Emory King sticks up for Newt and proposes a new standard of electoral acceptability for the 2012 Presidential Race.

I have not and will not post anything in support of a candidate for president. They all pass the Daffy Duck test for me and therefore will receive my vote once they secure the nomination. (The Daffy Duck test, by the way, is are they smarter than Daffy Duck and are they not named Obama.) However, pundits assailing Newt are getting on my nerves. Not because he isn’t worthy of criticism, (he is) but because they are trying to tell me he isn’t a conservative. Really. Where exactly were these folks in the eighties and nineties? I was alive then and can’t recall anyone telling me Newt wasn’t a conservative then. If Newt isn’t conservative, why was he used as an example of how the left tries to destroy its opponents in Ann’s book Treason. I quote from page 123 of my copy, ” The left’s enthusiasm for destroying individual lives still sputters to life occasionally, driving their monumental crusades against Newt Gingrich, Ken Starr, and Linda Tripp, for example.” If people don’t want to support Newt for president, I certainly understand why. He isn’t perfect by a long shot. But please don’t sit here and tell me he isn’t on our side of the fence because most of his critics among the chattering class loved the guy in 1994.

Dan in Philly observes:

Let me be clear, O is and always has been an ordinary political hack who was picked up by a brilliant campaign because he happened to be in the right place at the right time. This brilliant campaign ran him, and ever since he’s been trying and failing to lead the country. He’s been a failure from the beginning because he’s been a fraud from the beginning.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

R.L.G., writing in the Economist, wants to see the real ideological opponents square off and come out swinging. I’m with him.

[W]atching Mitt Romney pivot to the centre with the smoothness of a consultant flipping to his next slide, a manoeuvre we can all expect him to execute the minute he wraps up the nomination, will be depressingly predictable. The perception that he will say whatever he feels he must to become president is not founded on sand. Mr Gingrich, by contrast, can almost certainly be counted on to be the same Mr Gingrich we’ve seen in the primaries. Say what you like about the man, but he has ideas, says arresting things, and most of all, would make the clearest possible contrast with Barack Obama in the general election.

While some people groan at his idea for a series of “Lincoln-Douglas” debates, for example, I’d relish the chance to see Mr Gingrich and Mr Obama have long and freewheeling exchanges. ...

t I can very easily imagine Mr Gingrich repeating the “food-stamp” line in a general-election debate with Mr Obama several feet away. This would be a natural extension of his claim that journalists asking him questions about the story of the day was “despicable”. He is fearless, reckless, filterless; in any way, -less all of the things Mr Romney has too much of.

I want to see Mr Obama reply to “food-stamp president”, to the idea that annoying appeals courts should be de-funded, to the Gingrich claim that he is the most radical president in history, and so much more. I dread the scripted turns the election will take if Mr Romney is the nominee. I think America could use a straight fight between two boldly different visions of America. I don’t expect I’ll get my wish, but a journalist can dream, anyway.

The Wall Street Journal yesterday explained the Obama administration’s astonishing decision.

The central conflict of the Obama Presidency has been between the jobs and growth crisis he inherited and the President’s hell-for-leather pursuit of his larger social-policy ambitions. The tragedy is that the economic recovery has been so lackluster because the second impulse keeps winning.

Yesterday came proof positive with the White House’s repudiation of the Keystone XL pipeline, TransCanada’s $7 billion shovel-ready project that would support tens of thousands of jobs if only it could get the requisite U.S. permits. Those jobs, apparently, can wait.

Unless the President objected, December’s payroll tax deal gave TransCanada the go-ahead in February to start building the pipeline, which would travel 1,661 miles from Alberta to interconnections in Oklahoma and then carry Canadian crude to U.S. refiners on the Gulf Coast.

The State Department, which presides over the Keystone XL review because it would cross the 49th parallel, claimed yesterday that the two-month Congressional deadline was too tight “for the President to determine whether the Keystone XL pipeline is in the national interest.” The White House also issued a statement denouncing Congress’s “rushed and arbitrary deadline,” which merely passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.

This is, to put it politely, a crock.

Keystone XL has been planned for years and only became a political issue after the well-to-do environmental lobby decided to make it a station of the green cross. TransCanada filed its application in 2008, and State determined in 2010 and then again last year that the project would have “no significant impacts” on the environment, following exhaustive studies. The Environmental Protection Agency chose to intervene anyway, and the political left began to issue ultimatums and demonstrate in front of the White House, so President Obama decided to defer a final decision until after the election.

Robert J. Samuelson, in the Washington Post, calls the decision to block the pipeline an act of insanity, noting that it is an act of pure symbolism, no utility, not even supposititious enviro-utility is actually thereby served. But reality is never allowed to stand in the way of ideology by this administration.

President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico is an act of national insanity. It isn’t often that a president makes a decision that has no redeeming virtues and — beyond the symbolism — won’t even advance the goals of the groups that demanded it. All it tells us is that Obama is so obsessed with his reelection that, through some sort of political calculus, he believes that placating his environmental supporters will improve his chances.

Aside from the political and public relations victory, environmentalists won’t get much. Stopping the pipeline won’t halt the development of tar sands, to which the Canadian government is committed; therefore, there will be little effect on global-warming emissions. Indeed, Obama’s decision might add to them. If Canada builds a pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific for export to Asia, moving all that oil across the ocean by tanker will create extra emissions. There will also be the risk of added spills.

Now consider how Obama’s decision hurts the United States. For starters, it insults and antagonizes a strong ally; getting future Canadian cooperation on other issues will be harder. Next, it threatens a large source of relatively secure oil that, combined with new discoveries in the United States, could reduce (though not eliminate) our dependence on insecure foreign oil.

Finally, Obama’s decision forgoes all the project’s jobs. There’s some dispute over the magnitude. Project sponsor TransCanada claims 20,000, split between construction (13,000) and manufacturing (7,000) of everything from pumps to control equipment. Apparently, this refers to “job years,” meaning one job for one year. If so, the actual number of jobs would be about half that spread over two years. Whatever the figure, it’s in the thousands and thus important in a country hungering for work. And Keystone XL is precisely the sort of infrastructure project that Obama claims to favor.

The big winners are the Chinese. They must be celebrating their good fortune and wondering how the crazy Americans could repudiate such a huge supply of nearby energy.

Andrew Sullivan prefaces his recent Newsweek article offering an unusually optimistic assessment of the current president’s prospects and achievements by confessing:

I write this as an unabashed supporter of Obama from early 2007 on. I did so not as a liberal, but as a conservative-minded independent appalled by the Bush administration’s record of war, debt, spending, and torture. I did not expect, or want, a messiah. I have one already, thank you very much.

Barack Obama is, only too obviously, a political figure originating from the most extreme fringe of the radical left remodeled into a merely aggressively Progressive democrat. Barack Obama deliberately chose to break with the New Democrat/New Labour 1990s center leftism model successfully adopted by William Clinton and Tony Blair, in which politicians of the left offered an implicit understanding that their efforts to deliver more benefits to labor and the less well off would be pursued with restraint and never in such a way as to jeopardize economic growth and the general welfare of the country.

How it is, in any way, shape, or form, legitimately possible for a “conservative minded” person to be a supporter of Barack Obama is a mystery to me.

If one were so pacifistically-inclined that George Bush’s wars made one into a democrat, well, it is difficult to fail to notice that Barack Obama has continued the same military efforts.

Pointing to Bush’s war-time debt increases as justification for supporting Obama goes beyond obliviousness, on the other hand, far, far into hypocrisy. Barack Obama presided over a domestic spending spree utterly unprecedented in history in straightened economic times, multiplying dramatically all previous debt and, finding himself faced with a imminent crisis in funding existing entitlement obligations, proceeded, in defiance of an enormous public outcry of protest, to add a new massive entitlement.

Referring to mildly coercive interrogation techniques, carefully limited so as to inflict no real injury or permanent effects, as torture, while indulging in wildly exaggerated rhetoric and striking sanctimonious poses has become one of the principal exercises of Andrew Sullivan’s journalism. Sullivan has thereby become one of the foremost practitioners of the school of moral instruction combining flamboyant and in-your-face sexual latitudinarianism with Pecksniffian priggery applied to defense activities.

So, I start out, even before evaluating Sullivan’s analysis, arguments, and appraisals, confronted with a set of obviously fraudulent credentials. Andrew Sullivan is not “conservative minded.” He is a notoriously unstable and emotionally volatile partisan of the Homintern, who used to be on the right, but who has transferred his political loyalties to the left, partly in order to further the political agenda of his sexual subculture, and partly simply because the opportunities and accommodations are so much better over there.

No wonder that Ann Althouse didn’t even bother reading through the article. She knew perfectly well what she was going to find.

Over lunch with Peter Robinson, Victor Davis Hanson remarked reflectively:

When you think about it, Obama has kept the detention camp at Guantanamo. He’s going ahead with military tribunals. And where Bush only waterboarded three terrorists, Obama has used drones to execute about 2,600.

Obama’s sort of growing on me.

John Podhoretz explains that Barack Obama’s end-run around the Constitution this week is really evidence of his political weakness and desperation.

President Obama’s executive power-grab this week — making four “recess” appointments when the Senate isn’t in recess — is a mark not of his strength, but of his relative weakness. He is asserting an authority he does not possess through the Constitution because he has precious little personal authority left to assert.

He had it and he lost it, and he can’t figure out how to get it back — so he’s just going to take it.

“When Congress refuses to act, and as a result hurts our economy and puts people at risk, I have an obligation as president to do what I can without them,” Obama said Wednesday as he trumpeted his installation of Richard Cordray as head of his new consumer-activism bureau.

This is rhetoric designed to thrill liberals and Democrats, who (like all partisans and ideologues) love what they take to be the “good fight,” and don’t particularly care how it’s waged. That’s true even if they spent eight years screaming about supposed unconstitutional actions on the part of the Bush administration, every one of which had a far firmer foundation in constitutional law than Obama’s unprecedented action this week.

They also love it because they think it represents an awakening by Obama to the nature of the obstructionist efforts against him (and a winning re-election strategy) when he says he’ll do “what I can” to combat Washington’s brokenness.

This supposedly a) acknowledges the public sentiment against the city whose most powerful resident he is, b) alleges he’s not the reason for the problems and c) places the blame on the recalcitrant Congress.

Maybe it’s the best hand Obama has to play, but it’s not a very good hand. For one thing, the voters who have turned on him don’t think he has exercised too little power, but rather too much — so bragging about doing things without congressional sanction may not play well.

Second, no matter how resolute he sounds, the fact that he has to act in a somewhat rogue manner is an expression of a profound loss of presidential authority — and one that he can’t successfully blame on Congress.

Obama lost his ability to push his agenda through Congress when he received what he himself called a “shellacking” in the November 2010 elections. That shellacking was primarily the result of massive policy overreach when he had a Democratic Congress in his pocket.

He spent 2009 and 2010 getting what he wanted: a trillion dollar stimulus. Auto-industry nationalization. And, of course, his health-care law. It was a wildly successful first 18 months — and it led directly to the bruising defeat he suffered as soon as the American people could render their judgment on those actions.

The independent voters who’d put him over the top in 2008 were horrified by the results. Exit polls showed a 24 percent swing among them, from 8 percentage points in favor of Obama and the Democrats in 2008 to 16 points against in 2010.

What may have been even more painful for Obama’s vanity was his discovery in 2011 that his rhetorical gifts had lost their oomph. He gave speech after speech on topics dear to his heart — and found, each time, that the talk was either ineffectual or actually convinced more people to oppose him.

Read the whole thing.

Podhoretz is perfectly right. Obama’s discreditable (and illegal) ploy is only a short-term strategy to gratify his base and keep the small body of support he still possesses behind him by making a strong gesture of partisanship that makes them happy. Who cares that his action will set a really terrible precedent? Who cares that the appointments will probably be struck down in court? Just as long as he can fire up the base.

Peter Wehner marvels as the doomed democrat administration moves phantom divisions around its political positions map.

We are now reaching the point in which the president is running a truly post-modern campaign, in which there is no objective truth but simply narrative. Obama’s campaign isn’t simply distorting the facts; it is inverting them. This kind of thing isn’t unusual to find in the academy. But to see a president and his campaign so thoroughly deconstruct truth in order to maintain power is quite rare. The sheer audacity of Obama’s cynicism is a wonder of the modern world.

It is all so terribly sad, but actually pretty funny, too.

Hat tip to Theo.

From Steve Hayward at Power-Line.

Via Theo.

Ace asks an important question.

Is Obama’s Intellect Stunted by Epistemic Closure?

This occurred to me due to Obama’s claim that paying people not to work creates more jobs than actually creating jobs.

It is a thoroughly stupid and ignorant statement. Even as a weak bit of political spin, it verges, apologies for the word but I mean it, on being mentally retarded.

A year or two ago one of those guys who’s supposedly a libertarian but seems to make his rent attacking conservatives posited that the right suffers from “epistemic closure,” a mis-named term which he claimed to mean “closed off to information or experience inconsistent with one’s prior views.”

A tasteless and unnecessary neologism for the very old idea of a Community-Based Reality, a group which decides what reality is according to a group. Contrary information will not be permitted to interfere with the Community-Based Reality the group is deciding upon; they reason backwards from their conclusions to decide what the Facts are which prove those pre-supposed conclusions.

Not a particularly new idea. But he made up a (poor) neologism for it, and attacked the right, so of course he got lots of links and probably a few invitations to MSNBC.

Using this terminology: Is Obama’s mind epistemically closed?

Obama is supposedly a learned man. We are told he is a rara avis, in Chris Buckley’s dribblings, a true intellectual.

When was the last time Obama actually learned something about the world?

Did he, as the book’s title might have it, Learn Everything He Needed To Know By Second Semester Sophomore Year?

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

Ace’s rhetorical question is really more than just a witty backhand to a political adversary. It points to the real explanation for Barack Obama’s astonishingly ineffectual response to the country’s economic crisis and his own accelerating political disaster.

Obama is doing nothing useful for either the country, or his own political cause, simply because he is at a loss intellectually. Obama is, as Ace contends, nothing more or less than a conventional left-wing member of the elite establishment. He went to Harvard Law. He was appointed to lecture on Constitutional Law at the Law School of the University of Chicago. He and the other best people believe in a certain worldview, providing continual new occasions for advocacy by people like themselves for governmental intervention and for expansions of governmental authority.

Out there, you have the selfish, imperfect, unregulated and unimproved world which will automatically supply all the resources required by enlightened technocratic experts, equipped with the finest credentials from the most prestigious institutions, to intervene, regulate, reform, manage, and supervise that world’s operation and progress toward ever greater well being, equity, and perfection.

In the worldview of the best people, there is no alternative theory, there is no legitimate counter-hypothesis to suggest that government cannot do anything it wants, to contend that there are limits to taxation or intervention, to suppose that the general consensus of the elect could possibly be wrong, to warn that the calculative powers of human reason cannot make the economy do anything trained economists desire.

Obama, the experts and the best people, the consensus of the elect cannot be wrong. If they were wrong, how could they possibly be occupying the powerful and prestigious positions that they do? If they were wrong, why would the mainstream media be so vigorously championing their cause? It just isn’t possible that people so successful, people at the top of American society, can as a group be so wrong.

One just needs to communicate the proper arguments for raising taxes on the rich a little more loudly, and in words of fewer syllables perhaps. Eventually, Americans will understand that Barack Obama, Paul Krugman, and the democrats have been right about everything all along.

Naive as this sounds, the truth is that that is exactly what they think.

Obama first tried to emulate Truman by running against a Republican (majority holding one house of) Congress. More recently, he tried imitating Teddy Roosevelt in his last, sad, radical incarnation, going to Osawatomie, Kansas and delivering a divisive, populist, class warfare-themed speech harkening back to to turn of the last century Progressivism.

When Paul A. Rahe looks at Obama, though, he isn’t reminded of Harry Truman or Teddy Roosevelt so much as of John V. Lindsay, a similar glamor boy wimp with a similarly polished Ivy League style, who similarly chose to represent a coalition of the establishment elite and minority canaille in waging class warfare against the middle and the working class.

[I]t was Lindsay who had spent the city into the ground. In 1967, the city budget was $4.6 billion; in 1971, it was $7.8 billion. By 1974, the year Beame took over, it was $10 billion. Lindsay introduced the city’s first income tax and commuter tax, but the revenues he raised were never enough. By 1974, the annual budget deficit had climbed to $1.5 billion. Fred Siegel got it right when he described Lindsay as the worst Mayor New York had in the twentieth century and went on to remark that he “wasn’t incompetent or foolish or corrupt, but he was actively destructive.”

Lindsay’s natural constituency was the socially liberal WASP elite and those within the Jewish community who had joined them at the top of the social pyramid or aspired to do so. To win election and re-election as Mayor, he had to hold onto that constituency, split the Democratic Party, and win over one of the more substantial elements composing it. This he did by driving a wedge between working-class and lower middle class whites, on the one hand, and African-Americans and Puerto Ricans, on the other – and he managed to attract support from the latter by massively expanding the welfare rolls and increasing dramatically the patronage that found its way into their hands. To secure his re-election, Lindsay was prepared to bring the city to its knees.

And exactly like John Lindsay, Barack Obama is leaving spectacular and unprecedented economic ruin in his wake and will be remembered as the most despised holder of the same office in a century.

Drudge Report 12/9/2011: Obama celebrates Hanukkah at White House…
TWO WEEKS EARLY?
LIGHTS ALL THE CANDLES…

President Obama’s hopes for reelection next November look pretty dim, as the latest poll shows hypothetical Republican nominee Newt Gingrich winning 45% to 43% over the incumbent months before the campaign has actually started.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Barack Obama had been planning to emulate Harry S. Truman and run a populist campaign, coming from behind by running against a “do nothing Congress.” But the Truman strategy has not been working. Democrat advisors are urging the president to adopt a different predecessor as his model.

Politico:

The White House: “On Tuesday, … President Obama will travel to Osawatomie, Kansas where he will deliver remarks on the economy. The President will talk about how he sees this as a make-or-break moment for the middle class and all those working to join it. He’ll lay out the choice we face between a country in which too few do well while too many struggle to get by, and one where we’re all in it together – where everyone engages in fair play, everyone does their fair share, and everyone gets a fair shot. Just over one hundred years ago, President Teddy Roosevelt came to Osawatomie, Kansas and called for a New Nationalism, where everyone gets a fair chance, a square deal, and an equal opportunity to succeed.”

BACKSTORY FROM ALEX BURNS: “Last Sunday on ‘Meet the Press,’ historian Doris Kearns Goodwin urged President Obama to emulate Teddy Roosevelt in organizing his campaign around the theme of ‘a square deal, fundamental fairness” in America.

Apart from the spectacular incongruity of the wimp Obama trying to channel the Rough Riding, rifle-toting, lion-shooting presidential champion of the vigorous life, all this fantasy overlooks the fact that when Teddy finally slipped a cog and went all Progressive and Bolshie on us, he was rejected by his own party and wound up playing only the destructive role of Third Party candidate and spoiler, delivering the election of 1912 to his own enemy, Woodrow Wilson.

“The New Nationalism” went down to defeat a century ago, just as its recrudescence is going to be defeated come next November.

The real mystery is why reactionaries clinging to 19th century visions of collectivist statism and welfare state utopias built upon the rule of scientific experts are allowed in the 21st Century to refer to themselves as “Progressives.” They are about as progressive as the contraptions described in the novels of Jules Verne. Their political philosophy is as advanced as gas domestic lighting, horse-drawn cabs, and parlor pump organs.

And everything they advocate has been tried already, in Soviet Russia and in Hitler’s Germany, in Fascist Italy and Peronist Argentina, in post-war Britain (where food rationing continued until 1954), and by a succession of socialist governments in Britain and on the Continent. Socialism, centralized planning, the corporate state, cradle-to-the-grave welfare safety nets have all been tried and they have always failed.

The real question ought to be: when will “progressives” catch up intellectually to the liberal political ideas of the US framers?

Ace summarizes and talks back to the commentators.

There is a little more to all this, which I think needs to be noted. Obama’s failure doubtless has several causes, but I think his presidency is particularly interesting because Barack Obama is really demonstrating the failure of liberal economic policies publicly and emphatically because he so firmly believes in them.

Barack Obama is a classic product and representative of elite American academic culture. He knows what the consensus of the best people is. He believes in, and in fact personally embodies, that consensus. The American liberal elite comprises the best people with the best educations occupying the top positions in the most prestigious institutions. How could they possibly be mistaken or misinformed about anything?

Barack Obama has done exactly what he was supposed to do, on the basis of the consensus of the best people, and it hasn’t turned the economy around or even resulted in the masses rallying to his cause. No wonder he is depressed and at a loss.

They had nailed Romney beautifully, the left-wing comentariat thought happily. Another ham-fisted Republican mistake was exposed, and ridiculed, and totaled up in their credit column. They’d won.

But, whoops! as the next couple of days passed, frustrated Obama staffers found that nobody really cared all that much about the fine details of that particular line’s original source and context. It applied very aptly to the incumbent president’s situation. The ad worked and did real damage.

And, in the end, Romney strategists got to sit back and smile contentedly, shaking their heads, and remarking with feigned astonishment to Politico about the Obama camp’s “overreaction to ‘a small buy on one station in New Hampshire.’ ”

Jonathan Chait, in New York Magazine, discusses the history of liberal dissatisfaction with incumbent democrats at length.

Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president—indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious—but not with the real thing. The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline. Instead they compare Obama with an imaginary president—either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president. an apologetic Chris Rock said earlier this month. “I believe wholeheartedly if he’s back in, he’s going to do some gangsta shit.”) Obama has already given up on any hope of running a positive reelection campaign and is girding up for a grim slog of lesser-of-two-evils-ism.

Why are liberals so desperately unhappy with the Obama presidency? ...

Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president—indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious—but not with the real thing. The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline. Instead they compare Obama with an imaginary president—either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president. ...

For almost all of the past 60 years, liberals have been in a near-constant emotional state of despair, punctuated only by brief moments of euphoria and occasional rage. When they’re not in charge, things are so bleak they threaten to move to Canada; it’s almost more excruciating when they do win elections, and their presidents fail in essentially the same ways: He is too accommodating, too timid, too unwilling or unable to inspire the populace. (Except for Johnson, who was a bloodthirsty warmonger.)

Is it really likely that all these presidents have suffered from the same character flaws? Suppose you’re trying to find dates online, and everybody you meet turns out to be too ugly. Might it be possible that the problem isn’t the attractiveness of the single people in your town but rather your standards? ...

Conservatives are an interesting counterexample. While they are certainly capable of expressing frustration with Republican presidents, conservative disappointment is neither as incessant nor as pervasively depressed as the liberal variety. Conservatives are at least as absolutist as liberals in the ideological demands they make upon their leaders… At the same time, they are far less likely to turn against their president altogether. They assail the compromise but continue to praise the man. Conservatives did turn against George H.W. Bush after he raised taxes. But they stuck loyally with his son well through his midterm election. They remained consistently loyal to Nixon and Reagan. They’ll circle the wagons around Romney, too—trust me.

Why? Because conservatives are not like liberals. They think differently.

Chait shouldn’t be surprised.

Liberalism really amounts to a fanatical enthusiasm for 19th century fantasies involving the achievement of a Utopian society with no form of unhappiness or inequality, brought into being by the calculative powers of human reason operating through the rule of the collectivist state by scientific experts.

If electing the democratic candidate the liberals rallied behind fails to bring about a completely successful socialist revolution, silencing conservative opposition forever and eliminating capitalism, the market economy, and the economy of scarcity; if the entire population is not promptly converted into accepting the editorial perspective of the New York Review of Books in its entirety; if their president cannot crush the kulaks; then he, too, is going to wind up, rather like Capitalism and American society, being compared to an impossible fantasy yardstick of imaginary perfection and condemned.

Chait is, in essence, perfectly correct, but if one removes doctrinaire Utopian fantasy from the politics of the American left, the philosopher is bound to wonder: what exactly would remain?

Conrad Black observes the liberal media redirecting its fire from Herman Cain in the direction of Newt Gingrich, and shrugs indifferently. It is already obvious to any intelligent observer (like Mr. Black) that Barack Obama (absent divine intervention) has no real hope of being re-elected and that the election of 2012 is destined to be a genuinely transformative election, sweeping all of the consequences of the election of 2008 onto the ash-pile of history.

For me to achieve a degree of optimism from this procession of accident-prone Republican candidates might seem aberrant or a worrisome sign of cabin fever, but it isn’t. The grace of revelation came in two mighty flashes of celestial light, a few seconds apart, thunder to follow closer to next November. Whatever obloquy may be rained down on the well-tended topknots of the Republican hopefuls, it will not excuse or reelect the administration described by one commentator a few weeks ago as “the worst since before the invention of electricity.”

This administration will have produced $5 trillion of deficits, which will have the economic consequences of a 500 percent increase in the money supply in four years, without any serious effort to suggest how it is going to close the spigot, much less repay any of the accumulated debt. Only someone more familiar than I with the most fantastic realms of fiction could find adequately recondite metaphors for this level of fiscal irresponsibility. There has not been a hint of entitlement reform; no interest in a reforming budget or in changing the actuarial assumptions or vesting conditions of Social Security; no comprehensive analysis of municipal, county, or state debt, as Harrisburg, Pa., and Jefferson County, Ala. ($3 billion) went down in the last two weeks like tenpins; nor an effort to tackle the $1 trillion student-loan debt bomb. The administration continues its glazed pall of official prevarication in a reassuring monotone.

There has been no serious effort even to make the 10 percent token reduction in the projected decade of deficits required by the outcome of the debt-ceiling fiasco. The president clings to his arithmetic of the 99 percent and cozies up to the infantilists of Occupy Wall Street (even as he continues his dalliance with the stragglers among his limousine-borne Wall Street groupies). And Treasury Secretary Geithner, having been struck dumb like Zechariah in the temple for the last two years, recovered his voice to exhort the impecunious Europeans to join America in the St. Vitus’s Dance of spending confected trillions of virtual electronic dollars/euros. ...

At least Herbert Hoover acknowledged that a depression was in progress, and Jimmy Carter spoke of a malaise (of which his presence in the White House was the principal symptom). The president and other administration spokesmen seem supremely confident that all they have to do to retain immersion rights in the public trough for another four years is hammer the piñata about the 99 percent and incant the name of the preceding president.

As long as there is an alternative that can speak and tie up its shoelaces in the morning, I do not believe that this administration can be reelected. It is so unrelievedly incompetent that its fecklessness is more a matter of sadness and embarrassment than of the rage that engulfed George W. Bush. This, I surmise, is why the liberal establishment, the Times editorial writers and columnists, the Hollywood groupies, the rich fundraisers, don’t detect that the ship is sinking, and still squeal with delight as the Republican challengers fail to generate more than tentative or reluctant enthusiasm. But they are reading the wrong dials; there will be a Republican nominee. The country will not reelect this mockery of an administration, and whoever the Republican is will be elected and inaugurated, even if he has operated an open-air dog kennel on the wings of an airborne aircraft while groping relays of stewardesses.

And the other illuminated revelation, which came swiftly after the first: The voters will not only be disposing of a failed administration; they will be approving the Republican platform, which will call for radical tax simplification and reduction, entitlement reform, serious health-care reform, real spending reductions, incentives to increased domestic oil production and natural-gas use, and an absolute commitment to preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear military power.

It will be a drastic reform program that will signal that the United States is awakening like Brünnhilde, however unlikely the Siegfried, finally resuming world leadership, acting on its budget and current-account deficits, and behaving like a Great Power and a textbook case in self-government for the first time since President Bush Senior. The effect of the change will be electrifying. ...

The new president may have an imperfect CV and too-perfect hair; Speaker Boehner may surpass Mr. Obama’s historic favorite, Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh, in his proclivity to burst publicly into tears; the White House may be as boring and banal as it was under George W. Bush (though that is unlikely, especially in syntactical matters); but America will lead in policy terms, if not in the personality of its leader. Problems will be addressed and the mere anarchy of abdication compounded by smug official sophistry will no longer be loosed upon the world. Mr. Churchill’s bust may come back to the Oval Office, and FDR’s address at D-Day, including the godly references that the Bureau of Land Management feels disrupt the spirit “of the elegant memorial,” may yet be displayed there. The night will end and glorious will be the dawn, in Washington. I have seen the future, and in it, people work.

Read the whole thing.

A new book, SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama bin Laden, by Chuck Pfarrer based on interviews with Navy SEALS who participated in the strike that eliminated Osama bin Ladin apparently offers a number of details contradicting the White House version of events.

The Week:

The US Navy Seals who killed Osama Bin Laden – codenamed ‘Bert’ – are angry over inaccuracies in the official account of the al-Qaeda mastermind’s death, a new book featuring interviews with the men claims.

A former commander of Seal Team 6, which carried out the killing, Chuck Pfarrer, interviewed many of the men who took part for his new account, Seal Target Geronimo, reports The Sunday Times.

One of the biggest revelations is the claim that the White House blew valuable intelligence gathered during the mission by announcing Bin Laden’s death too soon, giving “time for every other Al-Qaeda leader to scurry to another bolthole” according to Pfarrer.

The Seals are also angry that the White House described the operation as a ‘kill mission’. First, says Pfarrer, Bin Laden was killed within 90 seconds of US Navy landing in his compound – though the version of events given to the press suggested his death came towards the end of the 38-minute mission.

He was killed not after a protracted gun battle – but in a clinical operation where just 12 shots were fired.

Second, the Seals were fully prepared to take him alive. “I’ve been a Seal for 30 years and I never heard the words ‘kill mission’”, Pfarrer said. “It’s a [Washington insider’s] fantasy word.

“If it was a kill mission you don’t need Seal Team 6; you need a box of hand grenades,” he added, explaining they were forced to shoot Bin Laden as he reached for his AK-47.

Daily Mail:

[T]he President was not nearly that engaged – and was actually playing golf until 20 minutes before the operation began in earnest. ...

Mr Pfarrer says the President’s role was largely inflated and suggests he stayed out on the golf course for so long so he could distance himself in case it went wrong. Mr Pfarrer writes: ‘If this had completely gone south, he was in a position to disavow.’

He says the White House photographs did not show the moment that Bin Laden was killed, but the moment a helicopter went down, which happened after the shooting. ...

The book also gives a dramatic new insight into what happened during the 1am raid, during which only 12 bullets were fired.

Within 90 seconds of their helicopter landing, the SEALs saw Bin Laden slam his bedroom door shut. Two SEALs burst in and saw Bin Laden and one of his four wives, Amal, who shouted: ‘It’s not him!’

Contrary to White House statements that he was unarmed, Bin Laden had a gun next to him. As he shoved his wife at the SEALs, four shots were fired.

The first round whistled past Bin Laden’s face. The second grazed his wife’s calf. Mr Pfarrer claims: ‘Two 5.56mm Predator bullets slammed into him. One struck him next to his breastbone, blowing apart his aorta. The last went through his skull.’

He also reveals that Bin Laden was known as Bert to the Seals, and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri was Ernie – a reference to the Sesame Street puppets.

Theo reports that it is already almost full.

Byron York reports approvingly that Rick Perry (who has suffered in popularity due to his non-stellar debate performances) intends to skip some of the excessively numerous upcoming GOP debates (that not many Americans watch anyway).

Perry opened the subject Tuesday night when he told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly that it might have been a mistake for him to take part in the debates. “These debates are set up for nothing more than to tear down the candidates,” Perry said. “So, you know, if there was a mistake made, it was probably ever doing one of the [debates] when all they are interested in is stirring it up between the candidates instead of really talking about the issues that are important to the American people. ...”

I think myself that this is another case where Rick Perry demonstrates both independence of mind and good judgment. A competition for the smoothest and safest 30 second sound bite in what amounts to a liberal press-arranged melee of mud-slinging by Republican candidates at one another is not really terribly useful or a very meaningful test of qualifications for the presidency.

On the contrary, Perry’s ability to see through the charade and to understand what really matters and what doesn’t is far better evidence that he is likely to make sensible decisions as chief executive and commander in chief. A president’s ability think for himself and possession of sufficient courage to set aside false expectations and pointless conventions matters infinitely more than how glib he is, or how pleasing his voice. Barack Obama speaks beautifully, but he is obviously utterly and completely incapable of thinking or operating outside the Weltanschauung of the left-wing community of fashion. Obama is ineffective as president, and is trapped in a pattern of self-destructive political behavior, precisely because he lacks that kind of independence of mind and is simply a captive of his ideology.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when every school boy read Emerson’s essay on Self Reliance. That particular essay was looked upon as as a fundamental expression of our national ethos, as vital instruction on how an American ought to approach life.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark. ...

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested, — “But these impulses may be from below, not from above.” I replied, “They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.” No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.

Today, we live not in the age of Emerson, but of Obama, and for many Americans, including the current president, the American ideal consists of statism, regulatory protection, and dependence on government.

ABC:

At a million-dollar San Francisco fundraiser today, President Obama warned his recession-battered supporters that if he loses the 2012 election it could herald a new, painful era of self-reliance in America.

“The one thing that we absolutely know for sure is that if we don’t work even harder than we did in 2008, then we’re going to have a government that tells the American people, ‘you are on your own,’” Obama told a crowd of 200 donors over lunch at the W Hotel.

Dan Riehl called Obama “the first truly un-American president.” via Bird Dog.

I think the seedy, crooked detective who delivers the 1:17 opening monologue of the Coen Brothers’ “Blood Simple” (1984) speaks for a lot of us:

LANDSCAPES

VOICE-OVER
And down here… you’re on your own.

13 months from now, Barack Obama is going to find out that the whole country is a lot more like Texas than he’d like.

They’ve managed to take the last debate (in which Republican rivals piled on Rick Perry), a meaningless Florida straw poll (which came out favoring Herman Cain), the former name of the location of a Perry family hunting camp, added some polling of their own (by CBS), and all the suckers are convinced that Herman Cain is the Republican front runner. Right!

The morale is: read the news a little less frequently and a lot more skeptically.

The real 2012 campaign news items are reports of hardening public opposition to Barack Obama’s re-election and of a massive flood of contributions, $17 million, pouring into Rick Perry’s war chest.

Iowahawk imagines the Strangelove-esque phone call from the current occupant of the White House to Mexico, to explain that a little something has gone wrong with a BATF gun control operation.

Juan? Hola, amigo! Como esta?

Fine, fine. And how are Lupe and the kids?

College already? Boy, how time flies. Has she picked a major?

Splendid. And how is Juan Jr.? He’s what now, 13, 14? The last time I saw him he was only…

Oh.

Oh.

My goodness. Boy, that’s… that’s just terrible. My deepest sympathies to you and Lupe on your loss. I’ll have my secretary arrange for a memorial bouquet. I know he was a fine boy, and…

Now, Juan, let’s not jump to conclusions here. We both know there are lots of machine gun murders in Mexico, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re all…

Yes, Juan, I got your messages. As a matter of fact that’s why I’m calling this afternoon. I’ve had my people look into this thing and…

Mmhmm.

Mmmhmm.

Now… now Juan… let’s just calm down here a minute. Just, okay.. okay… let me please explain, okay? See, the funny thing is, it turns out, a couple years back there was, well, this stimulus program money, and then there were these brainstorming sessions, where, well, there were some ideas what to do with it. So, anyhoo, one of the ideas that happened was, ‘hey, what if there were, say, 2000 machine guns that got sent to Mexican drug lords?’ and so forth.

Well no, of course we couldn’t tell you. It would have ruined the surprise.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.