Donald Trump has been making President Obama's failure to release his long-form birth certificate a huge public issue for several weeks now, though it has been much discussed in Internet political circles for the last three years. But now that the president has finally made the birth certificate public, I have a few thoughts about it.
The timing of the release is a strategic blunder two-fer.
Trump has said that he would run as an independent in the 2012 presidential race if he didn't get the GOP nomination. Such a race would ensure President Obama's reelection. However, since the president released the certificate today, he has effectively deflated a Trump spoiler candidacy and neutralized a potential weapon against the GOP candidate (it would have been far more damaging to the GOP candidate had the president released the certificate, say, in September 2012).
I don't think that was what the president intended to do. But, thanks anyway, Mr. President!
I ask because that's the only reason I can figure why he pwns himself, then doubles down on stupid via his Twitter stream.
In a recent post at the Washington Post's site, juicebox mafia capo Klein thinks he's figured out who Barack Obama really is.
Perhaps this is just the logical endpoint of two years spent arguing over what Barack Obama is — or isn’t. Muslim. Socialist. Marxist. Anti-colonialist. Racial healer. We’ve obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican from the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.
If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a health-care plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal coverage; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans staked out in the early ’90s — and often, well into the 2000s.
It's important to note just who is making this wack-job statement. As noted by my new blog homie Proof, Ezra Klein was the founder of the junior high mutual zit-squeezing club Journolist. The four hundred reporters, academics, professional liberals and assorted mouth breathers in the listserv were basically a wing of the Obama presidential campaign in 2008, with future Obambi Cabinet members to boot. Needless to say, Klein has a serious intellectual interest in rehabilitating his teeny bopper fan boi crush's political fortunes.
Now, let's look at the 90's era Republican's 'best ideas'. The individual mandate that some Republicans championed back in the day was...and more importantly, is...unconstitutional. I know Klein thinks the Constitution is just some old impossible to understand scrap of parchment, but when something is plainly unconstitutional that pretty much makes it a stupid idea, not a good one.
As for cap-n-trade, I don't know if paid Washington Post journalist Ezra Klein has been keeping up with current events, but anthropogenic climate change has been revealed to be a fraud. C&T was a policy cooked up in response to fears of global warming caused by man-made carbon dioxide emissions. Why would Republicans keep advocating a policy that supposedly solves a problem that does not in fact exist?
Finally, we get to Klein lauding President George HW Bush for raising taxes. Ezra pats Pappy on the back for 'getting the job done' on the 1990 budget deal in his original piece. Funny thing is that Klein never really specifies how these tax hikes were successful, either as policy or politics. He just sorta says they are and moves on.
When confronted about the shakiness of his 'Republican raises taxes = epic win' theory, Klein has a ready retort:
This is the part when you realize that debating Ezra Klein is like having a discussion with Barry Bonds about the dangers of performance enhancing drugs. No, it's even worse than that. It's like debating a pre-med student on specific techniques and methods involved in neurosurgery. The dude is simply in way over his head.
How did Bush the Elder get wacked for raising taxes? For one thing, Bill Clinton hammered him for it in campaign ads.
That ad was a staple of Clinton's 1992 campaign. What makes the spot so effective--and what Ezra Klein simply cannot grasp--is that HW Bush's raising taxes gave Clinton ammunition that didn't just wound the President, but also damaged the Republican brand on a critical everyday checkbook issue. Why does Klein think people vote for the GOP anyway if not because of tax policy? It must be for the Republican's famous snappy fashion sense and party-hearty attitude [sarc/].
The best part of Klein's journey into fail is when he is again confronted with his stunning lack of understanding, he resorts to the lamest of rhetorical evasions and promptly moves the goalposts. But hey, far be it from me to point out how badly his argument is falling apart. Let's let Klein's own source, that he dutifully pointed out, do it for us.
If politicians are not rewarded at the polls for the choices they make, don't expect other politicians to make similar choices.
What exactly are we dealing with here? Klein brings up a political period from the recent past. It's not like it's a hundred years ago, when the issues and characters involved are far removed from our current context. Nor are we talking about particularly deep or convoluted political theory. No, this stuff is pretty easy to understand.
Which makes me believe that Ezra Klein is not just another overpaid undersmart liberal. By producing such an elementary amateurish piece--and then digging further down into the proverbial hole--it's clear Klein is a masochist.
Ace had a great post the other day that I meant to talk about, but I didn't get to it. Well, I'm getting to it now.
Here's the money chunk.
...And at universities, in the pseudo-sciences, they are constantly attempting to "explain" conservative thinking as a type of cognitive dysfunction. Not willing to give into the faddish and ephemeral? Ah, well, a part of your brain is too small and won't let you sample "new experiences."
Note the normative assumption always packed into these claims: That the conservative brain is "too small" as compared to the liberal brain, defined as normative; the conservative measure represents a deviation away from the assumed norm while the liberal trait is privileged as the norm, or if not the norm, then the ideal.
No pseudo-scientist every finds that liberals have a bigger amygdala (or whatever) and are therefore "too open to new experiences" (a.k.a. too trendy, too faddish, too ephemeral in one's sense of self). None of these guys ever says the liberal trait represents a deviation from the norm or ideal -- no, they're always the norm or idea. It's always the conservative's traits that need to be "explained" as a psychological defect or an actual defect with their physical brain structure.
Yeah, you should definitely read the whole thing.
The thing is, that denormalizing process of conservatives and conservatism Ace talked about has been going on for a long time. To pick just one example, think about guns. For most of America's history, gun ownership wasn't really debated all that much. It was only relatively recently that the Left got the bright idea to limit gun ownership amongst law-abiding citizens.
A key part of the anti-gun strategy was to denormalize the idea of firearms. Guns weren't just supposed to be severely curtailed in the general population. They were weirdo objects for strange people. Whether it was geographic arguments ("Southerners are all gun nuts, of course") or class justifications ("The uneducated are the only ones people who still have guns") the goal was the same. In fact, lefties were so hell bent on making guns abnormal they faked at least one scholar-researched book to make it look like America didn't have widespread gun ownership in it's history.
In general, the Left has had some success in making conservatism seem strange. At the very least, they've reinforced amongst themselves the 'Right=Alien' arguments they always make. For committed progressives, conservatives are not just political rivals anymore. They're the Other.
Truth be told, the hard Left doesn't make up a majority of American citizens. Break it down on a state-by-state basis. Even where they make up the largest percentage of voters, they don't make up a majority. From those perspectives, it's pretty easy to see just how marginal the liberal ideology is in America.
Conservatives should take this vulnerability on the Left--specifically, their lack of numbers-- and use it against them. More importantly, how about we examine and highlight their own behavior. For your viewing pleasure, courtesy of No One Of Any Import, are some lefty protestors barking at a recent Tea Party rally.
Blinkered, moronic and as charming as athlete's foot ? Where's the sign-up sheet for that?
Lefties insist that they are the sane, logical and normal ones.
Yeah, that dude is totally playing with a full deck.
Before we get too cocky, liberals have a few advantages. They still control the MSM and they can still get some progged-up professors to create 'science' to prove their ideological biases. These are no small things. They can dupe a lot of the politically uncommitted folks out there.
However, conservatives have distinct advantages of our own. As stated before, the voter identification numbers are on our side. Best of all, any time the Left goes out in public, they behave like the complete oddballs that they really are. It shouldn't be too hard to make liberals seem strange--because they are strange.
Seriously, you have a group of people that are cool with one of their own shouting that he wipes his ass with the American flag every night. Now that's definitely a little bit of hyperbole on his part, but the fact remains that homeboy's peers were copacetic with his sentiment that the American flag should be disrespected early and often. Just a reminder: THIS IS NOT NORMAL.
The Right can score legislative victories. They can win elections. But in order to really make inroads they have to start beating back progressive culture. That means pointing out just how alien their ideology is when compared with the mainstream of American political thought.
ALSO: Here's the great RS McCain with a story about another Lefty weirdo. How weird are we talking about here? How's about possible jail time sound?
Looks like the Unions are flush with cash. Too bad they don’t spend it on their members.
Haha.
Let's suppose you're a UAW member. You do your job. You toss in your dues. Then you notice that your union has given $29 million dollars to Democrat Party candidates. Now your leadership might be hunky-dory with pro-gun control pro-abortion eco-nut tax-hiker gay friendly candidates, but how cool are you with all that?
Maybe the UAW isn't such a good example. President Obama just gave them a car company. Maybe the guy on the line is willing to put up with the vast variety of lefty crap if he thinks he got a good deal out of hijacking Government Motors.
Lets try a different group. What about the rank-n-file Teamsters? Thirty million dollars were sent from that union's coffers to political candidates, with 93% of that going to Donkey Punchers. The Unicorn-in-Chief's energy policies ("Drill Nowhere, Drill Never, Double Eco-Boner Rainbow All The Way!") have pushed diesel prices up past four dollars a gallon. That's gotta be putting a serious hurt on the wallet of most truckers.
The leadership of unions no doubt enjoys having a cozy relationship with Democrat Party power brokers. Rubbing elbows with the well-connected Donks and getting them to push the union big-wig's agenda is huge. The problem is that the average union member might not think their interests are being represented very well if all their dues money is going to Democrat candidates.
Blogger pal Chris Wysocki of the great Wyblog notes that we're entering a very special season.
Yes, it's that time of the year again. Time for the feminuts to whinge about Lilly Ledbetter and having to work for slave wages just because they don't have a penis.
Except it's not true. None of it. There is no male-female wage gap.
Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women's earnings are going up compared to men's.
I want a raise.
Haha, you and me both homie.
First of all, you should be reading Wyblog because he rules, so get to it.
The popping of the male/female pay differential myth is a needed reality check for the ultra orthodox feminist left. As necessary as this story is, it's just as important to recognize that the Feministing/GloriaSteinem cohort absolutely will not budge from their militantly wrong assertion that men get paid more then women. It's a foundational doctrine of feminism; going against that sacred text would be like asking David Brooks to stop writing hand-wringing mush-mouthed columns for the New York Times.
The thing is, the popular understanding of feminism (as opposed to the far-left campus version) got a few things right. Women should be paid the same as men for the same kind of work. That's just fair.
However, the further down the reading list you go on the Sisterhood of The Snarling Harridans' syllabus, the more incorrect stuff you find. From the role of men to the bizarre confused ideas about abortion, lefty feminists can't create paradigms that even sorta resemble reality.
The worst mistake that feminists have made in the last 40 years is their relentless denigration of motherhood. Remember when Academy Award-winning actress Natalie Portman described becoming a mother as "...the most important role of my life"? For many people, this was a charming sentiment. For at least a few feminists, this was simply not kosher. Check out Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams' reaction to Ms. Portman's announcement (quoted from The Other McCain):
Why, at the pinnacle of one’s professional career, would a person feel the need to undercut it by announcing that there’s something else even more important? Even if you feel that way, why downplay your achievement? Why compare the two, as if a grueling acting role and being a parent were somehow in competition? And remind me — when was the last time a male star gave an acceptance speech calling fatherhood his biggest role?
For now, forget the tin-eared insensitivity. That's a feature--not a bug--when it comes to feminist writing. More importantly, Ms. Williams' sentiment is a symptom of fundamental misreading of the importance of being a mother.
The Left in general, and feminism in particular, has spent a great deal of time, effort and money infiltrating the commanding heights of the culture. From the universities to the federal bureaucracy, feminists have carved out a sphere of influence from which they can push their ideas. In the course of a few decades, radicalized women (and not a few indoctrinated men) have become a sizable part of the national discussion on any number of issues.
The problem is that even with all the influence feminists currently wield, it pales in comparison to the power that mothers have in shaping the future. If feminists really wanted to create a society where, in the words of Gloria Steinem we raised girls like boys and boys like girls, feminists would be squeezing out children by the cart-load and raising the kids from the nanosecond they're born. Mothers have the kind of 24/7/365 access to a child's mind that a feminist ideologue can only dream about in her fevered fantasies.
Imagine if feminism hadn't drifted into BettyFriedan/BarbaraEhrenreich employment-centrism in the early 1970's, but instead had focused on actually changing American culture at its roots. The results would be stark. In fact, if that had occurred, the US would be hardly recognizable.
Conservatives and traditionalists often become angry when feminists demean the vital importance of motherhood. It's an understandable reaction; nurturing matriarchs are central to the emotional life of almost everyone and it's hard to hear it when some campus theorist makes it seem like mothers aren't important. Instead of being angry when feminists dismiss motherhood, we should just politely nod and move on, rather than give these leftist maniacs any bright ideas.
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