Thursday, May 31, 2012

Worldwide Deployable

There seems to be no end to the novel issues confronting our thoroughly modern military: "Military Moms Breastfeeding in Uniform Stirs Controversy"

I found this sentence from the story particularly interesting: "The Army, for example, didn't even come up with a combat uniform for women until 2010, so accepting the idea of a uniformed soldier breastfeeding a baby may be especially jarring."

But that was then.  No doubt now the Department of Defense has already commissioned a blue-ribbon panel with the task of developing a new combat uniform for breastfeeding women.  As soon, that is, as it finishes its more immediate charge of designing a new uniform for cross-dressing men.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

"A Nation of Hamburger Flippers"

Some of you may recall that phrase from the 1988 presidential campaign.  It was a punchline used by candidate Michael Dukakis and all Democrats as way to denigrate the kind of job creation experienced under the Reagan administration and likely to continue under a George H.W. Bush presidency.  It made my blood boil.

Too many elites and virtually all liberals seem constitutionally incapable of praising simple "honest labor" if it's not also what they deem to be "meaningful".  Other than as a reflection of their insufferable snobbishness, it's impossible to know what they mean by the modifier.  I don't know about you, but if it puts food on the table and pays the rent, it seems pretty meaningful to me.

Anyway, Thomas Sowell thinks similarly and as always we can turn to him for some common-sense thoughts on the subject.

Monday, May 28, 2012

Memory Serves

Amy and Leon Kass posted this Memorial Day reflection a year ago and while they certainly encourage pausing to remember the sacrifices of fellow Americans who "gave the last full measure of devotion,"  they actually diagnose and prescribe something even more important than that for the health of our nation.
American identity, character, and civic life are shaped by many things, but decisive among them are our national memories—of our long history, our triumphs and tragedies, our national aspirations and achievements. Crucial to the national memory are the words our forebears wrote, to show us who we are and what we might yet become. Robust citizenship is impossible without national attachment. National attachment is thin at best without national memory. And national memory depends on story, speech, and song. (my italics)

Sunday, May 27, 2012

Sobering Sunday

What's that old Kristofferson song?  Sunday Morning Coming Down

It's appropriate to a Memorial Day weekend of course, but for some deeper reason I suspect, I found myself thinking specifically about two men with whom I had served in the Air Force, both of whom  gave their lives in the course of performing their duty.  It's already long ago, or seems that way.  That lead me to thinking about several other old comrades who were gone as well.

I thank God for them...for them all.

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Shut Up and March!

That the Democrat Party is a hodgepodge collection of sometime conflicting interest groups is as true today as it was when Will Rogers famously quipped, "I am not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat."

But last week Cory Booker, Newark's popular-in-his-own-right Democrat mayor, publicly expressed disappointment with the direction of the Obama Campaign.  Very soon thereafter, he defensively and querulously retracted that expression of dissatisfaction, and even launched a somewhat angry counter-attack against the Romney Campaign for making use of his earlier statements.

The episode reminded me, again, that however disorganized the Democrats may be, their exercise of party discipline is, well, admirable.  The GOP could learn a thing or two from them.

Friday, May 25, 2012

Whose Community?

"Community" is one of those words and ideas contemporary liberals often use to pummel conservatives.  As in, we humane progressives/liberals are for instilling and encouraging a sense of community, while you selfish and heartless conservatives are against it.

Reliably silly Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr., has thrown the latest punch charging conservatives with an anti-communitarianism of relatively recent vinage, an un-American, a-historical embrace of the rugged, asocial, alienated actually, self-reliant but self-absorbed individual over against the more stable and emotionally healthy citizen who recognizes the debt he owes his alma mater, his "nurturing mother", not his real mom mind you, but the society that spawned him and within which he was reared.  Think Howard Roark in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.

Good grief.  There is so much wrong with Dionne's piece, not to mention his thinking, that it's hard to know where to begin.   How about these three quick counter-punches?
First, as Dionne's brand of community always involves more government spending, the easiest response is to say simply, "Hey E.J., haven't you heard, WE'RE BROKE!"

Second, confused but still ultimately secular liberals like Dionne apparently can only imagine community in material terms, where, a la Marx and Engels, "the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things."  Whether it's infrastructure, socialized medicine, entitlements, whatever, for them it's always and only a government program redistributing wealth that can effectively create community where it's absent, or demonstrate its health where it's present.  There is apparently no vertiginous anomie the isolated and alienated individual suffers that it can't be successfully mollified if not cured with a large enough welfare check.  This is so ridiculous it serves as its own rebuttal.  (Oh, and by the way E.J., a Civil War veteran's pension is not the same thing as a contemporary entitlement, but rather of payment or reward for services rendered.)

Third, the idea of "community" is actually being used in two very different ways by liberals and conservatives.  For liberals, and this is where they really are in a sense classical liberals, society or community is not something that occurs naturally, or at least it does not occur very well naturally.  Left alone, individuals remain, well, individual.  Whatever communities they do manage to form are purely instrumental and short-lived, satisfying or attaining some immediate need or goal (securing rights perhaps?, but I digress), but always at the expense of other individuals or other communities.  As their loyalties are ultimately to themselves alone, the communities thus created are, paradoxically, hostile to community.  Hence, the liberal need to supply what nature lacks, that is, to create, nay, to manufacture community, top-down, homogenized, one-size-fits-all, Esperanto-speaking community. Such a community would presumably provide everything... but liberty.

When conservatives use the word "community", we think instead of something that occurs, although not perfectly, quite naturally nonetheless, a product of family ties and extended family ties, of blood and of marriage that produces new blood, of a common language, of a common faith, of a common culture, of propinquity (look it up), of the shared search for solutions to common problems that arise because of propinquity, etc.  The succor afforded, the advice offered, the restraints required, yes, restraints, to my liberty by such a community is effectual because it is provided by family and friends, men and women I am more likely to know and therefore trust and not by some nameless bureaucrat from far-away Washington who I most assuredly do not know and therefore will not trust.

Finally, the distinction is this: conservatives have faith in a "community" formed of free individuals, liberals do not.  Conservatives are sometimes dismissed by liberals/progressives as simplistic libertarians because we share with them a similar commitment to liberty.  The difference is that we conservatives embrace liberty in large measure because it is only at the most basic level of the free individual that genuine community abides and abounds, providing what Dionne thinks he's providing when he isn't justifying yet another big-government program..    

To be fair, this is really a very BIG issue and warrants a much bigger response, but the bell just sounded and I need to rest up for the next round.

Mak'em Laugh

Boy did this piece come as a relief.  It's by F.H. Buckley, a professor at the George Mason University School of Law and here I was thinking that lawyers couldn't have a sense of humor.  Caustic bite?  You bet.  But humor?  Well, in this article it's both and it's long overdue.  Enjoy.

Silly Constitution

Michael G. Franc's NRO piece is about how Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is attempting to thwart the Constitution's Origination Clause.  In Article I, the Constitution states that all revenue bills must "originate" in the House of Representatives, not the Senate.  Apparantly, Reid dismisses the restriction as a “hyper-technical budget issue.”

But Franc's title is as interesting as his subject as it suggests a great one-liner for general usage this fall by all campaigning Republicans:  "The Democrats act as if the Constitution were a Republican plot."

I like it.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

All You Need to Know

Only at The Nation would they worry about the quality of the scholarship of someone chronicling Stalin's uncountable murders.

That alone tells you all you need to know about the magazine's ideological perspective.

The King of Nothing

CNN just recorded its fewest viewers in 20 years and anchorman John King sighed that it's tough "to be in the middle and have all sides", to pursue a "more objective style."  He was comparing his cable network to upstart MSNBC which he described as "left, and far left."

Good grief.

CNN is dieing a slow death, first, because it's finally had to face real competition in the form of FOX News.  But also because it leans left and just won't admit it.

MSNBC succeeds by comparison, and only by comparison, because, although it won't admit it either, it's brazenly left.

"The Power of Cool"

That's the title of Victor Davis Hanson's piece and the Sage, who has never been "cool" a day in his life, really thinks you should read it.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Red Votes and Blue Votes

I was watching a pair of talking heads discuss and debate this year's Electoral College math and as I looked at the colors on the map behind them something occurred to me. 

A reliably blue State will invariably send two liberal Democrat senators to Washington, but, from time to time anyway, they will also elect a Republican as governor.  The reverse, however, almost never happens.  (Does it ever happen?)  That is, a red state's governor, just like its senators, will almost surely be a conservative Republican.  Both offices face the same electorate, so why the ideological inconsistency among Democrats?

Easy.  Liberal senators are dispatched to the nation's capital by their constituencies with understood orders to confiscate as much of other people's money as possible.  Governors, by contrast, are elected to secure, or at least not squander their own.  On that score, conservatives have a much better record. 

Self-Made Man?, cont.

Apropos of a comment to my previous post on this subject by "Ken", NRO has re-posted an article by Michael Gledhill (a pseudonym) from the September 1, 2008 issue of National Review the magazine.

Gledhill, by way of review of Obama's 1995 autobiography, Dreams from My Father, reveals a man who should never have been elected, or even be electable, in the first place.  He concludes with this:
Dreams from My Father reveals Barack Obama as a self-constructed, racially obsessed man who regards most whites as oppressors. It is the work of a clever but shallow thinker who confuses ideological cliché for insight — a man who sees U.S. history as a narrow, bitter tale of race and class victimization. The Barack Obama presented in these pages is not electable to national office. No wonder that Obama, aided by a compliant media, has created a new self for public view, one the Obama of Dreams wouldn’t recognize and probably would disdain.  

Sunday, May 20, 2012

When the Roll is Called Up Yonder

Check this out:  "53,000 Dead Voters Found in Florida" 

I think the editor might better have used different words in the headline, but you take the point.  And that point is:  The Democrats' over-a-century-now stranglehold on this key constituency may soon be over.

Don't misunderstand, the Dems will still get near 100% of this voting block, it's just that turnout in the Sunshine State looks like it'll be a bit lower than previously expected.

Don't Fall For It

Notice how the media, with prompting from the White House, are beginning to frame and simplify the solution to the economic crisis in Europe and the Great Recession here as either "austerity" (bad) or "growth" (good)?

For heaven's sake, the only growth they're talking about is in taxes, spending, and debt.  And please don't mistake austerity for, well, austerity.  Imagine speeding toward a cliff at 100 mph.  Austerity for this bunch means slowing down to say 60-70 mph while still headed for the same cliff.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Self-Made Man?

Barack Obama as Jay Gatsby? 

Mark Steyn's funny as always, but I found this piece a little troubling as well.

Exactly who is Barack Hussein Obama?  And who are we to elect as president someone we don't really know?

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Left and Right on Wright

I read this New York Times story with some amusement.  The reporters claim that GOP strategists along with some unnamed billionaire conservative are about to launch a series of attack adds directed at President Obama, adds they felt constrained from airing in 2008 under pressure from the McCain campaign.  In particular is an add aimed at highlighting Obama's relationship with the controversial Reverend Jeremiah Wright:
The plan, which is awaiting approval, calls for running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., race-related sermons made him a highly charged figure in the 2008 campaign.
Hmmm?  After the revelation in Ed Klein's new book The Amateur, later validated with the release of audio-taped interviews, of Wright's claim that he was offered $150,000 by the Obama campaign to cease from sermonizing and speech-making until after the 2008 election, one would think the most vigorous attacks on the Reverend would come from the President's very own.

Who's a "Birther" Now?

Wow!

BREITBART reports that Barack Obama's literary agents from the early 1990s, Acton & Dystel, were also "birthers", going so far as to publish in a promotional booklet that he was "born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii."

And, according to the report, Acton stated that "while 'almost nobody' wrote his or her own biography, the non-athletes in the booklet, whom 'the agents deal[t] with on a daily basis,' were 'probably' approached to approve the text as presented."

So, how should the Right and the conservative press handle this?

Not by insisting that Obama was born abroad after all (very unlikely), but that his agents then thought that he was and they thought so because Obama himself may have led them to think it

Barack Obama is by all serious accounts a native-born American, but increasingly it seems as though he at least wishes he were not.  If that's so, then even though this guy was Born in the USA, he certainly is not American Made.

A Nation of Community Organizers

Let's just say that I've attended more than my fair share of commencement exercises and listened (or at least tried to) to more than my fair share of commencement addresses as well.  The latter are best when the speaker paints a compelling picture of the world the graduates will soon face, a world that while still seasoned with very real challenges, is nevertheless charged with hope.  Oh, yea, and they need to be short too.

But whatever they actually say to the graduates, commencement speakers end up revealing a lot about themselves as well.

Many thanks to Daniel Henninger for calling our attention to the differences between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney revealed by comparing their commencement addresses delivered this year before graduates at Barnard College and Liberty University respectively.  The speeches, as you would expect, were mostly pandering boilerplate, but they nevertheless revealed two very different men, two different temperaments, and two different ideologies.  They also revealed, and confirmed, more about Obama than they did about Romney.

I was struck particularly by this passage from the President's speech:
"Don't accept somebody else's construction of the way things ought to be. It's up to you to right wrongs. It's up to you to point out injustice. It's up to you to hold the system accountable and sometimes upend it entirely. It's up to you to stand up and to be heard, to write and to lobby, to march, to organize, to vote."
Rather than, as the leader of it, challenging those present to be thankful for this great country, to make good use of the blessings of liberty afforded by it, and through thrift and industry, service and sacrifice, to extend those blessings to their posterity, Obama focused instead on what he sees as its shortcomings, its "wrongs", its "injustice", and the need even to "upend it entirely" if necessary.

I only hope the Barnard graduates, like most grads on that busy day, weren't listening.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Some Perspective Perhaps

Respected reporter Michael Barone, who overlapped with Mitt Romney at Cranbrook School in the early 1960s, offers his own memory of the time.

Just As I Suspected

So how many homosexuals want to get married in the first place?  And once they do, how many stay married?  The answer, it appears, is not many.

Charles C. W. Cooke investigates (check out his numbers) and concludes:
The debate over marriage does not necessarily hinge on its popularity among the eligible, and advocates of gay unions would no doubt assert that “equality” is not a numerical proposition as quickly as their opponents would aver that the very idea is a hopeless category mistake. But it is nonetheless worth noting that there is no particular groundswell — even in states and cities that have both legal gay marriage and significant numbers of homosexuals — and that, when gay couples do decide to get married, they are more likely than their straight equivalents to change their minds later.
This is not surprising.  Whatever frisson bohemians experience in thwarting bourgeois sensibilities and practices by actually engaging in them, in this case by marrying, it is quickly replaced by the even more satisfying for them frisson of simply being different, a difference it would appear they are eager to return to as quickly as possible.

If, on the other hand, we are referring not to genuine bohemians, but instead to truly tortured souls who are at the very least uncomfortable with their state of being, then I would only say that pretending to be normal, in this case by marrying, will not because it cannot offer them the relief they so desperately seek.

For them I feel only sympathy.  But for the Left that uses them as little more than cannon fodder in the culture wars, I feel an abiding disgust.   

East of Eden

It turns out that California's budget shortfall will not be the $9.2 billion earlier predicted, but instead upwards of $16 billion.  Democrat Governor Jerry Brown's solution?  What else?  Raise taxes.

There was a report a few months back about the huge number of Californians fleeing the Golden State for Texas where the taxes were lower, the regulations fewer, and, no surprise, the opportunities greater.  Which proves a point I and many others have made countless times.  Everything liberals touch, much less run, they ruin.

Think of it, California is for the most part an undeniable paradise and Texas chiefly desert.  How bad must it be for people even to consider leaving the one for the other?

Monday, May 14, 2012

The Southern White Liberal

North Carolina's governor, my governor, Democrat Bev Perdue, has stuck her foot in her mouth more than once during her time in office and in one respect her most recent faux pas, reacting to the passing of the state's anti-gay marriage amendment by worrying aloud that people will think "we look like Mississippi", is only the latest.  But I find her comment more telling than just that.

Perdue is one of an easily recognizable type: the Southern White Liberal.  They hate who they are, how they talk, their accent, where they come from, where they went to school, etc.  Most, however, either won't or can't bring themselves to leave. (Daddy's or some Sugar Daddy's money?)

Now self-loathing is not unusual in a liberal, in fact, it's almost a defining trait.  But in a southerner, in a fellow southerner, I find it particularly distasteful.

TIME was...

...when news magazines played a big role in setting our national agenda.

But they don't anymore.

I'm guessing that by now you've heard about and seen the latest cover of TIME magazine.  You know, the one with the attractive young woman defiantly standing hand on hip, looking straight into the camera, one breast bared and plunged deeply into the mouth of her toddler son.

The cover is supposed to attract interest to a story about "attachment parenting", whatever that is, but let's be honest, shall we?  It was explicitly designed to shock and to titillate. (No adolescent pun intended.)  Its purpose is to recapture flagging interest in a dieing magazine published in a dieing medium.

And, I suppose, it worked.

But it won't last.

Sunday, May 13, 2012

Why He Had to Go

Incumbent Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) has served honorably in the nation's capital, lo these many years, both his state and his country.  But if it wasn't already clear that he had overstayed his welcome, the release of this statement after losing Indiana's Republican primary to Richard Mourdock surely made it so:
If Mr. Mourdock is elected, I want him to be a good Senator. But that will require him to revise his stated goal of bringing more partisanship to Washington. He and I share many positions, but his embrace of an unrelenting partisan mindset is irreconcilable with my philosophy of governance and my experience of what brings results for Hoosiers in the Senate. In effect, what he has promised in this campaign is reflexive votes for a rejectionist orthodoxy and rigid opposition to the actions and proposals of the other party. His answer to the inevitable roadblocks he will encounter in Congress is merely to campaign for more Republicans who embrace the same partisan outlook. He has pledged his support to groups whose prime mission is to cleanse the Republican party of those who stray from orthodoxy as they see it. (my italics)
As both parties become increasingly ideological in definition and increasingly partisan in, um, mindset, the nation is driven exactly where it should be driven, that is, to a watershed moment.  Quite simply, someone, or more importantly, something has to give.

First in War, First in Peace,...

"First Gay President"

First Black President was already taken.

Newsweek thinks they're doing him a favor...I guess.

Friday, May 11, 2012

But it Feels True

Let's just say that Ed Klein's new book, "The Amateur", about Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton is less than flattering. (Do read the short report.)  Unsurprisingly, spokesmen for the White House, the Secretary of State, and the former president were quick to challenge the book's  accuracy.  Bill Clinton’s spokesman Matt McKenna even went so far as to say that Klein is “a known liar.”

But then that all depends on what the meaning of "is" is.

Israel Prepares

This was the first thought to cross my mind on the news of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's new coalition.

Charles Krauthammer explains.

Thursday, May 10, 2012

"They gave each other a pledge?"

Woke up this morning re-imagining Fiddler on the Roof and Reb Tevye's reaction upon learning that the third of his young daughters was not marrying outside the faith after all, but was instead betrothed to his son-in-law Motel the tailor's...sister.

TRADITION!

Sunrise, sunset...sunrise, sunset...

In retrospect, maybe socialized medicine was the least of our worries.

Behold the Can of Worms!

The House Armed Services Committee yesterday voted to prohibit same-sex marriages at US military institutions.

This is only one of untold thousands of issues, great and small, that will have to be resolved, inevitably through litigation, with the repeal of "Don't Ask - Don't Tell" and now also with the Commander-in-Chief's endorsement of gay marriage.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Dearly Beloved...

My home state of North Carolina yesterday voted by a solid majority to amend its constitution to explicitly define marriage as between one man and one woman.  I voted in favor of the amendment.

I wont here rehearse my reasoning as it's common to most opponents of homosexual marriage and familiar to most everyone else.
I do want, however, to say this about those activists most strident in opposing this amendment as well as other similar amendments and laws across the country:  Whether they admit or not, whether they even recognize it or not, same-sex marriage is not now and never has been their real goal.  The goal is instead the destruction of traditional marriage.

Only a generation or two ago, people with the same ideological pedigree as those now championing homosexual marriage routinely dismissed the institution of marriage altogether as an affront to the absolute freedom of the individual and the fundamental equality of men and women.  (Tellingly, many are exactly the same people.)  You don't have to be very old to remember the querulous cries of the Flower Children, "Why do we need a piece of paper, much less a formal ceremony to acknowledge our love for one another?"

Then it was an attack from outside the institution, today it is from within.

The war is far from over.

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Over the Limit?

Without (further) comment, from the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette"Four Kids Strapped to Car; Driver Arrested"

I Got You Babe

Is Cher positioning herself to sing the national anthem to open the Democrat National Convention in Charlotte later this summer?   With this tweet (sic), she may indeed make the short list:
If ROMNEY gets elected I don't know if i can breathe same air as Him & his Right Wing Racist Homophobic Women Hating Tea Bagger Masters

Monday, May 7, 2012

Food Fight!

Oh, sorry, it's already over.  It was in Massachusetts and, as expected, the Left side of the cafeteria was again triumphant.

It seems the Bay State is outlawing school bake sales, to begin, and later all manner of munchies sold at, for example, high school football games.  It's for the children, you understand.

This story is just too easy to lampoon, so I'll let it speak for itself and simply whisper, again, a prayer of thanks for being spared from ever living there.

Oh, yea, almost forgot.

Bon Appetit!

What's that Definition of Insanity Again?, cont.

Add New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman to the same list headed by Robert Reich.

Krugman"s take on the French and Greek election returns:
"It’s far from clear how soon the votes will lead to changes in actual policy, but time is clearly running out for the strategy of recovery through austerity — and that’s a good thing."
Extravagance, not austerity, is what got us into this mess and his prescription is to double down on extravagance.

Unbelievable.

Sunday, May 6, 2012

What's that Definition of Insanity Again?

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?

Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich is convinced that the West's problem is not too much, but rather too little debt.  With economies that manage somehow, just barely, to sputter along not only on debt, but on a great deal of debt, on world class debt, on world record debt, on more debt than in the history of debt, he counsels not the tightening of our belts, not even a little bit, but instead, you guessed it, on yet more debt.

The next time you get misty over academic and intellectual credentials, remember that Bob and Bill were Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law classmates.

France Turns Left

Or should I say, further left?  After all, politics in France are kind of like a NASCAR race track where the road bends in one direction only.

Nevertheless, the ousting by the French voters of incumbent President Nicolas Sarkozy for Socialist challenger Francois Hollande does mean something...just not as much a some observers might think.

With almost the entire of the West facing either bankruptcy or near-bankruptcy, a strange unity has emerged.  If you will, we are entering an Era of Ill Feelings where we're all fiscal conservatives now.

Or at least we are where property owners are still armed and, thank God, in the USA, we still are.

Saturday, May 5, 2012

Tickling the Old Steyn-way

You know who weighs in on the Massachusetts Uprising, the unfolding story of an increasingly shamefaced (don't hold your breath), 31/32 paleface.

As you can tell, I can't get enough of this guy.

Friday, May 4, 2012

Cheap Guitars and Upward Mobility

Trust me, this one has nothing (or very little anyway) to do with politics.

I love the blues and like most people I thought its origins had a lot to do with the experience of black people in America.  (I also thought it had a lot to do with the legacy of Scots-Irish people in America, but that's another story.)  Anyway, that experience, that black experience, which included not only slavery, but Jim Crow segregation as well, I was led to believe, would make almost anyone sing the blues...and even invent it in order to sing.

But I was wrong.

Turns out the blues also owes much of its origins, like so many other things authentically American, to Sears, Roebuck, & Co.  In an interesting piece about not only the origins of the blues, but also about what people can and will do in order to get ahead in a free country (that's the small political part), Chris Kjorness makes the case that cheap guitars, widely available through the Sears catalogue, steadily supplanted the homemade banjo with its more limited musical range, and thereby played a huge role in the development of a style of music I can't ever seem to get enough of.

Dead End

"Cradle-to-grave."

"The womb to the tomb."

"From the rockin' of the cradle to the rollin' of the hearse"  (Not really relevant, but I've always loved that line. Who by/what from?)

Yesterday, the Obama Campaign released "The Life of Julia", a cartoon slide-show account of a fictional woman who is dependent on government at every stage of her life...all to recommend the reelection of President Obama and Democrats.  Yuval Levin's reaction was among the best: "I don’t think I have ever seen a cultural artifact that so desperately begs to be parodied and ridiculed, and is so ill-suited to the audience it is intended to reach, as the Obama campaign’s 'Life of Julia'."   And, sure enough, conservative pundits were quick to pounce (e.g., herehere, and here).

But there's nothing funny about it.  As head-shakingly weird as the "The Life of Julia" is, it is also perfectly emblematic of the thinking, and intention!, of left-wing America, the Obama Administration, and the Democrat Party.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Off the Rez

The spectacle of Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren explaining and then explaining away her American Indian heritage is amusing enough.  But I couldn't help but chuckle even more when she answered the query about why she had marked "minority" in law directories for nearly ten years with this:
 “I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group, something that might happen with people who are like I am.”
Point taken.  I understand it can get pretty lonely being a hyper-liberal feminist at Harvard.