Hat tip to Sarah Jenislawski.

Neo-neocon speculates about 2016:

So, could Rahm Emanuel become… the first Jewish president?

Only if Hillary decides not to run: “Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is said by well-connected Democrats to be considering the idea of running for president if Hillary Clinton opts out of the 2016 race.”

But Hillary will decide to run. And she almost certainly will be elected. You heard it here first (although I continue to hope I’m wrong).

It occurs to me—not for the first time—that our presidential future is likely to be a series of “firsts.” No WASP male will ever win again; the American people desire continual diversity novelty—although ordinarily Jews don’t count in that particular equation, because “diversity” can only come from groups considered underprivileged and oppressed. So even if by some wild chance Hillary declines to run, I don’t see a presidential future for Rahm.

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Commenter George Pal sneers:

He’s too short, anyway.

Plus there are pictures of him pirouetting in tights and codpiece.

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Then Vanderleun takes the ball and runs with it.

Oh George, George…. you don’t really get it yet do you?

Emmanual runs. And he comes out. And he introduces his secret partner of many years to a national audience on Ellen as….. Barack Obama!

Obama splits from Michelle to follow his heart. There’s an amicable divorce and Rahm and Barry marry. Barry reveals he’s the official “wife” and hence gets back into the White House as the First Lady.

The country applauds and then grieves for Michelle until it becomes known that she and Ellen are…. well, you know.

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The reference is to this Jerome Corsi article from 2009, which quotes reports claiming that:

“President Obama and his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel are lifetime members of the same gay bathhouse in uptown Chicago, according to informed sources in Chicago’s gay community, as well as veteran political sources in the city.”

David Stein (on Facebook): “Right now, America’s being held hostage by an insane, bitter, vengeful, leftist black man who believes that real or imagined slights entitle him to harm decent people and terrorize a nation. But enough about Obama. Some dude named Chris Dorner’s holed up in a cabin.”

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Hat tip to Jonah Goldberg.

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Daily Caller‘s drinking game:

Whenever Obama says “jobs,” pour eight percent of your drink down the drain.

If Speaker of the House John Boehner’s complexion looks particularly orange, pour a screw driver.

Hat tip to Theo.

Dan Greenfield takes the occasion of America’s reaffirmation of the choice of Barack Obama as president to discuss how it is possible for any country to make such a choice.

Mitt Romney, a fake authentic politician of the old school, back when politicians were working with magazine covers, snapshots and a 30 second clip, couldn’t compete against the truly fake Barack Obama, who in truly modern media style doesn’t just fake 30 seconds or 30 minutes in front of the camera, but fakes his entire life going back decades.

Obama is truly fake. He is authentically unreal. There is absolutely nothing to him. If you take away all the work that was done to make him famous, there would be nothing there. And that is exactly why he is the perfect avatar for the media age. …

America is being run by a Made in Indonesia leader whose performance is as bad as any of the Made in Indonesia, Pakistan or China crap you’ll find in Wal-Mart. And it doesn’t matter because he’s a brand. The savvier younger and urban voters don’t care what he’s made of, they care how he makes them feel. They may lose their job the next day and their prospects for paying off their college loans may be missing, but if it makes them feel good at the point of polling, then that’s what matters.

When all products are bad, then all that matters is how they feel. When everything can be deconstructed into a lie, then you embrace the lie that feels the most fakely real, even knowing that it will one day be exposed on another episode of Oprah as a lie.

Those who believe in nothing are the most gullible because they will fall for anything. Those without faith are always looking to believe in something or someone. Those who have never known value or quality are always looking to pick up a product that communicates value and quality to them, even while they retain no metric for assessing either one. Instead of learning the metric, they follow the brand, they become savvy brand-spotters, rather than knowledgeable buyers. And when they brand lets them down, then the brand apologizes, the emotions are soothed, and the low information voter turns to the big screen for another messiah.

In a culture where character no longer matters, competition loses all meaning. A lie is no longer a lie, it is not wrong in and of itself. A failure no longer matters if it makes people feel good. And the idea of leadership no longer exists, only the imitation of it. The faint media echo of the values of what was once a great civilization singing itself to sleep.

Justice Antonin Scalia

Justice Antonin Scalia provoked puzzlement among libs throughout the land by wearing what Gawker described as “a really weird hat” and the New York Daily News as “a beret on steroids.”

The mystery was elucidated by Richmond University of Law Professor Kevin C. Walsh, who explained:

The hat is a custom-made replica of the hat depicted in Holbein’s famous portrait of St. Thomas More. It was a gift from the St. Thomas More Society of Richmond, Virginia. We presented it to him in November 2010 as a memento of his participation in our 27th annual Red Mass and dinner.

It is not unlikely that Justice Scalia was intentionally making a reference to his own support of religious liberty in connection with the Obama Administration’s attempts to force Catholic institutions to act in opposition to church teachings by mandates requiring funding of employee birth control and abortion.

Hans Holbein, Sir Thomas More, 1527, Frick Collection, New York.

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White tie with dinner jacket.

Even more bizarre was the newly-inaugurated president’s appearance at Inaugural Balls incongruously wearing a white bow tie with a dinner jacket.

There must surely be White House specialists in protocol available to advise the ill-informed on what is and what is not correct in matters of this kind.

One correspondent of a list I read suggested that President Obama may have intentionally chosen a white tie (sometimes worn to indicate status as staff with a dinner jacket at evening events) as a kind of riposte to former President Clinton‘s unkind 2008 remark to the late Senator Kennedy dismissive of Senator Obama’s candidacy: “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”

Of course, it also might simply have been a casual expression of modernist contempt for traditional norms and customs.

Obama uses children as stage props as he signs his silly and pointless executive orders.

Dan Greenfield, in another of his intelligent essays, describes the national dynamic operating behind the current gun control debate.

The designated victim, like the ancient saint, is a martyr to a cause. And with the left, the cause is invariably really big government. The suffering of the saintly victims is monetized by the cause as unquestionable moral authority. The victims are designated, made famous and milked for their victimhood, and then the victimhood is bottled into white jars and shipped to Washington D.C.

Americans are suckers for a sob story. But a lot of them are also suckers for personal freedom. Whenever a bullseye is put on freedom for the greater good, two narratives battle it out for the soul of the country. “We have to fix this” and “Leave me alone.”

Think of We have to fix this” and “Leave me alone” as the devil and angel on the shoulders of every cartoon character for the last hundred years. “We have to fix this,” wears an earnest expression and her appearance is calculated to suggest nurse, teacher or PTA member, when in reality she’s usually an Ivy League grad with a lot of time spent in government and political advocacy and whose kids are raised by Elena from Guatemala, whose immigration status is that of Undocumented Democrat. …

The other figure on the shoulder is a familiar one. You can see him on the news talk shows where he shows up as the designated target. Usually he wears his best suit, combs his hair and comes prepared to explain why we shouldn’t give up our freedoms just because a California Senator has decided that this is her chance to create a lasting legacy over the bodies of dead children. …

But there’s still a great deal of visceral sympathy for “Leave it alone” from millions of Americans who have their privacy violated and their rights abridged by government officials every day. They like the thought of a little rebellion, even symbolic, and every time a gun ban is put on the table, they begin buying up the stock of sporting goods stores.

The ordinary Americans may have to account to the government for how he heats his home, mows his yard, feeds his hogs, fuels his car, teaches his kids, sells his crops and fixes his roof, but the 2nd allows him to hang on to the illusion that he is his own master and that at any moment an uprising can sweep away the petty bureaucrats who have their Vibrams on his neck. And maybe one day it can.

YAHWEH

Just as Louis Giglio, previously scheduled to perform the benediction at President Obama’s second inauguration, has been removed from the program as the result of previous anti-gay comments, the Obama Administration announced today that the well-known Semitic mountain deity, YAHWEH aka Jehovah aka Allah, will be voluntarily withdrawing as the object of prayers and invocations during the event.

YAHWEH is on the record as authoring the Old Testament book of Leviticus containing an explicit prohibition against “lying with mankind as with womankind.” He additionally reported first-hand, in his Book of Genesis and in the al-Koran (which he allegedly dictated to Mohammed), that he personally destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, a pair of “cities on the plain” near the Jordan River as a personal expression of His intolerance of homosexuality.

The Thracian Dionysius, famous for his personal androgyny will be stepping in as object of prayers and requests for benedictions. He is additionally reported in an account expected soon to appear in Gawker to have volunteered personally to take responsibility for the catering and to be in charge of arranging the Inaugural celebrations’ evening entertainment.

Dionysius

Richard Fernandez contends that our liberal friends have not given up religion, they’ve just turned to worshiping different gods.

One conclusion that might be drawn from disparate vignettes is that the fault line running through families and societies in the Western World today consists of those who think the world should save them and those who think everyone should pay their freight. Broadly speaking these two groups of people are fighting over the meaning of words and social relations.

One side sees “rights” as the ability to do anything they want and be free of the consequences. The Universal Right is the right to a free lunch which gives rise to derived rights like the right to wear any kind of pants they like and to stab any parents who may object. And if it actually comes to stabbing it will be the knife’s fault. That it should be a person’s responsibility is unthinkable. The opposite side sees a transactional universe in which everything has a cost and nobody has a reasonable expectation to a free lunch.

They are killjoys. Individual responsibility — as opposed to the duty to the deity — is an old and incredibly secular point of view. We live in a new age of Faith. Only the old gods are dead but religion itself is doing a land office business. The psychological appeal of Barack Obama and Steve Jobs lies precisely in having taken over the places formerly occupied by Jesus, Moses and the Buddha. Some teenagers seriously believe “they have made a paradise on earth right now” so that celestial place bands like Coldplay can blast out their angelic melodies on the Ipad, of course.

Religion hasn’t declined in the modern world as much as changed its business address from the traditional churches to the event stadiums. Christmas — which itself had roots in pre-Christian holidays — first became Xmas or now The Holidays. Perhaps the only reason that Mohammed still holds a place of esteem in heart of multitudes is that the Prophet had the foresight to enjoin his followers to shorten any infidel who suggested toppling him from a place of honor by a whole head. In the Muslim world, unlike the place formerly known as Christendom, knives and firearms are much sought after objects. They too have a thing problem, but in a wholly different way.

In any case the newly religious look to God to fix things whenever something breaks. In the Islamic world they turn to Allah of course and in Blue Christendom to Obama. And so with bated breath the Twitter feeds are speculating on what new gun control measure the President will propose to fix the latest school shooting. He’ll save us from ourselves, that’s for sure. And then there’ll be another button or app in the teenager shrine to Obama and Jobs.