This is by Lena Dunham, the unattractive, exhibitionistic, and tattooed creator of the HBO-series Girls, the cruelest indictment of the current youth generation imaginable. The Romney Campaign should pay to run this.

Voting for Obama is like losing her virginity. She got screwed each time.

Derisive image from HorsesandBayonetstumblr

Obama:

“You mention the Navy, for example… That we have fewer ships than in 1916. … We also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military has changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. So the question is not a game of Battleship where we are counting ships. It’s what are our capabilities?”

Donald Sensing points out that he’s completely wrong about the bayonets.

As 1916 opened, the US Army’s total size was about 110,000 troops. The Marine Corps was minuscule since the Marines were still seen then as a raiding or expeditionary force rather than a major land combatant force.

In 1916, the Congress passed the National Defense Act that doubled the Army to 220,000 (rounded slightly). The USMC was marginally affected.

So a compromise was passed in May 1916, as the war raged on and Berlin was debating whether America was so weak it could be ignored. The army was to double in size to 11,300 officers and 208,000 men, with no reserves, and a National Guard that would be enlarged in five years to 440,000 men.

The US Army today has more than 560,000 troops and the USMC more than 200,000. Obama is wrong. we have hundreds of thousands more bayonets now than in 1916.

Sarcasm and condescension only work if the speaker’s presumption of lofty superior knowledge is borne out by his command of actual facts. You can’t successfully accuse your opponent of being an ignoramus when you don’t know what you’re talking about yourself.

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The President was right on the basic fact that the US military, decades ago, replaced horse cavalry with mechanized infantry, armour, and helicopters, but his statement is inevitably undermined by the generally well-known fact that when US military forces were obliged to operate in Afghanistan, it was found that horse-mounted soldiers were essential.

US Special Operations Forces have consequently resumed training in horse-back riding at Fort Bragg.

So, though the US military hasn’t today got as many horses as it had in 1916, it actually has more horses than it had in 1986.

Special forces troops entered Afghanistan on horseback during the 2001 invasion.

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The President’s choice of submarines and aircraft carriers as a conceptual alternative to Mr. Romney’s larger number of ships than in 1916 (245) is particularly ironic when viewed in the light of the Obama Administration’s drastic plans to reduce both.

The Obama Administration, for example, plans to allow US attack submarines (the contemporary equivalent of the kind of submarines we had in 1916*) to bottom out at 40. In 1916, we had 44. By the end of WWI, we had 80 submarines.

*as opposed to ballistic submarines, used as launch platforms for ballistic missiles.

With respect to aircraft carriers, the Obama Administration’s plans to reduce the current 11 US aircraft carriers down to 9. (Comparisons of carriers with 1916 are not possible, as aircraft carriers did not yet exist.)

It is typical of Barack Obama’s rhetorical opportunism to try to exploit as examples of military strength, capability, and advanced thinking, some of the same portions of the Naval Fleet that he has actually dramatically cut.

The Third Presidential Debate proved a complete yawner, in which Barack Obama snarled and struggled to find opportunities to attack, while Mitt Romney contented himself by competing only in width of smiles, general affability, and presidential demeanor.

It could not have been more obvious that the professionals managing the Romney Campaign were confident that their candidate was winning and possessed strong positive momentum, so Mitt Romney’s debate strategy was simply to show up, and to do as little as possible to disturb outside events unfolding perfectly in his own favor.

Obama sometimes attempted to attack his opponent, and sometimes endeavored to strike triumphant poses of incumbency on his dazzling record of job creation, “saving the auto industry,” and making America safe by personally eliminating Osama bin Ladin.

Romney seemed, by comparison, the real incumbent, happily awaiting his January inauguration, politely going through the motions of indulging his already-defeated opponent in a sham contest involving matters already decided.

Obama occasionally looked mean, and at times seemed both desperate and petty. Romney was the model professional politician, giving away nothing, taking no risks.

Personally, I disliked Romney’s (as Rush would say) strategery intensely. I’d much prefer a candidate whose temperament was keener and less calculating, who could always be counted on to go for it, but we have the candidate we have. Newt Gingrich would have debated Obama into the ground even if he thought he was solidly ahead, but there is something in our national character that inevitably rewards the reserved and calculating schemer who strikes the cautious and conservative note. It’s not for nothing that Romney defeated all those Republican challengers and became the nominee.

He reminds me of Dwight Eisenhower, and like Eisenhower, Mitt Romney appears destined to go all the way. Whatever our reservations, we have to hope devoutly for his success. This country cannot afford another four years of Obama’s destruction of our economy.

The left can enjoy proclaiming that Obama won the third debate. But it was really one of those calculated refusals to engage, resembling Fabius Maximus Cunctator versus Hannibal or Kutuzov versus Napoleon, in which the cunning ultimate victor determinedly declines to permit his opponent to draw him into battle, postponing the final contest to a point which he already knows will be more certainly favorable to himself.

James Taranto, in the Wall Street Journal, defines George McGovern’s contribution to American politics.

One might say McGovern reinvented the Democratic Party by putting identity politics at its center–by encouraging members to think of themselves first in terms of sex or age or skin color (or, later, by sexual orientation). E pluribus, multis.

In the 1973 book “Sexual Suicide,” George Gilder speculated that such an approach “would find its reductio ad absurdum in a President who is an exact ethnic and sexual composite of the American demography–some kind of multiracial hermaphrodite from Kansas City.”

When Gilder wrote that, Barack Obama was 12.

Hat tip to Clarice Feldman.

Tonight’s Presidential Debate will be centered on foreign policy issues, which means the prime issue on the agenda will be the Obama Administration’s failure to protect the lives of four American diplomatic personnel in Libya and the subsequent series of misstatements concerning events in Libya by the President and Administration spokesmen.

Jennifer Rubin, in the Washington Post, considers whether to ascribe the blame for what has happened to Ideological Denial, Willful Deception, or Simple Incompetence.

Pick your favorite theory or a combination thereof. Lay blame at the intelligence community or at the feet of national security adviser Tom Donilon, whose job is to make sure all aspect of national security are in sync. But the president, even if not willfully misrepresenting events to the public, has engaged in a great deal of magical thinking ( from refusing to call jihadists “jihadists” to believing he had al-Qaeda on the run to thinking he could engage the mullahs). His executive skills, which lead to havoc and missed opportunities on the domestic side, can prove deadly in matters of war and peace.

Whatever the explanation for the fiasco, it is hard to muster any confidence that this president has the judgment, will or skills to be a successful commander in chief. He hasn’t been one so far.

Barack Obama:“If four Americans get killed, it’s not optimal.”

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Naturally, there is now a “Not Optimal” meme out there.

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama both attended the 67th Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation dinner at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York.

A variety of news sources are collecting the best one-liners.

Policymic

HuffPo

The best I’ve read came via Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt email:

[T]he single biggest metaphorical crotch-kick of the night came from great-grandson Al Smith IV, who told President Obama, “We recognize that you have some challenges this year. It’s never good when your opponent has produced more sons than you have jobs.”

Scott Adams Blog:

President Obama… is putting an American citizen in jail for 10 years to life for operating medical marijuana dispensaries in California where it is legal under state law. And I assume the President – who has a well-documented history of extensive marijuana use in his youth – is clamping down on California dispensaries for political reasons, i.e. to get reelected. What other reason could there be?

One could argue that the President is just doing his job and enforcing existing Federal laws. That’s the opposite of what he said he would do before he was elected, but lying is obviously not a firing offense for politicians.

Personally, I’d prefer death to spending the final decades of my life in prison. So while President Obama didn’t technically kill a citizen, he is certainly ruining this fellow’s life, and his family’s lives, and the lives of countless other minor drug offenders. And he is doing it to advance his career. If that’s not a firing offense, what the hell is?

Romney is likely to continue the same drug policies as the Obama administration. But he’s enough of a chameleon and a pragmatist that one can’t be sure. And I’m fairly certain he’d want a second term. He might find it “economical” to use federal resources in other ways than attacking California voters. And he is vocal about promoting states’ rights, so he’s got political cover for ignoring dispensaries in states where medical marijuana is legal.

So while I don’t agree with Romney’s positions on most topics, I’m endorsing him for president starting today. I think we need to set a minimum standard for presidential behavior, and jailing American citizens for political gain simply has to be a firing offense no matter how awesome you might be in other ways.

I think it would be more logical to desire to fire Obama for arranging the Midnight arrest and subsequent detention as part of an effort to mislead the public about the causes and motivations of the attack upon the US consulate in Benghazi.

The obscure Nakoula Basseley Nakoula was practically the victim of a literal contemporary equivalent of the ancien regime’s lettres de cachet.

It’s not that I disagree with Mr. Adams though about the absurdity, immorality, and perverse inutility of Drug Prohibition, of course, or would not be on the same side on the federalism issues. Arguing that we ought to throw out of public office everyone who is willing to put people in jail for drug crimes who has himself smoked pot is basically a sound position.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

(image via Vanderleun)

A lot of reactionaries like myself have described Barack Obama as “a socialist,” “a Marxist,” and “a Communist.” How could we possibly have thought that about someone who, in his closing statement at the Second 2012 Presidential Debate, delivered this encomium to Capitalism and Free Enterprize:

At 1:34:17:

I think a lot of this campaign, maybe over the last four years, has been devoted to this notion that I think government creates jobs, that that somehow is the answer.

That’s not what I believe. I believe that the free enterprise system is the greatest engine of prosperity the world’s ever known.
I believe in self-reliance and individual initiative and risk takers being rewarded. But I also believe that everybody should have a fair shot and everybody should do their fair share and everybody should play by the same rules, because that’s how our economy’s grown. That’s how we built the world’s greatest middle class. . . .

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This sounds enough like Barry Goldwater to make poor Bill Ayers go out and commit seppuku in Grant Park. But that would assume that Barack Obama was expressing himself with sincerity. In reality, Barack Obama, in his closing statement at that Second Debate, was fraudulently trying to position himself as a mainstream centrist believer in the American system, which he really is not. In the statement above, he is not expressing his real position. He is blowing smoke in an effort to conceal it.

The real Barack Obama is the Barack Obama who tried to revive turn-of-the-last-century Progressivism in a speech delivered lat December in Osawatomie, Kansas:

15:06:

[T]here’s been a certain crowd in Washington for the last few decades who respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes — especially for the wealthy — our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, well, that’s the price of liberty.

Now, it’s a simple theory. And we have to admit, it’s one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That’s in America’s DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. (Laughter.) But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked. (Applause.) It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the ‘50s and ‘60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade. (Applause.) I mean, understand, it’s not as if we haven’t tried this theory. . . .

John Lott noticed the contradiction between exactly the same two Obama statements.

Candy Crowley alone selected the questions for the debate. Candy Crowley interrupted Romney repeatedly, and awarded Barack Obama an extra 4 minutes of speaking time. And, finally, Candy Crowley came running to Barack Obama’s assistance at the very moment when the challenger had him nailed dead to rights.

I thought that Romney did well enough anyway. My prediction was that Republicans would say Romney won, and democrats would say Obama won, but Romney had some good moments and that was all he needed.

Stilton Jarlsberg, however, simply shrugged all that off, and defended Crowley:

Candy Crowley didn’t do a terrible job as moderator – although she tilted the questions and answers in Barry’s favor a bit too obviously, gave him 10% more time for responses, and frequently cut off Romney as he was making substantive points. But because she kept Carrie Fisher (dressed as “Slave Leia”) chained to her side throughout the debate, we’re willing to forgive her.

Hat tip to Clarice Feldman.

In a last desperate attempt to save Barack Obama’s hopes of re-election, Hillary Clinton took a leaf from Charles Dickens’ Sydney Carton, and did the “far, far better thing,” taking responsibility for the failure to provide security for the consulate in Benghazi and for the long series of misstatements, fabrications, and falsehoods describing the carefully-planned terrorist attack calculatedly timed to occur on 9/11 as a spontaneous mob outburst provoked by an obscure video.

Hillary Clinton, of course, does not fully resemble Sydney Carton. She is not going to the guillotine. She is only “accepting responsibility,” which in the manner of liberal democrats amounts only to issuing a statement tacitly eating crow on a single occasion. It does not mean resigning from office, ending one’s political career, or otherwise actually being subject to any real penalty or punishment.

One rather thinks that the reverse is probably the case. Hillary’s sacrifice must be part of a private arrangement made between Barack Obama and the Clintons. Barack Obama must have entered into some bargain promising Hillary some highly valuable future compensation, something along the lines of his complete support in the quest for the democrat nomination in 2016 combined with the delivery of his donors (Soros in particular) in return for Hillary assuming the role of scapegoat and going through the charade of throwing herself under the bus.

We have had the public ceremony of accepting responsibility and shame, but the question remains: Will this modest sacrifice of Hillary’s amour propre suffice to satisfy the curiosity of the media and the voting public’s wrath? It seems unlikely to me. Republicans in Congress are still demanding more specific and concrete explanations of why Ambassador Stevens’ requests for more security were denied and are still going to want to know who exactly decided to fabricate the false narrative given by UN Ambassador Rice and others. The spotlight will fall on Barack Obama directly at tonight’s Town Hall Debate, and it seems unlikely that even Hillary Clinton’s noble sacrifice will succeed in sheltering the president from pointed questions.

When Forbes Magazine is publishing editorials titled Pants On Fire: Obama Scrambles For Cover As Benghazi Lie Explodes, a press conference ceremony of the acceptance of responsibility by a subordinate is simply not going to be enough to stop the bleeding.

Barack Obama is not a truthful man. He was not truthful in his campaign promises. He is not truthful in the way he consistently belittles and makes strawmen of political opponents. He is not even truthful about his own life story. In 2008, Barack Obama was able to take advantage of very powerful, deeply reflexive cultural impulses which promoted him instantly to the highest ranks of media godhood and which surrounded him with a protective cloak of adoration which totally precluded any serious critical scrutiny. Bill Ayers? “Just a guy I ran into a few times.” Revered Wright goddamning America? “Gosh, I never heard that particular sermon.” Things are different four years later. There is blood in the water right now. We are twenty-odd days from a presidential election. Hillary Clinton’s little gesture of loyalty is not going to make the Benghazi debacle and the investigation of the coverup go away.