Pop quiz by Walter Russell Mead, who asks:

“American Presidents have long been criticized for being too in thrall to the Jewish lobby. The American Jews influence US foreign policy and that explains Washington’s unwavering support for Israel.”

Who made this statement this past week?

(a) A disgruntled fringe neo-Nazi
(b) Some poor soul ranting on their Facebook page
(c) The BBC

Sadly, as you can see in the clip above, the answer is C. This ugly assertion is the host’s opening line in an episode of this past week’s BBC HARDtalk program. This vicious garbage isn’t “sort of” or “almost” anti-Semitic; it is the real thing: vivid, unapologetic, odious and wrong.

Mead hopes that the BBC presenter is “just reading a script that some fool of a writer threw up on the teleprompter” — but in any case, veering into Protocols of Elders of Zion territory is a reminder of hard left bias and “powerfully corrosive internal culture,” as a former BBC journalist described it to me in 2007, which has seeped into the network over the past 15 years or so. Mead writes that his blog “spends quite a bit of time calling attention to the ominous rise of anti-Semitism around the world:”

It isn’t because we think that anti-Semitism is the only form of hate and bigotry in the world, or that we think that it is more important to fight prejudice against Jews than prejudice against other people. But anti-Semitism, besides being on the ascent at times when many other forms of hatred are mostly on the back foot, is particularly dangerous, and not just because of what anti-Semitism can do and has done to the Jews.

The rise of anti-Semitism is a sign of widespread social and cultural failure. It is a leading indicator of a loss of faith in liberal values and of a diminished capacity to understand the modern world and to thrive in it. Societies that tolerate anti-Semitism take a fateful step toward the loss of both freedom and prosperity. People who think “the Jews” run the banks lose the ability to understand, much less to operate financial systems. People who think “the Jews” dominate business through hidden structures can’t build or long maintain a successful modern economy. People who think “the Jews” dominate politics lose their ability to interpret political events, to diagnose social evils and to organize effectively for positive change. People who think “the Jews” run the media and control the news lose the ability to grasp what is happening around them. And people who think “the Jews” control America’s Middle Eastern policy lose the ability to understand, much less to influence, American policy in this vital part of the world. Emancipation from anti-Semitism is thus one of the necessary steps that many individuals and cultures have to take before they are able to act effectively and participate meaningfully in contemporary life.

Jew hatred isn’t more stupid or more wicked than other forms of racial and religious hatred. The anti-black bigot is as delusional as the Jew hater; hatred and prejudice of all kinds corrode the intelligence and degrade the spirit of everyone who suffers from them. But Jew hatred is more disempowering and self-defeating than most other kinds of hate because it involves not only negative emotions about a group of people but a deeply false set of ideas about how the world works.

Read the whole thing. And then click over to National Review Online, where John Fund and Boris Johnson, London’s newly reelected conservative mayor (besting “Red Ken” Livingstone) have a couple of solutions to the bias of the BBC. Ultimately, Fund believes the best answer is to starve the beast:

Critics such as Mayor Johnson beg to differ. “I sometimes felt that my chief opponent was the local BBC News,” Johnson says of the reelection campaign he just fought. “The prevailing view of Beeb newsrooms is, with honourable exceptions, statist, corporatist, defeatist, anti-business, [and] Europhile.” He finds it curious that BBC London ignores the 75 percent of London’s economy that is driven by the private sector.

The way to fight this, Johnson claims, is to appoint a Conservative-party supporter to replace Thompson as director general — “and no mucking around.” The new BBC head must be someone who is “free-market [and] pro-business and [who] understands the depths of the problems this country faces,” he insists. “If we can’t change the Beeb, we can’t change the country.”

I understand his frustration, but I worry about his methods. Of course the BBC is biased, but appointing someone to run it based on their political allegiance smacks of how the heads of French, German, Italian, and Austrian television are now chosen. The jobs have tended to go to hacks, and the programming has been unimaginative at best. Putting in a Tory is also unlikely to lead to permanent reforms. As Anne McEvoy of the London Evening Standard has noted, “Follow Boris’s disastrous recipe and when the government eventually changes, the cry would surely be to turf out the chief broadcaster and put in a political clone of the other party.”

There is a better way. Vladimir Bukovsky, the former Soviet dissident who spent a decade in the Gulag before being released in 1976, has fought a long-running battle with the BBC since he settled in Britain. Although it once spoke for the entire nation and had high standards, it now “unfairly competes with private channels and has sunk to juvenile levels in much of its programming,” Bukovsky has observed.

So he has joined the estimated 5 percent of Britons who simply refuse to pay the annual BBC license fee. He is not surprised that he and most other refuseniks haven’t been pursued. “I wanted people to see images of me being handcuffed and dragged into court,” he wistfully told the London Times in 2008. “But instead, the BBC retreated quietly.”

That seems in contradistinction to the BBC’s advertising on this topic — recall this creepy Orwellian ad the BBC produced four or five years ago to gin up its license fee renewals:

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“Cops: Former CNN Executive Leaves Dog Feces In Neighbor’s Mailbox,” CBS Atlanta reports:

A former high-ranking CNN executive is accused of leaving dog feces in his neighbor’s mailbox.

Covington police say the victims of the incident, Benjamin Dameron and Ralph Miller, have video of Bob Furnad walking with his dog up to the mailbox and placing a bag filled with the feces in their mailbox.

“Mr. Furnad stated that he did place a bag containing dog feces in the victim’s mail box,” Covington Police Capt. Ken Malcom told WGCL-TV.

Which seems appropriate, as CNN has been depositing similar products in viewers’ homes for the past decade or two.

Though with much less luck in more recent years than Mr. Furnad, if the above report is true.

Related: “Piers Morgan, Feather Duster.”

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In a lengthy article in the New York Post, Kyle Smith compares the intertwined fiscal, demographic and anti-business woes of Greece and California. After the handshakes and initial pleasantries are out of the way, Smith reminds the Golden State and the birthplace of western democracy, “The two of you should have a lot to chat about. Such as what to do when you’re in a burning building with no exits:”

In the absence of clear authority, conditions would be ripe for a strongman to take over Greece. Strongmen tend not to be very nice. A majority of police officers, according to a survey published in the Athens paper The Tribune, voted this month for the neo-Nazi group Golden Dawn.

Lee Harris, writing for the American Enterprise Institute, brings up a crucial point about Greece: In the US, “No one seriously argues that the period of austerity (i.e., recession) was the deliberate policy of this or that administration. But the European austerity programs are the deliberate policy of the governments that have imposed them, and this is a fact that every citizen forced to tighten his belt is perfectly aware of.”

Greeks aren’t going to be waiting patiently in breadlines singing “Brother, Can You Spare a Drachma.” We’re talking about serious rage. Greece may be the cradle of democracy, but its current democracy is only 37 years old. Before that: military rule.

These sound like just the kind of conditions you probably don’t want if your best hope of climbing out of recession is to attract tourists.

Nationalism, which the EU was supposed to cure forever as all member nations joined hands and sang hosannas to Delors, is rising again like heartburn: A left-wing Greek member of parliament declared, “Achtung Frau Merkel. The Greek people want to live free and they don’t want to be under a new occupation from Germany.” A left-wing extremist group torched a car belonging to a German who leads an EU task force on Greece. In relatively unscathed France, extremist parties captured 30% of the vote in this spring’s presidential elections.

ATHENS? I’d like you to meet Sacramento. The two of you should have a lot to chat about. Such as what to do when you’re in a burning building with no exits.

In California, efforts to close the budget deficit by taxing the rich resulted in the deficit shrinking from $9 billion all the way to $16 billion. Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed solution: Tax the rich even more (and tax everybody else, too, by hiking sales tax).

California contains about one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients (despite having 12% of the nation’s population) and is planning a high-speed rail system that will cost an estimated $68 billion, including $4 billion on a section The Los Angeles Times dubbed a “train to nowhere.” Its pension costs for public employees, 85% of them unionized, rose 2,000% in the first decade of this century, which is 1,976% more than revenues increased. A CEO survey in April ruled that California was the least business-friendly state in the US.

In 1999, when the state was flooded with dotcom tax revenue, it set in place a law, SB 400, that assumed the good times would continue forever and allowed government workers as young as 50 to retire on 90% of salary they earned in their final year, when they would ramp up the overtime. In order to cover these commitments through the CALPERS investment fund, the Dow Jones Industrial Average would have to be over 25,000 by now.

Pension and health-care spending for retirees are set to triple this decade. More than 12,000 state and local workers are collecting more than $100,000 a year in pensions. Even convicted felons can collect pensions.

Greek and Californian politicians made the same mistake: They wanted union backing so badly that they promised far more than they could ever deliver. They knew that they’d be long gone before the crisis kicked in, or maybe it would solve itself. Either way, they didn’t care. They were happy to use tomorrow’s seed corn to buy themselves power. California’s pension plans face a $500 billion hole in unfunded promises.

And speaking of California’s unions, at City Journal, Troy Senik invites us to observe (fortunately, at a distance far enough back so as to not to worry about the fists and brickbats), “The Worst Union in America — How the California Teachers Association betrayed the schools and crippled the state.” Senik describes the California Teachers Association as “the single most powerful special interest in California,” whose end product brings to mind Woody Allen’s classic Catskills-era riff at the beginning of Annie Hall – “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” “Yes I know — and such small portions.”

Related: Thomas Sowell predicts a Greece/California-style destiny for the rest of America:

Now that census data show — for the first time in American history — that the number of white babies born is exceeded by the number of babies born to non-white minorities, the question is: What does this mean for the future of American society?

Politically, it means that minorities who traditionally vote overwhelmingly for Democrats can ensure that the country veers ever further to the left over the years, making America more like the welfare states of Europe, whose unsustainable spending led ultimately to financial crises and widespread riots.

But this is not strictly a matter of whites versus non-whites. Jews vote consistently, and almost as overwhelmingly, for Democrats as blacks do. Moreover, Asian Americans are by no means as likely as other non-whites to vote for the class-warfare, tax-and-spend agenda of the Democrats.

Yet when all is said and done, the future political direction of the country seems painfully clear from these demographic trends, unless something happens to change the current correlation between race and political-party affiliation. Moreover, even that may not be enough.

Well, that’s something to look forward to.

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

“Fatherland” was first conceived as a nonfiction book, this time about the Europe that Hitler dreamed of creating.

But a summer vacation in Sicily in 1987 changed his plan. “There were a lot of German tourists on the beach,” he said, “and if you closed your eyes, you could just imagine you were in the victorious German empire. Suddenly, everything came to me as a novel, the idea of a cover-up, a sequence of deaths, someone investigating them. I went splashing into the water, and by the time I came back onto the beach I had it written in my mind.”

– The New York Times’ 1995 profile of Robert Harris, the author of Fatherland, the Cold War-alternative history, and the WWII-era novel Enigma.

A fortnight or so ago – before setting off for Berlin on my quadriga-spotting tour – I heard the Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, on Radio 4 opine that what Europe really needed now was for Germany to, once again, take a proper responsibility for the continent’s security and vastly expand her armed forces, which, since 1945 have been a mere bundeswehr rump.

I nearly fell off my Brandenburg Gate of a chair: the whole point of the European project had been to bridle the bellicosity of her big powers – and in particular that proven troublemaker Germany – and that in this respect at least, the European Union represented one of the few examples in human history of the political classes of several nations acting selflessly and sensibly.

That these same politicians were afflicted by a strange sort of doublethink – both aspiring towards unity, and desperate for their own nationalistic electorates to preserve the substance of their sovereignties – was and is the peculiar vaulting horse upon which Europa’s crotch has now painfully descended.

For myself, I had always been an enthusiastic pro-European and an unashamed believer in a federal European state. Like many English people of my tastes and proclivities, I rather fancied myself propping up zinc bars, sipping pastis and listening to the musical chink-clank of petanque.

I viewed an increasingly united Europe as a necessary counterweight to US world hegemony and Russian idiocy, while also being a handy cosmopolitan stick with which to beat the backs of uptight Little Englanders.

But times and opinions change: the continent’s sixty year double-thinking reverie has turned the European dream into something of a nightmare: the quadriga’s remaining obstinately faced to the East has resulted in an unfeasible extension of the EU in that direction also, while the attempt to reconcile national sovereignty with a single European economy has resulted in a bloated bureaucracy full of the wind of its own democratic deficit.

– “The European Dream Has Become A Nightmare,” Will Self, the BBC, May 20th, 2012. As Orrin Judd writes in response, “Must be tough to admit that the Iron Lady understood things so much better than the left.”

At the Corner, Andrew Stuttaford has more on “Crumbling (Euro)land:”

In yet another article to be read with whisky and revolver loaded with a single bullet (for a slightly more cheery view try Roger Bootle here), the Daily Telegraph’s Jeremy Warner throws in his usual grim twist:

A bizarre money-go-round has developed, which works something like this. Fearing crippling property losses and a possible exit from the euro, the Spanish depositor removes his money from Spain and places it in an apparently “safe” German bank account. But unable to invest these inflows safely, the German bank places the money on deposit with the Bundesbank. Denied access to market funding, the Spanish bank taps the European Central Bank for the money instead, which in turn uses the excess liquidity building up at the Bundesbank. It’s unclear where the ultimate liability would lie in the event of default and/or exit from monetary union, but in all likelihood with the German taxpayer.

The German taxpayer, that is, who was never asked whether he wanted this nonsense currency in the first place.

For her part, Angela Merkel veers between steely prudence and the dream-language of grand schemes, the language of delusion and disaster:

In a speech this month, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, spoke of the euro in utopian terms as not just a currency. Rather, she said, it is a “schicksalsgemeinshaft”, or “community of destiny” that Germans are committed to seeing through, almost whatever the costs.

Stalingrad will be taken.

Heh.™

Finally, at the London Telegraph, Janet Daley writes, “Europe finally awakes from its utopian dream.” Considering that various European utopian dreams been the cause of most of the world’s ills since 1914, I’m sure they’ll have another all set to go, once the fail on this latest utopian dream reaches even more epic proportions.

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The other night, I was watching a 1995-era History Channel show on the Nuremberg Trials — it was a classic case of clicking ’round the Roku box to see what was “new” at Netflix. I put “new” in quotation marks since so much of what’s available there in streaming format unfortunately consists of flotsam and jetsam I had either watched a decade or two ago, and/or shows I probably wouldn’t give the time of day to, except that the novelty of streaming video via the Internet still hasn’t worn off.

The History Channel show on the Nuremberg Trials mentioned in passing the Morgenthau Plan, a scheme for postwar Germany that was viciously punitive, if understandably so, and crafted by Henry Morgenthau, Jr., FDR’s  Treasury secretary, around 1944. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it:

The Morgenthau Plan, proposed by United States Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., advocated that the Allied occupation of Germany following World War II include measures to eliminate Germany’s ability to wage war.

• In the original proposal this was to be achieved in three main steps.
• Germany was to be partitioned into two independent states.
• Germany’s main centers of mining and industry, including the Saar area, the Ruhr area and Upper Silesia were to be internationalized or annexed by neighboring nations.
• All heavy industry was to be dismantled or otherwise destroyed.

At the Second Quebec Conference on September 16, 1944, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Henry Morgenthau, Jr. persuaded the initially very reluctant British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to agree to the plan, likely using a $6 billion Lend Lease agreement to do so. Churchill chose however to narrow the scope of Morgenthau’s proposal by drafting a new version of the memorandum, which ended up being the version signed by the two statesmen.

The memorandum concluded “is looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character.”

As that Wikipedia page goes on to note, cooler heads eventually prevailed after the war. Otherwise, just as East Germany traded one totalitarian regime for another, West Germany would have traded the nightmare of Hitler’s scorched earth policy when he knew the war was lost for the Allies’ own scorched earth policy afterwards. Wikipedia quotes former president Herbert Hoover, who reminded advocates of the Morgenthau Plan in 1947 that “There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a ‘pastoral state’. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it.” West Germany would go on to become an industrial powerhouse, albeit one with a US military base located within it, just in case…

And while the Morgenthau Plan is now merely a footnote in history, ever since the late ’60s and early 1970s, the desire for punitive reprimitivization on a global scale has become all the rage amongst the wackier elements of the environmental left, including the fellow recently spotlighted by John Aziz at the Zero Hedge econo-blog, whom Aziz dubs “The Face of Genocidal Eco-Fascism”:

This is Finnish writer Pentti Linkola — a man who demands that the human population reduce its size to around 500 million and abandon modern technology and the pursuit of economic growth — in his own words.

He likens Earth today to an overflowing lifeboat:

What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.

He sees America as the root of the problem:

The United States symbolises the worst ideologies in the world: growth and freedom.

He unapologetically advocates bloodthirsty dictatorship:

Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent a dictator that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. The best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and where government would prevent any economical growth.

We will have to learn from the history of revolutionary movements — the national socialists, the Finnish Stalinists, from the many stages of the Russian revolution, from the methods of the Red Brigades — and forget our narcissistic selves.

A fundamental, devastating error is to set up a political system based on desire. Society and life have been organized on the basis of what an individual wants, not on what is good for him or her.

Dude.

Or to put it a bit more articulately, “The ecochondriacs mean it: This’d be a pretty nice planet if we didn’t live here,” Mark Steyn wrote a few years ago, a quote we referenced back in 2008 rounding up additional examples of what James Taranto dubbed a few years later, “Green Supremacism.”

Linking to the above post at Zero Hedge, Glenn Reynolds responded this past Friday:

As Bob Zubrin has pointed out, such sentiments, if usually a bit less bluntly stated, are driving environmental policy nowadays. It’s Himmler in a green shirt. These are not nice people who want good things for everyone. These are evil people who hanker after mass death.

Still, it’s educational to hear things like this: “The United States symbolises the worst ideologies in the world: growth and freedom.”

If you like growth and freedom, these people are your enemies. Remember that and treat them accordingly.

Responding to Linkola’s manifesto, John Aziz writes at Zero Hedge (and I urge you to read his whole post), “My suggestion for all such thinkers is that if they want to reduce the global population they should measure up to their words and go first.”

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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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Why, it’s as if there’s a tyranny of cliches that vexes the nation; Mike of the Cold Fury blog attempts to chart our “Topsy-turvy world:”

Okay, let me see if I have all this straight. Bill Clinton, a white Southerner, was the first black president. Obama, an apparently straight guy, is the first gay president. George Zimmerman, a Hispanic, is a white guy. Elizabeth Warren, the whitest white woman anybody ever saw, is an Injun.

Andrew Sullivan, a liberal, considers himself the last “true conservative.” The Democrat Socialists, left-wingers to a fault, consider themselves “centrist” or “moderate,” and Mitt Romney, who is a liberal, is a “right-wing extremist.” Of course, Mittens calls himself a “severe conservative,” although nobody really believes it. Not even the Democrat Socialists.

The overwhelming majority of people who call themselves “journalists” actually function as advocates, while laughably declaiming their unbiased impartiality to anyone gullible enough to buy it. Violent OWS revolutionaries are “mostly peaceful.” Layabouts who collect government benefits are “hard-working Americans,” and people who actually want to work but can’t find a job in the Obama Depression and have abandoned all hope aren’t even counted as unemployed at all. More than three straight years of economic stagnation in the Obama Depression is some kind of “recovery,” and as for the real people whose lives have been marred by the inevitable and predictable result of Obama’s muttonheaded policies, “you’d think they’d be saying thank you.”

Read the whole thing.

And then to see where it leads, click here.

Update: Related thoughts, expressed in visual form.

(Headline by Mr. E. Blair; found via SDA.)

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We’ve already seen network TV newscasters, who make seven figure annual incomes taking shots at Mitt Romney’s weath, but late night entertainers earn much more, especially David Letterman, whose network career stretches back to the early 1980s, first with NBC, later with CBS. As Noel Sheppard writes at Newsbusters, “David Letterman Mocks Romney’s Wealth Despite Being Worth $400 Million:”

You want to see a perfect demonstration of almost unimaginable media hypocrisy?

On Friday, CBS Late Show host David Letterman mocked Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s wealth despite being worth $400 million embedded by Embedded Video
Download Video :

DAVID LETTERMAN: I was talking to Mitt Romney earlier today, and he and his family got a big two day weekend planned. They’re going to hike to the top of his money.

Excuse me, but who the heck is Letterman to ridicule anyone for how much money they have?

According to our friends at Celebrity Net Worth, the Late Show host makes $50 million a year with an estate valued at $400 million.

As Forbes estimated Romney’s net worth at $230 million Wednesday, Letterman’s worth almost twice the target of his derision.

How’s THAT for hypocrisy?

Sometimes Dave’s just not all that thoughtful, it seems.

Related: Bain or Bane?

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As you may already know, The Amateur, Edward Klein’s great new book, gets its title from this exchange involving Bill and Hillary Clinton, debating in August of last year in Chappaqua, New York, whether or not Hillary should run against Obama:

Bill and Hillary were going at it again, fighting tooth and nail over their favorite subject: themselves.

It was a warm summer Sunday—a full year away from the 2012 Democratic National Convention—and Bill Clinton was urging Hillary to think the unthinkable. He wanted her to challenge Barack Obama for their party’s presidential nomination. No American politician had attempted to usurp a sitting president of his own party since Ted Kennedy failed to unseat Jimmy Carter more than thirty years before.

“Why risk everything now?” Hillary demanded to know.

“Because,” Bill replied, “the country needs you!”

* * * * * * * *

“I’m the highest-ranking member in Obama’s cabinet,” she pointed out. “I eat breakfast with the guy every Thursday morning. What about loyalty, Bill? What about loyalty?” “Loyalty is a joke,” Bill said. “Loyalty doesn’t exist in politics. There’s no such word in the political rulebook. I’ve had two successors since I left the White House—Bush and Obama—and I’ve heard more from Bush, asking for my advice, than I’ve heard from Obama. I have no relationship with the president—none whatsoever. Obama doesn’t know how to be president. He doesn’t know how the world works. He’s incompetent. He’s… he’s… ”

Bill’s voice was growing hoarse—he was speaking in a rough whisper—but he looked as though he could go on forever bashing Obama. And then, all at once and without warning, he stopped cold.

He bit his lower lip and scanned the faces in the room. He was plainly gratified to see that his audience was spellbound. They were waiting for the politician par excellence to deliver his final judgment on the forty-fourth president of the United States.

“Barack Obama,” said Bill Clinton, “is an amateur!”

Right now, Bill Clinton’s legacy is unique (well, besides being the only president impeached in the 20th century) in that he’s the first Democratic president to serve out a full second term since FDR. Truman’s time in office consisted of serving out the remainder of Roosevelt’s last term, followed by a first term of his own; he could have run again for office in ’52 had he not squandered his reputation in the interim years. (Going full Godwin on Thomas Dewey didn’t help matters.) JFK’s first term was tragically cut short, LBJ chose not to run again, Carter wasn’t reelected. Given the bad blood that exists between Bill and Barry, think the former and his elephantine ego is all that keen on the latter getting reelected? Which helps to explain “Bubba’s Hot Mic Moment,” as captured by the Washington Free Beacon on Tuesday:

Former president Bill Clinton told attendees at the Peter G. Peterson Fiscal Summit in Washington, D.C., today that President Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on the rich will not be enough to close the deficit and that middle-class taxes may also have to be raised.

“This is just me now, I’m not speaking for the White House—I think you could tax me at 100 percent and you wouldn’t balance the budget,” Clinton said, according to Politico’s account. “We are all going to have to contribute to this, and if middle class people’s wages were going up again, and we had some growth to the economy, I don’t think they would object to going back to tax rates when I was president.”

Clinton’s comments are sure to provoke a response from Republicans who argue that President Obama may increase taxes for all or even propose a value-added tax in a more flexible second term.

Similarly, this moment from Hillary, captured by CNS News the following day in a story titled “Hillary: ‘Government Cannot and Should Not Control Any Individual’s Life,’” is also a dual-edged sword of a statement:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, told an assemblage of human rights and “civil society” activists gathered at the State Department Wednesday that “government cannot and should not” control the lives of individuals.

“(T)o make the case for civil society is really quite simple because government cannot and should not control any individual’s life – tell you what to do, what not to do,” Clinton said, taking part in a “Global Dialogue of Civil Society.”

That seems like quite a change from the woman behind her namesake HillaryCare, who once said, “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” Her statement this week, coupled with her husband does seem curious in light of their dissatisfaction — shared by seemingly just about all but the Professional Left, as Robert Gibbs* would say — with The Amateur.

* Who would also grow increasingly exasperated by the Amateur-Hour atmosphere in the Obama White House by the end of his tenure there, according to Klein.

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“Democratic opponent criticizes Elizabeth Warren’s response on Native American issue,” The Boston Globe reports:

For nearly three weeks, Scott Brown’s campaign has been battering Elizabeth Warren for listing herself as a Native American on a legal directory and then being billed as a minority law professor at Harvard University.

Now, Warren has a Democratic critic, too.

Warren’s primary opponent, Marisa DeFranco, who is trying to raise her profile in the race, is arguing that voters should be concerned about Warren’s “lack of a clear, consistent message” in response to the Native American controversy.

“I’m not sure what her answer is because it’s been so various,” DeFranco said today.

DeFranco said that, in general, it is commendable for universities to trumpet their hiring of minority professors. But she questioned why Harvard listed Warren as a minority.

“Come on, you have to look like a person of color,” she said. “You actually have to be a person of color.”

In 2012? Get real, Marisa:

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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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Talk about getting a story completely bass-ackwards — or at the very least a headline. The Today Show asks, “Does organic food turn people into jerks?”

“I stopped at a market to get a fruit platter for a movie night with friends but I couldn’t find one so I asked the produce guy,” says the 40-year-old arts administrator from Seattle. “And he was like, ‘If you want fruit platters, go to Safeway. We’re organic.’ I finally bought a small cake and some strawberries and then at the check stand, the guy was like ‘You didn’t bring your own bag? I need to charge you if you didn’t bring your own bag.’ It was like a ‘Portlandia skit.’ They were so snotty and arrogant.”

As it turns out, new research has determined that a judgmental attitude may just go hand in hand with exposure to organic foods. In fact, a new study published this week in the journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science, has found that organic food may just make people act a bit like jerks.

“There’s a line of research showing that when people can pat themselves on the back for their moral behavior, they can become self-righteous,” says author Kendall Eskine, assistant professor of  the department of psychological sciences at Loyola University in New Orleans. “I’ve noticed a lot of organic foods are marketed with moral terminology, like Honest Tea, and wondered if you exposed people to organic food, if it would make them pat themselves on the back for their moral and environmental choices.”

OK, everybody repeat after me — I need a study to tell me this?

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In his latest column, Mark Steyn navigates through “Eternally shifting sands of Obama’s biography,” along with a soupçon of the  crab with tomato mayonnaise from Elizabeth Warren’s Pow Wow Chow cookbook:

“I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then,” says Nick Carraway in “The Great Gatsby.” “His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people – his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself… . So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”

In a post-modern America, the things that Gatsby attempted to fake – an elite schooling – Obama actually had; the things that Gatsby attempted to obscure – the impoverished roots – merely add to Obama’s luster. Gatsby claimed to have gone to Oxford, but nobody knew him there because he never went; Obama had a million bucks’ worth of elite education at Occidental, Columbia and Harvard Law, and still nobody knew him (“Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him”). In that sense, Obama out-Gatsbys Gatsby: His “shiftless and unsuccessful” relatives – the deportation-dodging aunt on public housing in Boston, the DWI undocumented uncle, the $12-a-year brother back in Nairobi – are useful props in his story, the ever more vivid bit-players as the central character swims ever more out of focus, but they don’t seem to know him either. The more autobiographies he writes, the less anybody knows.

Like Gatsby presiding over his wild, lavish parties, Obama is aloof and remote: let everyone else rave deliriously; he just has to be. He is, in his way, the apotheosis of the Age of American Incredibility. When just being who you are anyway is an incredible accomplishment, Obama managed to run and win on biography almost entirely unmoored from life. But then, like Gatsby, he knew a thing or two about “the unreality of reality.”

Man Men’s Don Draper is a sort Gatsby-as-everyman; he’s not quite as wealthy as Jay Gatsby, and while his duplex Manhattan apartment in the new season is certainly swank, it’s not exactly a mansion on Long Island’s North Shore. But the idea that one can be born dirt poor in the heartland and reinvent yourself to reach the top of New York society is certainly similar. As I wrote in July of 2008, Obama is the very personification of Mad Men’s identikit philosophy, espoused in the show’s first season by Robert Morse’s Bert Cooper character:

“A man is whatever room he is in” — that’s a remarkably timely phrase right about now, isn’t it?

It’s even more so, seeing the Ministry of Truth-level airbrushing that Obama has done to his biography over the years. In 2008, like Don Draper, Obama at his best was a master salesman, and both are handsome men who know their way around a Lucky, a Brooks Brothers suit, and a skinny tie. But in real-life, the best ad men know that the product has to be equal to the ad campaign, or customer disappointment will be palpable. Or as Mad Men series advisor Jerry Della Femina wrote over 40 years ago in his classic book on advertising, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor: Front-Line Dispatches from the Advertising War:

There is a great deal of advertising that’s better than the product. When that happens, all that the good advertising will do is put you out of business faster. There have been cases where the product had to come up to the advertising but when the product fails to do that, the advertiser will eventually run into a lot of trouble.

A few years later, Cavett Robert, the founder of the National Speaker’s Association would advise clients in his profession, “Don’t be in too much of a hurry to promote, until you get good. Otherwise you just speed up the rate at which the world finds out you’re no good.” That’s the story of Edward Klein’s new book, The Amateur. Each chapter is features a different liberal clique (such as black and Jewish voters) or elitists (Oprah and the Kennedy clan) who embraced Obama in 2008, only to find out that they were sold a bill of goods, that Obama was only in it for himself, and that Obama either didn’t understand how Washington worked, or thought that through sheer force of ego, he could bend it to his will. Here’s a representative sample, early on in Klein’s book:

Shortly after Obama entered the White House, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner warned him, “Your legacy is going to be preventing the second Great Depression.” To which Obama boasted, “That’s not enough for me.”

* * * * * * * *

On the evening of Tuesday, June 30, 2009, Barack Obama invited nine like-minded liberal historians to have dinner with him in the Family Quarters of the White House. His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, personally delivered the invitations to each historian with a word of caution: the dinner was to remain private and off the record….At the time of this dinner, Barack Obama was still enjoying a honeymoon period with the American people. According to the most recent Gallup Poll, 63 percent of Americans approved of the job he was doing. Not surprisingly, he was in an expansive mood as he tucked into his lamb chops and went around the table questioning each historian by name—Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Beschloss, Robert Caro, Robert Dallek, David Brinkley, H. W. Brands, David Kennedy, Kenneth Mack, and Gary Wills.

* * * * * * * *

Tonight, in front of nine prominent American historians, Obama wasn’t shy about flaunting his famous self-confidence. He intended to bring the Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table and create a permanent peace in the Middle East. He would open a constructive dialogue with America’s enemies in Iran and North Korea and, through his powers of persuasion, help them see the error of their ways. He’d pass legislation in Washington to revolutionize the country’s healthcare system and energy policy. And he’d inject the regulatory hand of the federal government into the American economy in an effort to create “a more just and equitable society.” When several of the historians brought up the difficulties that Lyndon Johnson had faced trying to wage a foreign war while implementing an ambitious domestic agenda, Obama grew testy. He knew better. He could prevail by the force of his personality. He could solve the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, put millions of people back to work, redistribute wealth, withdraw from Iraq, and reconcile the United States to a less dominant role in the world.

It was, by any measure, a breathtaking display of narcissistic grandiosity from a man whose entire political curriculum vitae consisted of seven undistinguished years in the Illinois Senate, two mostly absent years in the United States Senate, and five months and ten days in the White House. Unintentionally, Obama revealed the characteristics that made him totally unsuited for the presidency and that would doom him to failure: his extreme haughtiness and excessive pride; his ideological bent as a far-left corporatist; and his astounding amateurism.

Compare that Hindenburg-sized level of hubris to the ad that Mitt Romney’s campaign rolled out today, to broach the idea of President Romney’s first day in office (as Mollie Hemingway asks at Ricochet, “Did You Just Say ‘President Romney?’”) No Styrofoam columns and lowering of the Red Sea here, in contrast, doable initial achievements:

Beyond the laundry list, there’s the tone of the ad. Perhaps Hugh Hewitt should reissue his 2007 book which invites us to imagine A Mormon in the White House under a new title: A Grown-Up in the White House.

It would make for a refreshing change. But do the American people want one there again?

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Obviously, this clears it all up — Obama was clearly born in San Clemente, not Hawaii or Kenya. At Power Line, Thomas Lipscomb writes:

After all where do the bios come from? We don’t make them up. And neither did Dystel & Goederich. They come from the authors, like Obama. No one has ever invented a detail like that, and the authors usually review them and scream like hell if we get them wrong.

Can Dystel and Goedrich show us the correction appeal letter they got from Obama about the Kenya birth in over 10 years of using this bio? Or any other incident from any other publisher or agent that is similar to this “error?”

I really don’t care where Obama was born. The continued degeneration of the press in passing on hilarious nonsense as fact is a lot more serious problem. Give Dystel & Goederich the Rose Mary Woods Memorial Award for the Most Absurd Lie to Protect a President of the Year.

Thomas Lipscomb
Senior Fellow
Annenberg Center for the Digital Future (USC)

Read the whole thing.

And note that this is far from the first time Obama and his handlers have been compared to Nixon and his staff.

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Well, so much for Obama’s former agent falling on her sword: “A ‘Fact Checking Error’? Dystel & Goderich Ask Writers to Submit Their Own Bios.” Which has always been the case with every magazine article I’ve written — it’s the author’s job.

At Red State, Erick Erickson writes that the legacy media have yet again been caught flat-footed on the Obama literary bio story that Breitbart.com (with a powerful assist from Matt Drudge) broke yesterday. Naturally, in response, Erickson writes, the MSM is “claiming the story is no big deal, irrelevant, or that somehow the Breitbart Crew is in the wrong and peddling Birtherism.” And we’ve all heard this story before, as yet another beloved far left figure is caught cooking the books:

They are not peddling Birtherism. The Breitbart Crew are kind of like illegal immigrants — doing reporting Columbia journalism grads won’t do. And doing it quite well. In 2008, the New York Times ran a big story on John McCain having an affair with a lobbyist. It got picked up all over the place. Reporters were on the trail. There was no *there* there.

It took most of the month of August in 2004 for the media to pay attention to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — men who served with John Kerry and had real problems with both his conduct in Vietnam and his conduct after he left Vietnam. The media did not want to cover the story. For a while, it was just Fox News. The clear demonstration of bias finally forced the New York Times and the big three nightly newscasts to play catch up as dismissively as possible.

This story has been out there since Barack Obama ran for the United States Senate. Even now the media is dismissing it as frivolous. If it turned out Mitt Romney had not actually been a missionary in France, it would be headline news.

Barack Obama embellishing his biography to make himself look unique? Hardly worthy of press attention. In fact, nothing Barack Obama has done suggesting serious character flaws — and that’s what this is about — is ever worth the media’s collective attention. Why? Because some people think Barack Obama was born in Kenya, but much of the press corps is pretty damn sure he was born in Bethlehem.

Moe Lane, where I found Erickson’s post, files it under the “[Quote of the Day,] It Explains So Much Edition.” But at this point, does the MSM still think Obama walks on water, or as in the 2004 and 2000 elections (and when they were pedaling Dean, Edwards, Hillary, etc.), any Democrat in a storm is better in the MSM’s jaundiced eyes than the alternative? That would also explain the enormous amounts of fear the MSM, and the Obama administration (and the two are deeply intertwined of course) have been pushing since the start of the year.

Erickson goes on to speculate that perhaps Obama claiming to be a Kenyan during his salad days in academia is why today, “the campaign screams bloody murder about racists and birthers every time someone asks about Barack Obama’s college transcripts?” Which takes us to Roger L. Simon’s latest post here at PJM:

Well, he might have wanted to glamorize his past, but if that’s so, it’s pathetic. I suspected there was a more substantive reason, one that would cause him to leave his African birth place in place in the bio. But to take the risk of being found out, it would have to be strong.

My wife Sheryl and I, like Nick and Nora Charles, discussed it over gimlets this evening. We both agreed the mystery lay somewhere in Obama’s college and university years at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard. We knew, as you do, there must be an explanation for why the court eunuchs of the mainstream media have never bothered even to investigate the scholastic career of the most powerful person in the world.

Because Obama got bad grades? Yawn — so did Bush, Kerry, Biden, Ted Kennedy, and dozens of others who later found themselves making life or death decisions over our lives.

No, it had to be something more significant, more potentially dangerous. What if, we thought, as others have suggested, the reason Obama’s school records have not surfaced is that he enrolled, at one of those institutions at least, as a foreign student — a Kenyan?

But why would he choose to do that? Well, maybe for a grant, a subvention, a scholarship that was available uniquely to students from Africa or similar locales.

Yes, I know that’s not “fair,” in the lexicon of the Lord of Fairness, to have adopted a phony identity and deprived others of an opportunity they may have more richly deserved. But it would certainly fit with Obama’s early need to be recognized as a Kenyan by his agent and, presumably, his publisher. As we all know, it’s not the crime, but the cover-up. (In this case, actually, it’s both.)

As time went on, of course, college drifted away and politics reared its head. The Kenyan identity became less necessary, even a liability, so it was dropped.

I don’t know about you — but this makes sense to me. It also fits with the tomb-like silence around his college years.

Moe Lane adds:

This is just like the Elizabeth Warren affair, in two ways.  First off: the reason why Obama and Warren lied about their backgrounds is because the environment that they were in – liberal academia – wanted them to lie, and encouraged them to lie.  It made them more diverse, which made liberal institutions more diverse in hiring them, and in this particular case ‘diverse’ is semantically equivalent to ‘exotic.’  Second: if Obama or Warren had ever decided not to seek higher office – if they had decided that they were comfortable in their academic cocoon – they STILL would be claiming their faux-exotic status.

See also: Churchill, Ward.

Oh, and speaking of Elizabeth Warren, this is just pathetic if it’s true: “Did Elizabeth Warren Plagiarize Her ‘Pow Wow Chow’ Recipes?”

What also ties all of these stories together is something that I wrote about in 2004 — John Kerry assumed the MSM would bury his radical chic 1970s days; Obama assumed the MSM would bury Rev. Wright and his own radical chic years in academia, and Warren never thought anybody would check on her background. It’s infinitely easier to adjust the chocolate ration when the Ministry of Information is a closed shop (and there was much less information to go around, back when the news consisted of a half of local TV news, a half hour of national TV news, and a couple of wire services). Neither Warren nor Obama’s narratives were built to withstand serious scrutiny, which is what they’re now facing. But considering the left loved (and loves) the notion of the October Surprise to knock out their GOP opponents at the last minute, having turned von Clausewitz’s maxim on its head and transformed politics into an extension of warfare, they can’t complain much about the new media world they inadvertently helped to build.

Related: Bookworm asks, “Is Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, a 1978 case rejecting academic racial quotas, the smoking gun behind Obama’s Kenyan identity?” Read the whole thing.™

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Scientific America looks at “Ancient Diseases of Human Ancestors:”

I’ve written before about ancient diseases of the ice age, but this time I’m going even further back in time, to diseases that were present in the first human-like hominids. Although many human infections only developed after human settlements and animal domistication, early human ancestors would still have been fighting off bacteria and other nasty diseases. Some of these diseases are still around today.

Perhaps more than are necessary; am I the only one having flashbacks to the opening of Tom Wolfe’s “The Great Relearning” essay”

In 1968, in San Francisco, I came across a curious footnote to the hippie movement. At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic there were doctors who were treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroll, the rot. And how was it that they had now returned? It had to do with the fact that thousands of young men and women had migrated to San Francisco to live communally in what I think history will record as one of the most extraordinary religious fevers of all time.

The hippies sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from zero. At one point the novelist Ken Kesey, leader of a commune called the Merry Pranksters, organized a pilgrimage to Stonehenge with the idea of returning to Anglo-Saxon civilization’s point zero, which he figured was Stonehenge, and heading out all over again to do it better. Among the codes and restraints that in the communes swept aside—quite purposely—were those that said you shouldn’t use other people’s toothbrushes or sleep on other people’s mattresses without changing the sheets or, as was more likely, without using any sheets at all, or that you and five other people shouldn’t drink from the same bottle of Shasta or take tokes from the same cigarette. And now, in 1968, they were relearning . . . the laws of hygiene . . . by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.

This process, namely the relearning—following a Promethean and unprecedented start from zero—seems to me to be the leitmotif of the twenty-first century in America.

Faster please, to coin a phrase.

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Back in March, Ann Althouse had lots of fun with a New York Times article on “The Go-Nowhere Generation” on the “unexpectedly” sedentary nature of today’s youth. Althouse responded:

Isn’t that what the Boomer generation told them to do? Cars are bad. They are destroying the planet. Then, when they avoid driving, we scold them for being — what? — sedentary? unambitious? incurious?!

Similarly, having spent decades extolling the value of higher education and the payoff afterward of an Annie Hall and Alvy Singer-style lifestyle in midtown Manhattan, the New York Times is now running a series titled, “Degrees of Debt — This series examines the implications of soaring college costs and the indebtedness of students and their families.” The latest edition focuses on “A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College:”

Kelsey Griffith graduates on Sunday from Ohio Northern University. To start paying off her $120,000 in student debt, she is already working two restaurant jobs and will soon give up her apartment here to live with her parents. Her mother, who co-signed on the loans, is taking out a life insurance policy on her daughter.

“If anything ever happened, God forbid, that is my debt also,” said Ms. Griffith’s mother, Marlene Griffith.

Ms. Griffith, 23, wouldn’t seem a perfect financial fit for a college that costs nearly $50,000 a year. Her father, a paramedic, and mother, a preschool teacher, have modest incomes, and she has four sisters. But when she visited Ohio Northern, she was won over by faculty and admissions staff members who urge students to pursue their dreams rather than obsess on the sticker price.

“As an 18-year-old, it sounded like a good fit to me, and the school really sold it,” said Ms. Griffith, a marketing major. “I knew a private school would cost a lot of money. But when I graduate, I’m going to owe like $900 a month. No one told me that.”

I learned a lot in college — but I’m pretty sure that even before I enrolled, I knew that loans were required to be paid back. Chevy Chase’s parody version of Gerald Ford may have been incensed about being blindsided by a complex no-win economic question during a presidential debate, but how does one enroll in college without understanding this basic fact of life?

Oh, and speaking of presidents, numbers and students, “Generation 44,” as our Zelig-like president dubbed them, is likely about to experience sticker shock:

President Obama’s fiscal 2013 budget proposal would double the interest rate on federally backed student loans from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent–eight months after the November presidential election.

The White House fiscal year 2013 plan calls for maintaining the current 3.4 percent interest rate for federally guaranteed student loans, but only through July 1, 2013, at which point it would automatically increase to 6.8 percent. Neither the president’s plan nor the Democrats’ legislation would extend the low rate beyond another year.

The president’s budget calls for “Suspending an Increase in Student Loan Interest Rates.” (See page 97).

“Under current law, interest rates on subsidized Stafford loans are slated to rise this summer [July 1] from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent,” reads the Obama budget. “At a time when the economy is still recovering and market interest rates remain low, it makes no sense to double rates on student loans. The Budget suspends the scheduled increase for the coming year, so that rates will remain at 3.4 percent.”

The Senate bill favored by Democrats states, “in the matter preceding clause (i), by striking ‘and before July 1, 2012,’ and inserting `and before July 1, 2013.’”

The Republican alternative legislation would also extend the low rate for only another year.

* * * * *

Obama has focused heavily on keeping student loan interest rates down to 3.4 percent in some of his recent speeches on college campuses. The youth vote helped boost his victory in 2008, where he beat John McCain by 34 percent among voters under 30, according to the Associated Press. However, last month a Harvard poll found that this year Obama is leading his Republican opponent Mitt Romney by 12 points (41%-29%) among voters aged 18 to 24.

The details of that last paragraph are explained in depth here.

Related: “What I Learned About Money in My Twenties.”

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In case you haven’t seen it, here’s a screencap of the top of the Drudge Report as of the time of this post.  The link on the headline takes you to a post at Breitbart.com written by Joel B. Pollack and titled “The Vetting — Exclusive — Obama’s Literary Agent in 1991 Booklet: ‘Born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.’” The article itself begins with a “Note from Senior Management” that cautions the reader, “Andrew Breitbart was never a ‘Birther,’ and Breitbart News is a site that has never advocated the narrative of ‘Birtherism:’”

In fact, Andrew believed, as we do, that President Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961.

Yet Andrew also believed that the complicit mainstream media had refused to examine President Obama’s ideological past, or the carefully crafted persona he and his advisers had constructed for him.

It is for that reason that we launched “The Vetting,” an ongoing series in which we explore the ideological background of President Obama (and other presidential candidates)–not to re-litigate 2008, but because ideas and actions have consequences.

It is also in that spirit that we discovered, and now present, the booklet described below–one that includes a marketing pitch for a forthcoming book by a then-young, otherwise unknown former president of the Harvard Law Review.

It is evidence–not of the President’s foreign origin, but that Barack Obama’s public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times.

The article goes on to note that “Breitbart News has obtained a promotional booklet produced in 1991 by Barack Obama’s then-literary agency, Acton & Dystel, which touts Obama as ‘born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.’”

Ace (who also reminds readers that he’s not a birther, either. For the record, neither are we) notes that Obama himself was likely the source of the copy in the screencap above, which is also presented in numerous other scans in the Brietbart.com article.

While it’s true that bios are often not written by the subject, the information in the bio must come from somewhere — and the obvious place to get such information is the subject himself.

I’ve been asked to write these myself — and in fact I owe someone one right now — and while they may be rewritten and edited, the guy asking you for the bio wants the basic information. He doesn’t want to go researching stuff which you can provide for him in 40 seconds.

So it seems very likely this came from Obama. Where else would Obama’s birthplace have come from? In 1991, Obama had not yet written his two (ahem) memoirs. He was not a famous man.

So, why did Obama say this?

Hey, it probably played well at the time, an early example of Jim Geraghty’s recurring theme that all of Obama’s statements have expiration dates on them. And so do Obama’s previous names, another way that he has altered the way he presented himself to the world at various times.

All of which dovetails into the question that Roger L. Simon asks at the Tatler: “Is Obama a Pathological Liar?”

We have always branded Bill Clinton a liar, at least about sex, and probably other things. But the amazing scoop by Breitbart.com today makes Obama one up on Bill. In all likelihood, the president will say that he never saw the information from his literary agents claiming he was born in Kenya. But as the author of 11 books, I can say that in EVERY instance that I have been published, I have seen such material in advance. It could be that Obama is the exception, but that is highly unlikely.

In other words, we have in the White House a man willing to bend his national identity for profit. Pretty cool! (He’s supposed to be cool, isn’t he? Well that’s as cool as it gets.)

Speaking of playing well during his college days, placing that 1991 bio into context also helps to explain what drives the Birthers, something that Mark Steyn discussed last year in his book After America:

With hindsight, this is what drove both the birthers and the countering cries of racism. Detractors and supporters alike were trying to explain something that was at first vaguely palpable and then became embarrassingly obvious: it’s not so much that he’s foreign to America, but that America is foreign to him. Outside the cloisters of Hyde Park and a few other enclaves, he doesn’t seem to get America. Not because he was born in Kenya or wherever, but because he’s the first president to be marinated his entire life in a post-modern, post-American cultural relativism. What’s worrying about Obama is not that he’s weird but that he’s so typical of much of the Eloi [Steyn's recurring H.G. Wells-inspired leitmotif in After America for the pampered elite -- Ed]; in that sense, his post-Americanness is all too American.

In both Chicago’s Ward Four, where the Obamas lived, and Ward Five, where they worked, 95 percent of electors voted Democrat in 2004. You would be hard put to find another constituency so committed to celebrating lack of diversity. Like most professional multiculturalists, Obama has passed his entire adulthood in a very narrow unicultural environment where your ideological worldview doesn’t depend on anything so tedious as actually viewing the world. The aforementioned Michael Ignatieff, who actually has viewed the world, gets close to the psychology in his response to criticisms of him for spending so much time abroad. Deploring such “provincialism,” he replied: “They say it makes me less of a Canadian. It makes me more of a Canadian.”

And how better to sound cool and exotic to Harvard’s professors (many of whom likely share the same punitive liberal worldview of America that Obama has marinated in much of his life) than to claim you weren’t born in America?

Related: At the Tatler, Myra Adams links to the Breitbart post and asks, “It is only May. Can you imagine what the October presidential campaign will look like?”

I hope for their sake that the Romney camp has.

Update: At Hot Air, Allahpundit adds:

An author born in colonial Kenya sounds more worldly at first blush than one born in Honolulu, just as a law professor who’s 1/32 Cherokee sounds more in tune with the minority experience in America than a white woman from Oklahoma. Beyond that, though, this is a story about the media: I’d bet cash money that some reporter somewhere stumbled upon this booklet in years past and politely suppressed the info rather than do the journalist’s job of asking questions and finding out why the mistake in the booklet was made. The alternative, that the media was so uninterested in O’s background that they never checked his professional listings, is grimly possible, but I’m skeptical. I think this is a case where someone probably heard about the booklet and ignored it in order to play gatekeeper so that the Birthers couldn’t exploit the information. That’s what the press has come to when the subject is Obama’s background.

Read the whole thing. And then click back over to Breitbart.com, where Ben Shapiro notes, “Obama’s Lit Agency Used ‘Born in Kenya’ Bio Until 2007″:

According to archive.org, a website that caches websites on a regular basis, [AKA The Internet Archieve Wayback Machine -- Ed] the Dystel.com website – the official website for Dystel & Goderich, Obama’s literary agents – was using the Barack Obama “born in Kenya” language until April 2007, just two months after then-Senator Obama declared his campaign for the presidency.

Here’s a screencap we made of the Dystel.com client list that the Wayback machine captured in April of 2007 lest it disappears; we’ve scrolled down to the relevant entry; click to enlarge:

Shapiro writes that apparently, sometime later in April of 2007, Obama’s bio at Dystel was revised to state that he was born in Hawaii. Speaking of the Wayback Machine, a commenter at Hot Air links to a 2004 Associated Press article archived there from the Nairobi-Kenya Standard and notes, “This has been around for a long time. But most people assumed it was a one-off error: Kenyan-born Obama all set for US Senate.” Here’s its lede:

Kenyan-born US Senate hopeful, Barrack Obama, appeared set to take over the Illinois Senate seat after his main rival, Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race on Friday night amid a furor over lurid sex club allegations.

Snopes, the left-leaning veteran fact-checking Website has a 2009 article debunking this article; one can only imagine how crazy they’re going there today.

Similarly, Obama’s former literary agent has decided to do one last bit of damage control today for her old client:

Miriam Goderich issued the following statement to Political Wire:

“You’re undoubtedly aware of the brouhaha stirred up by Breitbart about the erroneous statement in a client list Acton & Dystel published in 1991 (for circulation within the publishing industry only) that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.  This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me — an agency assistant at the time.  There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii.  I hope you can communicate to your readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing more.”

But one they kept making for 16 years. Still though, nice of Goderich to take the fall herself. As Mark Steyn likes to quip:

When the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dumped some of his closest cabinet colleagues to extricate himself from a political crisis, the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe responded: “Greater love hath no man than to lay down his friends for his life.”

And the wheels of the bus go ’round and ’round.

More: Vindication for Jack Cashill, who believes that Bill Ayers wrote Dreams From My Father? Roger adds his his video interview today with Cashill to discuss these latest revelations to his Tatler post:

Related: Jim Treacher squares the circle: “Obama wasn’t born in Kenya, except when he claims he was born in Kenya:”

Either Obama was born in Kenya or he wasn’t. I remain skeptical that he was. The question is, then: Why did he claim to be? What advantage did he think it gave him at the time?

Maybe Elizabeth Warren can tell us…

To coin a popular Blogospheric phrase, heh.

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The World Wildlife Federation, who along with a little help from Fairfax Media, a major media conglomerate in Australia and New Zealand, has made Earth Hour an annual eco-pagan “holiday” amongst the far left (including businesses either dumb enough to play along, or perhaps in the hopes of appeasement). But that isn’t their only effort at playing Chicken Little. This year, they managed to convince the New York Daily News (a center-left paper that should know better) to run an article titled “Two Earths would be needed to sustain human activity by 2030, report finds,” that’s really a glorified press release for the WWF:

Planet Earth in a tight spot.

Mankind is draining the earth’s resources so quickly the globe would be bled dry before the end of the century at this rate, a new report shows.

Humans are living outside their means, depleting natural resources like forests, air and water 50% faster than the planet can renew, according to the 2012 World Wildlife Fund’s “Living Planet Report” released this month.

If the trends aren’t reversed, by 2030 we’d need more than two Planet Earths to sustain human activity, according to the study.

“If we just do business as usual…we’re just going to continue moving in this direction. At some point, the earth’s going to just give out. We don’t know when. But that’s a pretty scary thing to think about,” said Colby Loucks, director of conservation science at WWF. “The question is, we don’t know what the tipping point is.”

But you sure know how to shout doomsday on a regular basis. In 2009, the WWF commissioned this ad, in both still and video versions, which they pulled at the last minute, perhaps risking the backlash from the general public over a form of agitprop that James Taranto once dubbed, “Green Supremacism:”

Having exploited 9/11 to play the Moral Equivalent of War cliche, a couple of months later, the WWF decided to use children as human shields for their next campaign:

That 2030 date randomly chosen by the WWF’s latest “report” is interesting — it’s at least far enough out that most people will have forgotten it by the time it arrives, unlike all of the “we only have five years/ten years/four years to save the earth” cri de coeurs, many of which date from the Bush administration era, and are coming due, and making the enviro-socialists who issued them look particularly silly. But it’s close enough to scare those who wish to be scared by the latest Malthusian doomsday scenario.

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According to TMZ, Donna Summer has passed away at age 63:

9:27 AM PST- TMZ has learned … Donna died from lung cancer. Several sources are telling us Donna believed she contracted it by inhaling toxic particles after the 9/11 attack in New York City.

9:35 AM PST- Donna’s family just released a statement, claiming, they “are at peace celebrating her extraordinary life and her continued legacy.”

Donna Summer — the Queen of Disco — died this morning after a battle with cancer … TMZ has learned.

We’re told Summer was in Florida at the time of her death. She was 63 years old.

The reference to 9/11 sounds like her survivors are preparing some sort of lawsuit against the City of New York, but in the meantime, RIP to the late-’70s-era icon.

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