Sarah Palin
Noemie Emery tries to explain the hatred of Sarah Palin, but I think misses the mark.
Decades from now, teams of psychiatrists will try to explain and account for the explosions of angst from our best and our brightest when Palin appeared on the scene. Lest you forget, Matt Continetti’s new book “The Persecution of Sarah Palin” refreshes your memory, with a list of such sober critiques of her governing record as that she was a slut, a moron, an ignoramus, a “cancer,” a perfume saleswoman, one of the “swilly” people, and a woman who faked her own pregnancy, under conditions that were biologically impossible, and for reasons that never made sense.
After November, they followed her back to Alaska, and besieged her with lawsuits designed to distract her from governing. It worked.
Teams of psychiatrists are not needed. Obama got 53% of the vote with a corrupt and compliant media. Palin got attacked by a corrupt and dishonest press, and yet she still keeps going strong. Palin is, in short, a better politician than Obama, and a vastly better leader. The Obama hacks know it, hate her for it, and are determined to destroy her before she defeats their caudillo, their Messiah.
Communism
In Foreign Affairs, Stephen Kotkin, a history professor at Princeton, offers a reading list on communism. You know it is promising when it begins with Leszek Kolakowski and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. There are books here I did not know about. For example, Mao’s Last Revolution, by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, which Kotkin describes this way:
MacFarquhar and Schoenhals have provided a definitive account of China’s insane Cultural Revolution (1966-76), a self-inflicted bloodbath that was colossal even by communist standards. An unintentional casualty of the upheaval was the mechanism of state… Read More…
The funniest thing I read today
Mayor Richard Daley’s administration believes it has cleaned up the city’s corrupt hiring system and early next year will seek to end court oversight of its personnel practices, his top lawyer told aldermen Thursday.
Mara Georges said she plans to tell a federal judge that the city is in “substantial compliance” with the decades-long Shakman decree, the legal threshold for getting out from under court control.
Richie Daley has cleaned up Chicago’s corruption? I know lawyers are paid to stretch the truth some, but Mara Georges just… Read More…
Who is Proinsias de Rossa?
In the Irish Independent, David Quinn attacks the Irish left for its years of pro-Soviet agitation.
There has been something just a tad galling about some of the coverage of the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall this past fortnight. You would think, to judge from the coverage, that opposition to Eastern European communism was uniform throughout the Western world, including Ireland, when it was anything but.
In fact, many politicians, many commentators, and many academics were actively sympathetic towards the Soviet Union when it was still in existence…. Read More…
Denial is more than just a river in Egypt
On the desperate efforts by the mainstream lefty press to dogmatically insist that Maj. Hasan was just a psychiatrist under stress, Eric Posner at Volokh offers a vicious parody, which he calls a peek into the Times’ archives.
Sept. 1, 1939
Nazis Invade Poland
Overcrowding in Germany Cited
Sept. 2, 1939
For Nazis, a Hard Time To Be Europeans
Neighbors’ Suspicions Caused Stress, Resentment
Sept. 3, 1939
In Central Europe, Other Countries Invade Their Neighbors, Too
Sept. 4, 1939
When Fuhrers Snap
Rallies, Pogroms Took Toll on Leader
Vicious and accurate.
The bad and the good of Europe
Today is the 71st anniversary of Kristallnacht, and the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, anniversaries of the rise and fall of murderous totalitarianism in Europe. The Guardian celebrates the latter event by publishing an apologetic for East German communism by an East German, Bruni de la Motte, who got out with connections rather than joining one of the hundred people murdered trying to get over the wall. This is how she describes the end of people being murdered for trying to leave.
Of course, unification brought… Read More…
Shredding the Chicago mobster
In the Daily Telegraph, Simon Heffer gives Obama a good kicking.
Now he is immersed in a deliberative exercise about whether to send more troops to Afghanistan. As is the lot of politicians, he will be damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. What the dilemma illustrates is that governing is not so easy as it might once have seemed; that you cannot please all of the people all of the time, so there is little point trying; and that the expertise of the Obama campaign in managing… Read More…
Shut up and take what the government gives you
Fiona Millar, who calls herself a journalist, but is mostly a political activist who advised the creepy Cherie Blair, explains why British parents should shut up and take what the government deigns to give them.
Most schools aren’t failing, and most children with a supportive home environment can get a perfectly good education in their local school if it is, as the vast majority of them are, good enough. The sort of parent who is prepared to devise an elaborate scam to win a school place is probably the sort… Read More…
Only some religions may be trashed
Roland Emmerich, who likes to blow things up in his movies (he made Independence Day and Godzilla), has his limits. Reports the Guardian.
For his latest disaster movie, 2012, the 53-year-old director had wanted to demolish the Kaaba, the iconic cube-shaped structure in the Grand Mosque in Mecca that Muslims the world over turn towards every day when they pray and which they circle seven times during the hajj pilgrimage.
But after some consideration, he decided it might not be such a smart idea, after all.
“I wanted to do that, I… Read More…
A vain, pompous ass
In the Guardian, former Sunday Times editor Harold Evans takes Richard Goldstone to the woodshed.
Poor Judge Goldstone now regrets how his good name has been used to single out Israel. The Swiss paper Le Temps reports him complaining that “This draft [UN human rights council] resolution saddens me … there is not a single phrase condemning Hamas as we have done in the report. I hope the council can modify the text.” Fat hope.
The truth is he was suckered into lending his good name to a half-baked report –… Read More…
Mote in the eye and all
A young pop star dies at the age of 33, and Britain’s Daily Mail runs an unpleasant column about it. Charlie Brooker of the Guardian is outraged.
The funeral of Stephen Gately has not yet taken place. The man hasn’t been buried yet. Nevertheless, Jan Moir of the Daily Mail has already managed to dance on his grave. For money.
It has been 20 minutes since I’ve read her now-notorious column, and I’m still struggling to absorb the sheer scope of its hateful idiocy. It’s like gazing through a horrid little… Read More…
Just surrender and be done with it
That would appear to be the Obama motto. Charles Krauthammer notes the fiasco that is Obama foreign policy.
And what’s come from Obama’s single most dramatic foreign policy stroke — the sudden abrogation of missile defense arrangements with Poland and the Czech Republic that Russia had virulently opposed? For the East Europeans it was a crushing blow, a gratuitous restoration of Russian influence over a region that thought it had regained independence under American protection.
But maybe not gratuitous. Surely we got something in return for selling out our friends. Some… Read More…
Left wing big business
The Washington Times reports that Fenton Communications is working for Qatar.
In March, the queen or sheikha of Qatar, Mozah Bint Nasser al Missned, hired a U.S. public relations firm, Fenton Communications. According to the contract filed with the Justice Department, Fenton will support an “international public opinion awareness campaign that advocates for the accountability for those who participated in attacks on schools in Gaza.”
In other words, Fenton is doing Hamas’s dirty work, courtesy of Qatar. What is Fenton? It is a left wing PR firm that represents such creatures… Read More…
On being slow off the mark
Last Friday, the Democratic National Committee’s Brad Woodhouse announces, via the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent.
The Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists — the Taliban and Hamas this morning — in criticizing the President for receiving the Nobel Peace prize. Republicans cheered when America failed to land the Olympics and now they are criticizing the President of the United States for receiving the Nobel Peace prize — an award he did not seek but that is nonetheless an honor in which every American can take great… Read More…
On not embarrassing the Scandinavians
Unlike the peace prize, which is pretty silly, the Nobel prize in economics, funded by the Swedish central bank, has done a good job of not embarrassing itself. I ran down the list of recipients, and I cannot find a recipient whose career has not included important contributions. The main charge against the prize is omission, and I can think of only two egregious ones: the neglect of Joan Robinson, and a prize to James Buchanan that ignored Gordon Tullock. There were omissions that should not have been made,… Read More…
A great piece in the Onion
The Onion runs a really funny piece saying that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, apparently for giving some nice speeches. I am still laughing. Even funnier, the link is to the Guardian, not the Onion. The Washington Times carries the same story. Do you remember during the primaries, Hillary Clinton’s shot at Obama?
I think you’ll be able to imagine many things Senator McCain will be able to say. He’s never been the president, but he will put forth his lifetime of experience. I will put forth my… Read More…
Picking winners
Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma has proposed dropping all National Science Foundation funding for political science. Political scientists Dan Drezner, Henry Farrell, and Andrew Gelman are not, unsurprisingly, happy. Farrell and Gelman limit themselves to complaining that Coburn’s examples are cheap shots, which may be true but seems to me irrelevant. Dan Drezner gets at the substantive point.
Basic research in the hard sciences or the social sciences is a public good — these things tend to get underprovided in a perfectly free market. It’s not clear to me at… Read More…
How very nice of him
The Guardian reports that Robert Mugabe is willing to make nice with other countries.
The Zimbabwean president offered a rare olive branch to the west today, with a call for “fresh, friendly and co-operative relations” with former enemies.
Robert Mugabe, subject to targeted sanctions by America and the EU, made the unusually conciliatory remarks in a speech at the opening of Zimbabwe’s parliament.
How nice. Maybe he could start by being a bit nicer to the rest of the people in that long suffering country. I am not the first to think… Read More…
Good cartels and bad cartels
In the late ’80s and early 90s, there was a cartel of lysine producers, including Archer Daniel Midland. The losses to consumers because of the cartel were probably around $70 to $80 million. It ends up a movie, The Informant, directed by reasonably big time director and trendy lefty (he made Che, which even NPR suggested was hagiography) Steven Soderbergh, starring very big time actor and trendy leftie Matt Damon, and made by very big Warner Brothers.
Take a different cartel, the inept and corrupt American government schools unions. Via… Read More…
Perverts’ defense association
Tom Shales of the Washington Post joins a perverts’ defense group. Specifically, he defends pervert and cheat David Letterman because, see, Letterman is a clown, not a congressman.
Some of those who’ve seen the current Letterman mess as a golden opportunity to trash and attack him claim that it’s fit retribution for the jokes Dave has made about naughty-boy politicians and their sexual high jinks. Letterman can continue to lampoon sleazy political figures with no real fear of hypocrisy, however, because a TV comic is not an elected official responsible… Read More…