waka waka waka

I watched earlier today as John McCain introduced his clever choice for running mate: the former Miss Wasilla (and current governor of Alaska), Sarah Palin.

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Here’s Peggy Noonan once again (do forgive me for generating so little original content during this vacation), commenting on the speeches made so far at the democratic convention. She offers a simple but accurate insight:

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We’ve had a demanding schedule today: lolling and body-surfing at White Crest Beach, then the daily swim at Great Pond — and still to come this evening, our friend Larry Horowitz’s latest opening at the Cove Gallery, followed by dinner at Winslow’s Tavern. But a free moment having presented itself, I’ll take this opportunity to catch up a bit.

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It has been alleged in some partisan quarters that the current Speaker of the House of Representatives is a fatuous ninny, a feckless, mealy-mouthed, obstructionist birdbrain. Here is a video clip that may help settle the matter. (Hat tip: BV.)

Don’t like having your freedoms infringed? Worried about the economy? Forget the Patriot Act and the credit crisis; here comes the EPA.

Here’s the latest political newsletter from Robert Novak. (Feel free to comment, but no Valerie Plame, please.)

Our reader JK, a Navy man who is a steady source of all sorts of information, has provided us this link to an item about gathering tensions with Iran. The source is the blog Information Dissemination, whose focus is naval matters. We read:

Following an attack on Iran by Israel, Iran is not going to find much success trying to sink the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) in the Indian Ocean, but they might have a great deal of success killing you and me here in America. We don’t believe for one second that Iran is going to abide by the Geneva Conventions and not intentionally support the killing of American civilians in North America. If war happens, they are as likely if not more likely to attack here than in the Gulf. Whether you like it or not, there was absolutely no way the Democrats, including Barack Obama, were going to leave the possibility open that Israel attacks Iran, and the US gets hit by terrorist attacks inside the US while the FISA bill wasn’t passed.

This is a key point. The Democratic Party in mass shifted from a core position. This doesn’t happen without keen awareness to some strategic condition. Clearly some outside force has produced conditions which are far outside the scope of national politics, because nothing short of insight and real concern for political survival would Democrats find inspiration for such a massive policy shift with virtually no explanation to its core constituency. This is a major reason, and to Democrats scratching still their heads, an obvious sign we believe that Israel has demanded a time table.

Also from this item: “[T]he conditions for war are indeed being met.” Let’s hope not.

Barack Obama has, since Hillary Clinton “suspended” her campaign, adjusted his position on quite a few important issues — heeling to starboard on every one in a most sensible and gratifying way. Indeed, the more I see of him, the more he seems to be a man who is actually willing to study complex issues, and who has considerable intelligence to bring to the task. I’m warming to the guy, even if Jesse Jackson wants to “cut his nuts off”.

His rightward slide, however, has the far Left in fits, and he is being bastinadoed in their media organs as a vile betrayer. All very enjoyable. What on earth did they expect?

Gail Collins asks the same question in a delightfully tart piece in today’s Times. Here.

Democracy has obvious drawbacks, not least of which being that at its worst it is nothing more than mob rule. As William Alger said, “a crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason.” So the leader of a democracy, depending upon his aims and his talents, can seek to lead by addressing his people as individuals amenable to reasoned argument and capable of rational deliberation — or he can appeal to their sentiment, their prejudices, their greed, their pride, and their social allegiances in all their coarsest forms.

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From my friend Wayne Krantz comes a link to a story that will appear in tomorrow’s New York Times: apparently some of Barack Obama’s younger and more enthusiastic supporters, having noticed that his middle name — Hussein — has been a heavy cross to bear, have decided to make it their own middle name as well.

This comes as Mr. Obama continues to be vexed by rumors that he is a closeted Muslim. He appears, quite reasonably, to regard these allegations as slanderous calumny (which they almost certainly are), and has done all he can to distance himself from that troublesome religion — including going so far as to have a pair of bescarfed Muslimahs removed from the stage during a recent campaign appearance. For him actually to be a Muslim, of course, would be political suicide: it would be hard to imagine anything more viscerally repugnant to the average US voter, short of being a rational secularist with no religion at all. (That said, there is in fact one Muslim member of Congress: Representative Keith Ellison, a Farrakhan supporter who represents the anomalously tolerant district of Minneapolis — but the politically astute Mr. Obama has so far had the good sense to fend him off with a boathook whenever he approaches.)

One girl’s father was appalled, his heart blackened by fear that his daughter might actually be converting to Islam. But he needn’t have worried: it’s all in good fun, of course. Whee!!

Read the story here.

There was a heartening item on the Washington Post’s editorial page a couple of days ago, describing a conversation between Barack Obama and the Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari. Mr. Obama, who prior to becoming the presumptive nominee made an effective play for the left wing of the Democratic base by declaring his support for a forced withdrawal from Iraq, now seems, with the general election as his focus, to be making a laudable and pragmatic move toward the center, and is taking into account the genuine progress that has been made in Iraq in recent months. While he has not yet publicly reversed his position on a timed U.S. pullout, he is planning to visit Iraq soon, and I imagine that a man of his intelligence and subtlety of mind (how refreshing!) can be trusted not to let ideology trump wise counsel.

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It is hard to imagine that anyone has had a more difficult spiritual path than Al Gore. The struggle against personality is central to all esoteric systems of inner work, and life has placed obstacles in his path at every turn: a privileged boyhood in a powerful political family, an Ivy League education, election to both the House and the Senate — followed by two terms as Vice President of the United States, and a photo finish for the White House. And if losing the Presidency to a fellow like George Bush caused him any doubts as to his own natural superiority, they were soon put to rest by his being awarded both an Oscar and the Nobel Prize (helped along, no doubt, by the effect of the Bush victory on the political climate in Hollywood and Stockholm). Small wonder, then, that he is such a smug, self-righteous windbag, as was recently in evidence in Chicago as he bestowed, with grandiloquent and orotund bombast, his coveted Endorsement upon Mr. Obama — a performance in which he apparently set aside environmental concerns for the moment, oblivious as he was to the enormous volumes of greenhouse gas he released in the process.

Anyway, the man really can’t help himself, I suppose, given the challenges he’s had to face; it’s fair to say that any of the rest of us, given similar circumstances, might have become overbearing prigs as well. So in the interest of giving the man a leg up, inner-development-wise, here’s a recently published item that might help him to take himself down a peg.

I haven’t commented lately on the presidential race, but I’m certainly pleased that Mrs. Clinton, who gives me the shuddering fantods, appears finally to have been knocked out. Short of some gruesome work with an oaken stake and a wooden mallet we can’t be sure, however, and yesterday Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto, who has a clearheaded appreciation of what sort of politicians the Clintons really are, gave us his thoughts in his Best of the Web newsletter about what sort of calculations the former First Couple might be making as they retreat to their Westchester lair to lick their wounds and plot their next sally.

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We’ve had plenty of chat in in here lately about the political Left and Right, and what the words mean. I recently induced, with mischief aforethought, a conniption or two merely by mentioning that I was reading a book that argues (and persuasively, I might add) that Fascism was a phenomenon of the political Left; for many folks of my acquaintance the political markers “Left” and “Right” appear to be nothing more than synonyms for “good” and “evil”, respectively. There are many others, of course, for whom the polarity is reversed, but what never seems to be lacking is the polarization itself.

Here’s an online political quiz that locates you on the two-dimensional Nolan chart. It only takes a minute or so. Where do you stand? (Leaving aside the obvious disclaimers about boiling down such complexities to a one-minute quiz, I appear to be a “Left-leaning Libertarian.”)

Can anybody explain to me why there is such a flap about Hillary Clinton’s mention of the RFK assassination? It makes no sense to me whatsoever, even taking into consideration that taking offense is the new national pastime. I’m no fan of Mrs. Clinton, but this seems ridiculous.

Steven Pinker, writing in The New Republic, takes aim at The President’s Council on Bioethics for mulish opposition, on largely theological grounds, to a variety of promising medical and scientific efforts.

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If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you know that the word of the week is “appeasement”. President Bush popped it up in an address to the Knesset, and Barack Obama, waving off his teammates, managed to get himself under it and make the catch. And now Pat Buchanan, who is clearly off his meds, is hollering imprecations from the bleachers.

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For those of you who have been following this somewhat distasteful presidential-election business, here’s Robert Novak’s take on where matters stand in the wake of Barack Obama’s strong showing yesterday.

George Orwell, in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, wrote: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ’something not desirable’. ” Little has changed since then.

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While looking over the latest from our friend The Stiletto (who, by the way, has just been chosen as a Webby Awards Official Honoree for her “tart” political commentary), I ran across a story about Arizona’s efforts to deal with its enormous influx of illegal aliens. I was struck by one passage in particular:

[E]nough immigrants have left that the government of Sonora, the Mexican state bordering Arizona, has complained about how many people have arrived on its doorstep.

Read the story here.

Christopher Hitchens weighs in, with customary acerbity, on Hillary Clinton’s audacious Tuzla whopper. Here.

I have often, in posts having to do with foreign policy, expressed the sentiment that it is in our interest to foster “democracy”. It has occurred to me, however, in the course of a recent conversation, that the essential point is to promote regimes that rule with the consent of the governed. I’m not sure that this is an important distinction, but it might be, so I thought I’d make it.

I have often expressed the opinion that the United Nations, though an appealing notion, is so feckless and corrupt, and so utterly devoid of any real power to inhibit the ambitions of scoundrels and tyrants, that the civilized nations of the world might simply be better off without it. Certainly the United States would; at the very least there’d be more parking available in Midtown.

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We thank Kevin Kim once again, this time for calling our attention to a gratifying piece by David Mamet about a road-to-Damascus event regarding the standard liberal worldview.

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I’ve often expressed my distaste for the Clintons: how anyone in his (or, yes, even her) right mind could want to send those Travellers back to the White House is beyond my comprehension. Lots of others feel the same way, of course; with a hat tip to our friend the Stiletto, whose pointed insights and piercing commentary we recommend to all, here is a piece by Andrew Sullivan that sums it all up nicely.

I won’t have much more to say about the Eliot Spitzer debacle, as it’s not especially interesting, and certainly nothing new. But I wouldn’t want readers to think that when big stories like this come along, all I can do is jeer and snigger, so for tonight, let’s set aside the japery for a moment of more serious reflection. And then, back to sniggering.

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This should be interesting: our governor, former prosecutor Eliot Spitzer, has been identified as a client of a high-end prostitution ring.

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Today’s offerings at the excellent weblog Gates of Vienna included a post that links to a recent Barack Obama campaign video, which I have embedded below.

I realize I’m only a bilious old crosspatch who, unable to hear the chorus of angels that wells up in exultation whenever the junior Senator from Illinois opens his pie-hole, has nothing better to do than snipe from his rocking chair at the sweet optimism of youth. Nevertheless, I have to say that this video gives me the shivering fantods. A pan-ethnic parade of smug and ensorcelled thralls, in varying transports of ecstasy, swim into view to explain that their god-child will fix the environment, end all war, bring the nation together, stifle corporate greed, speak for all people, make America the darling of the world, and so forth. A few miracles are left unpromised — perhaps a World Series ring for the Cubs, or a chemistry Nobel for Paris Hilton — but with O-Ba-Ma, anything’s possible.

See for yourself.

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An article from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal examines a bill introduced by Barack Obama that would offer tax incentives to “patriotic” corporations.

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We note that the aging, self-centered gadfly Ralph Nader has announced his intention to screw up yet another presidential election.

One has to wonder what he could possibly be thinking. Does he figure that at almost 74 years old he is a more attractive candidate than he was in 2000, when he got a paltry 2.7% of the vote — just enough to put George Bush in the White House — or in 2004, when he managed only 0.38%? Does he reckon that what it will take to snap the legions of breathless young Obama congregants out of their ecstatic thralldom is to offer them one last chance to be led by a cantankerous old grouch?

Face facts, Ralph: at this point in your career, you make Dennis Kucinich look unstoppable. Go write a book or something.

With a hat tip to James Taranto, here’s a story you didn’t see in the New York Times: Bob Geldof, the noted social activist, former Boomtown Rat, and star of Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb video, praised George Bush for his commitment to fighting disease and poverty in Africa.

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Thanks to Kevin Kim for bringing to our attention the World’s Stupidest Comment Thread. It includes such gems as:

When politicians say they are for Change but never explain what the change is we better all be careful. I think Adolf Hitler was elected in Germany on a platform of “Change”.

and

A lot of people have pointed out that Mr. Obama is a practicing muslim, but the thing that a lot of folks have yet to recognize is: sources have told me that Barack Obama is actually a Nazi. I have yet to confirm this, but his comments about terror, Mitt Romney and others seem to lean that direction. Am I saying that he wants to burn the entire Jewish race? I haven’t seen any comment from him on that topic, one way or the other. But his stance of pro muslim, pro terror and anti israel politics seems to indicate as such.

Here it is.

*Update: if you’re just reading this for the first time, you’re too late. The whole comment thread has been taken down, I’m sad to say. -MP

About forty years ago I read a science-fiction book called Wasp. I remember it only dimly, but as I recall it was a corking good read, and the central metaphor of the book has stayed with me: that a small insect, buzzing around the inside of an automobile, can so distract the driver as to cause an accident. A tiny animal weighing less than a gram can cause the destruction of an enormously massive machine and the deaths of its vastly more powerful occupants.

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I’ve been nettled for years by the near-worship with which Bill Clinton has traditionally been regarded in these parts; if you ask most of my neighbors in Park Slope or Wellfleet, the man can simply do no wrong. This has always puzzled me, because although he is obviously highly intelligent and possessed of a certain raffish charm, he is also, as far as I can tell, a venal, ill-tempered, philandering rogue.

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By now you’ve probably heard that our ex-mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was recently anointed, amid much controversy, by the waka waka waka editorial board as our favorite, has dropped out of the presidential race.

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In a touching display of mutual link-love, I urge readers to drop everything and read Kevin Kim’s salty critique of the New York chapter of NOW, which recently issued a girly, self-pitying whinge about Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama. Why they should even mind being spurned by a pompous, Falstaffian cad who left an admiring young woman to drown is beyond me, but couldn’t they just have put on some fuzzy slippers and curled up with a quart of Ben & Jerrys?

Anyway, you can read Kevin’s response here.

Having wearied, apparently, of cat-burning the Bushies, Times columnist Maureen Dowd has lately found new sport in that “two-headed monster”, the Clintons. It’s a felicitous choice: I’ve had enough of these two to last a lifetime, Bill in particular.

Today’s entry here.

Today’s Times features a thoughtful article about the presidential campaign and the struggle in Iraq. It’s by Michael Gordon, who has spent a great deal of time there ever since the beginning of the war, and who undoubtedly has a better understanding of the “facts on the ground” than any of the candidates (not to mention high-falutin’ bloggers and commenters).

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Our friend The Stiletto wonders, in a recent post, how an irreligious voter might go about selecting a candidate, given the way they’ve been elbowing each other aside to crow about their faith:

† Romney Didn’t Win Any Converts: Rarely does someone get the chance truly to see things from another’s perspective. Having read as much as she can about Joseph Smith, the angel Moroni and the tenets of Mormonism - admittedly, mostly from LDS-sanctioned sources that omit doctrinal beliefs non-Mormons are not meant to know – The Stiletto has a pretty good idea what atheists think of all the miraculous (supernatural) events described in the Old and New Testaments that believers take on faith. When he’s settled back into his post-holiday routine, The Stiletto will ask her pal at waka waka waka to explain how an atheist decides for whom to vote, considering that every candidate holds a variety of “irrational” and “fraudulent” religious beliefs – her curiosity on the matter having been raised by this editorial in The Guardian (London), which asks: “Could you vote for a man who abides by Moronish wisdom?”

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The columnist, author and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan has an item today in the Wall Street Journal in which she rates the current crop of Presidential candidates according to her slogan for 2008: “Reasonable Person for President”. She is herself a reasonable person, and while our assessments diverge in spots, I agree with much that she has to say. In particular I share her view of Hillary Clinton:

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Following a link from Bill Vallicella, I’ve just read a review of the movie Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, in which the reviewer, the historian Ronald Radosh — who knew Seeger personally, and admires him as an artist and a man of peace, generally — nonetheless calls attention to the unrepentance of those of the American Left, including a great many beloved folk musicians, who strove on behalf of the Communist Party for much of the 20th century.

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It should come as no surprise that Christopher Hitchens had something to say about Mitt Romney’s speech last night. From his latest piece in Slate, a sample:

Romney does not understand the difference between deism and theism, nor does he know the first thing about the founding of the United States. Jefferson’s Declaration may invoke a “Creator,” but, as he went on to show in the battle over the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, he and most of his peers did not believe in a god who intervened in human affairs or in a god who had sent a son for a human sacrifice. These easily ascertainable facts are reflected in the way that the U.S. Constitution does not make any mention of a superintendent deity and in the way that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention declined an offer (possibly sarcastic), even from Benjamin Franklin, that they resort to prayer to compose their differences. Romney may throw a big chest and say that God should be “on our currency, in our pledge,” and of course on our public land in this magic holiday season, but James Madison did not think that there should be chaplains opening the proceedings of Congress or even appointed as ministers in the U.S. armed forces. Trying to dodge around this, and to support his assertion that the founders were religious in the Christian sense, Romney drones on about a barely relevant moment of emotion in 1774 and comes up with the glib slogan that “freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.” Any fool can think of an example where freedom exists without religion—and even more easily of an instance where religion exists without (or in negation of) freedom.

Amen. Read the whole thing here.

Well, we’re all still drying off after our dousing last night from Mitt Romney’s Gatorade barrel of holy water. Like JFK in 1960, Romney saw that his campaign was imperiled by a controversial religious affiliation; in this case, however, the risk was not that he was afraid of being seen as some sort of religious kook, but rather that he might be seen as the wrong sort of religious kook. Despite previous assurances that the particulars of a President’s religion don’t matter, as long as he has plenty of it, Mitt now feels the need to reassure the fundamentalist Protestant Republican base that he is every bit as tight with Jesus as they are, and that trivial details — such as polygamy, or that the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri, and so forth — need not come between them.

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We note that former world chess champion Garry Kasparov has been arrested in Russia for leading a protest rally. According to reports he has been sentenced to five days in jail.

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I might as well not keep the media on tenterhooks any longer. At the risk of confirming suspicions that I am nothing more than a Republican tool¹, I hereby let it be known that, as regards the bouquet of presidential candidates on offer this time around, the one most likely to pick up the official waka waka waka endorsement — so far at least — is Rudolph Giuliani. He has his peculiarities, to be sure, but they are not of the sort that bother me, and he is intelligent, principled, and consistent.

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1. Actually, I am a registered Democrat.  

You may have noticed that a great many people seem to really, really hate George W. Bush. Here in Park Slope, Brooklyn, one of the “bluest” neighborhoods in America, there’s a tacit assumption on the part of everyone you meet that you, too, really, really hate George W. Bush. And why do all the people here make that assumption? It’s because they themselves really, really hate George W. Bush, and because everyone else they know around here really, really hates George W. Bush too.

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Violence declined sharply in Iraq last month. This was such unwelcome news at the New York Times that the story, which opened with the sentence “The number of violent civilian deaths in Iraq dropped precipitously in September compared with the previous month”, was presented “below the fold” on page 10, having been knocked off the front page by a fast-breaking story about how girls in their early teens have become an attractive demographic target for Broadway producers.

One must imagine that gladder tidings, such as a massive flareup in sectarian violence, preferably with heavy coalition casualties, would have been featured more prominently.

Well, it looks like John McCain is done. I don’t suppose that he had much of a shot at the Republican nomination anyway, but now he’s being roasted alive for some candid remarks he made during an interview at Beliefnet.org.

What was McCain’s unpardonable offense? Being a Christian himself, he expressed a wish to have a Christian president. Wasting no time, and with depressing predictability, the Muslims, the Jews, and presumably everyone else on down to the Jains and the Zoroastrians have queued up to bastinado him for his effrontery.

It’s a fine line a candidate has to walk; strait is the gate, and narrow the path. On the one hand, he is required to appear on CNN specials to bawl like a carnival barker about the vital role his “faith” plays in his life, because American voters would sooner elect a carjacking crack addict than a Godless heathen. But if he actually goes so far as to believe the teachings of his religion, and to consider them to be of sufficient worth that he would prefer to see the leader of the free world informed by them — and is honest enough to say so — he is promptly assailed as a bigot.

What appears to be required, then, is a deep and abiding religious faith, with an unshakeable and fortifying reliance upon the guidance and wisdom of the Almighty, but also untainted by any content specific enough to differentiate a Calvinist from a Yazidi.

Small wonder the Europeans think we’re a bunch of lunatics.

One hears a lot these days about a “right” to health care. I bristle at this, because I think the notion of “rights” as anything other than matters of human convention is rubbish. We may, as a society, choose to define our laws such that they include a “right” to those things we deem appropriate: health care, broadband Internet access, full pirate regalia for all adults, or whatever else we like — and of course we have already done exactly that in the case of freedom of the press, bearing arms, and so forth. But until we have made such formal arrangements, any talk of axiomatic “rights” is weightless froth. So while we may yet decide that it is in our nation’s interest to establish a universal health-care arrangement of some sort — and there are good arguments on both sides of the issue — to claim, as matters stand today, a “right” to such a government-supported service is to gabble nonsense.

I mention all of this because Bill Vallicella has just posted a pungent little essay on this very topic. Have a look here.