Rod Dreher discusses Rick Perry’s ability to speak out loud forbidden thoughts, like calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme, and not only survive as a viable candidate, but defy efforts at excommunication and ostracism by the establishment College of Pundits and go on rising in the polls.
New CNN poll taken over the weekend shows that Texas Gov. Rick Perry has maintained his commanding lead in the GOP field — this after many pundits, including conservatives, dinged Perry for having had a supposedly bad debate last week.
Like Your Working Boy said, Perry won that debate. No question, he was not as smooth as Romney, but it clearly didn’t hurt him. East Coast pundits really need to get over the idea that Perry’s views on the science of climate change and evolution will hurt him — not in a country in which very large numbers of people share Perry’s skepticism. Mind you, I’m not endorsing Perry’s positions, only saying that “science†is one of those culture-war issues that gets elites (both liberal and conservative) worked up, but that mean very little to most people. Whether it should matter more is another question. While I disagree with Perry on these particular points, I do think it’s generally a healthy instinct that people are skeptical of what science says, insofar as technocratic elites have a penchant for appealing to scientism (versus science) to justify liberal policy preferences (e.g., embryonic stem-cell research). But I digress.
Nor did the supposed Social Security gaffe hurt Perry — at least it hasn’t yet. Why not? A couple of reasons, I think. The lesser reason is that people may not agree with him on Social Security, but they appreciate his willingness to stake out a risky position on the issue (and, truth to tell, they may well be confident that he won’t be able to do squat about it). I think the far more likely reason is that Cowboy Rick looks exactly like the kind of guy who is going to take the fight to Obama, and take it to him hard.
Actually, ordinary normal Americans are finding Perry’s willingness to defy orthodoxy, to refuse to truckle and triangulate, refreshing, and recognizing how much that sort of courage and independence sets Perry apart from conventional forked-tongued and conniving politicians, who are willing to do and say absolutely anything to get elected.
As to science, Americans outside the establishment community of fashion are simply too well equipped with common sense to be susceptible to catastrophist theories, no manner how many studies are brandished in their faces or how grand a consensus of experts is declared by the mainstream media to have ruled on the subject. Ordinary sensible people know perfectly well how biased and medacious the mainstream media is.
The notion that some kind of vital contest is underway in high school biology classrooms between Charles Darwin on one side and Archbishop Ussher on the other continues to have an irresistible appeal to the kinds of people who want to march us all off into a glorious future in which our lives and the economy will be ruled by scientific experts, but the rest of us are perfectly well aware that Evolution typically receives only a brief and passing mention in the course of one single class session and and that high school science courses do not actually concentrate their focus on converting believing Christians into secular materialists and supporters of Gay Marriage.
There was a time when Little Green Footballs was probably the most respected blog commenting from the right. Its author, Charles Johnson, essentially cost Dan Rather his job by demonstrating via a simple gif that the National Guard letter CBS was reporting as written in 1973 had been created in Microsoft Word, using the MS Times Roman font.
In 2009, Mr. Johnson broke ranks with the conservative side of the blogosphere, publicly switching sides. He was infuriated, he announced in his “Drop dead, Conservatives” kiss off posting, by a number of prominent conservative blogs having some sort of sinister associations with European nationalist parties; by conservatives being hostile toward statism, being politically incorrect, and skeptical of catastrophist theories of Anthropogenic Global Warming; because conservatives typically oppose the creation of Same-Sex Marriage as a public institution; and because conservative bloggers are too mean to Muslims and Barack Obama.
It was hard to understand reading all that how Mr. Johnson had previously done such an excellent job of opposing statism, exposing Islamic pathologies, and debunking liberal stupidity and mendacity himself.
Now, we can see the transformation has become complete. The formerly brilliant and admirable Charles Johnson has successfully turned himself into another obnoxious, prevaricating and sophicizing leftist idiot.
Johnson clocked in yesterday on the recent alleged Obama Lincoln gaffe:
Here we go again. Don’t these people ever get tired of humiliating themselves?
Practically the entire right wing blogosphere went into vapor-lock this morning, shrieking in unison at the evil librul PBS for “editing†the transcript of the President’s joint session speech on jobs, to cover up his “gaffe†that Abraham Lincoln was a founder of the Republican Party.
American Stinker leads the pack with this typically vitriolic, hate-filled post (but it’s currently on at least a dozen other blogs too): Blog: PBS alters transcript to hide Obama gaffe.
At one point Mr. Obama made a major gaffe; he identified Abraham Lincoln as the founder of the Republican Party.
Lincoln did not join the Republicans until 1856, over two years after the party was founded. The first Republican convention was held in Ripon, Wisconsin in 1854.
Such a gaffe would have brought huge amounts of ridicule and derision on George W. Bush, but in the case of Obama the media yawned.
Actually, they did more than yawn; government-funded PBS has altered the transcript of the President’s speech, removing the offending comment.
So are they right? Did PBS edit the transcript?
Gasp! Yes, they did!
Johnson goes on to justify the PBS emendation on the basis that it was really a White House emendation.
Then, he proceeds to grab, out of the mouth of the opposition itself, a close-enough-for-government-work citation to “prove” that those identifying “Lincoln founded the Republican Party” as a gaffe were wrong.
Abraham Lincoln helped establish the Republican Party with a speech denouncing an 1854 law, written by a Democrat Senator, that allowed slavery to expand into the western territories. Two years later, he co-founded the Illinois GOP. Lincoln was runner-up for the 1856 Republican vice presidential nomination and then became a Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate.
Charles Johnson then performs the classic happy dance of the demented left-wing troll happily preaching to his own one-sided choir.
Oops! Wingnuts with egg on their faces … again. I guess they must enjoy the embarrassment, because they just keep falling for this crap, over and over and over.
It is simply amazing how blogging for the left can so thoroughly and absolutely transform a one-time astute and dignified voice of reason into a shrill, slangy, repetitiously name-calling partisan hysteric.
I’m a fair-minded guy. I think you could vaguely and imprecisely refer to Lincoln that way. But it is vitally important to bear in mind that the overwhelmingly liberally-biased mainstream media does not grant the same “vaguely and imprecisely is ok” benefit of the doubt to Republicans. If Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, or Rick Perry make any kind of historical statement, each of them had better be dead right, or else.
Proving my point, and demolishing Mr. Johnson’s, Ace quotes Tom Maguire pointing out that “Lincoln founded the Republican Party” has already been established as a gaffe, at least when a Republican says it.
Surprise: Time Magazine Noted Non-Candidate Huckabee’s “Lincoln Founded The Republican Party” Gaffe In 2008; Refuses To Note Obama’s Exact-Same Gaffe In Joint Session
Actually, Huckabee’s error was noted by one Jay Carney. That must explain it, then: The only guy in the media capable of doing a quick Wikipedia search is now in the Obama Administration, so lucky him. …
It’s pretty easy to appear to be a good student when a doting teacher corrects your errors for you, and gives you nothing but gold stars.
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Exactly how incorrect it is to say “Lincoln founded the Republican Party” is a trivial point. But clearly the impact of conversion to the left on someone’s dignity, style, integrity, and stature can be really devastating. Reading LGF these days is like encountering unhappily today someone you knew and admired at college, coming upon them lying in the gutter drunk and homeless. The experience is shocking and painful. “If only there were anything one could do,” one thinks as one shudders and passes on.
“Over the last 15 months we’ve created over 2.1 million private sector jobs. (Laughter.)”
— President Obama, in an official transcript of a fundraising speech this week. The transcript was later corrected by replacing “Laughter” with “Applause”.
(or woman) who does not possess the same conventional pop culture familiarity with Longfellow’s poem and Paul Revere’s 18th of April in ’75 ride to warn the Minutemen of Lexington and Concord that the British were coming.
Sarah Palin, unfortunately, in her characteristically more extreme version of the politician trying to bloviate for the media who engages mouth without fully engaging brain, made a syntactical hash of Paul Revere’s ride and laid herself open to accusations by the left that she was astonishingly ill-informed on supposed fine points of America history with which every member of the elite community of fashion is naturally intimately familiar.
A bit painful to watch, but short.
All the glee on the left provoked the learned Professor Jacobson to quote Revere’s actual account, which by one of life’s strange coincidences happened to fit Sarah Palin’s garbled narrative very nicely. It was all just more persiflage, of course. Palin really did misspeak, but the good Professor’s factual rejoinder quite effectively disarmed the smug lefties and drove them into full retreat, muttering unhappily to themselves. Bill Jacobson decisively closed down discussion on this particular incident.
The reality is that Sarah Palin obviously knows approximately as much (or as little) as any typical contemporary American adult about Paul Revere’s ride and the battles of Lexington and Concord. What happened is that Palin tried to combine more than one conceptual thread while distracted, and tied her verbiage into knots. When she is not paying attention, Sarah Palin does not express herself coherently and does not necessarily say what she means to say. Instead, she produces some kind of untidy substitute for what she needed and intended to say, and the result is too commonly a very unsatisfactory and naive sounding failure featuring some form of gaping vulnerability.
Palin is not as glib as many politicians, and she is not as careful as most politicians, so she has a well-recognized tendency to expose herself to this kind of unfavorable interpretation and ridicule from the left.
All politicians are fallible and human, and all politicians are capable of misspeaking when not paying attention, tired, or distracted.
Palin is not unusually ill-informed or even uniquely capable of gaffes. She is just not as cautious and characteristically self-protective as most politicians. There is no doubt, though, that her proclivity toward verbal confusion and gaffes is a serious weakness and a great vulnerability. Her credibility as a presidential candidate rests on her successfully making the effort to overcome these kinds of weaknesses. If Palin isn’t willing or able to improve, she is not going to be nominated.
The President of the United States bows before the Emperor of Japan
The LA Times reports that the Chosen One bent low again, this time to Akihito, 125th Emperor of Japan.
Obama’s bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia last April produced widespread criticism as a violation of American Republican principle and protocol. Many Americans believe it is profoundly inappropriate for the President of the United States to render honors acknowledging the superiority of any monarch since the American Republic by its Declaration of Independence rejected monarchy and the claim of unelected rulers to reign on the basis of divine authority.
Oddly enough, Obama reserves, it seems, his gestures of supreme respect for Worthy Oriental Gentlemens. He merely nodded to Queen Elizabeth. In the case of Queen Elizabeth, Michelle Obama made gestures in quite the opposite direction, hugging the Queen and later even patting her affectionately on the back.
Last April’s obeisance to the “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques”
Liberals are always telling us that Barack Obama deserved to be elected president, despite his skimpy public career and lack of any record of serious accomplishment, because he is so absolutely brilliant and intelligent as evidenced by his ability to produce the kind of eloquence that sends quivers of ecstacy running down pale, flabby liberal legs.
Or is he all that brilliant after all?
Carol E. Lee, at the Politico, describes how Barack Obama’s reliance on the teleprompter, and increasingly obvious incapacity to function at all ex tempore, is proving both a physical inconvenience and an embarrassment to his faithful followers in the press.
Obama’s reliance on the teleprompter is unusual — not only because he is famous for his oratory, but because no other president has used one so consistently and at so many events, large and small.
After the teleprompter malfunctioned a few times last summer and Obama delivered some less-than-soaring speeches, reports surfaced that he was training to wean himself off of the device while on vacation in Hawaii. But no such luck.
His use of the teleprompter makes work tricky for the television crews and photographers trying to capture an image of the president announcing a new Cabinet secretary or housing plan without a pane of glass blocking his face. And it is a startling sight to see such sleek, modern technology set against the mahogany doors and Bohemian crystal chandeliers in the East Room or the marble columns of the Grand Foyer.
“It’s just something presidents haven’t done,†said Martha Joynt Kumar, a presidential historian who has held court in the White House since December 1975. “It’s jarring to the eye. In a way, it stands in the middle between the audience and the president because his eye is on the teleprompter.â€
Just how much of a crutch the teleprompter has become for Obama was on sharp display during his latest commerce secretary announcement. The president spoke from a teleprompter in the ornate Indian Treaty Room for a few minutes. Then Gov. Gary Locke stepped to the podium and pulled out a piece of paper for reference.
The president’s teleprompter also elicited some uncomfortable laughter after he announced Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as his choice for Health and Human Services secretary. “Kathy,†Obama said, turning the podium over to Sebelius, who waited at the microphone for an awkward few seconds while the teleprompters were lowered to the floor and the television cameras rolled.
Obama has relied on a teleprompter through even the shortest announcements and when repeating the same lines on his economic stimulus plan that he’s been saying for months — whereas past presidents have mostly worked off of notes on the podium except during major speeches, such as the State of the Union.
Two female conservative columnists today discuss the media’s indulgent treatment of gaffemaster Biden.
CORRECTION: Should be: Two female columnists, one a Fox News commentator of democrat party background, and our own Michelle Malkin today discuss the media’s indulgent treatment of gaffemaster Biden.
(Thanks to Bohemian Conservative for enlightening me on the political background of Kirsten Powers.)
Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden as his running mate prompted a small wave of warnings about Biden’s propensity for gaffes. But no one imagined even in a worse-case scenario such a spectacular bomb as telling donors Sunday to “gird your loins” because a young president Obama will be tested by an international crisis just like young President John Kennedy was.
Scary? You betcha! But somehow, not front-page news.
Again the media showed their incredible bias by giving scattered coverage of Biden’s statements.
So what gives?
The stock answer is: “It’s just Biden being Biden.” We all know how smart he is about foreign policy, so it’s not the same as when Sarah Palin says something that seems off.
Yet, when Biden asserted incorrectly in the vice-presidential debate that the United States “drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon,” nobody in the US media shrieked. (It was, however, covered with derision in the Middle East.) Or when he confused his history by claiming FDR calmed the nation during the Depression by going on TV, the press didn’t take it as evidence that he’s clueless.
And Biden is the foreign-policy gravitas on the Democratic ticket, so his comments are actually even more disconcerting. …
Part of the problem is their “Obama love,” but we’re also seeing the media elite’s belief – prejudice – that anyone with an R behind their name is dumb. So, if they say something dumb, they must be dumb. A Democrat, like Biden, can make wildly inaccurate or outrageous comments and they are ignored because the TV and press insiders feel they “know who he really is.”
On the stump recently, Sen. Biden declared he had “three words” for what the nation needs: “J-O-B-S.”
Lucky for him, his name isn’t Dan Quayle, or that would have followed him for the rest of his career.
Hysterical Sarah Palin-bashers on the unhinged left and elitist right have dominated campaign press coverage and pop culture. They’ve ridiculed her family, her appearance and her speech patterns. They’ve derided her character, her parenting skills, her readiness and her intellect.
Meanwhile, the increasingly erratic, super-gaffetastic Joe Biden gets a pass. What does the guy have to do to earn the relentless scrutiny and merciless mockery he deserves? Answer: wear high heels, shoot caribou and change the “D” next to his name to an “R.” …
Dan Quayle will have “POTATOE” etched on his gravestone. But how many times have late-night comedians and cable shows replayed the video of senior statesman and six-term Sen. Biden’s own spelling mishap last week while attacking McCain’s economic plan?
“Look, John’s last-minute economic plan does nothing to tackle the No. 1 job facing the middle class, and it happens to be, as Barack says, a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S.”
No, Joe. “D’-O-H” is a three-letter word.
Nightly news shows still haven’t tired of replaying Palin’s infamous interview with Katie Couric. But how many times have they replayed Biden’s botched interview with Couric last month — in which he cluelessly claimed: “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.'”
Er, here’s what really happened: Roosevelt wasn’t president when the market crashed in 1929. As for appearing on TV, it was still in its infant stages and wasn’t available to the general public until at least 10 years later.
During the lone VP debate earlier this month, the increasingly erratic, super-gaffetastic Biden demonstrated more historical ignorance that Palin would never be allowed to get away with: “Vice President Cheney’s been the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history,” he said. “He has the idea he doesn’t realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that’s the executive — he works in the executive branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that.”
Article 1 of the Constitution defines the role of the legislative branch, not the executive branch. You would think someone who has served 36 years in government — the same someone who is quick to remind others of his high IQ and longtime Senate Judiciary Committee chairmanship — would know better.
Biden’s erratic and gaffetastic behavior is the least of America’s worries. He’s worse than a blunderbuss. He’s an incurable narcissist with chronic diarrhea of the mouth. He’s a phony and a pretender who fashions himself a foreign policy expert, constitutional scholar and worldly wise man. He’s a man who can’t control his impulses.
Ben Smith identifies a hundred eighty degree policy reversal made by Joe Biden in one 72-hour period.
Some great rope line video from Joe Biden’s recent Ohio swing, where he was asked by an anti-pollution campaigner about clean coal — a controversial approach in Democratic circles for which Obama has voiced support, particularly during the Kentucky primary.
Biden’s apparent answer: He supports clean coal for China, but not for the United States.
“No coal plants here in America,” he said. “Build them, if they’re going to build them, over there. Make them clean.”
“We’re not supporting clean coal,” he said of himself and Obama. They do, on paper, support clean coal.
The answer seems to play into John McCain’s case that Obama has been saying “no” to new sources of energy.
Today, Senator John McCain pounced on Biden’s remarks.
“I am going to put in place the priorities and policies that will create jobs in Ohio. One important way that we are going to create jobs here is with the development of additional nuclear plants and through investments in clean coal technology,” he said. “[Obama’s] running mate here in Ohio recently said that they weren’t supporting clean coal.”
Biden spokesman David Wade responded by calling McCain’s statement “yet another false attack from a dishonorable campaign.”
He continued: “Senator McCain knows that Senator Obama and Senator Biden support clean coal technology. Senator Biden’s point is that China is building coal plants with outdated technology every day, and the United States needs to lead by developing clean coal technologies.”
But the error here does seem to be Biden’s, and his remarks, and his apparent return to his primary position Tuesday, were striking because just three days ago, he praised the possibilities of coal to a crowd at the United Mine Workers of America annual fish fry in Castlewood, Va.
“You know we have enough coal in the United States of America to meet out needs domestically for the better part of the next hundred to 200 years,†Biden said before launching into a critique of McCain’s energy priorities, slamming his support for billions in tax breaks for oil companies as the industry rakes in record profits.
“Imagine … what Barack and I can do taking that $4 billion … and investing it in coal gasification, finding out what we can do with carbon sequestration, finding out how we can burn the coal that you dig that can free us from being dependent on foreign oil countries and at the same time not ruin the environment. That’s within our capacity to do it, if you give me $4 billion I promise you, I promise you we will find the answer,†Biden said.
He linked the ticket’s support for coal with their call to have U.S. automakers produce plug-in electric cars. “Where’s that [electricity] come from? That comes from a utility. What do utilities burn? They burn coal mostly.â€
Southwest Virginia UMWA members are just too dumb to notice what he says in a different state, Biden obviously surmises.
Michael Graham, at the Boston Herald, addresses democrats denying the obvious.
Let’s start with the obvious and inarguable: Of course Sen. Barack Obama’s comment about “lipstick on a pig†was a reference to Supergirl Sarah Palin.
You know it, I know it and the partisan crowd that literally rose to their feet and cheered when they heard it knew it.
And it’s nothing new. Democrats shot the lipstick line at Gov. Palin on their official Web site last week with a posting entitled “McCain’s Selection of Palin is Lipstick on a Pig†– accompanied by what I’m sure was intended to be a flattering photo of the Alaska outdoorswoman.
And – coincidence or something more? – the same day Obama made his crack, a Democratic congressman introducing Joe Biden said of Sarah Palin, “There’s no way you can dress up her record, even with a lot of lipstick.â€
If there was anyone in the audience still too dense to get it – say, an employee of CNN, perhaps – Obama immediately followed up with a reference to the McCain/Palin campaign wrapping “an old fish in a piece of paper called ‘change.’ â€
A lipstick-wearing pig and an old fish? Gee, who could he possibly be talking about?
So please, my Obama-supporting friends, let’s stop the nonsense about how Obama’s lipstick talk was, as he put it yesterday, an “innocent comment,†or that the reaction is “phony outrage.†…
Smart people are asking why Obama would do something so dumb. He couldn’t have meant to say it, they argue, because he had to know it would exacerbate his biggest political problem – women voters abandoning the Democratic ticket.
I agree. This wasn’t a political plot. It was a Barack Obama point of personal privilege.
What we’re seeing is how Barack Obama performs under pressure. And so far, it isn’t pretty.
I believe Obama knows it, which is why I believe he indulged that moment of unbecoming snarkiness on Tuesday. He did the same thing back in April when, during a speech about Hillary’s attacks, he carefully “scratched†his face with his middle finger. And, then as now, the crowd picked up on his digital communications.
Obama is frustrated. He’s cranky. He was on his way to a coronation and now finds himself in a catfight that, so far, he’s losing.
And so the Obama team is lashing out. The same day they started the “lipstick†meme, Democrats sent out 12 press releases attacking the bottom of the GOP ticket.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Obama campaign has “airdropped a mini-army of 30 lawyers, investigators and opposition researchers†into Alaska, all to deal with the Palin problem.
Obama’s poll numbers keep sinking, his fundraising is flat. And there isn’t a Swift Boat in sight.
Just a hockey mom with a bachelor’s degree, who has brought the great and powerful Obama to his knees.
