“Bomb the Suburbs”
– Title of 1994 book by Chicago graffiti “artist” William Upski Wimsatt.
“When the president visits suburban backyards, it sometimes seems like a visit from a ‘president from another planet.’ After all, as a young man [in the early nineties], Obama told The Associated Press: ‘I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me.’”
– Joel Kotkin, October, 2010.
“Obama’s Election 2012 dilemma: the DOOM that came from suburbia?”
– Moe Lane, on Monday.
Susan Ferrechio of the Washington Examiner writes that “Romney swept the Texas primary Tuesday night to secure the last of the 1,144 convention delegates needed to guarantee him the nomination:”
Mitt Romney, who just two months ago was battling a series of conservative Republican challengers, on Tuesday grabbed enough votes in Texas to become the first Mormon positioned to win a national party presidential nomination.
Romney swept the Texas primary Tuesday night to secure the last of the 1,144 convention delegates needed to guarantee him the nomination.
The former Massachusetts governor stood alone after months of battling conservative challengers and his own occasional campaign-trail gaffes, which repeatedly knocked him from the front of the pack. In his second run for the White House, Romney relied on a well-financed, well-organized campaign machine, including a super-PAC with deep pockets, to repeatedly rebound until finally seizing the nomination so many sought to deny him.
Romney said he was “humbled” to have reached the delegate threshold.
“I have no illusions about the difficulties of the task before us,” Romney said in a statement. “But whatever challenges lie ahead, we will settle for nothing less than getting America back on the path to full employment and prosperity. On November 6, I am confident that we will unite as a country and begin the hard work of fulfilling the American promise and restoring our country to greatness.”
At the Wall Street Journal, Pete Dupont explores what the alternative next four years would look like.
Back in October of 1976, Time magazine reported “The Blooper Heard Round the World:”
Chopping the air with his right hand, Gerald Ford boldly declared: “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford Administration.”
Incredulous, New York Times Associate Editor Max Frankel asked a follow-up question that offered Ford a chance to retreat, but Ford lowered his head and charged into a trap of his own making. By his reckoning, Yugoslavia, Rumania and even Poland were not under the Soviet thumb. “Each of these countries is independent, autonomous; it has its own territorial integrity.”
Thus, in his second debate with Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford made what could well be the most damaging statement of his career.
Flash-forward to today, when Obama made a gaffe involving Poland and the totalitarianism that was forced upon it that rivals Ford’s: “President Obama Causes Outrage with Reference to ‘Polish Death Camp,’” Jake Tapper reports at ABC:
Poles and Polish-Americans expressed outrage today at President Obama’s reference earlier to “a Polish death camp” — as opposed to a Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland.
“The White House will apologize for this outrageous error,” Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski tweeted. Sikorski said that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk “will make a statement in the morning. It’s a pity that this important ceremony was upstaged by ignorance and incompetence.”
The president had been trying to honor a famous Pole, awarding a Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski, a resistance fighter who sneaked behind enemy lines to bear witness to the atrocities being committed against Jews. President Obama referred to him being smuggled “into the Warsaw ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself.”
Sikorski also tonight tweeted a link to an Economist story noting that “few things annoy Poles more than being blamed for the crimes committed by the Nazi occupiers of their homeland. For many years, Polish media, diplomats and politicians have tried to persuade outsiders to stop using the phrase ‘Polish death camps’ as a shorthand description of Auschwitz and other exemplars of Nazi brutality and mass murder. Unfortunately this seems to have escaped Barack Obama’s staff seem not to have noticed this.”
As Seth Mandel noted earlier this month at Commentary, “it turns out Obama has added bullet points bragging about his own accomplishments to the biographical sketches of every single U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge (except, for some reason, Gerald Ford).” Nice Obama to rectify that omission with his latest gaffe.
After last week, I don’t think I need to explain to regular readers of the Blogosphere what “SWATting” means, but just in case, here’s Erick Erickson of Red State.org on Friday:
Ever hear of swatting? It’s a tactic used by left-wing activists and others these days to spoof phone calls in order to get SWAT Teams to show up at houses. It has happened to several conservative activists.
Consider this your must read of the day. It is LA County Prosecutor John Patrick Frey, who blogs as Patterico, describing just what harassment he and his family were subjected to by the online left.
The mainstream media, which has greater sympathies with the left than the right, would prefer not to cover stories like this. But it is getting to the point where they ignore the ongoing, sustained harassment of conservatives because they are conservatives.
And here’s Erickson early this morning — after he got SWAT-ted himself on Sunday evening:
Sunday night as my family and sister’s family were around the dinner table and playing outside, sheriff’s deputies pulled into my driveway responding to an accidental shooting at my home.
One deputy was in the driveway. Another blocked the end of the driveway with his car. A neighbor tells me another was up the hill from the house.
There was no shooting at my home. Someone called 911, claimed to be at my home, and claimed to witness a shooting at my home.
As the one deputy and I spoke, the other deputy walked up the driveway, positioned himself behind the car in the driveway, and kept his eyes on me and his hand on his gun. My three year old ran between us all thinking it was so cool to have a police car in the driveway with its blue lights flashing.
Luckily, after I had starting writing about Kimberlin, I advised the Sheriff’s Department to be aware this could happen.
It was a prank, but not just any prank. This is a prank left-wing activists are increasingly deploying against those who dissent from their political views. When Barack Obama told his supporters in 2008 to bring guns to knife fights, some of his supporters took him more literally than I assume he intended.
The stories of what is happening are not getting much traction outside of right-of-center blogs and the occasional opinion column at the Wall Street Journal, D.C. Examiner, and Washington Times.
Will it get any attention at CNN, where Erickson is paid to contribute, both on the air and to their Website? For half a century, the media narrative is that all violence and threats of violence happen on the right, while the left are all United Colors of Benetton wearing happy shiny flower children with peaceful easy feelings. That narrative is why over the last three years, CNN first melted down over the Tea Party, and then blamed Sarah Palin for Gabrielle Giffords’ shooting. In contrast last fall, first CNN, and then Time magazine, which is owned by the same conglomerate that owns CNN, would quickly go all-in praising Occupy Wall Street (where the recurring theme is the “mostly peaceful” OWS) — violence and the threat of violence are tools of the right in their minds, as Jesse Walker of Reason thoroughly explored in 2009.
So how does CNN begin to cover a story that doesn’t fit anywhere within the narrative they’ve worked so hard to construct? As blogger Ace of Spades wrote yesterday:
Even though Erick Erickson is a CNN contributor, I think there’s a good chance they won’t cover the story. If they do, you can bet your bottom dollar it will be a “balanced” piece including lots of supposed harassments of liberals.
They’ll reach back ten years for “balance.”
There are only two media storylines: Conservatives are doing bad things, and “a broken system permits both sides to do bad things.”
There is never the third type of story: Leftists are doing bad things.
That is, if CNN covers the story at all. So far it seems to be nothing but crickets; if you hear otherwise, let me know in the comments below.
Related: Jim Geraghty explores “What Fuels Irrationality in Our Public Life?”
Update (5/30/12): Welcome Instapundit readers — if you want to know why CNN is getting clobbered in the ratings, here’s one very good example — they’re being scooped by Fox over news involving a paid CNN contributor.
More: Clearly, there is only one veteran newsman who’s both Old and New Media savvy who can turn CNN around — and who just might be full tilt double-live gonzo enough to take on the job — if he can still be found…
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.
Zhou Enlai apparently never did say, “The impact of the French Revolution? Too early to say,” in the early 1970s, but whoever mistranslated him was certainly onto something. Sometimes it really does seem like it takes a rather extended period to elapse for the truth of a story to filter out.
First up, at Newsbusters, Tim Graham quotes from Pat Buchanan; whom long before he was a TV pundit was an aide in the Nixon administration:
The Nixon-hating legends at The Washington Post are furious with author Jeff Himmelman for pulling the curtains back on their own machinations. You can see the damage in Pat Buchanan’s latest column on how Watergate was over-inflated in the history books.
In a taped interview in 1990, revealed now in “Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee,” the former Washington Post executive editor himself dynamites the myth: “Watergate … (has) achieved a place in history … that it really doesn’t deserve. … The crime itself was really not a great deal. Had it not been for the Nixon resignation, it really would have been a blip in history.” Buchanan enjoyed how Bob Woodward was put on the other side of the microscope:
Still, what is most arresting about “Yours in Truth” is the panic that gripped Bob Woodward when Jeff Himmelman, the author and a protege of Woodward, revealed to him the contents of the Bradlee tapes.
Speaking of “All the President’s Men,” Bradlee had said, “I have a little problem with Deep Throat,” Woodward’s famous source, played in the movie by Hal Holbrooke, later revealed to be Mark Felt of the FBI.
Bradlee was deeply skeptical of the Woodward-Felt signals code and all those secret meetings. He told interviewer Barbara Feinman:
“Did that potted palm thing ever happen? … And meeting in some garage. One meeting in the garage. Fifty meetings in the garage … there’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.”
Bradlee spoke about that fear gnawing at him: “I just find the flower in the window difficult to believe and the garage scenes. …
“If they could prove that Deep Throat never existed … that would be a devastating blow to Woodward and to the Post. … It would be devastating, devastating.”
When Himmelman showed him the transcript, Woodward “was visibly shaken” and repeated Bradlee’s line — “there’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight” — 15 times in 20 minutes.
Woodward tried to get Bradlee to retract. He told Himmelman not to include the statements in his book. He pleaded. He threatened. He failed.
That Woodward became so alarmed and agitated that Bradlee’s bullhockey detector had gone off over the dramatized version of “All the President’s Men” suggests a fear in more than just one soul here.
Prior to aggrieved FBI agent Mark Felt outing himself as “Deep Throat” a few years before passing away, Buchanan himself was thought be some to be Deep Throat. But as Mark Steyn wrote in 2005, Felt’s admission dramatically cheapened the myths of Watergate, for those who are paying attention beyond the 1976 Robert Redford-Dustin Hoffman movie (which added plenty of mythology of its own to the story. Not that some at the Washington Post minded very much):
Like the ”Star Wars” wrap-up, ”How Mark Felt Became Deep Throat” feels small and mean after three decades of the awesome dramatic burden placed upon it. The nobility of the Watergate myth — in which media boomers and generations of journalism school ethics bores have sunk so much — seems cheapened and tarnished by this last plot twist.
The best thing I read on the subject in the last few days was a 1992 piece by James Mann from the Atlantic Monthly. He doesn’t identify Deep Throat, though he mentions Mark Felt in an important context. But get a load of this remarkably shrewd paragraph from 13 years ago:
”By coincidence, the Watergate break-in occurred on June 17, less than seven weeks after Hoover’s death and [FBI outsider] Gray’s appointment [as acting director]. The FBI took charge of the federal investigation at the same time that the administration was trying to limit its scope.
”Therein lies the origin of Deep Throat.”
Bingo! Mann also adds: ”Rarely is it asked whether White House aides like Haig, Ziegler, and Garment were the sort of people willing to hold 2 a.m. meetings in a parking garage, or whether they were able to arrange the circling of the page number 20 of Bob Woodward’s copy of the New York Times, which was delivered to his apartment by 7 a.m. — the signal that Deep Throat wanted a meeting.”
With the benefit of hindsight, Mann’s observation seems obvious. That’s what the spy novelists call ”tradecraft.” It’s the sort of thing spooks and feds do, not White House aides. Why then was it not so obvious for the last three decades?
The answer is that, thanks to All The President’s Men, the media took it for granted they were America’s plucky heroic crusaders, and there’s no point being plucky heroic crusaders unless you’ve got the dark sinister forces of an all-powerful government to pluckily crusade against. Think how many conspiracy movies there’ve been where White House aides are the sort of chaps who think nothing of meeting you at 2 a.m. in parking garages, usually as a prelude to having you whacked. In films like Clint Eastwood’s ”Absolute Power” or Kevin Costner’s ”No Way Out,” political appointees carry on like that routinely. That image of government derives principally from the Nixon era.
And similarly, the halo of Walter Cronkite, another 1970s-era old media titan is looking a bit tarnished these days, as even Howard Kurtz noted recently in the Daily Beastweek:
But he was far more liberal than the public believed, and he let it show in unacceptable ways. Had Cronkite pulled such stunts today, I would probably be among those calling for him to step down.
Barry Goldwater distrusted him from the start, and with good reason. On the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Cronkite nodded his head in thinly veiled contempt when handed a note on air that the Arizona senator had said “no comment.” Goldwater was attending his mother-in-law’s funeral that day.
“Whether or not Senator Goldwater wins the nomination,” Cronkite told viewers another day, “he is going places, the first place being Germany.” Although Goldwater had merely accepted an invitation to visit a U.S. Army facility there, correspondent Daniel Schorr said he was launching his campaign in “the center of Germany’s right wing.” During Goldwater’s speech at the 1964 convention, some conservatives fed up with the networks gave Cronkite the finger.
Four years later, after Cronkite had belatedly turned against LBJ’s Vietnam War, he met privately with Robert Kennedy. “You must announce your intention to run against Johnson, to show people there will be a way out of this terrible war,” he said in Kennedy’s Senate office. Soon afterward, Cronkite got an exclusive interview in which Kennedy left the door open for a possible run—the very candidacy that the anchor had urged him to undertake. (Kennedy announced three days later.) I am shaking my head at the spectacle of a network anchor secretly urging a politician to mount a White House campaign—and then interviewing him about that very question. This was duplicitous, a major breach of trust.
Speaking of “Too Soon to Say,” note this admission over the past weekend from Bob Schieffer, another grizzled CBS stalwart:
I think one of the lessons that probably all of us recognize is that if you — I wrote a book once about Ronald Reagan. It came out the month that he was, that George Bush was inaugurated. The book, I think, everything in the book is accurate, but it is not entirely true, because we didn’t know at that time that the Soviet Union was going to fall in. I don’t give Reagan credit, total credit, for that but certainly his policies had a part in it. I think you really run a risk when you start trying to judge a presidency too soon.
“Accurate, but not entirely true?” “Fake but accurate?” Just another day for the CBS “news” team — and Old Media in general — when it’s covering a Republican president.
Back in February of 2009, at the very beginning of the Obama administration, I said at the conclusion of one of my Silicon Graffiti videos:
The American economy is remarkably resilient. It survived a depression in FDR’s 1930s, and it survived double-digit inflation, unemployment and interest rates in the last years of Jimmy Carter’s 1970s. But there’s only so much more abuse and top-down control it can take before it reaches overload.
You and I have a rendezvous with scarcity—a destiny that for some is already here—and for the rest of us may be arriving all-too soon—because a surprisingly wide swatch of the country wants just that.
Contrast the rendezvous with scarcity that Obama forced upon us with this:
Why is energy such a high-level issue this year?,” said Harold Hamm, the CEO of Continental Resources and chairman of Romney’s energy policy advisory team, on Thursday. “It is pretty simple: because of the failure of Obama’s energy policy.”
The billionaire Hamm, whose company is a major player in North Dakota’s booming Bakken oil formation, is also a major donor to the Romney effort. Hamm this year gave $985,000 to Restore Our Future, the super-PAC supporting Romney’s presidential campaign.He said Obama’s policies aimed at developing renewable energy are based on a false notion of oil and natural-gas “scarcity” that has been overtaken by the U.S. production boom.
“Romney has a policy of abundance; the other one is one of scarcity,” Hamm said.
As Jazz Shaw writes at Hot Air, “In the American west: An ocean of oil.” Despite that, “This past weekend, Gas prices in Los Angeles County were the highest they’ve ever been on Memorial Day.”
And that’s just the way that Obama and the MSM want it — provided the rise was gradual enough.
Or at least that’s just the way one version of Obama wants it. His ego and teleprompter are both large; they contains multiples.
Now is the time at Ed Driscoll.com when we juxtapose, Small Dead Animals-style:
Bismarck arbitrarily chose 70 when he created social insurance in 1889. Clever guy: Life expectancy at the time was under 50.
When Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security, choosing 65 as the eligibility age, life expectancy was 62. Today it is almost 80. FDR wanted to prevent the aged few from suffering destitution in their last remaining years. Social Security was not meant to provide two decades of greens fees for baby boomers.
– “The Great Social Security Debate — Of course it’s a Ponzi scheme,” Charles Krauthammer, September 16, 2011.
The romantic concept of being able to retire on a sunny beach with endless drinks is a modern notion largely pushed by mainstream advertising. It is hard for many middle class Americans to imagine a world where retirement is a luxury for the very few. However that is the path we are now following. The ability to retire is being severely impaired for most Americans given their lack of savings but also the massive spending occurring by the government. Recently we have heard that Social Security is expected to run out of funding far quicker than was once expected. This information in itself is troubling but couple that with the incredibly low to non-existent savings rate for younger Americans and you realize the day of reckoning that is lining up. Even recent data has looked at pushing the retirement age from 65 to 80 for some workers which might be hard to do given it is beyond the normal life expectancy of most Americans. The new retirement model appears to be no retirement.
– “Saying goodbye to the middle class concept of retirement – many workers plan to work up until they are 80, well beyond the typical life expectancy of Americans,” My Budget 360, yesterday.
(Via Glenn Reynolds, who asks, “How’s that Hopey-Changey Stuff Workin’ Out for Ya?”)
Related: “On The Road With Obama,” from Tom Maguire: “More importantly, why is this old chap looking for work? Did his home equity fall off a cliff in Florida? Did his 401(k) implode? I think it is great that this guy has the energy and motivation to look for a job but my goodness — if Obama has led us to a point where ninety year olds need to look for work to avoid the cat food diet, it’s time for a change.”
At Ace of Spades, “One year ago today, we were all minding our own business and looking forward to a nice, relaxing Memorial Day weekend. Then all hell broke loose:”
It started late on Friday night, when people started getting wind of a story at Breitbart’s about New York Congressman and liberal attack terrier Anthony Weiner tweeting a picture of his member of congress to a young woman. Over the weekend, the story started picking up steam both on Twitter and the blogs, and our humble Head Ewok joined the fray.
I’m not positive Ace slept for about a week after that, but he and a few others (notably Andrew Breitbart, Patterico and Lee Stranahan) kept on the story until the mainstream media had no choice but to finally cover it.
The rest, as they say, is history. Along with Anthony Weiner’s congressional career.
Flash-forward to today: “Elizabeth Warren: We’ve Seen This Movie Before.”
Related: What a difference two years makes: “Happy Anniversary: Obama Praises Solyndra As ‘True Engine Of Economic Growth.’”
More: “Hey, Let’s Put this Ad for an Indian Casino Next to Our Warren Piece” — “Kudos to the Miami Herald for the best ad placement of the year.” Heh.™
“Not all campaign books are treated equally. Just look at Edward Klein and J.H. Hatfield,” Byron York writes in the Washington Examiner:
“Reporters for The New York Times, which received an advance copy of Mr. Hatfield’s book last week, spent several days looking for evidence that might corroborate his account,” wrote Times reporter Frank Bruni, now a liberal columnist for the paper, on October 22, 1999. “But they did not find any, and the newspaper did not publish anything about the claim.”
Lots of other news organizations did. When both Bushes denied the story, the Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Post, Los Angeles Times, and many others reported Hatfield’s revelation.
The New York Times also found a way to pass on the accusation without passing on the accusation; the paper published several articles about the controversy over the book, even if it did not directly quote the book itself. Times readers certainly got the idea.
The party ended when the Dallas Morning News reported Hatfield was “a felon on parole, convicted in Dallas of hiring a hit man for a failed attempt to kill his employer with a car bomb in 1987.” The publisher of “Fortunate Son,” St. Martin’s Press, quickly withdrew the book.
But nobody could withdraw the story. For a while, the tale that Bush had been arrested for cocaine possession, even though it was told by an unknown author who was also a felon who apparently made the whole thing up — that tale was the talk of the 2000 presidential race. (Hatfield committed suicide in 2001.)
Read the whole thing. As far as Edward Klein, don’t miss Bill Whittle’s PJTV interview with Klein, embedded above from YouTube.
You stay classy, Chris Hayes; the MSNBC anchor was “uncomfortable” yesterday calling fallen military “heroes:”
Thinking today and observing Memorial Day, that’ll be happening tomorrow. Just talked with Lt. Col. Steve Burke [sic, actually Beck], who was a casualty officer with the Marines and had to tell people [inaudible]. Um, I, I, ah, back sorry, um, I think it’s interesting because I think it is very difficult to talk about the war dead and the fallen without invoking valor, without invoking the words “heroes.” Um, and, ah, ah, why do I feel so comfortable [sic] about the word “hero”? I feel comfortable, ah, uncomfortable, about the word because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. Um, and, I don’t want to obviously desecrate or disrespect memory of anyone that’s fallen, and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism: hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers and things like that. But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic. But maybe I’m wrong about that.
Transcript by Mark Finkelstein of Newbusters, which also has video of Hayes in action, which Finkelstein defines thusly:
Effete: affected, overrefined, and ineffectual; see “Chris Hayes.” OK, I appended the name of the MSNBC host to the dictionary definition. But if ever you wanted to see the human embodiment of the adjective in action, have a look at the video from his MSNBC show this morning of the too-refined-by-half Hayes explaining why he is “uncomfortable” in calling America’s fallen military members “heroes.”
Hayes is worried that doing so is “rhetorically proximate” to justifications for more war. Oh, the rhetorical proximity!
As Ed Morrissey writes, the Veterans of Foreign Wars aren’t happy with Hayes’ rhetoric; neither is left of center blogger Brendan Loy. Ed himself adds:
I’d suggest that Hayes needs to talk to a few veterans. We’re specifically remembering those who died in service to their country today (Veterans Day in November honors those still among us), but those veterans knew the men and women who didn’t make it back home to their families. Ask those veterans who the heroes were and are, and you won’t hear any whimpering about rhetorical proximations.
Related: Don’t question the left’s patriotism; they reserve that judgement strictly for themselves.
Update (8:56 PM): Hayes attempts a walkback.
“This early-90s ad for a CD compilation called Punk has all your favorite Punk tunes and more! It’s like stepping into CBGB’s in mid-1979 just in time to catch the Thompson Twins launch into a heroin-fueled rage and drop their instruments right in the middle of their generational punk anthem ‘Hold Me Now.’”
And nothing says punk like puffed-out ’80s-era hair metal shag cuts.
Via Kathy Shaidle, who writes, “This is right up there with, if you were a teenager in 1965, and your mother knew you loved The Beatles, so she baked you a special birthday cake… shaped like a beetle.”
“Nobody is challenging Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries this year–and is doing surprisingly well,” James Taranto writes in his Best of the Web column:
One of the reasons some commentators thought Obama would be a shoo-in for re-election is that like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, he drew no serious primary opposition as an incumbent president. By contrast, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Bush père were challenged by Reagan, Ted Kennedy and Pat Buchanan respectively. Lyndon Johnson abandoned his 1968 re-election bid after Eugene McCarthy’s surprisingly strong showing in New Hampshire and Robert F. Kennedy’s late entry.
The theory goes that presidents lose re-election when they have a strong primary opponent and win when they don’t. This requires treating Buchanan as a “serious” opponent, even though he didn’t win a single primary in 1992 and his best showing, in New Hampshire, was 37%.
Writing at RealClearPolitics, the delightfully named Sean Trende reformulates the rule and carries it back a century: “There are only seven sitting presidents who have ever received less than 60 percent of the vote in any primary: Taft in ’12; Coolidge, ’24; Hoover, ’32; LBJ, ’68; Ford ’76; Carter, ’80; and Bush ’92. All of these presidents, with the exception of Coolidge, were not re-elected.” One of Coolidge’s challengers, Robert LaFollette, ran a third-party challenge. He ended up with 16.5% of the nationwide popular vote and carried his home state, Wisconsin.
Actually, there’s an eighth sitting president who received less than 60% in a primary–in more than one, in fact. That would be Obama in ’12, who, as Trende points out, received just 58.4% in Arkansas, 57.9% in Kentucky, 57.1% in Oklahoma and 59.4% in West Virginia. In Kentucky, his main opponent was “Uncommitted,” another name for Nobody.
If the Trende trend is predictive–admittedly, a big if–Obama is much likelier than not to lose in November. “I think we can reasonably begin to view this as a sort of organic primary challenge to Obama,” Trende writes. “Obama’s not likely to lose any states outright in the primaries; think of this more like Buchanan’s run against George H.W. Bush in 1992.”
At Big Journalism, John Nolte adds:
I’m old enough to remember the weeks-long narrative the media created around Pat Buchanan’s 37% showing in New Hampshire against then-President George H.W. Bush in 1992. The media used this result to tag Bush as a loser, an incumbent in trouble and unable to hold on to his base. This was all part of a bigger narrative the media was crafting to peg Bush as out-of-touch. Perot eventually won the election for Bill Clinton, but this certainly didn’t help.
Though today’s media won’t admit it, the difference between 1992 and 2012 is a big one and not good news for Obama. Buchanan was a legitimate insurgent candidate; after years as a columnist and television commenter, Buchanan was a known quantity with a serious campaign platform and access to all kinds of media coverage. Meanwhile, Obama is losing a larger percentage of the vote to inmates and relatively unknown attorneys. Moreover, Obama is losing nearly one in five votes to the likes of “uncommitted.”
In 1992, many Republicans voted for Buchanan. In 2012, a whole lot of Democrats are voting against Barack Obama. The closest the Post comes to acknowledging Obama’s troubles is with this:
Regardless of the reasoning, it’s clear that there is a bloc of Democratic voters in every state who want to register their opposition to Obama. … even a minor abandonment of Obama by self-identified Democrats could make a difference this time around.
It’s pretty obvious that the media is desperate to avoid narratives surrounding Obama’s glaring problems with his base. After all, with the economy going in the wrong direction and all of the very public Bain Capital rebellion (the centerpiece of Obama’s re-election strategy), Obama has enough problems.
As a result, Roger L. Simon asks today, “Is Liberalism Dead?”
They will literally do anything or say anything to maintain control. They will even contradict everything they stand for to survive.
You can really see this in action at CNN. In February of 2010, the network literally baked a cake (surprisingly, Michelle Obama never scolded them about this high-calorie sugary treat) to celebrate the spending binge of the first year of Obama’s “Stimulus” program. Today they’re simply cooking the books. Just as they did in 2008 by building the Wright Free Zone, “CNN Fails to Refute Bogus Numbers Claiming ‘Obama Spending Binge Never Happened,’” Newsbusters reports.
Which is why, as Doug Ross writes we can watch in real time as “Old Media Is Bleeding Out Right Before Our Eyes.”
“For years we’ve wondered what dark secrets might lurk in The One’s shadowy past. I knew we’d find out one day and I knew it’d be bad, but I never imagined quite how bad,” Allahpundit writes at Hot Air. “Apparently, we elected Pauly Shore.”
Read the whole thing — and then do not miss this post at Buzzfeed, “A User’s Guide To Smoking Pot With Barack Obama.”
Related: Commentary’s Alana Goodman on Conor Friedersdorf, palace guard concern troll. (See also: Frum, David.)
More: Scroll down the Buzzfeed item for this tidbit, spotted by Matt Drudge:
In another section of the [senior] yearbook, students were given a block of space to express thanks and define their high school experience. … Nestled below [Obama's] photographs was one odd line of gratitude: “Thanks Tut, Gramps, Choom Gang, and Ray for all the good times.” … A hippie drug-dealer made his acknowledgments; his own mother did not.
Classy. And Jim Treacher adds:
Why did Obama put his dog on the roof of the car? So it wouldn’t get stoned.
Speaking only for myself, I’m fine with having a president who used to get blazed out of his mind. It’s just funny that the same people who are scrambling to defend him were, shall we say, somewhat less accepting of Bush’s youthful indiscretions.
As Treacher writes, “Question: What’s the sound of David Axelrod’s weekend getting ruined? Answer: Choom.”
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.
Having just declared Mr. Obama “The First Gay President,” Tina Brown’s Daily Beastweek is now angrily envisioning the GOP’s emotionally manipulative campaign “to tell women they shamelessly indulged in Obama in ’08:”
According to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll released this week, Romney is gaining on Obama’s favorability amongst women at a surprisingly rapid pace. The report indicates that the 19-point lead that the president enjoyed last month has diminished to a mere 7-point advantage in recent weeks.
What gives?
How about an emotionally manipulative, unapologetically condescending, Karl-Rove-concocted messaging strategy that preys on women’s weakness for instantly gratifying experiences coupled with their propensity for self-blame?
In effect, the right is framing Barack Obama as a guilty pleasure, saying to women—or, at the very least, implying—that the fairer sex indulged in his campaign with shameless abandon in 2008 and now they should be atoning in equal proportion.
It’s as if the president were a heedlessly devoured tub of triple-caramel-chunk cookie-dough ice cream that has left a bad taste in your mouth, not to mention a few extra inches on your waistline, and needs to be traded for the presidential equivalent of a rice cake (Romney).
Obama as a guilty pleasure? Where on earth would women have gotten that idea?
The other night I dreamt of Barack Obama. He was taking a shower right when I needed to get into the bathroom to shave my legs, and then he was being yelled at by my husband, Max, for smoking in the house. It was not clear whether Max was feeling protective of the president’s health or jealous because of the cigarette.
The other day a friend of mine confided that in the weeks leading up to the election, the Obamas’ apparent joy as a couple had made her just miserable. Their marriage looked so much happier than hers. Their life seemed so perfect. “I was at a place where I was tempted daily to throttle my husband,” she said. “This coincided with Michelle saying the most beautiful things about Barack. Each time I heard her speak about him I got tears in my eyes — because I felt so far away from that kind of bliss in my own life and perhaps even more, because I was so moved by her expressions of devotion to him. And unlike previous presidential couples, they are our age, have children the same age and (just imagine the stress of daily life on the campaign) by all accounts should have been fighting even more than we were.”
As we all know, in journalism, two anecdotes are just one short of a national trend. I figured that my friend and I couldn’t possibly be the only ones dreaming, brooding or otherwise obsessing about the Obamas. Were other people, I wondered, being possessed by our new first family?
I launched an e-mail inquiry. And learned that they were. Often, in strikingly similar ways.
Many women — not too surprisingly — were dreaming about sex with the president. In these dreams, the women replaced Michelle with greater or lesser guilt or, in the case of a 62-year-old woman in North Florida, whose dream was reported to me by her daughter, found a fully above-board solution: “Michelle had divorced Barack because he had become ‘too much of a star.’ He then married my mother, who was oh so proud to be the first lady,” the daughter wrote me.
– “Sometimes a President Is Just a President,” Judith Warner, February 5th, 2009, the New York Times.
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.
Mark Tapscott writes:
Fox News’ Roger Ailes said this recently during an address at his alma mater, Ohio University: “I have one wish for OU, that it continues to be a place for open debate where people from different points of view with various opinions can meet and discuss these things openly. Because there will be no progress, and America will not survive, if we don’t allow that open debate,” Ailes said.
Ailes is right about the crucial importance of freedom of speech and thought in American life. The First Amendment is under intense attack from many points on the ideological compass, but mostly from the far Left.
The enemies of free speech and thought have lately turned to more subtle tools of suppression than merely shouting down speakers. Among these are extortionary threats to launch false charges of racism against companies that support politically incorrect groups, such as the American Legislative Exchange Council.
Read the whole thing, then click over to Lee Stranahan.
At a news conference after the meeting, Barry and several Asian American leaders sought to present a united front, saying that the dialogue is an important step toward defusing long-standing tension between blacks and Asians. Asked about the underlying sources of the conflict, Barry said the United States “has had racial tensions since it was founded.”
“The Irish caught hell, the Jews caught hell, the Polacks caught hell,” Barry said, invoking a word that Polish people have viewed as disparaging. “We want Ward 8 to be the model of diversity.”
Asked later about his reference to “Polacks,” Barry at first denied using the word, then retracted it, saying, “I meant Poles.”
His remark prompted a demand from Gary Kenzer, executive director of the Chicago-based Polish American Association, that Barry “apologize to the Polish American community of this country.”
“You wouldn’t say a derogatory statement to an African American, a Jewish American, and we deserve the same respect,” he said.
Note that while the Washington Post did headline the story “Marion Barry commits new gaffe while apologizing to Asians,” it took them seven paragraphs to actually get to the P-word. This is in sharp contradistinction to the paper’s Bletchley Park-level of ability to discern racism as the cause of even the slightest twitch of bad news involving President Obama.
On Sunday, I flashed back to the Morgenthau Plan. As I wrote, it was a scheme for post-World War II Germany that was viciously punitive, if understandably so, and crafted by Henry Morgenthau, Jr., FDR’s Treasury secretary, around 1944, designed to de-industrialize Germany, to prevent another outbreak of war:
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…
At the Climate Policy Network today, “Green Energy Transition: Germany Fears De-Industrialisation,” translates a page from Handelsblatt, a German business newspaper:
As a result of Germany’s green energy transition, electricity prices are exploding. Consumers and businesses are paying the price while Germany faces gradual de-industrialisation. Economists estimate that the cost of the green energy transition will total 170 billion Euros by 2020. This is more than double of what Germany would have to write off if Greece were to withdraw from the monetary union. “The de-industrialization has already begun,” the EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger has warned.
Meanwhile, those on the left who enjoy Earth Hour, an annual celebratory preview of the joys of de-industrialization cooked up in 2007 by the World Wildlife Fund and Australia’s Fairfax Media Limited, should hightail it to Detroit, where the lamps will be going off all over the town, according to Bloomberg News: “Half of Detroit’s Streetlights May Go Out as City Shrinks.” And Detroit isn’t the only failed Blue city where this is occurring:
Detroit, whose 139 square miles contain 60 percent fewer residents than in 1950, will try to nudge them into a smaller living space by eliminating almost half its streetlights.
As it is, 40 percent of the 88,000 streetlights are broken and the city, whose finances are to be overseen by an appointed board, can’t afford to fix them. Mayor Dave Bing’s plan would create an authority to borrow $160 million to upgrade and reduce the number of streetlights to 46,000. Maintenance would be contracted out, saving the city $10 million a year.
Other U.S. cities have gone partially dark to save money, among them Colorado Springs; Santa Rosa, California; and Rockford, Illinois. Detroit’s plan goes further: It would leave sparsely populated swaths unlit in a community of 713,000 that covers more area than Boston, Buffalo and San Francisco combined. Vacant property and parks account for 37 square miles (96 square kilometers), according to city planners.
“You have to identify those neighborhoods where you want to concentrate your population,” said Chris Brown, Detroit’s chief operating officer. “We’re not going to light distressed areas like we light other areas.”
Detroit’s dwindling income and property-tax revenue have required residents to endure unreliable buses and strained police services throughout the city. Because streetlights are basic to urban life, deciding what areas to illuminate will reshape the city, said Kirk Cheyfitz, co-founder of a project called Detroit143 — named for the 139 square miles of land, plus water — that publicizes neighborhood issues.
Naturally, the Obama administration views both the 21st century Morganthau Plan in Germany and Detroit’s lights-out policy as how-to guides, not warnings.
Because he’s so real world, you know.
Update: At the Tatler, Bryan Preston writes, “If a private enterprise decided on its own not to service certain parts of a city, we would never hear the end of it. But government doing it is ok. The victims of all this will just keep voting the same people back into office decade after decade.”
