Life isn’t much fun when you have 200+ unread articles to get through every day in your RSS reader. In light of this rather burdensome (albeit self-imposed) condition, I’ve decided to re-evaluate my news-gathering activities. I’ve dropped some RSS feeds that were not really that informative and have added some others (most notably the American Spectator Blog). Additionally, I’ve moved off of eventbox (which I did like) back to NetNewsWire (which now has google reader integration AND an iphone app!).
During this transition, I went back and read through some old posts from Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism blog (which he is no longer maintaining, to my chagrin), one of which I particularly enjoyed. If I were this kid’s father, I would be pretty proud!
From a reader:
Hi—
A couple months ago I took my teenager, a freshman in high school, to hear your lecture to the Leadership Program of the Rockies at the Broadmoor Hotel. I thought at the time your talk made a great impression on him, and now I know it did. He came home from school the other day chortling about his “take-down” of what he described as “the liberal at the lunch table.”
Seems someone alleged Obama has socialist tendencies…The liberal student retorted, “At least he’s not a fascist, like Bush!”
My son James, who has been taught always to ask for examples when arguing with someone’s opinion, asked what, exactly were Bush’s fascist policies? Liberal student couldn’t come up with any, but sputtered that Fox News was full of lies (isn’t it amazing that even teenagers resort to this non sequitur when challenged?), so James asked for examples of Fox’s dishonesty. Here I gather the sputtering and stammering became more pronounced.
But the best part was when my son said, “And then I had to go into the whole thing since they didn’t understand socialism and fascism.”
What whole thing, I asked.
“You know, the whole thing we heard in that guy’s [that’s you] speech. About Mussolini, and how he was trying to nationalize things, and that nationalizing something means socializing it, and the Nazis were actually the National Socialist party and that Obama is taking over the banks and car industry and healthcare and that is anti-capitalist and more like fascism than anything they could tell me Bush did.”
Not your most eloquent fan, perhaps, but a pretty serious application of your arguments for a 15-year-old!
One wonders how differently the media might have covered Obama presidency… had it been the Palin presidency.
IT’S THE MATH, STUPID!
“Well,” lectured Paul Krugman, again in the Times, “we were worried that they didn’t teach math at Idaho U., and now we know for sure they don’t. Is it $1.6 trillion, $1.7 trillion, or $2 trillion in red ink this year? Are we supposed to be impressed that she offers ‘fiscal sobriety’ by cutting 0.003 percent of the budget? She gives out money to those who don’t pay taxes and calls it a tax cut. And now Queen Sarah tells us that in four years she’ll ‘halve’ the deficit, as if she hasn’t borrowed another $5 trillion in the meantime. Does she think we’re morons? How many ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ oil wells can she tap into up there in Alaska to pay for the extra $11 trillion in debt she’s saddling us with?”
WORSE THAN ‘NUCULAR’
ABC’s Katie Couric summed up the general disappointment with the president’s communication skills. “I tried to warn the American people in that interview a few years back what they would get if they voted for her. Let’s face it: She’s a walking embarrassment. I mean just count ’em up: The mayor of Wasilla thinks Austrians speak some lingo called ‘Austrian.’ Then she tries her hand at Spanish and comes up with some concoction, ‘Cinco de Cuatro.’ Next thing she’ll walk into the window of the Oval Office and expect it to open — oops, she’s already done that. No wonder that when her Teleprompter stalls, she shuts her mouth until it catches up. I’m surprised she managed to get sworn in. And did she think that tasteless ‘Special Olympics’ slur was funny? Or making fun of octogenarian Nancy Reagan’s séances? No wonder Wanda Sykes feels at home.”
via President Palin’s First 100 Days by Victor Davis Hanson on National Review Online.
This may be the best article written on the Obama administration to date. Turns out that all those criticisms Obama leveled against Bush… were a bunch of bunk compared with the way Obama runs the country.
Victor Davis Hanson on NRO:
There were many legitimate critiques of the Iraq war. But insisting, as Barack Obama did, that we invaded recklessly and in haste was not one of them. From the fall of the Taliban in December 2001 to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the Bush administration deliberately and in public fashion sought debate in the Congress for over a year, received bipartisan authorization, and tried for months to win sanction from the United Nations.
In contrast, Barack Obama immediately upon entering office demanded the largest government expansion in the history of the nation. The staggering debt program will require nearly a trillion dollars in borrowing to fund all sorts of entitlements and redistributive efforts, and in revolutionary fashion redefine the role of government itself. Obama pronounced the current economic crisis the moral equivalent of war, and he wanted a national mobilization to meet it — pronto.
But unlike the Bush administration, which took 15 months to prepare the country for a real war in Iraq, the Obama administration gave the public only a few hours to read the final draft of the legislation before it was made into law. Where the polarizing partisan George Bush managed to obtain the vote of majorities in both parties to remove Saddam Hussein, the healing bipartisan Barack Obama lacked the support of even a single Republican in the House and won over a mere three Republicans in the Senate.
Liberals who once screamed that congressional opponents of the Iraq war were being unfairly tagged as unpatriotic by the Bush administration now yelled louder that the opponents of the Obama debt program were, in fact, unpatriotic.
Bush was pilloried for supposedly hyping al-Qaeda in order to create a security state. Obama trumped that by proclaiming that the present recession is a catastrophe, a disaster, a Great Depression. He ceased his scare-mongering only when he had exhausted the vocabulary of doom. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” bragged Rahm Emanuel, reminding us that the envisioned Obama socialism could take root only if a climate of fear was created.
via The Audacity of Irony by Victor Davis Hanson on National Review Online.
OBAMA: We cannot impose a military solution on what has effectively become a civil war.
OBAMA: “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”
OBAMA: My assessment is that the surge has not worked and we will not see a different report eight weeks from now.
OBAMA: Finally, in 2006-2007, we started to see that, even after an election, George Bush continued to want to pursue a course that didn’t withdraw troops from Iraq but actually doubled them and initiated a surge and at that stage I said very clearly, not only have we not seen improvements, but we’re actually worsening, potentially, a situation there.
OBAMA: “Here’s what we know. The surge has not worked.
OBAMA: “After putting an additional 30,000 troops in, far longer & more troops than the president had initially said, we have gone from a horrendous situation of violence in Iraq to the same intolerable levels of violence that we had back in June of 2006. So, essentially, after all this we’re back where we were 15 months ago… So, I think it is fair to say that the president has simply tried to gain another six months to continue on the same course that he’s been on for several years now. It is a course that will not succeed. It is a course that is exacting an enormous toll on the American people & our troops.
OBAMA: “Tonight Pres. Bush said that the surge in Iraq is working, when we know that’s just not true.
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OBAMA NOW: I had no doubt, and I said when I opposed the surge, that given how wonderfully our troops perform, if we place 30,000 more troops in there, then we would see an improvement in the security situation and we would see a reduction in the violence.
Let’s pray to GOD that we don’t get attacked again during Obama’s administration because I don’t think he has a clue how warfare works, or what progress looks like.
Yes, THIS is the CHANGE we were all hoping for… revisionism masquerading as principled pragmatism.