My friend Mike Reynolds tipped me to Spengler’s article in the Asia Times on Barack Obama–Obama’s women reveal his secret. Most political opinion is dross, including much of my own. Spengler often tends to go off half-cocked, but he’s often interesting. Here he may even be right. If you haven’t read it, take a look.
Meanwhile, as I watch the continued NAFTA-baiting by Clinton and Obama, I find them increasingly despicable. What utter liars. Can the American public be so stupid they don’t recognize this? We shall see.
MORE REGARDING NAFTA: I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am highly disturbed reading the following paragraph on Marc Ambinder’s blog (via Instapundit):
To the best I can gather, here is what most likely happened to set off CTV’s reporting that the Obama campaign is fudging the truth about its NAFTA intentions. Someone from the Canadian consul general’s office in Chicago got to talking with Dr. Austan Goolsbee, he the principle economic adviser to Sen. Obama, and NAFTA came up. Mr. Goolsbee may have warned him that the rhetoric about NAFTA might be amped up and that the policy follow through might not be as drastic as the volume of the rhetoric would indicate. By no means, though, does that mean that Obama isn’t serious about renegotiating the labor and environmental provisions of NAFTA — just that, Goolsbee may well have said, Obama recognizes that the normative case for NAFTA is not as one-sided as general campaign trail bromides make it out to be.
First of all, I don’t believe this is the full story by a long shot. But even if it is it does not speak well of the veracity of the Obama campaign. The Politician of Hope and Change appears to have a great deal of contempt for the public if he feels it’s necessary to distort reality on free trade to this degree to get elected. What else is he distorting? … I could ask the next obvious question — then who is he really? But that would take you back to Spengler. For all of us, I hope he’s wrong.
Bob Geldof accompanied George Bush in Africa and came up with a fascinating article for TIME. Geldof loves what Bush has done in Africa, but reviles what he did in Iraq. Even so, he likes Bush personally, as do many who have met him. What’s interesting to me is that when I read this article and came to the parts Geldof had written about Iraq (Abu Ghraib,Guantanano, waterboarding…. the usual litany) I sensed Geldof didn’t really believe them himself. He felt he was supposed to believe them. See what you think.
The New York Times’ “endorsement ” of John McCain seems eons ago as it continues its almost pathological inability to play his campaign straight. Here’s the latest from the quondam newspaper of record:
“Al Qaeda is there now,” Mr. McCain said in Houston, with a tone of belittlement in his voice. “So to state that somehow if Al Qaeda were there that he would consider going back militarily is really a remarkable comment, and I don’t think displays an understanding of the size of the threat and what’s at stake in Iraq.”
What McCain says, of course, makes logical sense so, rather than contradict it, the Times must find a way to undercut McCain, hence “a tone of belittlement in his voice”. This may seem like a small thing, but as most writers know, even one well-placed word can tilt a story. And with the NYT, it’s hard to find anything in their political coverage that is not tilted.
Are Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton secretly working for John McCain? Maybe those old Karl Rove behind it all rumors are true. How else to explain the idiotic mess the two Democratic candidates have gotten themselves into over NAFTA? As almost everyone knows, compared to most trade agreements, NAFTA works. By almost any standard, the economies throughout North America have improved since NAFTA’s inception, even poor Mexico’s (despite it’s being so “far from God and so close to Texas,” etc.)
In whoring after votes in the Rust Belt, however, Clinton and Obama vie against each other with fake protectionism they never intend to carry out, those handing a club to McCain, which he is well advised to take. Clinton and Obama may call themselves liberal, but the word is reduced to gibberish in the context of their policies, which are inherently reactionary.
After having won the “tawdry journalism of the year award” last week for their outing–sans proof– of John McCain’s supposed affair with a lobbyist, the newspaper of record now raises the issue of whether the Arizona senator is qualified to run for President at all because he was born to an American military family in the Canal Zone. Never mind that his father and grandfather were US Navy admirals, the Grey Lady tut-tuts the rules “may be” the rules.
Of course everybody knows this is a non-starter. So why are they raising it now? Well, we all know, don’t we? And they claim to be the “newspaper of record.” Frankly, I prefer The Onion.
I was up early this morning to help with PJM’s ongoing coverage of the Al Dura Trial in Paris. We seem to be almost alone in the US media bothering with this trial, yet it has arguably tremendous historical significance. The photo of the supposedly-dead Palestinian boy Mohammed al Dura, “murdered” by Israeli troops, went round the world and helped instigate Intifada II (which in turn helped instigate a lot of things, including the Iraq War). If this video and ensuing photo proves to be a forgery, many things must be reexamined, although I doubt they will be. People cling to their views like a two-year olds’ security blanket.
Nevertheless, that’s why I was on Skype this morning with Richard Landes, using the reliable Call Recorder software to record our conversation for a podcast you can hear here. Skype is a marvelous invention, when it works. And it works more often than not these days.
Bragging rights: I’m proud of Pajamas Media this morning. If you haven’t seen it, we had a great story by Ardeshir Arian yesterday from inside Iran (with video). The mainstreammedia is of course missing or ignoring this entirely.
This morning, we have, via our perspicacious Tel Aviv editor Allison Kaplan Sommer, the first translation of Barack Obama’s interview with Israel’s leading daily Yediot Aharonot. Obama has clearly woken up to the fact that Jews are a major Democratic Party constituency – and he is in danger of losing them. This could be fatal, especially in the general election.
Those who think politicians are phonies (not a small number, I would imagine) will be getting plenty of reinforcement from Barack Obama who is as phony as it gets. The nonsense he’s been shoveling about NAFTA is right up there on the demagoguery scale. Rich Lowry puts his hammer on the head:
Obama’s culprit is Mexico, our third-largest trading partner. It is trade deals like NAFTA — the 1993 accord eliminating tariffs among the U.S., Mexico, and Canada — that “ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with teenagers for minimum wage at Wal-Mart,” Obama intones. Feel inspired yet?
The big picture doesn’t justify this Dickensian evocation of gloom. Since 1993, the U.S. economy has grown by 54 percent. The jobless rate has dropped from 6.9 percent in 1993 to 4.9 percent today. Manufacturing output has increased by 63 percent. Canada and Mexico are our first- and second-largest export markets, and U.S. merchandise exports to them have increased at a slightly faster clip than exports to the rest of the world.
So what exactly is bad about NAFTA? Well, there’s probably some fine print that needs to be refined (always is), but it’s a largely successful agreement that has created jobs on all sides. Obama reminds me of Romney when the former governor, during the recent primary, told Michigan voters he would bring back industrial jobs to their outdated economy. Of course, Romney knew he was lying just as Obama knows he’s lying now. That’s the politics of hope? I predict right now McCain will do to Obama what he did to Romney – blow him out of the box.
They’re in it for the money!
Both of them are onto a good thing and they don’t want to change. What earthly incentive would Raul have in the short run to alter a system that made his brother a billionaire? (No figures yet on what it’s done for Raul.)
As for Sulzberger…. Craig Karpel’s interesting new look at the recent New York Times hit job on McCain only reinforces what it’s all about.
By now it’s been all over cable television and the internet that that the Academy Awards had all-time ratings lows last night. The CW on conservative blogs is that the public is punishing Hollywood for their un-patriotic or anti-patriotic movies. Others say the films themselves were too gloomy. Those viewpoints may have some merit, but I suggest it’s something simpler and, alas, less within the control of the Industry. There is simply too much competition for the audience’s time, whether it’s computer games or the Internet. Entertainment has changed. Once the leading factor, Hollywood is just another niche.
