Posts Tagged ‘reality’

The cult of Obama: out censoring the censor

Posted: February 20, 2009 by datechguy in opinion/news
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Dan Greenberg uses that term to describe President Obama:

In his day, Ronald Reagan was called “the teflon President” by his detractors, because they felt that criticisms never stuck to him, but somehow always slid off into oblivion. Well, we are now witnessing the birth of a new concept, that of “the SuperTeflon President”, whose very existence repels all criticisms before they even come near him, and vaporizes them out of popular consciousness. It is a remarkable phenomenon.

It’s not super teflon its something worse:

Item via Baseball Crank: Reporters complaining about any critique of the president:

Mike Lupica had a column this morning weeping bitter tears over his shock and hurt that people are criticizing Barack Obama. Amazing, when you think about it, that the President of the United States should receive criticism. It’s such a novel concept.

This was probably the funniest line in the piece:

Once, 100 days was the mythical grace period for a new President. This one doesn’t get five minutes. In the process, he finds out that Washington is even lousier and meaner with partisanship than he knew before he got there.

You would almost think, from reading this, that Obama really did just get there. Not that he’d been a United States Senator the last four years

Item via Big Hollywood : Comics unable to joke about him:

Alex Rodriguez (Letterman, Leno, Kimmel), the recession (Letterman, Leno, Ferguson) and the octuplets (Letterman, Leno, Kimmel) are the most popular topics right now. Meanwhile, the shows still struggle to find a handle from which to grab the new administration.

Leno hit one fairly squarely: He said that Congress commemorated George Washington throwing a silver dollar across the Potomac by tossing $700 billion down a rat hole. Conan and Kimmel only told one political joke. Granted Conan is closing down “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” (his last show is this Friday), and much of the show was devoted to running old clips, tearing up the set, and saying goodbye to the masturbating bear. Jimmy Kimmel said that Obama thanked Republicans for their support on the stimulus package by sending a jar of peanuts to each of them — and this is how many of the Late Nights seem to be approaching the administration right now, by making jokes about Republicans trying to ruin it all.

Item: via Gateway Pundit: A person with an anti-obama gets special treatment in OKC:

…don’t criticize Dear Leader or you may get arrested.

An Oklahoma man was pulled over for taping an anti-Obama sign on his vehicle.
Later, the secret service searched the man’s home because of his blasphemous sign against His High Holiness.

Item via Instapundit: Criticism of the president disappears from stories:

So I linked to a story on high school students skeptical about Obama’s stimulus speech. Now the story has the same headline, but the quotes are missing, replaced by a bunch of feelgood talk about how excited everyone was to have Obama in town. But you can find the original story here. And here’s the Google Cache. Some difference, huh? I emailed the reporter, Hayley Ringle, to ask what happened. (Bumped).

UPDATE: The Google Cache now shows the new story. No response to my email yet. I saved screenshots, though, and of course there’s the Drudge capture.

Item via Michelle Malkin: Protests in Seattle, Denver and Mesa against the president drawing hundreds and thousands of people but no media:

My syndicated column reports on the growing, grass-roots movement against porkulus/spending binges/the entitlement culture from Seattle to Denver to Mesa, Arizona and beyond. Why aren’t you hearing about it in the MSM? Because it doesn’t fit the victim mentality/government savior narrative. We don’t exist, remember?

Well, more of you non-existent rebels will be gathering in Overland Park, Kansas tomorrow, Saturday, at Rep. Dennis Moore’s office (D-KS) at 10 am.

What is most scary is the mentality behind this. It reminds me of a line from one of C. S. Forester’s Hornblower books Flying Colours

Hornblower bowed, but as the Colonel remained unbending he stiffened to attention. He could recognize that type of man at once—the servant of a tyrant, and in close personal association with him, modeling his conduct not on the tyrant’s but on what he fancied should be the correct behaviour of a tyrant, far out-Heroding Herod

I can’t really see the difference between this cult of personality, the Legionaries of Christ one or the Fr. Kennedy in Australia.

How long can this be kept up? Well how long did the media pretend that the John Edwards story didn’t exist?

Right to the point

Posted: February 20, 2009 by datechguy in opinion/news
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I teased the Reculsive leftist a little because she didn’t notice the outrage of the right and Christians over the beheading in Buffalo and lack of coverage thereof. She however hits it out of the park with this one:

For many commenters on the web, it is apparently impossible to condemn this nightmare without hastening to add that American culture has plenty of its own home-grown brand of misogyny, and it’s therefore “intolerant” to notice the particular lethalness of the honor-shame paradigm in some non-Western cultures. You know the argument: America is full of sexism and the commodification of women and our own gendered violence, so we have no business even talking about women’s rights.

If you’re a habitué of the progressive blogosphere, this line of thought is probably so familiar that you take it in without blinking.

She sees it as woman’s rights vs human rights and argues that they are same thing:

But for me, as a feminist, women’s rights are human rights. I am not an apostle for American culture, which is certainly far from perfect; I am an advocate for women. When I criticize honor killings or sharia law or any of the other non-Western abuses of women, I’m not speaking from a standpoint of cultural chauvinism. The ground I occupy is one of fundamental human rights for all women: freedom of action, of self-determination, of bodily integrity; freedom from violence and oppression and subjugation; freedom to be educated, to work, to love, to have children (or not); freedom to participate fully in life as first-class citizens. I view and judge every society on earth through that lens, including my own.

But by the same token, it doesn’t work to simply advocate for a universal ideal of women’s rights without inquiring too closely into the specific cultural obstacles to achieving that ideal. The devil, as ever, is in the details. We cannot unpack the situation of an abused wife in a conservative Christian community, for example, unless we understand the particular social and religious codes at work. We can’t stop honor killings unless we know why they happen — and I mean exactly why they happen. What are the social and religious codes at work there? What is the psychology of the people who do this? What drives them, what sustains them, what potential punishments and rewards are in the offing? I wrote on Tuesday that “we must be like doctors fighting disease, seeking to identify precisely the pathogens involved.” If we’re serious about ending the oppression of women, nothing less will do.

She does ignore the real possibility that people writing are afraid of getting ones head cut off but other than that omission this is about as solid as it gets.

Don’t attribute to cowardice what can be explained by greed

Posted: February 19, 2009 by datechguy in opinion/news
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Mark Steyn points to this article by Lars Hedegaard that I am ashamed to say didn’t hit me until I read it:

We know that the broad Left – which in Europe would include various shades of the hard, Communist or Marxist Left, the New Left, which has now transformed itself into tree huggers, and the traditional Social Democratic parties – has vacated its traditional ideological positions in order to preach ideologies that used to be hallmarks of the far right. Positions such as the need for censorship, kissing up to demands that “religions” (i.e. Islam) must not be criticized or ridiculed, the institution of ethnic or tribal special privileges and inequality before the law – depending on what ethnic, tribal or clan chief or holy man can ingratiate himself to the top of the totem pole as most aggrieved victim.

This new weltanschauung takes us back to a legal order – or rather lack of order – the like of which we haven’t seen in the civilized world since – when? The democratic revolutions of the 19th century, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, England’s Glorious Revolution, John Milton’s Areopagitica, Magna Carta?

Take your pick. Any one of the above is true.

The road chosen by the parties on the Left permits no return. Having alienated – not to say discarded – large chunks of their traditional working class voters,
they are now increasingly dependent on the Muslim vote, which they hope will guarantee them a perpetual foothold at least in the major populations centers. emphasis mine

It’s all about money and power. These pols of the left primary principle is to keep both. It it means appeasing Islam, then so be it. After all when you don’t have a next generation of your own to worry about or a belief system that looks beyond today’s comfort who cares?

Some risks are more worthy than others

Posted: February 18, 2009 by datechguy in opinion/news
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Liz Fairley comments on Australians who choose to live in areas vulnerable to fire:

…to inhabit the bush, especially as climate change takes hold, is to make yourself fuel.

Certainly, we should feel compassion. And certainly, there should be regulations. Quite probably there should be more assiduous back-burning. But to blame green policies – to cull already endangered shark species, to reduce tree cover – is to blame nature for human folly.

Liam Sheahan might disagree she goes on:

Some have to live in bush, or swim at dusk. But bush suburbs and forested hamlets are voluntary, designed for the illusion of paradise on earth. It works, too, like any bubble, until it doesn’t.

Tim Blair contrasts her suggestion to avoid one voluntary life threatening risk to the numbers on a different one:

So they should live elsewhere; make different “lifestyle choices”. Farrelly is dismissive of tactics (“Cut the trees! Burn the undergrowth!”) that would reduce the risk of living in the country, preferring that people simply live elsewhere, contrary to their preferences.

Yet more than 6700 people died of AIDS in Australia from the beginning of the epidemic until mid-2007 – a far greater number than were killed in bushfires during the same period. Imagine if Farrelly had written in 1989 that those at risk of AIDS should stop being gay (“To inhabit the bath houses, especially as AIDS takes hold, is to make yourself HIV positive”). Instead, sensibly, medical and social solutions were sought (“Kill the virus! Use the condoms!”) in order to preserve human freedom and human lives.

Funny how numbers can put some things in perspective.

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