Hat tip to Clarice Feldman.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Nederlandse Spreekwoorden [Netherlandish Proverbs], also known as The Blue Cloak and The Folly of the World, 1559, Staatliche Museen, Berlin

Dan Greenfield has another absolutely brilliant essay on the contemporary tyranny based upon ressentiment.

[The] same noxious formula of the fight for equality shamelessly transmuted into special privilege has flowed into every struggle that models itself on the civil rights movement. And with each battle, freedom has been lost as a new layer of privilege and the regulations that protect that privilege have been added. We have long ago lost the presumption of innocence, now everyone is guilty of something and the power to wield that guilt like a whip is the ultimate privilege.

With a new wave of civil rights movements popping up every few years, backed by academic papers, grants from the Ford Foundation and “groundbreaking books” with confrontational titles, it is easy not to notice how little actual freedom we have. We spend so much time on the barricades fighting for the next wave of freedom that we are too community organized to realize how much freedom we have lost. We lost it while demanding more regulations to protect our freedom to be regulated from all the people who would take our freedom away from us by giving us back our rights as individuals.

He’s spot-on right. Look at the talk these days about “Marriage Equality.” What Marriage Equality means is a small minority is demanding the right to redefine the most basic and immemorial human institution in such a way as to cause the state to recognize and enforce the moral and social equality of homosexual relations. And if you go around insisting in retaining the freedom to think as you like on that particular subject, you are defined as the oppressor.

Read the whole thing.

Reputedly taken with Phantom High Speed Camera (V711).

Hat tip to Aniela Dowmunt-Iwaszkiewicz.

US consulate in Benghazi in flames.

Tom Maguire watches the Obama Administration busily trying to pin the blame for the debacle in Benghazi anywhere else, on anyone but us.

The AllahPundit convinces me that Biden and Obama would be crazy to throw Hillary under the bus for the Benghazi debacle. However, he does not convince me that Biden is not crazy.

The Times tries to pretend that all is well with the reassuring news that, like the Flying Dutchman, the buck stops nowhere:

In a debate with Representative Paul D. Ryan on Thursday night, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said White House officials were not told about requests for any additional security. “We weren’t told they wanted more security again,” Mr. Biden said.

The Romney campaign on Friday pounced on the conflicting statements, accusing Mr. Biden of continuing to deny the nature of the attack. The White House scrambled to explain the apparent contradiction between Mr. Biden’s statement and the testimony from State Department officials at the House hearing.

The White House spokesman, Jay Carney, said Friday that security issues related to diplomatic posts in Libya and other countries were dealt with at the State Department, not the White House. Based on interviews with administration officials, as well as in diplomatic cables, and Congressional testimony, those security decisions appear to have been made largely by midlevel State Department security officials, and did not involve Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton or her top aides.

Darn those mid-level staffers! If they would only run for re-election so we could vote them out. …

[B]laming mid-level staffers? Really? Is Obama going to campaign on a slogan that he killed Osama and will keep America safe unless those darn mid-level stafers screw up again?

Jonathan Chait tells the liberals that Republicans have the edge this election and warns that the result of this year’s presidential election will be consequential.

In practice, then, Democrats have just one election that gives them a remotely fair chance to win: the presidential election. They have no chance to control the House or to wield effective control over the Senate. The whole weight of the party’s agenda — protecting health-care reform, progressive taxation, and everything else that might be mowed down by Republican-controlled government — rests on Barack Obama’s shoulders.

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Meanwhile, Gerard Van der Leun gloats: It’s Over. Romney’s the Next President. Obama is Toasted as Brown as a Benghazi Safehouse.

Relax. We got this.

Washington Examiner:

At a New York fundraiser for GOP congressional candidate Dan Halloran, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani blasted President Obama for his leadership failures after the terrorist attacks in Libya.

Giuliani reasserted that Obama was wrong to blame the attacks on the YouTube video and criticized the president for decreasing security at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

“This was for President Obama, I believe, a teaching moment. Because next year, I believe, he’ll be teaching,” he joked, as the crowd laughed.

From Jammie via Ed Driscoll.

Quickly going viral, and typically accompanied by a “there is no doubt in my mind that this woman voted for Obama” kind of comment.

Hat tip to Henry Bernatonis.

Joe Biden’s histrionic performance last night, consisting of mugging, smirking, sneering, laughing, muttering No!, interrupting, and continually visually manifesting condescension, contempt, and his disagreement with, and dissent from, Paul Ryan’s statements and position in the debate has provoked much criticism and, most interestingly, comparison with another Vice President, Al Gore’s, disastrous debate performance in 2000.

Toby Harnden, of Britain’s Daily Mail, was one of many viewers who detected the presence of a ghost.

[The] Ghost of an over-confident Al Gore will haunt smirking Vice President Joe Biden who tried too hard to make up for his boss’ weakness . . . and was caught fibbing about the U.S. intelligence community.

Joe Biden came out swinging at Paul Ryan, flailing wildly and landing a few punches on his own jaw as well as his opponent’s.

He showed the kind of spirit and populist anger that President Barack Obama was so conspicuously lacking and has cheered up many demoralised Democrats.

But Biden’s performance here in Danville, Kentucky was both comical and self-defeating. Just as Al Gore sighed and rolled his eyes in 2000, so Biden smirked and guffawed.

His brief was to show the aggression that Obama so obviously lacked when the President went up against Mitt Romney last week. But as the dust settles today many will be left feeling that he went too far, tried too hard.

Many women and swing voters will have hated his condescending, swaggering display.

Perhaps the even bigger problem the Obama campaign will have in the coming days is that Biden, again just like Gore in 2000, repeatedly exaggerated and mischaracterised for effect.

And worse than Gore – who was caught in a series of small lies in 2000 – Biden was demonstrably untruthful in some big respects.

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The RNC has already produced a campaign ad devoted to Biden’s derisive laughing. But the Daily Mail video clip was longer:

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The comparison with Al Gore’s smirking in the 2000 presidential debate with George W. Bush occurred to me as well, and I was sitting here wondering why it is that experienced professional politicians would make such an obvious blunder as to over-act so much during a debate that they injured their own performances and credibility. How could they both be so naive? I asked myself. Where does this impulse to so much dramaturgy come from?

And, as I thought about it, it came to me. They are lying. They know that they are lying, and they are internally ill-at-ease because they know that they have nothing to offer but hot air. They are overacting because they are trying so hard to pretend, to pretend that it is all for real, that they believe in what they are saying. But they don’t actually, in their heart of hearts, really believe in the lines of guff that they are spinning, so they huff and they puff and they make faces at their opponents, desperately trying to persuade the audience of viewers to share their contemptuous dismissal of their miserable and unworthy opponents who dare to challenge the great and magnificent Oz!

To pull this kind of thing off, you have to be incredibly talented at dissimulation, at pure acting, Gore and Biden are just not that talented, and as a result, they come across as over-acting hams. They cannot really conceal their own insincerity. To succeed at this kind of thing on this level of stage, you need to be Bill Clinton, and only one Bill Clinton comes along every century or two.

Amusingly, partisan commentators from both sides are claiming victory. So the way to tell who really won is to check what the kind of commentator who can be counted to be found jumping on the winning bandwagon is saying. Let’s look at Peggy Noonan‘s analysis:

There were fireworks all the way, and plenty of drama. Each candidate could claim a win in one area or another, but by the end it looked to me like this: For the second time in two weeks, the Democrat came out and defeated himself. In both cases the Republican was strong and the Democrat somewhat disturbing.

Another way to say it is the old man tried to patronize the kid and the kid stood his ground. The old man pushed, and the kid pushed back.

Last week Mr. Obama was weirdly passive. Last night Mr. Biden was weirdly aggressive, if that is the right word for someone who grimaces, laughs derisively, interrupts, hectors, rolls his eyes, browbeats and attempts to bully. He meant to dominate, to seem strong and no-nonsense. Sometimes he did—he had his moments. But he was also disrespectful and full of bluster. “Oh, now you’re Jack Kennedy!” he snapped at one point. It was an echo of Lloyd Bentsen to Dan Quayle, in 1988. But Mr. Quayle, who had compared himself to Kennedy, had invited the insult. Mr. Ryan had not. It came from nowhere. Did Mr. Biden look good? No, he looked mean and second-rate. He meant to undercut Mr. Ryan, but he undercut himself. His grimaces and laughter were reminiscent of Al Gore’s sighs in 2000—theatrical, off-putting and in the end self-indicting.

Mr. Ryan was generally earnest, fluid, somewhat wonky, confident. He occasionally teetered on the edge of glibness and sometimes fell off. …

I have just realized the problem with the debate: it was the weird distance between style and content, and the degree to which Mr. Biden’s style poisoned his content.

In terms of content—the seriousness and strength of one’s positions and the ability to argue for them—the debate was probably a draw, with both candidates having strong moments. But in terms of style, Mr. Biden was so childishly manipulative that it will be surprising if independents and undecideds liked what they saw.

National Democrats keep confusing strength with aggression and command with sarcasm. Even the latter didn’t work for Mr. Biden. The things he said had the rhythm and smirk of sarcasm without the cutting substance.

And so the Romney-Ryan ticket emerged ahead. Its momentum was neither stopped nor slowed and likely was pushed forward.

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Another way to tell who’s winning is to watch the random omens. For instance, today Lindsay Lohan endorsed Romney.

(Image from photoessay by Steven Hayward at Power-Line)

Gavon Laessig collected even more examples of Crazy Uncle Joe’s histrionics.

Close-up of Obama’s hand in Cairo, Egypt, June 4, 2009.

Theo Spark tells us that Barack Hussein Obama always wears or carries on his person three items:

– A Hindu god amulet
– A Masonic emblem
– A ring inscribed “there is no god but Allah”

He is ‘secretive’ about these things, but nobody really ‘cares’ if he is a Prince Hall Freemason.

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WND found that Barack Obama has been wearing that ring for more than thirty years, since at least 1981 when he was a student at Occidental.

As a student at Harvard Law School, then-bachelor Barack Obama’s practice of wearing a gold band on his wedding-ring finger puzzled his colleagues.

Now, newly published photographs of Obama from the 1980s show that the ring Obama wore on his wedding-ring finger as an unmarried student is the same ring Michelle Robinson put on his finger at the couple’s wedding ceremony in 1992.

Moreover, according to Arabic-language and Islamic experts, the ring Obama has been wearing for more than 30 years is adorned with the first part of the Islamic declaration of faith, the Shahada: “There is no god except Allah.”

Inscription on Obama’s ring

The Shahada is the first of the Five Pillars of Islam, expressing the two fundamental beliefs that make a person a Muslim: There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is Allah’s prophet.

Sincere recitation of the Shahada is the sole requirement for becoming a Muslim, as it expresses a person’s rejection of all other gods.

Egyptian-born Islamic scholar Mark A. Gabriel, Ph.D., examined photographs of Obama’s ring at WND’s request and concluded that the first half of the Shahada is inscribed on it.

“There can be no doubt that someone wearing the inscription ‘There is no god except Allah’ has a very close connection to Islamic beliefs, the Islamic religion and Islamic society to which this statement is so strongly attached,” Gabriel told WND.

Does his wearing that ring prove that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim? No… but it obviously establishes beyond a shadow of a doubt that he has a very strong personal sense of identification with Islam and views Islam far more positively than many Americans do these days.

“There is no God but Allah” overlaid on Obama’s ring.

The chicken man, 1967, Maxwell Street Market and skid row on West Madison Street in Chicago. (Photograph by Vivian Maier/Courtesy Cityfiles Press)

The street photography of Vivian Maier made a sensation when her cache of photos was discovered and the images began to be made public early last year. NYM story with links.

Heather Murphy, in Slate, reports that two books have already appeared: Vivian Maier: Street Photographer published late last year, to be joined next week by Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows.

The new book is a compilation of images from rolls of film which the photographer never even printed (!). As usual, her work is completely fascinating.

Hat tip to Fred Lapides.