I was doing some traveling over the weekend, with connecting flights through Chicago’s O’Hare, and during what seems to be the routinely scheduled five-hour O’Hare delay, decided to kill some time browsing the magazine racks – with their displays replicated in one terminal after another of this major hub of American airborne gridlock. Looking out from row upon row of the racks were covers devoted to the two women most prominent in the presidential campaign, now that Hillary, with a salute to the pantsuit set, has left the stage to the ladies in heels.
Here’s what jumped out:
There were two covers showing Sarah Palin. One was Time, “The Education of Sarah Palin.” The other was the already much-commented upon cover of Us, showing Palin holding her newborn son, stamped with the headline: “Babies, Lies and Scandal.”
That second Palin cover was paired in main displays with OK magazine’s cover showing Michelle and Barack Obama and their two daughters, a happy frolicking family; headline: “Life With My Girls.”
There were another four covers showing Michelle Obama. On the cover of “Upscale” (which has as its slogan, “Living the Affluent Lifestyle), with a story about Michelle as a powerful force who will never lie to her husband. On the cover of ”Ladies Home Journal” hugging Barack, headlined: “Barack and Michelle Obama/Why he calls her his chief adviser and what jolts him awake at 3 A.M.” On the cover of Ebony, headlined ”The Real Michelle Obama. The First Lady Hopeful Talks Family, Fidelity & the Future of America.” On the cover of Essence, yet another in the series of magazine stories on the idyll: “At Home With the Obama Family.”
There’s no law — nor should there be — that says magazines have to be fair. But there’s also no law that says anyone has to buy this stuff. My advice, if transit O’Hare you must: bring a book.
That was the most refreshing speech from an American politician in years. She did it with humor, and grace, and steel. There were loads of good lines – one of my favorites, that the American presidency “is not supposed to be a journey of personal discovery.”
What a relief, to hear from a national pulpit such a litany of sweet sense.
Watching the dynastic politics swirling around the White House these past 20 years – Bush, Clinton, Bush, (Clinton) — has become wearing. Listening to the collectivist chant of “We are the change we seek” has been alarming.
John McCain has picked for a running mate someone who gives me real hope for the years ahead, and a new generation. Sarah Palin talked tonight about an America of individual responsibilities, a country proud to win its wars and defend its interests – not a vale of groaning victims waiting for rations of relief from Washington.
On Obama: “What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he’s done turning back the waters and healing the planet? The answer is to take more of your money…give you more orders from Washington…and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world. America needs more energy… our opponent is against producing it.”
We can expect quite a dogfight ahead. Her joke about the difference between hockey moms and pitbulls — “lipstick” — was not cosmetic. Tonight, clearly, directly, Palin looked straight at the Obama campaign and laid out the real issues. Whatever the smears and attacks and discoveries ahead, that kind of clarity has got to be good for American politics.
As for teen pregnancy, does anyone still think that’s the defining issue of this election?
Sarah Palin is preparing to take the stage at the Republican convention, and if you believe the chorus in the MSM, the pivotal issue she must deal with is the pregnancy of her teen-age daughter — which in the space of two days has apparently become one of the most burning policy matters of our time. Move over, U.S. economy, world markets, jihadis, oil despotisms, resurgent Russian aggressors, Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
I don’t know what Sarah Palin is going to say. But I am trying to imagine the effect it would have if she stood up before the crowd and declared the following:
There are a few more things you need to know about me. As a troubled teen-ager, I myself used cocaine and marijuana (yes, I inhaled), and as an adult, I attended and took my family to (and my inspiration from) a church where the preaching included hate-speech about America and assorted ethnic and religious groups. In my business career, before entering politics, I had talents that allowed me, simply by reading the newspaper, to earn a 10,000% return on a $1,000 investment in cattle futures in the space of 10 months. While holding elected office, my experience included the pursuit of assorted adulterous liaisons, including intimate activities in my landmark government office with an intern less than half my age, though as I regard it, I did not have sex with that person (depending on the meaning of “is”). When I got caught, my spouse denounced my critics as members of a vast political conspiracy. I could add a great deal more to this list (though please remember that when I got caught taking home state silverware, I eventually did send it back), but let us now turn to the mighty issue of the hour…
That scene, of course, is fantasy. Sarah Palin won’t say these words, because they do not apply to her. But the activities listed here do apply, as a quick compendium, to the three most prominent political figures (the politicians themselves, not their children) who paraded across the stage at the Democratic convention in Denver last week — to wild ovations from the crowd.
Somehow, the awkward moments of Barack Obama, and Hillary and Bill Clinton, rank as pardonable and ultimately unimportant in the eyes of many of the same folks who would now pillory Sarah Palin as unfit for office … because her 17-year-old daughter got pregnant and plans to marry the father and have the baby.
Enough with the audacity of hypocrisy. Now may we go ahead with the real political debate?
Until today, this presidential campaign has been a grinding experience to watch. It has been mostly about getting to know Barack Obama, who whether on world speed-tour, or columned stage, Berlin or Denver, inhabits realms in which the oratory is too thick, and the air is too thin. It’s all perorations, promises and pathos. Joe Biden riding the acela every day is just not enough to bring it down to earth.
Now, on the other side, with McCain’s VP pick, we have a former runner-up for Miss Alaska, who knows how to use a gun, and nixed the bridge to no where. This is suddenly wilder than a Macau poker game. But at least it feels real. Finally, I’m enjoying this election, and here’s some more relief — the best send-up yet of the Democratic litany, thank you, David Brooks! But let’s be fair. As the Republicans prepare to take the stage, where are the folks who produced this splendid even-handed tribute to our candidates of 2004?
Something splendid did happen at Invesco Field Thursday night. Race is no longer a bar to nomination for the American presidency. The pity is that this historic occasion deserved a far better candidate –a disciple of someone like Tom Sowell, not Jeremiah Wright.
And enough, already, of Barack Obama’s “improbable journey.” He grew up in an America in which, under both Democratic and Republican presidents, his rise turned out to be wonderfully possible — and at lightning speed. What’s really improbable is the destination that in the name of “change” he now promises this nation.
The place to which he would guide us is a land of the free lunch, where the government will wake you up in the morning, tuck you in at night, and pay your bills in between. Healthcare, daycare, college tuition, energy, pensions, jobs … you-name-it, the super-size state will be there, assuring, insuring, investing, redistributing, paying off credit card bills, rebuilding cities, mending lives, saving farms. All of that would of course require a state bureaucracy even more immense and intrusive than the bailout-happy tax-and-spend behemoth we have now. But that’s OK, because under Obama, lobbyists would vanish and special interest groups would melt away. With all Americans holding up “change” placards on cue and chanting “Yes we can,” our dreams would become one.
Of course, someone would have to pay for this vast experiment in state-mandated largesse, and since even America’s resources aren’t infinite, someone would have to ration it out. So there’s the intriguing glitch that while Obama’s big plans are supposed to help Americans succeed, anyone with the audacity to do so would be taxed and regulated right back into victimhood — with the exception, perhaps, of those an Obama administration might judge virtuous enough to deserve special privileges and exemptions. That’s not the system that made America great, and it’s not the system that gave Barack Obama the rich opportunities he has enjoyed to realize his own dreams. But he’s right about one thing. It would be change.
With all the charm of Lady Macbeth at the castle banquet, Hillary has had her say (in which she lavished more praise on the late Bill Gwatney and Stephanie Tubbs Jones than she did on Barack Obama). Now the Denver convention moves on to foreign policy, and Joe Biden’s moment. Biden is in the interesting position that on almost every front except Iraq, President Bush’s foreign policy has been converging with what the Democrats say they want — diplomacy with dictators, talking with tyrants, haggling with WMD-addicted rogue regimes. Piloted by Condi Rice, the American ship of state has already become the love boat of global diplomacy.
It’s not working out very well. While the homefront promises for a remade world have been rolling out of Denver – 5 million greencollar jobs, quality universal healthcare, arugula in every pot (all to be paid for by…?) — these alarming news items keep stacking up out of Russia, Pakistan, North Korea, Syria, Iran…
Russia, in its despoiling of Georgia and push toward the Caspian pipeline has now cranked up the heat by officially recognizing Georgia’s secessionist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent. Syria’s President Bashar Assad, host of Hezbollah and recent collaborator with North Korea on that fried nuclear reactor, has been shopping in Russia for ballistic missiles. In nuclear-armed Al Qaeda-infested Pakistan, the government is in turmoil. North Korea — predictably — having extorted fresh rounds of fuel, aid, cash and diplomatic concessions from the U.S. and friends, has halted the disablement of its Yongbyon nuclear reactor and is threatening to rebuild it (while never having declared anything in the first place about its other nuclear ventures). Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency reports that the Bushehr nuclear plant, built with Russian help, is expected to be fully tested by the end of this year and operational in early 2009. Iran’s Fars News Agency further reports that Iran is designing a second nuclear power plant in the southwestern town of Darkhoveyn, and in order to fuel it “has to continue enriching uranium,” as part of the nuclear program meant to turn Iran’s Islamic Republic into “a world power and a role model for other third-world countries.”
You get the idea. All this has come to pass after the Bush administration got out of the business of regime change, tried to relieve the anxieties of assorted thug regimes, held up Libya as a role model and poured its efforts into multilateral happy talk. In the name of change, Obama favors four more years of even more of the same. But hey! Why worry? With a few more speeches, powered by hope, we can sort this all out. They’ll have nuclear bombs — so what? We’ll have universal healthcare. I just want to know — will that include a geiger counter for every family in America?
The appearance of Sen. Ted Kennedy on the Democratic stage in Denver last night needs the narrative ministrations not of a journalist, but of a novelist — and a superb novelist at that. Perhaps there was such a person in the TV audience, attuned to the immense appetite for life, in all its rich array, that propelled a mortally sick man to stand up before the crowd and declare that nothing could keep him away – and yet also attuned to the failures of character and flaws of vision, nursed by decades of power and privilege, that make this man a terrible guide for our nation’s future. If a story rich in the full dimensions of this lion’s last roar is to be written, it could hardly be published until well after this election and a great many more things – on which hang matters of life and death for a great many people — have been decided.
In the moment, there is an etiquette we accord to those engaged in mortal struggles, and a respect we render to those who do not go gentle into that good night. It would be wild folly, however, and a betrayal of future generations, to translate that wholesale into an embrace of all they have stood for. Watching the Kennedy tribute last night, in which the sea was invoked as the element of renewal, I wondered how many others in the audience thought of Chappaquiddick and Mary Jo Kopechne — left to die in the submerged car while Ted Kennedy meandered off to salvage his political career , a career symbolized in last night’s film tribute by that expensive sailboat with Kennedy at the wheel and family aboard.
The year of Chappaquiddick was 1969. John McCain was then two years into his more than five years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi.
These are the dramas in which we discern not only clues to the character of a politician, but hints of our own struggles with courage, cowardice and mortality. They are far more gripping than the details of debates over tax policy, the progress and pitfalls of diplomacy, threats gathering in places far away, and whether “universal healthcare” portends a golden age, or the drab and unhealthy realities of socialized medicine. Politics feeds on symbols, fictions, images that linger in memory in ways that humdrum policy debates and practicalities do not. But I keep remembering a speech that the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa gave more than 20 years ago in New York. It was before the age of google and the internet, and I cannot now find a copy of the text, but the gist of it was this: he warned that art and politics have separate roles to play in our lives, and when the two become too much entwined — beware.
No, “The Respected Comrade Supreme Commander Is Our Destiny” is not a new Obama campaign slogan — it just sounds like one. It’s actually the title of a movie that was screened this past Saturday at the People’s Palace of Culture in Pyongyang, North Korea. But if some wag were to slip it into the lineup this week at the Democratic Convention in Denver, would anyone notice the difference?
The mix-and-match sloganeering for yes-we-can, we-are-the-change-we-seek, hope, destiny, moment, and above all, change, including the changing meaning of change, has reached the point at which there is simply no meaning left in the words — they have become blank checks which Americans are asked to “come together” and sign. Along with Beltway diehard Joe Biden now joining the comrades for change (scroll down for the video), we are about to see such rusting Democratic fixtures as Jimmy Carter, Jesse Jackson and the Clintons warming up the crowd these next three nights for the grand finale mass rally at INVESCO Field: “Change You Can Believe In.”
Come to think of it, if someone were to slip some of this stuff into the program at the Pyongyang People’s Palace of Culture, would anyone notice the difference?
While we wait for details of an Obama-Biden ticket that will surely propose an even deeper love affair with the United Nations than that of the Condi Rice State Department, here’s one of those United Nations conundrums:
But the UN still hasn’t managed to come up with a basic definition of terrorism.
So if the UN can’t even figure out who’s a terrorist, how will the UN decide who’s a victim?
For a clue about where this latest initiative from Ban is likely to take us, check out the language in the UN press release linked above. Ban’s terror-victim forum, described as “the first of its kind at the United Nations,” is supposed to “help Member States to stand as one to support the victims of terrorism and to encourage civil society’s involvement against the scourge…” etc. etc.
“Stand as one”–?? Maybe Ban hasn’t noticed, but this is the fast track to the UN’s usual brand of Orwellian politics and moral bankruptcy. There are some UN member states — such as Iran — that like the idea of obliterating other entire member states, and support terrorists, such as Hezbollah, as a matter of state policy. (Although at the UN, Hezbollah cannot be regarded as a terrorist group, because there is no definition of terrorism).
For the UN, of course, it’s boom busines to keep ginning up new programs for an ever-expanding list of assorted groups of “victims.” Every new initiative becomes a rationale for more UN conferences, jobs, and solicitations for money. Whether any real victims are actually helped (or harmed) tends to become a secondary issue, if not simply irrelevant to the servicing and gourmet feeding of the UN organism — the conferences on Bali, the aid to dictators, the billions for peacekeeping forces that can’t keep peace and also can’t seem to keep their hands off the children they are supposed to protect. The UN has by now involved itself with so many categories of “victims” that by now the only victims for whom Ban is not convening forums or launching programs or dispatching envoys would seem to be the taxpayers of the developed democratic world, who fund most of the UN’s opaque, unaccountable patronage systems.
In this case, supporting victims of terrorism might sound worthy — after all, who wouldn’t be sympathetic to genuine victims of terrorism? But before Ban starts convening participants from “all regions, cultures and religions, representing a diversity of terror-victim experiences,” how about the UN producing a clear and reasonable definition of this experience Ban wants the world-as-one to address?
If Ban really wants the UN to do something useful to stop the scourge of terrorism, he’d do better to start by cleaning up his own house. Step one: Instead of holding a new symposium, he could stand up and call loud and clear for member states to stay away from the UN’s Durban II conference, now being planned for 2009 by the likes of Libya, Iran, Cuba, Russia and Pakistan — which shows every signs of becoming a replay of the malevolent 2001 hate-fest that was Durban I. Before the UN starts cashing in on teror-victims as a source of employment and per diems for the UN itself, His Eminence the Secretary-General ought to bestir himself to defuse the UN itself as a mothership of moral equivalence, and an incubator of hatred.
Writing in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, Soviet Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov proposes a new world order in which Russia and America, envisioned here as two equally great powers, carve out spheres of influence while rolling right over any democratic pipsqueaks who get in the way –or at least who get in Russia’s way. Under the headline ”America Must Choose Between Georgia and Russia,” Lavrov suggests that “An embargo on arms supplies to the current Tbilisi regime would be a start.”
In menacing tones, Lavrov warns of “the cost of the choice being made in Washington in favor of the discredited regime in Tbilisi.” Lavrov also dangles the bait that “Russia is committed to the ongoing positive development of relations with the U.S.” Implying a world in which Russia and America reign as co-regents, in chiding manner that comes close to parody of some of Condi Rice’s recent diplomatic locutions, Lavrov says:
“It is up to the American side to decide whether it wants a relationship with Russia that our two peoples deserve. The geopolitical reality we’ll have to deal with at the end of the day will inevitably force us to cooperate.”
… Perhaps, Mr. Lavrov. But on what terms? Lavrov’s proposal to Americans carries eerie echoes of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression deal hammered out on the eve of World War II between the “High Contracting Parties” of Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The pact included a secret additional protocol, carving up spheres of influence, interest and territory in the Baltics, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. Regarding Poland, in particular, the text noted: “The question of whether the interests of both parties make desirable the maintenance of an independent Polish States, and how such a state can a state can be bounded can only be definitely determined in the course of future political developments.”
The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact disintegrated in June, 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the USSR in Operation Barbarossa. Today’s Russia has far less to fear from a democratic United States, which has no territorial designs on Russia, and has been looking to democratic evolution of other states as the best bet for a safer, more peaceful world. America, by the same token, has more to fear, in terms of threats all too likely to be incubated under the spreading shadow of an autocratic and bullying Russia. The world has yet to recover from the corrosive effects of Soviet hegemony in the last century, from which this not-so-new Russian KGB-FSB brand of order is now sprouting.
If America goes for this bait, swallows this Russian manifesto of the new world order, and hands over Georgia on a plate — with Ukraine, Moldova, and other former Soviet satellites and dominions to follow – we are in for a century even more brutal than that presaged by Sept. 11, 2001. Russia and America have a shared interest in thwarting the spread of Islamist jihad. But for America under the banner of that shared interest to collaborate in the resurrection of a predatory, despotic Russian empire would be to invite not a safer world, but a proliferation of threats.
It would be comforting to assume that Washington understands this, and will treat Lavrov’s article not as an invitation, but as a window on the disturbing political evolution going on inside Russia. These are sinister enticements the Kremlin now offers. Surely the American electorate knows better? This is a test of nerve, resolve, wisdom and basic decency. It will cost America dearly if we fail.
