President Nixon: Now More Than Ever

I'm back from the Left Coast, where attractions ranged from Ronald Reagan's burial place to Richard Nixon's burial place and several Forest Lawn drive-by's.  We're calling it the "I See Dead People Tour."  In truth, I visited with and stayed with some wonderfully Conservative (capital "C"!) people who are very much alive.  Among them, an 86-year old "second Mom" who is still driving herself around and spending summers at her cabin in Stehekin, WA, and an 80+ year old couple who own, manage, and work a lemon ranch in Camarillo, CA, and who left yesterday on a six-week driving trip to AK to visit their son and Inuit in-laws, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  I met up with the Weezer and her lovely mother for the library jaunts, and the weather cooperated.  The news of the $16B, as in Large Large budget deficit came through as I was sipping my coffee with yet another host, who happens to be in the dreaded Financial Industry.  

Here's a tasty tidbit: we know that Californias budget deficit for this year is $16 billion, which is just off Jerry Brown's estimate by... wait, I need my calculator... oh, $8 billion.  That's right: the estimate came in at half of the real.  You Congressional Budget Office afficianados who are hanging your Obamacare hats on their projections, take note.  But give Jerry his due: it takes real Moonbat talent to screw up the numbers that badly.  You know you're in a bad way when they name a high digit multiplier after you.  I hear HP is coming out with a financial calculator that has a Jerry Brown button you can press for any calculation involving a negative figure for rates of return in California.

Have you ever ridden a shuttle bus with someone who knows all of the plane models and configurations?  I hadn't until day-before-yesterday.  A woman of some means, judging from the hair, clothes, and the fact that she flew to Santa Barbara for one day just because (from Dallas), prattled on at length about all the types of airplanes, makes and models, that she flew on, then identified all the ones she could see on the tarmac from the bus ("Oh, look: there's a British Airways McD 180- I didn't know they were still flying those into LAX.")  I swear, I thought I was in Britain with one of the thousands of people who know every train carriage number for all the rolling stock in that country.  It was odd: she looked so normal.

"We're Not There Yet"

This is the title of today's "Best of the Web Today" column by the estimable James Taranto, and it reminded me that I've been wanting to offer some suggestions for the Obama campaign's central slogan.  "Hope and Change" is sooo 2008, and apparently "Forward!" is the latest in a spate of not-ready-for-primetime slogans.  In fact, I think it makes me think of wagon trains, and the leader saying, "Forward, ho!", which as we know is racist, so if pointing out that Barack Obama plays a lot of golf suggests that he doesn't work hard and must therefore be racist stereotyping on the part of the person who dares to observe that Barry plays a lot of golf, then I think that his campaign had better get with the not-quite-ready-for-post-racial politics and avoid using the command, "Forward!"

My point is, I think we can do better... oh, that one's taken I think.  But, fellow Quidniks, don't you think you can help a struggling campaign out?  Here are some of my suggestions:

• "Bend Forward! This is the Flexible 2nd Term!"
• "We Got There, You Missed It"
• "If You Like Your Ditch, You Can Keep Your Ditch.  In fact, every family should have its own ditch.  Kathleen, where's that ditch mandate? Finally, a shovel-ready job!"

Have at it, kids!

Betsy Warren as Steyn-fodder

I'm sure this has gone viral.  It's the funniest Steyn in nearly two weeks.  He's coined two, two Indian names for our Nativist American (spoiler alert!): Fauxcahontas and Crockagiwea. I'm collecting them- they're better than Beenie Babies or Franklin Mint First Lady Inauguration Dolls.

Now here's the good news (excuse me while I savor these quotes from the Boston Herald)

• “There’s nobody watching this that doesn’t think she’s in big trouble,” one well-known Massachusetts Democrat said.
• Joe Trippi, a prominent national Democratic consultant, told the Herald that while Warren has time to recover, the campaign should have anticipated this issue would surface.
• Another nationally known Democratic consultant said while there is no hand-wringing yet in the party, “The fact they weren’t prepared for this is a little surprising.”
• “This takes her biography into a bizarre dimension,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “It has derailed the effort to define Warren in a voter-friendly way.”
• Warren then recounted how a relative had told her that her Native American heritage was why her grandfather had “high cheekbones like all of the Indians do” — a response that critics have pounced on as perpetuating Native American stereotypes.
• “That’s kind of racism,” Sabato said.

ROFLMAO.  Oooohhhh, the irony!

Just when you think the degenerate spectacle that is liberalism can't get any more pathetic, some woman runs against Scott Brown.  BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

Disclaimer: My great-grandmother made her kids swear not to tell anyone about their Indian ancestry, so my grandfather dutifully didn't delve into it until after his sisters had died.  He looked so "native", you know, what with the high cheekbones and all, that he was actually asked by people if he was.  He always said yes, because he was, in fact, a native American.  His mother's nickname? Indian Mary, plus she had a stroke when she was fairly young and so she slept with one eye open.  Talk about your stereotypes... anyway, I clearly missed the boat on the whole affirmative action thing.  Who knew?  I thought that with brown hair, blue eyes, and no cheekbones to speak of, people wouldn't believe me.  I didn't realize universities don't check on these things!

We Sold the Book

Several years ago my husband was gathering up all the random books in the house that matched a list of "textbooks" that were eligible for buy-back and he saw that my copy of "Dreams from My Father" and decided that he could get two birds with one stone, so to speak: get the book out of the house AND get some of his money back.  We got the buy-back price on it even though the first 20 pages were missing because I was using them to pick up dog turds when I took the dogs for walkies.  Long story short, I don't have my reference copy to quote chapter and verse about the now-famous composite girlfriend, so I must content myself with Obama in his own words (as opposed to DFMF), via Vanity Fair:

In one letter, he told Alex that it seemed as if many of his Pakistani friends were headed toward the business world, and his old high-school buddies were “moving toward the mainstream.” Where did that leave him? “I must admit large dollops of envy for both groups,” he wrote. “Caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions [and] classes; make them mine, me theirs.”

I think the key word here is "absorb", although as a reader, one slams on the brakes at "large dollops of envy."  I stand by my conviction that this man only wrote the parts of DFMF that were about Africa, which were capital "B" boring.  The first part of this exerpt talks up Obama as cosmopolite: he'd lived in these exotic places and that "polyglot world" of Hawaii.  But Obama is rather famously uniglot, except for that Muslim prayer-thingy (Mare-see bo-coo!).  I wonder how he "absorbed" anyone's culture without learning any lingo other than (bad) English.  And what does "make them mine, me theirs" mean?

Aside: He is the death-knell for pronoun agreement in English.  What Bill Clinton was to the definition of "sex", Barry is to English grammar. End aside.

But, we're happy to note, Barry has matured.  In his extended interview with Dave Marannis, the author of the upcoming bio we're all waiting with bated breath for, SINCE 2007, Dear Leader explains his search for "commonality" among people:

“There is no doubt that what I retained in my politics is a sense that the only way I could have a sturdy sense of identity of who I was depended on digging beneath the surface differences of people,” Obama said during an interview. “The only way my life makes sense is if, regardless of culture, race, religion, tribe, there is this commonality, these essential human truths and passions and hopes and moral precepts that are universal. And that we can reach out beyond our differences. If that is not the case, then it is pretty hard for me to make sense of my life. So that is at the core of who I am.”

I know I'm convinced by this, even though it's non-sensical.  In conflating his own sense of identity and trying to find the "commonality" of all people, he basically admits that he has no sense of identity.  But we shouldn't spend too much time grieving for this lack (except to the extent that thinking he's American should really be a qualification for the U.S. President) because it's a total pack of lies anyway.  If you want to find out what all people have in common, if that is your core and what makes your life make sense, you don't spend 20 years warming the pews of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church.

I read through the whole excerpt, and wished I had done so at bed time.  It isn't nearly skeptical enough, and like everyone in the piece, it goes where Barry wants it to go.  I suppose this is the most interesting bit for the general (liberal) reader, Barry's love life before Michelle, but it reads like a bad Woody Allen movie, with none of the Jewish jokes.  Which is interesting- conspicuously absent from all of Barry's meanderings about "other cultures" he seems really uninterested in what's right around him. 

Cue the Wizard of Oz, please.

Friday Lighter Note

To keep myself from diving into a total funk about Mr. Chen and the corruptocracy that is the Obama-Democrat Axis of Evil, I check in at regular intervals to this site.

Another Tyrannical Cliché

One of the clichés that Jonah Goldberg takes apart in his new book (that I haven't bought/read/really thought about) is the "Better 10 guilty people go free than one innocent person be punished" cliché.  While I agree with the sentiment on a moral level, I think we could have a long and unproductive conversation about why this is a reason to have a scrupulous and fair judicial system and rule of law, not to be slap dash about enforcing our laws.

But let's talk for a minute about the moral equation of Mr. Chen and America's indebtedness.  We have little leverage with the Chinese because we have borrowed so heavily from them and our spending deficit is so huge that we literally can't afford to offend the Chinese.  If, let's just say, the Chinese backed away from buying our paper, and this caused a huge fiscal crisis here, government shut downs, bankruptcies, Greece on steroids and the rest, would that all be worth it to save the life of a blind man and his family?  

There's a trade off.  If you let 10 guilty people go free, it may not be better generally for them to be continuing their crimes than to have all 10 plus one locked up.  We can't know statistically because it's a hypothetical, and then there is the value judgment of the damage their crimes would do, versus the pain, suffering, and lost productivity of the innocent person and his loved ones.  In Mr. Chen's case, which is really about the trade off we've already made, is the loss of America's power and self-reliance, not to mention our moral standing and hence Mr. Chen's valiant struggle against murder, worth the vast numbers of bureaucrats that are making an average of $170K per year?  Is it worth Medicare part B?  Is it worth all the free contraceptives you can use, and all the subsidized student loans for third-rate university degrees?

Mr. Chen and his friends are courageous fools.  I admire them deeply, and pity them even more deeply for the disappointment they are suffering.

Mrs. Obama, you can stop being proud of your country now.  It was a brief interlude, but you'll always have Málaga.

Elizabeth Warren, Squaw

So they finally found the elusive Cherokee princess who is one of Elizabeth Warren's forebears, so her claim of being a minority isn't completely bogus in a technical sense, just in any reasonable, realisitc, common sense.  

Of course, we can now amuse ourselves by making up Indian names for her induction ceremony when she becomes a full-fledged member of the diversity community.  Maybe she'll have to have sticks driven through her pectoral muscles to prove her worth... oh, even better: locked in a room at a black site with Jose Rodriguez for an hour.  That should do it.  OK, here are the trending names:

• Running Joke (wait- I thought that was Joe Biden's Secret Service code name...) 
• Hunts at Whole Foods
• She Who Sioux's

My contribution: "Trail of Tears Ends in Cambridge."

Great Piers Morgan Interview about "Tyranny of Clichés"

That was sarcasm.

"A category error!  A category error! I've never even heard of that!", delivered in the same incredulous tone as Dudley Moore's Arthur upon discovering the profession of his date.

Dear Jonah: if you haven't already, add, "I've never heard of that" to your list of liberal cliches.  It's a logical fallacy, sort of an appeal to authority for the terminally self-involved narcissist (and let's face it, who among us hasn't been subjected to the acid test of self-limiting knowledge, "If I haven't heard of it, it's not true and/or it's not worth knowing").

In the end, we have a less witty, less cogent, less entertaining Basil Fawlty at the anchor desk at CNN.  If only Jonah had bouffed his hair a bit and done the "machine-gunning seals" laugh, we could have called it a re-run (The first 1:30 has the best comment on the famous laugh).