set records both in the number of meet-and-greet campaign fundraisers and the number of golf rounds played. As Obama damned the fat cats and corporate jet owners, he courted them in preparation to joining them post-officium. It simply is unsustainable for a Hawaii prep-schooled president to talk down to black audiences in a fake black patois in warning about “them,” only to put on his polo shirt, shades and golf garb to court “them” on the links.

The Great Divide

Race? We live in a world where either the president or the attorney general will too often weigh in, and clumsily and in polarizing fashion, on any high-profile white/black legal matter. By now we got the message that we are all cowards, are not nice to Mr. Holder’s “people,” are racists in wanting audits of his performance, and are the sort of enemies the president wants punished.

We live in an age of a daily dose of the provocateur Al Sharpton and the nearly daily shrill accusations of the Black Caucus. No president ever entered office with more racial goodwill and no president has so racially polarized the country. Anyone who read the racially obsessed Dreams From My Father or reviewed the race-baiting sermons of the demented Rev. Wright could have predicted the ongoing deterioration in racial relations. We live in an age in which criticism of the president is alleged racism, creating an impossible situation: the country is redeemed only if it elects Obama, and stays redeemed only if he is reelected. How strange to read columnists one week alleging racism, and on the next warning us about the Mormon Church.

You can see that at work at Time-Warner-CNN, which created The Wright-Free Zone in 2008, but now asks (link safe; goes to Newsbusters), “Time Blog: Romney Comfortably Lies About Obama Due to ‘His Mormon Faith.’”

So if religion is now back on the table at Time-Warner-CNN, can we discuss the intersection of Obama’s obfuscations and religious background now? (No of course not. That would be…raaaaaaacist!)

Oh, and speaking of Time-Warner-CNN, one of the on-air employees of its HBO division finally discovers that the president’s Fast & Furious scandal doesn’t involve Vin Diesel racing souped-up cars in a big-budget B-movie.

The predictability of it all is enough to transform someone who was once The Biggest Celebrity in the World into…the Least Interesting Man in the World:

Update: “Ouch! Only 29% Agree With Obama’s Executive Privilege Stunt to Protect Holder.”

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Now is the time when we juxtapose, Small Dead Animals-style:

• “Art or Vandalism: Does Houston’s new Graffiti Mobile put street art in danger?”

– Headline, Houston Culture Map, January 27, 2011.

• “Vandal stencils over Picasso work in Houston museum.”

– Headline, My Fox Houston, yesterday.

What’s the problem? I thought major museums considered graffiti to be “aerosol art” — though they tend to act rather “unexpectedly” indignant once their own property is threatened.

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Hey, his boss scored a devastating own goal on Friday, why shouldn’t the attorney general have a Freudian Slip of his own today?

“I’ve enjoyed my time as attorney general,” he told the panel. “It’s been a tough job. It is one that takes a lot out of you. Some raised concerns as to whether I was tough enough for this job. I think that people will hopefully see that I’ve done this job in a way that is consistent with our values.”

He was responding to Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) who asked Holder if he would consider serving a second term as attorney general if Obama is reelected.

“I stuck by my guns,” Holder continued. “I’ve been criticized a lot for the positions that I’ve taken. I’ve lost some. I’ve won more than I’ve lost. I’m proud of the work that I’ve done. More important, I’m proud of the 116,000 people in this United States Department of Justice. This has been the highlight of my career to have been the attorney general of the United States, to work with you all and to serve this president. What my future holds, frankly, I’m just not sure.”

The House Oversight and Government Reform committee, which has been investigating the Justice Department’s involvement in a gunrunning operation dubbed “Fast and Furious,” plans to vote June 20 on whether to hold Holder in contempt of Congress for failing to provide more than 100,000 subpoenaed documents pertaining to the botched gun sting.

In a post titled, “Cornyn to Holder: ‘It is my sincere hope President Obama replaces you,’” Ed Morrissey adds, “The smarm on Holder’s end was perhaps slightly less palpable than usual — perhaps because Congress decided to hold a vote on contempt proceedings next week — but Holder insisted that his boss has ‘full confidence’ in him. …Uh huh. If that’s the case, President Obama is probably the last remaining American who does.”

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…You’ve lost yet another midtown-Manhattan rube who drank deep the Kool-Aid in 2008:

On Friday, an ugly job market report led to the stock market’s worst day of the year. As the recovery flat-lined, the president conceded to a crowd at a Honeywell factory in Golden Valley, Minn., that “our economy is still facing some serious headwinds” and getting sucked further into Europe’s sinkhole. In depressing imagery for the start of the summer campaign, cable channels carried the red Dow arrow pointing down while Obama spoke; the Dow wiped out all of its 2012 gains.

The president who started off with such dazzle now seems incapable of stimulating either the economy or the voters. His campaign is offering Obama 2012 car magnets for a donation of $10; cat collars reading “I Meow for Michelle” for $12; an Obama grill spatula for $40, and discounted hoodies and T-shirts. How the mighty have fallen.

Once glowing, his press is now burning. “To a very real degree, 2008’s candidate of hope stands poised to become 2012’s candidate of fear,” John Heilemann wrote in New York magazine, noting that because Obama feels he can’t run on his record, his campaign will resort to nuking Romney.

In his new book, “A Nation of Wusses,” the Democrat Ed Rendell, the former governor of Pennsylvania, wonders how “the best communicator in campaign history” lost his touch.

The legendary speaker who drew campaign crowds in the tens of thousands and inspired a dispirited nation ended up nonchalantly delegating to a pork-happy Congress, disdaining the bully pulpit, neglecting to do any L.B.J.-style grunt work with Congress and the American public, and ceding control of his narrative.

As president, Obama has never felt the need to explain or sell his signature pieces of legislation — the stimulus and health care bills — or stanch the flow of false information from the other side.

“The administration lost the communications war with disastrous consequences that played out on Election Day 2010,” Rendell writes, and Obama never got credit for the two pieces of legislation where he reached for greatness.

The president had lofty dreams of playing the great convener and conciliator. But at a fund-raiser in Minneapolis, he admitted he’s just another combatant in a capital full of Hatfields and McCoys. No compromises, just nihilism.

Wow, a Chicago machine hack politician with enough identity shifts and name changes to make Don Draper seem like a model citizen, who’s chums with a former terrorist and a racist pastor right out of Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic and who nonchalantly admits to eating dogs in his(?) autobiography is a nihilist who’s only in it for himself. Who saw that coming?

(Almost half the country, as it turns out. I suspect that number will “grow” even larger in the coming years, as former Obama voters in 2008 slowly begin to do a reverse Pauline Kael on the man: Barack Obama? Nobody I knew voted for him…)

On the other hand, as with former Timesman Frank Rich having a nervous breakdown over “the GOP Stalinists,” at last, a Times writer sounds uncomfortable with the concept of nihilism. That’s a minor bit of progress for the Gray Lady, I suppose.

Or maybe not; after searching the archives, I found that I wrote a similar passage as the last sentence when a similarly confused and frustrated MoDo called prominent Republican women such as Jan Brewer, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin nihilists back in October 2010. Can one be a God-fearing nihilist? But that won’t stop anyone associated with the New York Times. In his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell defined fascism as a word having “no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.” Apparently the same definition applies to a Timesperson who uses nihilism as a pejorative.

Update: Welcome those readers clicking in from the “Morning Jolt” daily email of Jim Geraghty of National Review Online’s Campaign Spot.

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At Big Journalism, John Nolte writes:

It’s an old and obvious trick and just a few minutes ago the basement-rated CNN assumed its favorite position – shilling for Obama — with this. Note the chryon: Romney supporter under fire for “birther” comments.

The rationale behind the media drawing a direct line from Romney to Trump is that Romney has met with Trump, accepted his endorsement, and won’t distance himself from the famous billionaire.

But as is always the case, the media’s double standard is a glaring one. After all, Al Sharpton is a proud and open Obama supporter, Obama has met with Sharpton, and Obama hasn’t distanced himself from the MSNBC’ racial demagogue – who just this weekend made headlines with this: Republicans Want To ‘Wipe Out Innocent People’ Like ‘Hitler’s Germany’.

And this is the least of the hateful, racially divisive things Sharpton says on a disturbingly regular basis.

And yet, as recently as Easter, Obama invited Al Sharpton to the White House. In April, Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, publicly praised Sharpton.

Never once, though, has the media ever coordinated and dedicated — as it did today — a full day’s narrative push to damage Obama with what his ally Sharpton had done and said.

Why would they, when Old Media created the current incarnation of Sharpton by airbrushing away his radical chic past — and view him in much the same way that MSNBC President Phil Griffin does, based on what Griffin told NPR in September:

I’m a big fan of the Reverend Sharpton. I’ve known him quite a bit. he’s smart. He’s entertaining. He’s experienced. He’s thoughtful. He’s provocative, all the things I think that MSNBC is.

Which, come to think of it, would make a great MSNBC “Lean Forward” ad, as seen at the top of our post.

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As Prager writes, “The Left craves power not money, and that makes it much more frightening:”*

You cannot understand the Left if you do not understand that leftism is a religion. It is not God-based (some left-wing Christians’ and Jews’ claims notwithstanding), but otherwise it has every characteristic of a religion. The most blatant of those characteristics is dogma. People who believe in leftism have as many dogmas as the most fundamentalist Christian.

One of them is material equality as the preeminent moral goal. Another is the villainy of corporations. The bigger the corporation, the greater the villainy. Thus, instead of the devil, the Left has Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, the “military-industrial complex,” and the like. Meanwhile, Big Labor, Big Trial Lawyers, and — of course — Big Government are left-wing angels.

And why is that? Why, to be specific, does the Left fear big corporations but not big government?

The answer is dogma — a belief system that transcends reason. No rational person can deny that big governments have caused almost all the great evils of the last century, arguably the bloodiest in history. Who killed the 20 to 30 million Soviet citizens in the Gulag Archipelago — big government or big business? Hint: There were no private businesses in the Soviet Union. Who deliberately caused 75 million Chinese to starve to death — big government or big business? Hint: See previous hint. Did Coca-Cola kill 5 million Ukrainians? Did Big Oil slaughter a quarter of the Cambodian population? Would there have been a Holocaust without the huge Nazi state?

Whatever bad things big corporations have done is dwarfed by the monstrous crimes — the mass enslavement of people, the deprivation of the most basic human rights, not to mention the mass murder and torture and genocide — committed by big governments.

How can anyone who thinks rationally believe that big corporations rather than big governments pose the greatest threat to humanity? The answer is that it takes a mind distorted by leftist dogma. If there is another explanation, I do not know what it is.

In The Tyranny of Cliches, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

When man loses God he sets about to make new gods. Or as the philosopher Eric Voegelin puts it, “[ W] hen God is invisible behind the world, the contents of the world will become new gods; when the symbols of transcendent religiosity are banned, new symbols develop from the inner-worldly language of science to take their place.”

Likewise man creates dogmas because man needs dogmas. The light of reason illuminates the darkness and science provides us compasses to find our way. But it does not provide us with reasons to get out of bed in the first place. As John Dos Passos said, “The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave webs.”

You can hear more from Dennis Prager in the latest edition of the Ricochet podcast.

* And how.

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In the latest issue of City Journal, Rudy Giuliani looks back at the career of James Q. Wilson and explores the enormous dept that New York City owes the late sociologist:

In the early days of Rudy University, we met with George Kelling, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who, with James Q. Wilson, had written an article called “Broken Windows” in the March 1982 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. I had worked closely with Wilson in 1981, when he was cochair of the Task Force on Violent Crime and I was the associate attorney general. In New York, during the 1980s and 1990s, local government seemed to have conceded defeat. The city would actually put up stickers of plants and venetian blinds in the windows of abandoned buildings to disguise the decay. But Wilson had a revelation about crime: focus on the small crimes, such as littering, and keep neighborhoods clean and free of signs of disorder, such as broken windows in a building. The big idea was this: if the neighborhood looks as if someone is watching and maintaining order, it is far more likely that order will prevail. A neighborhood that is clean and well-ordered sends a signal to criminals and citizens alike.

Contrast the above with the video in a new post from Jim Treacher at the Daily Caller: “Watch Occupiers smash up San Francisco’s Mission District as the cops look on helplessly:”

Keep in mind that this video was uploaded by one of the irrepressible scamps involved. They’re proud of this.Yeah, man, don’t mess with the SFPD, or they’ll… um… drive away slowly. Has Internal Affairs investigated the officer who dared to turn on his siren, thus impinging on these children’s right to free speech?

And I was ready to congratulate the one kid who tried to talk some sense into the rest of him, until I realized he was okay with smashing up other people’s property as long as they’re above a certain income level.

These idiots did more property damage in one night than the Tea Party has done to date. Remember, though: Occupy is “mostly peaceful.” Just look at all the windows they didn’t smash. Look at all the walls they didn’t spray-paint. Look at all the police stations they didn’t vandalize.

And Mr. Obama, the once and future community organizer, still has their back. You never know when you need to supply the pitchforks.

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As spotted by RD Brewer, one of Ace of Spades’ co-bloggers, who reads the Politico and the New York Times, so you don’t have to. As Brewer writes, “Emmy winner Campbell Brown, former CNN host and former co-anchor at of NBC’s Weekend Today, rapped President Obama for being condescending toward women:”

WHEN I listen to President Obama speak to and about women, he sometimes sounds too paternalistic for my taste. In numerous appearances over the years — most recently at the Barnard graduation — he has made reference to how women are smarter than men. It’s all so tired, the kind of fake praise showered upon those one views as easy to impress. As I listen, I am always bracing for the old go-to cliché: “Behind every great man is a great woman.”

. . .

The women I know who are struggling in this economy couldn’t be further from the fictional character of Julia, presented in Mr. Obama’s Web ad, “The Life of Julia,” a silly and embarrassing caricature based on the assumption that women look to government at every meaningful phase of their lives for help.

. . .

In an effort to win them back, Mr. Obama is trying too hard. He’s employing a tone that can come across as grating and even condescending. He really ought to drop it. Most women don’t want to be patted on the head or treated as wards of the state. They simply want to be given a chance to succeed based on their talent and skills. To borrow a phrase from our president’s favorite president, Abraham Lincoln, they want “an open field and a fair chance.”

At Ace of Spades, Brewer adds:

More and more high profile personalities are speaking out. It’s starting to look like an Abilene paradox is breaking down, and we’re at the beginning of a full-blown preference cascade, described by Glenn Reynolds here:

This works until something breaks the spell, and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers – or even to the citizens themselves. Claims after the fact that many people who seemed like loyal apparatchiks really loathed the regime are often self-serving, of course. But they’re also often true . . . .

(Emphasis added.) If it starts to look like Obama is likely to lose, the left will turn on him fast. He lied to them, and they’re not happy. It’ll be the president’s problem or the messaging or the packaging, not the philosophy. They will turn on him to preserve their worldview.

No matter what happens in November, even more will be speaking out in the coming years; lots of rubes will want to come clean.

Such as this one: “Wapo’s Kathleen Parker: Republican’s aren’t wrong that we never vetted Obama sufficiently:”

The subject on the Chris Matthews show was the right wanting to emphasis Obama’s relationship with Jeremiah Wright, which they all agreed was playing the ‘race card’ which is idiotic. Matthews brought up the fact that while Romney doesn’t want to talk about Wright, Hannity certainly wants him to as he said so this week. Parker responded:

Well yeah Sean Hannity wants him to, a lot of Republicans do, a lot of the sorta further right people feel like ‘look we never vetted Obama sufficiently’, talking about us the media, and to some extent they’re not wrong about that. They do feel that we pulled back on Rev. Wright…

Gee, Kathleen, what on earth would give them that idea?

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“Sometimes you do wonder if [Republicans] are moles, Manchurian candidates for I don’t know who, if their real job is to bring down America.”

– Paul Krugman, appearing on MSNBC’s Martin Bashir Show yesterday.

Man, I wish you guys would make up your minds — Thomas Friedman wants us to be more like China (after previously wishing we were more like Cuba), even as Krugman has visions in his sleep of Laurence Harvey and the bald guy who later played Wo Fat in Hawaii Five-O. Meanwhile, Frank Rich (before he left the Times) imagined the GOP in late 2009 to be “Stalinists.” And that’s after the Times shilled for Stalin’s Soviet Union, and “Pinch” Sulzberger, their publisher, at least in his radical chic salad days, for communist Vietnam.

Given what a momentous development for a then-Timesman like Rich to use the word “Stalinist” as a pejorative, I did a Silicon Graffiti video titled “The Pinchurian Candidate” to document the occasion. Perhaps it’s worth revisiting in light of Krugman’s latest argument ad hominem.

Best to play a little solitaire while watching, though…

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