Bloodthirsty Liberal

Jonah Goldberg notes perhaps the best defense of Elizabeth Warren that liberal orthodoxy can offer:

…The first poetic vision of Europeans in the new world was that of James Fenimore Cooper, who conjured Natty Bumpo. He had an “Indian name” — he had several: Hawkeye, Deerslayer, Pathfinder — indicating that he had been “reborn” in the new world in the Indian spirit. It is the oldest and most important myth in the American canon of our folklore, from Lone Ranger, who died and became “born again” via agency of an Indian shaman, and Fox Mulder, who returned from the dead via Indian intercession in “The X Files,” born anew with the past burned away in death, to enter a new age under the flag of the White Buffalo.

So Warren’s claim to be “part Indian” is correct in mythical terms. Every old-school white Oklahoman is in this regard even if this in nominally not true. But it is not a lie to want to be Indian and to imagine your ancestors were. It is to be free of Europeanism. Emerson saw the laggard Europeanism within the Yankee mind as a curse of the unformed American, living half in shadow. It would bring temptation unnatural to us raised free in the forest; fascism, as in Italy, Spain and German, and the perennial virus of French nihilism.

Warren in that regard brings a fresh, classical Americanism from the heartland back to us in Boston where we still have tendencies. The James brothers, both William and Henry, would appreciate it. Henry in particular, in The Bostonians, could only find one worthy character up here, the country cousin Basil Ransom, a lawyer visiting from Mississippi. We are lucky to have Warren among us. She adds stock and substance.

I hope Mitt Romney remembers this and incorporates Indian blessings and ritual in his inaugural ceremonies as Canadians do and as they did in those terrific Winter Olympics in Salt Lake in 2002. And I hope Elizabeth Warren doesn’t back down on this, because wanting to be Indian, like Hawkeye, makes us in a deeper sense fully American.

Rush Limbaugh got in trouble for repeating—not coining, repeating—a phrase he read in the Los Angeles Times: “magic Negro”. (It was applied to Obama, but arises from an archetype in the liberal imagination that predates him.) Is the writer imagining a “magic Indian”? Is Betty Buckskin a “magic squaw”?

The “stock” that she trades is without “substance”. The closest her family came to real Indian blood is their spilling of it on the “Trail of Tears”. Even her recipes from Pow Wow Chow (imagine the howls of racial genocide if a Republican had come up with that title) are counterfeit—lifted word for word from that noted French nihilist and pastry chef, Pierre Frenay.

Liberals not only don’t acknowledge truth, they sweep it away like a cobweb. Bills don’t need to be passed (much less read), if they can be deemed passed. The Constitution doesn’t say what it says, it says what liberals feel it should say—and when it does not, it is dismissed as a “charter of negative liberties”.

And if the Nordic ice queen wants to imagine herself a sun-dried, wizened Hopi basket weaver, who the hell are any of us to say otherwise? Shame!

We don’t trade in the nasty innuendo and racist demagoguery surrounding the Reverend Jeremiah Wright here, no sir, not us, uh-uh, no way.

BUT, we allow that others do:

Our friend Doug Schoen, the Democratic pollster, is a political centrist, ideologically much closer to the post-1994 Bill Clinton than to Barack Obama. That makes all the more troubling his advocacy of government censorship of political speech, the kind of expression that is at the core of First Amendment protection.

Schoen finds it “more than just disquieting” but “shameful and embarrassing” that, as the New York Times reported (and we noted) last week, Chicago Cubs part-owner Joe Ricketts considered funding an anti-Obama super PAC ad that would have reminded voters about the president’s “spiritual mentor,” Jeremiah Wright. Under political pressure, Obama in 2008 repudiated the America-hating pastor, whose views even the New York Times concedes are “clearly racist.”

“Speaking frankly,” Schoen writes, “racially divisive negative advertisements of this sort do not belong in a presidential election. Whether one supports the president or not, he should be judged on his record, and an ad hominem attack of any sort should have no home in the public arena.”

He would like to use the power of the government to suppress this speech of which he disapproves, as he has made clear in other columns. His complaint about the Ricketts ad that wasn’t shows just what a pernicious idea this is and why the Supreme Court was right to uphold free speech in the celebrated case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

Schoen and the rest of the press are discovering that the marketplace of ideas functions like any other market: there is supply and demand, and no amount of manipulation or regulation can succeed in stifling the natural direction of information toward wider dissemination. In the old days, sure—even among the mainstream media today—information unflattering to the press’s preferred candidate (and boy do they have their preferences) was buried, ignored, or locked in a broom closet (literally). JFK’s sexual dalliances, to choose the most obvious example, would make Bill Clinton look like the before picture for a Cialis ad.

Jeremiah Wright would not be an issue today if the press in 2008 had fully explored his beliefs and his significance in Obama’s life and personal development. I still don’t know what Obama knew about Wright and when he knew it—but I know he lied and is lying today. He lied about Ayers and Dohrn, stonewalled on his birth certificate, and still refuses to release some of the most basic background material that other candidates routinely release.

But all of this stuff has been smuggled as it if were pornography from under the counter, or samizdat publications from behind the Iron Curtain. We are made to feel dirty just for asking WTF about “God damn America” and “US of KKKA” and “America’s chickens… [can't forget the pause] are coming home to roost!”

Politicians since Nixon (and certainly before) have learned the hard way that it’s not the crime, but the cover-up, that does them in. Obama committed no crime in befriending a racist minister and two former members of the Weathermen. But the press has committed the highest crime of all in suppressing the truth—often with such determination and contempt as would have made Stalin nod in appreciation.

Hey, a BTL can dream, can’t he? [NY Times piece, if you're counting.]

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

Some women are smarter than men and some aren’t. But to suggest to women that they deserve dominance instead of equality is at best a cheap applause line.

…

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

…

I have always admired President Obama and I agree with him on some issues, like abortion rights. But the promise of his campaign four years ago has given way to something else — a failure to connect with tens of millions of Americans, many of them women, who feel economic opportunity is gone and are losing hope. In an effort to win them back, Mr. Obama is trying too hard. He’s employing a tone that can come across as grating and even condescending. He really ought to drop it. Most women don’t want to be patted on the head or treated as wards of the state. They simply want to be given a chance to succeed based on their talent and skills. To borrow a phrase from our president’s favorite president, Abraham Lincoln, they want “an open field and a fair chance.”

In the second decade of the 21st century, that isn’t asking too much.

Oh, come on, “sweetie”, is he that bad?

While I’m sure this is a minority view (meaning the view of a minority of women, as opposed to—oh, never mind), she is not the only one to hold it:

A student at Barnard College, Ayelet Pearl, has written a stirring protest to President Barack Obama’s commencement speech yesterday. Noting that the president’s words were “beautiful,” Pearl nonetheless objected to the use of the historic women’s college as a political prop, and said that the event left her feeling “stereotyped, simplified, and used.”

Pearl, a junior, pointed out in her article in the Columbia Political Review that while many Barnard students shared President Obama’s enthusiasm for “change,” they did not necessarily agree with his policies:

..what if our way is not his way? More importantly, what if my way differs from the woman sitting next to me in my art history class or my English class or my computer science class? What if the change I think we need is a different brand of education reform and a more conservative economic plan?

She also objected to the assumption by Barnard administrators that “all” the women at Barnard shared Obama’s political agenda, and the same conformist liberal orthodoxy:

Barnard President Debora Spar, in an interview on MSNBC, boldly told the show’s hostess that “they’re [Barnard students] all huge fans [of Obama].” Is that true? Can the president of Barnard College say, in good faith, that every single one of her students is a fan of President Barack Obama? Are we that unindividual? Or are we just a liberal student body, and, as women, a key component of the Democratic vote? Too often, the assumed answer is yes.

…

Some women are pro-life; some women are pro-choice. Some women are advocates for universal health care; some women are not. Some women support gun rights, others do not. Some women will vote for Barack Obama in 2012, and other women will not.

The speech at Barnard, she said, was “the perfect political platform” for the president–yet ironically, the speech was held on the campus of Columbia University, Obama’s alma mater, and he left not “setting foot on our campus.”

A press that is typically attuned to symbolism missed that one big-time. The man who fancies himself God’s gift to women “stereotyped, simplified, and used” them without actually setting foot on Barnard’s campus. (One only has to cross Broadway.)

Both like and unlike his father, President Obama leaves part of himself behind with the women he comes into contact with. Barack Sr. “punished” many women with a baby; Barack Jr. punishes them with no job prospects and a condescending attitude. Both would have benefitted from learning a little respect.

PS: Aggie and I wonder (as do all of you) if this guy can be beat. Well, George Bush won reelection (or just election) in 2004, in spite of a hostile media and a couple of controversial wars. And it was people like Aggie and me what did it. We voted for Gore in 200, but for Bush in ’04. All it takes is for enough of Obama’s hardly insurmountable coalition to crumble. He can remain overwhelmingly popular among his various constituencies, only slightly less so—and lose. I’m coming to believe he will (knock on wood).

Oh wait, they did—and they didn’t!

Seven women participated in the National Organization for Women’s day of protest against Rush Limbaugh in front of Limbaugh’s D.C. affiliate WMAL, Friday.

NOW’s national protest day had been in the works since April 19, when the women’s advocacy group launched their “Enough Rush” campaign.

Pairing with media watchdog Media Matters for America NOW is targeting local affiliates and local advertisers, Friday’s demonstration was touted as the group’s big demonstration of opposition to Limbaugh with affiliates across the country participating in protests.

NOW has had Limbaugh in their crosshairs for nearly two decades, and they renewed their effort to get Limbaugh off the air as a response to the radio host’slate February insult of contraception activist Sandra Fluke.

Wait, is that how she’s billing herself now? “Contraception activist”? It does suggest some rather more attractive images than first year junior partner at Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe. But as BAR-ack (to use his original pronunciation) learned, activism—even contraception activism—isn’t all its cracked up to be (pardon the pun).

Last week Limbaugh launched a response to NOW’s campaign against him in the form of a Facebook group for his female listeners, “Rush Babes for America aka the National Organization for Rush Babes,” to show not all women adhere the NOW agenda. His Facebook group surpassed NOW’s Facebook “likes” in under 24 hours.

Matson shrugged off the women who have joined the “Rush Babe” Facebook group explaining that it is just an attempt by Rush to feed his ego.

Well, duh! Even Rush would tell you that. What part of “serving humanity just by showing up”, “half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it fair” and “talent on loan from God” was unclear to you?

But your Ditz Fits have backfired on you dreadfully. In the future, when your well-publicized turnout at a “massive rally” is seven, just pretend you’re trying to decide where to go for lunch. It’s a natural cover.

Brilliant riff on Obama, violence, liberalism. Enjoy.

You know what would make the world a better place? More Taliban poetry. Even any Taliban poetry.

Ask and ye shall receive:

“Poetry of the Taliban” – edited by a group of London researchers – has already been released in the U.K. and the liberal media are praising the collection as “important” and “original,” remarking how the Taliban’s verse “humanizes” murderers.

Dr. James Caron of the University of Pennsylvania gushed, “In providing such a picture, the ‘insurgent’ is restored a sense of humanity and agency.”

Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer for “The New Yorker” fawned over the terrorist composition in similar fashion. “It’s a remarkable and important book that reveals a hitherto concealed side to the harshly perceived Afghan Taliban,” he wrote.

Obviously, Americans have been too hung up on IEDs, suicide bombers and bloody riots over books to get to know the Taliban’s sensitive side.

No more. Now we’re going to be rooting for those plucky underdogs. Wall Street Journal Istanbul bureau chief Hugh Pope wrote, “Thanks to a clear and emphatic translation, Western readers will find here a rare door to the emotions and motivations of Afghans trapped in bloody events beyond their control, and will soon forget which side they are supposed to be on.”

I particularly liked this bit of verse that shows how like us the Taliban are:

A journalist by the name Pearl
Had the habit of making me hurl.
I cut off his head
To make sure he was dead,
And then—oh look, it’s a squirrel!

Taliban Attention Deficit Disorder! What a sense of “humanity and agency”! No longer will I perceive them “harshly”!

That the Taliban write poetry is hardly a surprise; that someone might see fit to compile it is hardly more so. But that liberal Western journalists would praise it is disgusting. I might expect such sewage from that scourge of old growth timber, The New Yorker—but the Wall Street [bleeping] Journal? “Afghans trapped in bloody events beyond their control”? I would say the “bloody events” perpetrated by the Taliban are very much in their control.

As “Jawed” wrote:

Hot, hot trenches are full of joy;
Attacks on the enemy are full of joy.
Guns in our hands and magazine belts over my shoulders;
Grenades on my chest are full of joy.

How about a Hellfire missile from a Predator drone up your a**, Jawed. That fill you with joy? Harshly perceived my a**.

I mean “evolved”! Read: “So Evolved”

Of course we all know what the winner was:

[image via Moonbattery]

Again, Aggie and I support gay marriage (as recognized by the state—churches are on their own), but we don’t go mincing and prancing around boasting how evolved we are. No one calls us the first “gay blog” (well, maybe some unevolved critics).

But if you think Newspuke only went gay after being absorbed into The Daily Beast, you don’t remember. Senior correspondent Jonathan Alter had a book deal before the election returns were counted to deliver a hagiography on the first 100 days. I think it sold fewer than 100 copies, but they’ve been in the bag (his bag) from the beginning.

PS: There goes Obama claiming credit again for something he didn’t do (see Aggie’s post below). Even if Obama were as gay as Tom Cruise at an Elton John concert, he’d still be the second gay president. Abraham Lincoln allegedly got there (so to speak) first. (Third, if you believe the rumors about James K. Polk.)

NY Times poll

Hah!

President Obama’s claim that the GOP is mounting a war on women has proven to be a failure. A month into his assault on the Republicans and Mitt Romney, the new CBS-New York Times poll shows that the GOP presidential candidate now leads among women–and men.

Since April, women have gone from strongly backing Obama to endorsing Romney. In April, Obama held a 49 percent to 43 percent lead among women. That has now flipped to 46 percent backing Romney with 44 percent for Obama, an 8-point switch.

Ironically, Romney’s support among men has dropped, but he still edges Obama 45 percent to 42 percent.

And here’s a surprise: Despite the media hyping the so-called war on women, no major outlet today noticed Romney’s new lead with women voters.

“This is unbelievable,” said conservative consultant Greg Mueller. “The CBS story manages to not mention the change in women numbers,” he said, adding sarcastically. “No media bias here — Obama is getting fluffy stories about his commencement speech to women at Barnard — so we better bury the reality.”

They are going to go ballistic if Romney wins. Should we stock up on food and bottled water?

- Aggie

Let’s see who gets out of jury duty because he or she is not a US citizen, yet votes.

Watch the whole thing. At the end, there are faculty members at U North Carolina counseling students to vote more than once in a single election.

- Aggie

We allowed her to overstay her visa for decades, turned a blind eye to her illegal contribution to her nephew’s campaign, and even gave her subsidized housing—against express regulations to the contrary. And when she got caught, we excused everything, as if her nephew himself had issued a blanket pardon.

No wonder she’s so sad:

Auntie Zeituni has written a book. It’s called “Tears of Abuse,” on account of how tough she’s had it.

Have I read it? Of course not. Have you read her nephew’s best-seller — Dreams from My Ghostwriter, I mean Father? No one has — it’s sold millions of copies, but until two weeks ago, not a single reader got far enough into it to learn that Obama was a dog-eater with “composite” girlfriends.

Anyway, I have the press release on “Tears of Abuse,” which describes Auntie Zeituni’s journey to the United States “where she faces the unthinkable; failing health and quarantined in a hospital while on vacation in a foreign country.”

Vacation? Surely she meant to say “welfare.”

“As her story unfolds she becomes a resident of (a) homeless shelter and a subject of deportation.”

How dare they! Just because she’s an illegal alien, they want to deport her.

Have they forgotten the immortal words of Marsha Coakley: “Technically it is not illegal to be illegal in Massachusetts.”

And if you don’t believe Marsha, just ask Uncle Omar, Auntie Zeituni’s brother, or half-brother, or whatever. Technically, it is also apparently not illegal to be driving drunk illegally in Massachusetts, at least if you’re an illegal alien.

“Quarantined” in a Massachusetts hospital? How many sick people around the world do you think would choose to be “quarantined” in this mecca for medical care? All of them, give or take, right? And how much, I wonder, did that set her back financially? Was she also under “house arrest” in the subsidized house she somehow received over other candidates, more legal, if not more worthy?

“‘Tears of Abuse’ reveals how this remarkable woman turns the unfathomable into triumph.”

Public housing, on the dole — what else would you call it but a triumph? The inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty needs to be rewritten. Forget the huddled masses yearning to “breathe free.” Now the huddled masses demand to “live free.”

Speaking of “the homeless, tempest-tost,” Uncle Omar gets his driver’s license back today. I hope nobody at the registry is even thinking of slapping that $100 license-restoration fee on this proud Kenyan illegal alien assistant manager of Conti’s Liquors in Framingham. That restoration fee is for U.S. citizens only.

Howie’s right, though. Democrats don’t have the habit of reading the actual documents they favor. ObamaCare, Dreams of Barack’s Father (Wm. Ayers, author), I, Zeituni—no one actually reads them. They just feel them. You provide the abuse, we provide the tears. It’s a win-win.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that:

“‘Let the games begin,” Tina Brown said last week after Time Magazine released its controversial breastfeeding cover.

Brown, whose tenure as editor at Newsweek has seen an array of controversial covers, will respond with the above, pegged to Andrew Sullivan’s piece on Obama’s support for same-sex marriage: “The First Gay President.”

If Newsweek wanted to deliver an honest and direct response, it would have portrayed Obama suckling an infant (the first lactating president) swaddled in the American flag to symbolize the growing ranks of Americans who are forced (and encouraged!) to nurse off the public teat.

Obama is the first gay president, Clinton was the first black president; I guess John Edwards would have been the first monogamous president.

The media has contorted itself into irrelevance.

And somehow Wright was offered $150,000 shut up money

An ally of then-Senator Barack Obama offered Rev. Jeremiah Wright $150,000 to keep his mouth shut until after the 2008 election, according to excerpts released today from the upcoming book “The Amateur” by Edward Klein.

Wright, Obama’s former Chicago pastor, had become a significant political liability in the 2008 presidential campaign because of his anti-American rhetoric. Just months before the election, networks were poring over months of Wright’s sermons, which suggested that the United States deserved the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Wright has also encouraged blacks to sing “God Damn America” instead of “God Bless America.”

Twenty years in that church, guys. Sat front and center with his wife and kids.

“After the media went ballistic on me, I received an e-mail offering me money not to preach at all until the November presidential election,” Wright told Klein, according to the New York Post, which obtained the excerpts.

That’s when Obama himself got involved, Wright said, and made a personal plea to keep Wright out of the spotlight.

“Barack said he wanted to meet me in secret, in a secure place. And I said, ‘You’re used to coming to my home, you’ve been here countless times, so what’s wrong with coming to my home?’ So we met in the living room of the parsonage of Trinity United Church of Christ, at South Pleasant Avenue right off 95th Street, just Barack and me. I don’t know if he had a wire on him. His security was outside somewhere.”

Wright added that Obama seemed more concern about his political circumstances than Wright’s personal well-being.

“And one of the first things Barack said was, ‘I really wish you wouldn’t do any more public speaking until after the November election.’ He knew I had some speaking engagements lined up, and he said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t speak. It’s gonna hurt the campaign if you do that.’ … I said, ‘I don’t see it that way. And anyway, how am I supposed to support my family?’ And he said, ‘Well, I wish you wouldn’t speak in public. The press is gonna eat you alive.’”

I realize that it is Mother’s Day (Happy Mother’s Day everyone!), but I sure do hope that American Jews are reading this.

According to Wright, he also received a short lecture from Obama on the necessity of sometimes stretching the truth.

“Barack said, ‘I’m sorry you don’t see it the way I do. Do you know what your problem is?’ And I said, ‘No, what’s my problem?’ And he said, ‘You have to tell the truth.’ I said, ‘That’s a good problem to have. That’s a good problem for all preachers to have. That’s why I could never be a politician.’”

Well, Obama certainly has no problem stretching the truth, does he?

- Aggie