Posts Tagged ‘reality’

Hell my friend already told me that

Posted: February 21, 2009 by datechguy in opinion/news
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First (Dec 3) there is the known unspoken reality:

You can take this to the bank: Any successful attack on American soil during an Obama administration is going to be wholly owned by not only that administration but the Democratic party.

Next (Jan 16) there is the quiet acknowledgment:

“Obama is now saying how difficult it is going to be to close Gitmo, he is now seeing the same intelligence that President Bush has seen for the last 6 years.”

Then (Jan 25) the ground is prepared:

One would think that the media wants to give cover to the new administration in case it takes say the first terms to decide what to do with these oppressed individuals, dangerous terrorists. It will be interesting to see what happens.

And lo and behold now the Obama administration is telling us that all those stories about Gitmo being the Gulag of our times were just…stories:

A Pentagon report requested by President Obama on the conditions at the Guantánamo Bay detention center concluded that the prison complies with the humane-treatment requirements of the Geneva Conventions. But it makes recommendations for improvements including increasing human contact for the prisoners, according to two government officials who have read parts of it.

Glenn Reynolds notes;

So, kinda like the Katrina stuff, this Guantanamo stink was all just a bunch of political propaganda?

The Other McCain goes snark:

“This is a remarkable achievement,” the president told a press conference Friday. “A mere four weeks ago, Guantanamo Bay was a human-rights catastrophe such as the modern world had never seen. Yet today, through the power of Hope, we have succeeded in making this facility a shining examplar of freedom, a beacon of Change admired throughout the world.”
The amazing transformation, Obama told reporters, would not have been possible without the “tireless labors” of the staff of the newly-created federal Department of Unicorns and Rainbows. . . .

Now if they had talked to Josh who served there like I did years ago they would have already known this. I now wait to see if the left goes Kryten, or retracts their previous comments.

Update Volokh notices:

In the past, objecting to a Gitmo-Gulag comparison was evidence of a “withered moral sensibility,” but I suspect we’re allowed to reject such false equivalencies now.

This is how Civilized people think

Posted: February 20, 2009 by datechguy in opinion/news
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Via Glenn this Kos diary on the cartoon nonsense is pretty good but the best part of it is at the end:

A while back, I wrote a diary about Warren, who I met while canvassing for Obama in southern Fairfax County. Warren was well into his 70’s and white. He began our conversation by informing me, quite bluntly, that he was voting for McCain because of “the lazy coloreds on welfare”. In spite of his comment, I engaged him. We talked for an hour. He eventually said, “That Obama is smart as a whip”, asked me for a pamphlet outlining Obama’s positions on the issues, and told me he had some thinking to do. You know what several people here on DailyKos said? That I was wrong for talking to the guy after he used the word colored. That I should have given him a lecture on how negative and hurtful the term is. Some people were.. yes… outraged.. that I didn’t tell Warren then and there that he was out of line. And this would have helped then candidate Obama… how? This would have helped me… how? This would have helped my country… how?

This doesn’t make Obama a better candidate but if the other side can persuade people in legitimate discussion then it is fine. It is similar to my conversation with a Quaker protesting at a Palin rally. This is exactly the way political speech should work.

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
Tags: , , ,

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.

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