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Never a fan of religion, Christopher Hitchens has some fun with Fidel’s plans for a Russian  Orthodox cathedral in Havana.

… I have been in Cuba many times in the past decades, but this was the first visit where I heard party members say openly that they couldn’t even guess what the old buzzard was thinking. At one lunch involving figures from the ministry of culture, I heard a woman say: “What kind of way is this to waste money? We build a cathedral for a religion to which no Cuban belongs?” As if to prove that she was not being sectarian, she added without looking over her shoulder: “A friend of mine asked me this morning: ‘What next? A subsidy for the Amish?’ “

All these are good questions, but I believe they have an easy answer. Fidel Castro has devoted the last 50 years to two causes: first, his own enshrinement as an immortal icon, and second, the unbending allegiance of Cuba to the Moscow line. Now, black-cowled Orthodox “metropolitans” line up to shake his hand, and the Putin-Medvedev regime brandishes its missile threats against the young Obama as Nikita Khrushchev once did against the young Kennedy. The ideology of Moscow doesn’t much matter as long as it is anti-American, and the Russian Orthodox Church has been Putin’s most devoted and reliable ally in his re-creation of an old-style Russian imperialism. If you want to see how far things have gone, take a look at the photograph of President Dmitry Medvedev’s inauguration, as he kisses the holy icon held by the clerical chief. Putin and Medvedev have made it clear that they want to reinstate Cuba’s role in the hemisphere, if only as a bore and nuisance for as long as its military dictatorship can be made to last. Castro’s apparent deathbed conversion to a religion with no Cuban adherents is the seal on this gruesome pact. How very appropriate.

A prof at NYU’s Stern Biz school nixes Detroit bail out. More proof here, in case you needed it, that Michael Moore is a fool.

Before Michael Moore became famous for documentaries like “Fahrenheit 9/11″ and “Sicko,” his first big success came in 1989 with “Roger and Me.” In that film, Mr. Moore followed General Motors chairman and chief executive Roger Smith with a camera crew, asking him why the company was closing plants and producing low-quality vehicles. Mr. Smith looked flustered and inartfully avoided Mr. Moore’s camera crew while it lingered outside his country club or GM’s executive offices.

“Roger and Me” was entertaining, but it missed the real story about Roger Smith, who turned out to be a forward-thinking genius. Mr. Smith made big investments in information technology and satellite communications, acquiring Electronic Data Systems in 1984 for $2.5 billion and Hughes Aircraft in 1985 for $5.2 billion. Mr. Smith’s successors divested those businesses at huge profits — EDS was taken public in 1996 for more than $27 billion, and Hughes, renamed DirecTV, went public in 2003 for more than $23 billion. (The man who sold EDS to Roger Smith at a bargain price was H. Ross Perot, who then convinced many people that the experience qualified him to be president.)

Mr. Smith understood all too well that GM shouldn’t continue investing in its failing automobile business. That was 25 years ago. Today, our government is being asked to put tens of billions of dollars in GM, Ford and Chrysler, but we would be much better off if Washington allowed these companies to go bankrupt and disappear. …

George Will has Detroit thoughts.

… In his new book, “The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath,” Post columnist Robert Samuelson recalls that in 1950, when GM signed a five-year contract with the UAW, Fortune magazine celebrated this as the “Treaty of Detroit.” Under “pattern bargaining,” Ford and Chrysler struck similar bargains, thereby eliminating competition in labor costs. In 1950, the Big Three’s share of America’s domestic auto market was about 95 percent, Japan’s and Germany’s war-smashed economies were feeble, and the VW Beetle was a barely discernible harbinger of a huge threat. The Big Three and the UAW probably did not doubt the immortality of their oligopoly. …

Martin Feldstein thinks it’s Chapter 11 time for Detroit.

The Big Three U.S. automakers need more than an injection of $25 billion from the federal government. Because of their ongoing losses, they would burn through that money in less than a year and would soon be back for more.

General Motors, Ford and Chrysler can make excellent cars, but they cannot sell them at prices that are competitive with the prices of cars produced in the United States by Toyota and others or with the prices of cars imported from Europe and Asia. The basic reason is the labor costs imposed by union contracts.

The Big Three pay much higher wages than production workers are paid in the nonunion auto firms and in the general economy. And the health-care costs of current workers and retired union members are an enormous additional burden.

The simplest solution is to allow GM and the others to file for bankruptcy. If the companies file under Chapter 11, they would be able to continue producing cars, and the workforce would remain employed while the firms reorganized. The firms would also be able to get short-term credit under bankruptcy protection. …

A Contentions bailout post.

Management of the Big Three automakers will be on Capitol Hill today, begging for federal money to bail them out of the mess they are in. Right there beside them will be their partner in failure, the United Auto Workers.

As a general proposition, when an industry and its unions want the same thing from the federal government, the answer should always be no. In the 1970’s, the airlines and their unions fought deregulation. So did the trucking industry and the Teamsters. Both got told no, and the American economy is much better off as a result. In 1980, shipping costs were fifteen percent of GDP. Today they are about ten percent. Translation: when the Interstate Commerce Commission cartel ended, shipping costs declined by a third, reducing the price of goods generally. …

Now a series of three Contentions posts on the idea of Hillary Clinton as Sec. State. Justin Shubow Eric Trager Daniel Halper

Marty Peretz takes a dim view of Hillary at State.

… So the fact is that she is not a committed leftist at all.  She is something worse: like Bill, a committed situanionalist.  Hillary is not a person of principle.  She is  a person of shifting position.  The best you can say of her, then, is that she is flexible, endlessly felxible.

Now, if Barack Obama has actually offered Hillary the post of secretary of state, he has reversed what most Americans thought was one of the much sought-after consequences of his nomination and his electoral victory.  That is, sought after by the voters.  And this was to end the Clinton dominion in American politics.   That’s certainly what the primaries were about.  Once Obama freed himself and the party from the vice presidential blackmail almost everyone assumed that, with Joe Biden as their candidate’s running-mate, the Democratic nominee did not need the experience of someone who’d visited 81 capitals for a day or two or who’d been to Bosnia “under fire” or who kissed Suha Arafat only moments after the pampered lady had accused Israel of spreading cancer in the West Bank. …

In a National Review Corner post, Jonah Goldberg introduces us to a NY Times item on National Review election controversies.

… As much fun as it might be, I’m not going to spend a lot of time addressing the individual personalities here. But: please. This is an old complaint of mine, but it’s no less true for being tiresome. National Review is not, and has not been, an unalloyed intellectual defender of the Bush administration. Most of the people who say this sort of thing simply don’t read the magazine. We have criticized the Bush administration from the Right. We were very skeptical about the DHS reorganization, the federalization of airport security, his faith-based initiatives, big-government conservatism and compassionate conservatism. We opposed his signature education bill, No Child Left Behind,  his steel tariffs and his expansion of national service programs. We opposed the campaign finance “reform” he signed into law and his farm bill. We led the opposition to his amnesty plan for illegal immigrants and against Harriet Miers. …

Here’s the NY Times article.

In a span of 252 days, the National Review lost two Buckleys — one to death, another to resignation — and an election.

Now, thanks to the coarsening effect of the Internet on political discourse, the magazine may have lost something else: its reputation as the cradle for conservative intellectuals and home for erudite and well-mannered debate prized by its founder, the late William F. Buckley Jr.

In the general conservative blogosphere and in The Corner, National Review’s popular blog, the tenor of debate — particularly as it related to the fitness of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska to be vice president — devolved into open nastiness during the campaign season, laying bare debates among conservatives that in a pre-Internet age may have been kept behind closed doors.

National Review, as the most pedigreed voice of conservatives, has often been tainted — unfairly and by association, some argue — by the tone of blogs, reader comments and e-mail messages. “Bill was always very concerned about having a high-minded and thoughtful discourse,” Rich Lowry, the magazine’s editor, said. “If you read the magazine, that’s what it was and that’s what it is.”

In October came the resignation of Mr. Buckley’s son, the writer and satirist Christopher Buckley, after he endorsed Barack Obama for president. He did so on Tina Brown’s blog, The Daily Beast, to avoid any backlash on The Corner. …

Dilbert likes pirates.

I love pirates. I love their parrots, their wooden legs, their eye patches, and obviously their AAARGS! But I have never loved pirates more than the day they seized a fully laden supertanker off the coast of Somalia.

We should have seen this coming. I blame Obama and his whole “Yes I can” philosophy. Suddenly even the pirates are thinking big. Six months ago these pirates were probably robbing convenience stores. After they saw Obama get elected president, they figured anything was possible. …

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Two good pieces from WaPo. First, Howard Kurtz on media hype and then Chris Cilizza on five myths from the election. The Washington Post continues to be the grown-up part of the media. Pickerhead can only explain his Sunday NY Times subscription as a form of ancestor worship (Roger Simon’s words). The Post is definitely a better read.

Howard Kurtz notices the media has gone gaga.

Perhaps it was the announcement that NBC News is coming out with a DVD titled “Yes We Can: The Barack Obama Story.” Or that ABC and USA Today are rushing out a book on the election. Or that HBO has snapped up a documentary on Obama’s campaign.

Perhaps it was the Newsweek commemorative issue — “Obama’s American Dream” — filled with so many iconic images and such stirring prose that it could have been campaign literature. Or the Time cover depicting Obama as FDR, complete with jaunty cigarette holder.

Are the media capable of merchandizing the moment, packaging a president-elect for profit? Yes, they are.

What’s troubling here goes beyond the clanging of cash registers. Media outlets have always tried to make a few bucks off the next big thing. The endless campaign is over, and there’s nothing wrong with the country pulling together, however briefly, behind its new leader. But we seem to have crossed a cultural line into mythmaking.

“The Obamas’ New Life!” blares People’s cover, with a shot of the family. “New home, new friends, new puppy!” Us Weekly goes with a Barack quote: “I Think I’m a Pretty Cool Dad.” The Chicago Tribune trumpets that Michelle “is poised to be the new Oprah and the next Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — combined!” for the fashion world.

Whew! Are journalists fostering the notion that Obama is invincible, the leader of what the New York Times dubbed “Generation O”?

Each writer, each publication, seems to reach for more eye-popping superlatives. …

Chris Cilizza writes on five 2008 election myths.

The 2008 presidential election ended less than two weeks ago, but the mythmaking machine has already begun to churn. President-elect Barack Obama transformed the face of the electorate! The Republican Party will be a miserable minority in Congress for the next century! Cats and dogs are now living together! Below we explode the five biggest myths that have already sprung up around the election that was. …

Since we were reporting on media fools, Ed Morrissey has the details of how the “warmest October on record” turned out to be September.

The main statistical facility for global-warming activists compounded error with folly and have undermined their credibility entirely.  NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies announced that last month was the warmest October on record, surprising meteorologists who had seen colder temperatures and unseasonal snowstorms and wondered where all the heat originated:

GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-skeptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running. …

Mr. Morrissey also notices that, Gasp!, lobbyists have key positions in The One’s transition team.

To put the old song on its ear, everything new is old again.  Remember when Barack Obama said this?

To rousing applause, Barack Obama formally announced this afternoon that the Democratic National Committee will follow his lead and begin refusing donations from registered lobbyists and special-interest political action committees.

“They do not fund my campaign,” the presumptive Democratic nominee told a small-town southwest Virginia crowd, after delivering a standard refrain that blames drug and insurance interests for blocking universal health care. “They will not fund our party. And they will not drown out the voices of the American people when I’m President of the United States.”

They may not have funded his campaign, although that’s highly questionable, but the Washington Post reports that they’ll be running his government. …

This is fun. BBC News painted their name on a forty foot shipping container. They also fitted it with a GPS system. All of this to start a year long illustration of global trade as they follow it around the world. The first stop for the container was the Chivas distiller in Scotland for a shipment bound for Shanghai, China. Along the way, the box went thru the Suez Canal and BBC did a piece on that too. From time to time we’ll check in on the BOX.

WSJ Interviews Malcolm Gladwell on his new book.

In the thoroughly engaging “Outliers,” author Malcolm Gladwell asserts that success seems to stem as much from context as from personal attributes. Read the review of “Outliers.”

In “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell’s third book, he casts his eye on people who have excelled in their fields — and then analyzes how their lives have been as influenced by serendipity as much as their own talents. His publisher, Little, Brown, has ordered up a large first print run of 640,000 copies. (See review on W10.) Mr. Gladwell, whose two earlier titles, “The Tipping Point” and “Blink,” were national best sellers, asks his readers to question individual success stories. “People don’t rise from nothing,” he writes. “They are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.” The 45-year-old Mr. Gladwell, who lives in New York City, reflects on his new book as well as how he frames his ideas.

Scrappleface says Obama resigned from Senate so he could write a new memoir.

Claiming that the hectic pace of his work in the U.S. Senate has taken its toll, Barack Obama announced today he would resign his senate seat effective Sunday, and take a couple of months off to relax and finish a tell-all memoir. …

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Remember a year ago when Israel bombed a site in Syria’s eastern desert? What did happen there? Speculation from Contentions ties off some loose ends.

A Contentions post on Obama’s contradiction of Polish leadership.

Barack Obama’s miscommunication of plans to move ahead with an American missile defense project in Poland, and his subsequent contradiction of Polish President Lech Kaczynski’s statement, are bigger problems than most are readily admitting. John Bolton, characteristically, calls it like he sees it. In the Wall Street Journal, Bolton writes that Russia’s recent vow to place missile assets in Poland was an act of aggression aimed at Obama and at Kaczynski. Obama’s mistake and disavowal leaves a Polish-American partnership looking very foolish, because Obama “should have understood that foreign leaders, both friends and adversaries, are in a state of high tension.” …

Another Contentions post on what we can expect from the new administration.

Come January, when Barack Obama takes the oath of office as our 44th president and the Democrats formally take possession of two-thirds of our government, many people will wonder just what the Obama administration will do. What will be its priorities? What legislation will become most important?

Those who are even slightly familiar with Obama’s record ought to have a firm grasp of what is to come: whatever Majority Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi think is most important to them will be pushed first.

Obama, in his entire political career, has lived by one overarching philosophy: “go along to get along.” He has never once bucked the leadership of his party, never publicly disagreed with those who hold the reins of the Democratic party, never once put principle ahead of partisanship.

And it certainly has not been for lack of opportunity. Obama came up through the ranks of the Chicago Democratic machine, an institution so ripe with corruption and cronyism and back-room deals and whatnot that only Louisiana, with its storied (and broadly ecumenical) legends of rogues and villains and scoundrels, could hope to rival it. …

Charles Krauthammer writes on a “lemon of a bail-out.”

… With almost 5 million workers supported by the auto industry, Democrats are pressing for a federal rescue. But the problems are obvious.

First, the arbitrariness. Where do you stop? Once you’ve gone beyond the financial sector, every struggling industry will make a claim on the federal treasury. What are the grounds for saying yes or no?

The criteria will inevitably be arbitrary and political. The money will flow preferentially to industries with lines to Capitol Hill and the White House. To the companies heavily concentrated in the districts of committee chairmen. To clout. Is this not precisely the kind of lobby-driven policymaking that Obama ran against?

Second is the sheer inefficiency. Saving Detroit means saving it from bankruptcy. As we have seen with the airlines, bankruptcy can allow operations to continue while helping to shed fatally unsupportable obligations. For Detroit, this means release from ruinous wage deals with their astronomical benefits (the hourly cost of a Big Three worker: $73; of an American worker for Toyota: $48), massive pension obligations and unworkable work rules such as “job banks,” a euphemism for paying vast numbers of employees not to work. …

David Brooks, who drank the Obama Kool-Aid, is now surprised Obama wants to appoint a car czar.

Not so long ago, corporate giants with names like PanAm, ITT and Montgomery Ward roamed the earth. They faded and were replaced by new companies with names like Microsoft, Southwest Airlines and Target. The U.S. became famous for this pattern of decay and new growth. Over time, American government built a bigger safety net so workers could survive the vicissitudes of this creative destruction — with unemployment insurance and soon, one hopes, health care security. But the government has generally not interfered in the dynamic process itself, which is the source of the country’s prosperity.

But this, apparently, is about to change. Democrats from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi want to grant immortality to General Motors, Chrysler and Ford. …

… The second part of Obama’s plan is the creation of an auto czar with vague duties. Other smart people have called for such a czar to reorganize the companies and force the companies to fully embrace green technology and other good things.

That would be great, but if Obama was such a fervent believer in the Chinese model of all-powerful technocrats, he should have mentioned it during the campaign. Are we really to believe there exists a czar omniscient, omnipotent and beneficent enough to know how to fix the Big Three? Who is this deity? Are we to believe that political influence will miraculously disappear, that the czar would have absolute power over unions, management, Congress and the White House? Please. …

Speaking to Brooks, Jennifer Rubin indulges in some “I told you so.”

… Perhaps Brooks missed it, but at every turn during the campaign, Obama gave us plenty of warning that he believes “in the Chinese model of all-powerful technocrats.” Government bureaucrats are going to control lots of things in the Obama administration. They are going to decide which size of business must carry health insurance, and the type of insurance they must have. They are going to decide what type of energy is worth subsidizing, and which projects will get billions in taxpayer funding. They are going to tell the whole world the labor standards they must abide by in order to trade with us. And on it goes. It really isn’t quite fair to say we were not warned. Maybe not on this particular item. But Obama’s penchant for having the “deity” of government command and control a great many things was hard to miss during the campaign.

So what happens if, in January, the Democratic Congress passes, and President Obama signs, an auto bailout? This would show downright economic ignorance on Obama’s part, revealing the new President to be either less bright or less courageous than the pundits assured us he was. We will see if the scales fall from their eyes. But make no mistake: they were warned that this is exactly the sort of thing Obama would favor.

David Harsanyi always knew the government would screw up.

… What is one to make of Democrats enlisting the genius who helped bring about the Freddie and Fannie mess, Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and a Michigan senator, Carl M. Levin, to craft the Detroit bailout legislation? It’s a shame Jack Abramoff is too busy to chip in with his thoughts.

Though Congress already has approved $25 billion in loans to prop up a defective auto industry, one wonders if anyone in Washington has asked if this near- corpse is worth saving in its present form. If it is, surely other corporations and investors will excavate the facets of the business that work.

Yet, if you happen to listen to backers of a car bailout, you may be led to believe that the Tahoe is a pillar of American life. “It is critical that the nation understand this isn’t just a Michigan problem, that one in 10 jobs in the country are impacted by the auto industry,” Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm recently proclaimed in an interview.

We’re still going to buy cars, Madame Governor, but perhaps we will buy them from companies that have the temerity to say “no” to unions and crushing legacy costs associated with them. These corporations may not even be headquartered in Michigan. …

The Economist doesn’t like the idea either.

… Bailing out Detroit would be a bad use of public money. It would be bad in principle, because it would be an open invitation to companies everywhere to apply for aid to survive the recession. Banks qualify for help because the entire economy depends upon their services. They are vulnerable to sudden collapses in confidence that can spread to other banks that are perfectly solvent. A good car company does not face the same threat. And although Detroit employs a network of suppliers, which would suffer if production shuts down, nothing would sap a recovery and job-creating enterprise like locking up badly used resources in poorly performing companies. …

Michael Barone puts a human face or two in his doubts about bailing Detroit.

… As one born and raised in Detroit and its suburbs, who once lived next door to Big Three factory workers and later went to school with the children of Big Three executives, I have mixed feelings about this proposal. My native Michigan is ailing, with the highest unemployment in the nation, plummeting housing values and cascading foreclosures. Its economy, despite the efforts of two previous governors — Democrat Jim Blanchard and Republican John Engler — is dangerously dependent on what used to be called the Big Three and are now called the Detroit Three.

The bankruptcy of one or more of them would deeply impact the personal lives and dash the seemingly reasonable expectations of those who, directly or indirectly, have depended on them. I can’t help but think of these people when the issue is raised.

And yet the implications of a bailout are frightening. The Detroit Three were unprofitable well before the current financial crisis hit, and GM is reportedly hemorrhaging $1 billion a month. The huge cost of lavish employee and retiree health care benefits, negotiated with the United Auto Workers (UAW), makes it impossible for the companies to sell for a profit anything but the big cars and SUVs that, after gas prices hit $4 a gallon last spring, almost no one wants to buy. …

Shorts from National Review.

WSJ piece on doctor’s use of placebos.

About one in two American doctors say they prescribe placebos to their patients, and more than two-thirds believe it permissible to do so, according to a new study from the National Institutes of Health. Surveys of physicians in other countries, including Israel, Denmark and the U.K., have found similar results. These revelations, published last month in the prestigious BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal, seem disquieting, even unethical. After all, when doctors prescribe a medication, we trust them to dispense the real thing.

In their coverage of the new study, the media portrayed placebo use as commonplace — “For Many Doctors, Placebos Are an Answer” said the Washington Post — and even a guilty indulgence: “Many MDs Admit, Privately, Giving Patients Placebos,” as the Star-Ledger put it. It would be no surprise if most people concluded that arrogant, impatient doctors were cheating them or pushing their concerns aside. In this light, the placebo story was simply further evidence that the cherished doctor-patient relationship is becoming a relic of the past.

But before we rush to judgment about placebos and the physicians who use them, let us examine what doctors actually mean when they say they occasionally use placebos and why so many of them find these pseudomedications valuable. …

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Karl Rove looks forward to 2010.

… In a sign Mr. Obama’s victory may have been more personal than partisan or philosophical, Democrats picked up just 10 state senate seats (out of 1,971) and 94 state house seats (out of 5,411). By comparison, when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980, Republicans picked up 112 state senate seats (out of 1,981) and 190 state house seats (out of 5,501).

In the states this year, five chambers shifted from Republican to Democrats, while four shifted from either tied or Democratic control to Republican control. In the South, Mr. Obama had “reverse coattails.” Republicans gained legislative seats across the region. In Tennessee both the house and senate now have GOP majorities for the first time since the Civil War.

This matters because the 2010 Census could allocate as many as four additional congressional districts to Texas, two each to Arizona and Florida, and one district to each of a number of (mostly) red-leaning states, while subtracting seats from (mostly) blue-leaning states like Michigan, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania and, for the first time, California. Redistricting and reapportionment could help tilt the playing field back to the GOP in Congress and the race for the White House by moving seven House seats (and electoral votes) from mostly blue to mostly red states. …

David Harsanyi on coming out of the GOP coma.

The Republican National Committee recently launched a website to give “users the opportunity to discuss their reasons for being a member of the Grand Old Party and what being a Republican means to them.”

It means having their butts kicked — big time. The rest, I assure you, is a profound mystery.

So the battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party is on. Then again, many Democrats probably contest the notion that Republicans own a heart or a soul. On the latter, they may have a point.

The prominent conservative columnist David Brooks recently declared the coming Republican war would pit traditionalists (conservatives who believe Republicans have strayed too far from Reaganism) against reformers, who, he argues, want to modernize, moderate and expand the party.

Traditionalists vs. reformers. If only it were that clinical.

For the past eight years, we have had a Republican Party that was neither excessively conservative nor too moderate, but a party that employed no principles to speak of — unless securing power for power’s sake is now a creed. …

Ann Coulter notes the NY Times had a bigger decline than the GOP.

For the first time in 32 years, Democrats got more than 50 percent of the country to vote for their candidate in a national election, and now they want to lecture the Republican Party on how to win elections. Liberal Republicans have joined them, both groups hoping no one will notice that we just lost this election by running the candidate they chose for us.

For years, New York Times columnist David Brooks has been writing mash notes to John McCain. In November 2007, he quoted an allegedly “smart-alecky” political consultant who exclaimed, in private, “You know, there’s really only one great man running for president this year, and that’s McCain.”

“My friend’s remark,” Brooks somberly intoned, “had the added weight of truth.”

Brooks gushed, “I can tell you there is nobody in politics remotely like him,” and even threw down the gauntlet, saying: “You will never persuade me that he is not among the finest of men.”

That took guts at the Times, where McCain is constantly praised by the op-ed columnists and was endorsed by the paper in the Republican primary. Even Frank Rich has hailed McCain as the “most experienced and principled” of the Republicans and said no one in either party “has more experience in matters of war than the Arizona senator” — the biggest rave issued by Rich since “Rent” opened on Broadway.

They adored McCain at the Times! Does anyone here not see a cluster of bright red flags?

In January this year, Brooks boasted of McCain’s ability to attract “independents.”

And then Election Day arrived, and all the liberals who had spent years praising McCain all voted for Obama. Independents voted for Palin or voted against Obama. No one outside of McCain’s immediate family was specifically voting for McCain.

But now Brooks presumes to lecture Republicans about what to do next time. How about: “Don’t take David Brooks’ advice”? …

Speaking of the NY Times, they report on the Palin/Africa hoax that fooled FOX and MSNBC.

It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent.

Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. “Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,” Mr. Shuster said.

Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.

And the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate hoax that has been going on for months. MSNBC, which quickly corrected the mistake, has plenty of company in being taken in by an Eisenstadt hoax, including The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.

Now a pair of obscure filmmakers say they created Martin Eisenstadt to help them pitch a TV show based on the character. But under the circumstances, why should anyone believe a word they say? ..

Walter Williams on the Obama win.

Despite the fact that President-elect Barack Obama’s vision for our nation leaves a lot to be desired, the fact that he was elected represents a remarkable national achievement. When the War of 1861 ended, neither a former slave nor slave owner would have believed it possible for a black to be elected president in a mere century and a half, if ever. I’m sure that my grandparents, born in the 1880s, or my parents, born in the 1910s, would not have believed it possible for a black to be president and neither did I for most of my 72 years.

That’s not the only progress. If one totaled black earnings, and consider blacks a separate nation, he would have found that in 2005 black Americans earned $644 billion, making them the world’s 16th richest nation. That’s just behind Australia but ahead of Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland. Black Americans have been chief executives of some of the world’s largest and richest cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Gen. Colin Powell, appointed Joint Chief of Staff in October 1989, headed the world’s mightiest military and later became U.S. Secretary of State, and was succeeded by Condoleezza Rice, another black. A few black Americans are among the world’s richest people and many are some of the world’s most famous personalities. These gains, over many difficult hurdles, speak well not only of the intestinal fortitude of a people but of a nation in which these gains were possible. They could not have been achieved anywhere else. …

As if we don’t have enough to worry about, Robert Samuelson raises the spector of deflation.

Until recently, the idea that deflation — the decline of most prices — was possible, let alone a potential economic danger, seemed outlandish. If anything, inflation was the threat. Led by rising oil and food prices, it was increasing in most countries. But in the past two months, deflation has suddenly become conceivable, and, though still a long shot, it’s much more menacing than most people realize. The most urgent economic task for Barack Obama and other world leaders is to prevent the long shot from happening.

A mild deflation — like a mild inflation — would be barely noticeable, and even pleasurable. Who doesn’t like lower prices? But beyond a few percentage points, deflation can create economic havoc by forcing debtors to repay loans in more expensive money and causing consumers to postpone purchases. In the Great Depression, deflation reigned. Consumer prices fell about a quarter from 1929 to 1933. Spending collapsed. Supply swamped demand, driving prices down. By 1933, manufacturing output had dropped 39 percent and joblessness had reached 25 percent.

It’s this history that makes deflation terrifying. Obama and his fellow leaders should worry. Since mid-September, economic conditions have deteriorated badly. …

However, Carpe Diem has a point about the media’s unemployment hyperbole.

… So before we make exaggerated comparisons to the 1930s when the unemployment rate peaked at 25.6%, maybe we should more realistically be making comparisons to the more recent double-digit jobless rates of the 1980s and the 7.8% rate in 1992. And we’re not even close to those rates yet. …

John Tierney posts on Michael Crichton’s question.

In memory of Michael Crichton, who died Tuesday, let us consider a question that preocuppied him: How do we separate science from religion in environmentalism? As a spinner of sci-fi horror stories himself, he had a finely honed skepticism for the apocalyptic scenarios presented by environmentalists. In a speech in 2003, he argued that environmentalism was a modern remapping of Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths:

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe. …

Q and O has details on the cash collapse at the New York Times.

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Camille Paglia is out with her monthly column.

… Given that Obama had served on a Chicago board with Ayers and approved funding of a leftist educational project sponsored by Ayers, one might think that the unrepentant Ayers-Dohrn couple might be of some interest to the national media. But no, reporters have been too busy playing mini-badminton with every random spitball about Sarah Palin, who has been subjected to an atrocious and at times delusional level of defamation merely because she has the temerity to hold pro-life views.

How dare Palin not embrace abortion as the ultimate civilized ideal of modern culture? How tacky that she speaks in a vivacious regional accent indistinguishable from that of Western Canada! How risible that she graduated from the State University of Idaho and not one of those plush, pampered commodes of received opinion whose graduates, in their rush to believe the worst about her, have demonstrated that, when it comes to sifting evidence, they don’t know their asses from their elbows.

Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology — contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and independent thought. One would have to look back to the Eisenhower 1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice.

I like Sarah Palin, and I’ve heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is — and quite frankly, I think the people who don’t see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn’t speak the King’s English — big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns — that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World.

As for the Democrats who sneered and howled that Palin was unprepared to be a vice-presidential nominee — what navel-gazing hypocrisy! What protests were raised in the party or mainstream media when John Edwards, with vastly less political experience than Palin, got John Kerry’s nod for veep four years ago? And Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, for whom I lobbied to be Obama’s pick and who was on everyone’s short list for months, has a record indistinguishable from Palin’s. Whatever knowledge deficit Palin has about the federal bureaucracy or international affairs (outside the normal purview of governors) will hopefully be remedied during the next eight years of the Obama presidencies.

The U.S. Senate as a career option? What a claustrophobic, nitpicking comedown for an energetic Alaskan — nothing but droning committees and incestuous back-scratching. No, Sarah Palin should stick to her governorship and just hit the rubber-chicken circuit, as Richard Nixon did in his long haul back from political limbo following his California gubernatorial defeat in 1962. Step by step, the mainstream media will come around, wipe its own mud out of its eyes, and see Palin for the populist phenomenon that she is.

Holman Jenkins on the auto bail-out.

… The media have been terrible in explaining how the homegrown car companies landed in their present fix, when other U.S. manufacturers (Boeing, GE, Caterpillar) manage to survive and thrive in global competition. Critics beat up Detroit for building SUVs and pickups (which earn profits) and scrimping on fuel-sippers (which don’t). They call for management’s head (fine — but irrelevant).

These pre-mortems miss the point. Critics might more justifiably flay the Big Three for failing long ago to seek a showdown with the UAW to break its labor monopoly. In truth, though, politicians have repeatedly intervened to prevent the crisis that would finally settle matters.

The Carter administration rushed in with loan guarantees to keep Chrysler out of bankruptcy. The Reagan administration imposed quotas on Japanese imports to prop up GM. Both parties colluded in the fuel-economy loophole that allowed the passenger “truck” boom that kept Detroit’s head above water during the ’90s.

Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi now want to bail out Detroit once more, while mandating that the Big Three build “green” cars. If consumers really wanted green cars, no mandate would be necessary. Washington here is just marching Detroit deeper into an unsustainable business model, requiring ever more interventions in the future.

The Detroit Three will not bounce back until they’re free to buy labor in a competitive marketplace as their rivals do. In the meantime, private money, even in bankruptcy, almost certainly will not be available to refloat GM and colleagues. Nationalization, with or without a Chapter 11 filing, is probably inevitable — but still won’t make them competitive. …

There is much that is silly in Megan McArdle’s panning of a possible auto bail-out, but here and there, a gem.

Why bail out Wall Street and not GM, demand many people.  Why do we care about bankers and not ordinary folks?

I think this misses the point of the financial bailout.  Whether or not it works–and I sure hope it will–I don’t think very many people wanted to bail out the financial industry because we were so moved by the plight of those plucky traders on the mortgage desk.  We bailed them out not because they deserved it–they didn’t–but because if we didn’t, there was a very big risk that they would take us down with them.

This is not generalizeable to other industries.  Money is weird.  Finance is weird.  There is no other industry that is, first, so tightly coupled, and second, severely affects every other industry in the country.  Moreover, there are few other industries that are so vulnerable to panic.  Strategic injections of capital can actually salvage operations that are otherwise sound.

GM’s operations are not otherwise sound.  They have been headed for this moment since 1973.  Conservatives blame legacy costs, and liberals blame management.  They’re both right.  GM’s legacy costs are crazy.  So is the UAW leadership, which, goaded by the retirees, is knowingly driving the company into bankruptcy rather than negotiate sustainable deals. …

John Stossel reminds us of the Road to Serfdom.

It’s exciting that the world is so excited about Barack Obama. I’m excited, too. That he achieved the presidency says something good about America.

But the excitement also frightens me. It reinforces the worst impulse of the media and political class: the assumption that all progress comes from Washington. In a free society, with constitutionally limited government, the president would be a mere executive who sees to it that predictable and understandable laws are enforced. But sadly, the prestige and power of the presidency have grown, and liberty has contracted. That is not something to celebrate.

The infatuated chattering classes now demand “action” on the economy. They use positive words like “bold steps.” The insufferable New York Times suggests the choice is “between a big-bang strategy of pressing aggressively on multiple fronts versus a more pragmatic, step-by-step approach …. ” There is endless talk about how FDR ended the Great Depression and how Obama will apply similar “stimulus.”

Please. FDR’s “bold” moves didn’t end the Depression. They prolonged it by discouraging capital investment. Hoover and Roosevelt turned what might have been a brief downturn into 10 years of double-digit unemployment.

Now Obama says, “we don’t have a moment to lose,” and he and the Democrats insist that government must unionize most of America by passing “card check” and taxpayers must throw even more money at American automakers.

This is the conceit of what Thomas Sowell calls “the anointed”. The politicians know best how our money should be spent. The “road to serfdom” is paved with such good intentions. …

Famous hunter announces open of RINO season. Ted Nugent in Human Events.

Like any entity that abandons basic quality control, political parties rot from within. It happened to the Democrats long ago, and now has become the case with the Republican Party, which has strayed from its conservative underpinnings.

There are really only four things I have a strong aversion to: unloaded guns, dull knives, banjos, and Republicans in Name Only (RINOs).

The Nugent family simply doesn’t allow any of those things in our lives.

RINOs are Fedzilla punks who feign support for conservative principles only when it serves their political interest. RINOs are also known for their moderate positions such as supporting tax increases, federal “bailouts”, “comprehensive immigration reform”, advocating more counterproductive gun control that guarantee more innocent victims, opposing the death penalty, and growing and sustaining Fedzilla and all its toxic mongrels by going along with the liberals. RINOs have forgotten President Ronald Maximus Regan’s admonition that government is the problem, not the solution. …

Michael Crichton’s legacy from the Weekly Standard.

Bestselling author and TV producer Michael Crichton, who died of cancer Tuesday at the age of 66, had an ambivalent view of science but an unfailingly benevolent attitude toward humanity. His writings are particularly important for having brought an intelligent, nuanced view on science to a popular culture much more inclined toward ignorance and political shibboleths in its treatment of scientific issues.

Known for his hugely popular thriller novels dealing with scientific subjects and for his TV series ER, Crichton, an M.D., infused his works with a powerful sense of scientific investigation as an adventure and the world as a place of real wonders.

In Crichton’s world, knowledge is always a good thing, but what people do with it is often foolish and enormously destructive, perhaps most famously in Jurassic Park, where a scheme to recreate dinosaurs for entertainment goes horribly awry. …

Short history of the bagel from Slate.

When my family first moved to Larchmont, N.Y., in 1946, my father had a feeling that the neighbors living behind us were Jewish. In those days, you didn’t broadcast your religion, so he devised a plan that would reveal their cultural background. We would go to the Bronx and bring back some bagels. If our neighbors knew what the rolls were, they were Jewish. If they stared at them in bewilderment, we would know they were not. To my father’s delight, as soon as our neighbors saw the bagels, they recognized them. Nowadays, dad’s devious plan to determine a neighbor’s religion wouldn’t work. After all, who doesn’t know what a bagel is? But what are the origins of this once-mysterious bread, and what happened between 1946 and today that turned the bagel into a trans-cultural and all-American breakfast bun? …

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Cafe Hayek divides our country into two groups.

And Independent.Org says one of the groups knows the truth of Twain’s dictum; “ It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”

Driving yesterday past the gasoline station where I usually buy fuel, I noticed that the price of the lowest grade of unleaded–the one I buy–was down to $2.09 per gallon. Registering this perception as a little piece of good news in an unhappy world, I drove on.

Later, however, I began to mull over the altogether unsurprising fact that, to my knowledge, Congress has held no televised hearings to look into the tremendous fall in fuel prices since last summer, when I paid more than $4.00 per gallon for a while. Oil company executives have not been summoned to Washington so that they can be applauded for sloughing off the greed that (allegedly) impelled them to charge so much for their products in June and July. No member of Congress has apologized for calling the businessmen there last spring to berate and threaten them while angrily mouthing sentiments that can only be described as idiotic.

These congressional show trials, which are held whenever gasoline prices rise substantially, always adhere to a tight protocol and a traditional script for each of the actors. …

Particularly timely WSJ Op-Ed from the Abby and Steve Thernstrom on the need for the repeal of the Voting Rights Act.

… In fact, racially gerrymandered districts are an impediment to political integration at all levels of government. Herding African-Americans into “max-black” districts forces black candidates to run in heavily gerrymandered districts. The candidates who emerge from those districts are, unsurprisingly, typically not the most well-positioned to appeal to a broader swath of the electorate.

Black candidates can win in multi-ethnic and even majority-white districts with color-blind voting. Mr. Obama should make it a priority to give more aspiring black politicians the opportunity to stand before white (and Latino and Asian and other ethnic) voters. He won, so can they.

American voters have turned a racial corner. The law should follow in their footsteps.

Froma Harrop says “card check” is one campaign promise Obama should break.

The first campaign promise Barack Obama should break is to push through the Employee Free Choice Act. That harmless sounding piece of legislation would let union organizers do an end run around secret-ballot elections: Companies would have to recognize a union if most workers signed cards in support of it.

We’re not children here. We know how those majorities can be reached. There’s repeated harassment, bullying and more inventive tactics, such as getting workers drunk, then sliding sign-up cards under their noses. Meanwhile, any strong-armed tactics by employers can be dealt with.

Unclear is why unions even want to go there. Their decline is one reason for the falling fortunes of American workers, particularly those without college educations. Unions have an interesting product to sell. Surely, they can persuade workers to support them in the privacy of a voting booth. That’s how Obama and the enhanced Democratic majority in Congress got where they are.

Former Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern, a pro-labor liberal, has come out against the so-called card-check provision. He calls it “disturbing and undemocratic.” …

Peter Hitchens on waving goodbye to the “our last best hope on earth.”

Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell – or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.

The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something.

I really don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts.

It already has all the signs of such a thing. The newspapers which recorded Obama’s victory have become valuable relics. You may buy Obama picture books and Obama calendars and if there isn’t yet a children’s picture version of his story, there soon will be.

Proper books, recording his sordid associates, his cowardly voting record, his astonishingly militant commitment to unrestricted abortion and his blundering trip to Africa, are little-read and hard to find. …

WSJ editors ask if Barack and the Dems are going to pay off Michigan unions bailing out Detroit.

… Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid met last week with company and union officials, and they later sent a letter urging Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to bestow cash from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (Tarp) on the companies. Barack Obama implied at his Friday press conference that he too favors some kind of taxpayer rescue of Detroit, though no doubt he’d like to have President Bush’s signature on the check so he won’t have to take full political responsibility.

We hope Messrs. Bush and Paulson just say no. The Tarp was intended to save the financial system from collapse, not to be a honey pot for any industry running short of cash. The financial panic has hit Detroit hard, but its problems go back decades and are far deeper than reduced access to credit among car buyers. As a political matter, the Bush Administration is also long past the point where it might get any credit for helping Detroit. But it will earn the scorn of taxpayers if it refuses to set some limits on access to the Tarp. If Democrats want to change the rules next year, let them do it on their own political dime. …

And they note Henry Waxman is leading the Dems “night of the long knives” as they purge their ranks.

The champagne is barely off the ice and Democrats are already celebrating their new majorities by punishing a few heretical colleagues. In almost every sense, John Dingell and Joe Lieberman are loyal Democrats. But Mr. Dingell is holding down the party’s right flank on energy, and Mr. Lieberman in foreign affairs. Now they’re targets, and the retribution speaks volumes about the direction of liberal politics.

California Democrat Henry Waxman kicked things off the morning after Barack Obama’s victory, with an announcement that he will seek the chairmanship of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee. The post is currently held by Mr. Dingell, the bulldog Michigander who next year will become the longest-serving Member in U.S. history. In Congressional physics, seniority is gravity, which alone makes Mr. Waxman’s challenge extraordinary. …

Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals.

… During the 1930s, some of the leading intellectuals in America condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model— all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large exporter of food.

New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for telling the intelligentsia what they wanted to hear— that claims of starvation in the Ukraine were false.

After British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge reported from the Ukraine on the massive deaths from starvation there, he was ostracized after returning to England and unable to find a job.

More than half a century later, when the archives of the Soviet Union were finally opened up under Mikhail Gorbachev, it turned out that about six million people had died in that famine— about the same number as the people killed in Hitler’s Holocaust. …

Environmental Graffiti posts on Russia’s 1908 Tunguska event.

… Dubbed the Tunguska Event, or Tunguska Explosion, because of the location of the blast in the Tunguska Valley of Russia, the event would have registered a devastating 5.0 on the Richter Scale, had it been invented at the time. And had it occurred about five hours later in the day, the Earth’s rotation would have guaranteed that instead of killing 1,000 reindeer, the blazing object would have completely wiped out St Petersburg. …

Dilbert finds the recession’s bright side.

… As painful as this recession is likely to become, everyone agrees that sometimes you have to shake the rug to get all the crap out of it. Economies don’t grow in straight lines.

It’s expensive to travel anywhere, but on the other hand, the new season of 24 is almost here. I don’t need to go to faraway places and meet people when I can sit on my couch and watch Jack Bauer shoot those people.

I remember driving home in 1989 and thinking I had a flat tire because the car went all wobbly. I pulled over and discovered that my tires were fine; the earth was moving. It was the Loma Prieta Earthquake, and I soon discovered my apartment in shambles. But a funny thing happened. All of my neighbors were outside, stunned. We talked. We shared stories. We bonded. It was a strangely good time. And I felt connected to people at a deeper level than ever before. Shared disaster does that. …

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According to Scott Rasmussen, a noted pollster, Reaganism is not dead.

Barack Obama won the White House by campaigning against an unpopular incumbent in a time of economic anxiety and lingering foreign policy concerns. He offered voters an upbeat message, praised the nation as a land of opportunity, promised tax cuts to just about everyone, and overcame doubts about his experience with a strong performance in the presidential debates.

Does this sound familiar? It should. Mr. Obama followed the approach that worked for Ronald Reagan. His victory confirmed that voters still embrace the guiding beliefs of the Reagan era.

During Reagan’s campaign, the nation suffered from high unemployment and high inflation. This time around, data from the Rasmussen Reports Daily Presidential Tracking Poll showed that Mr. Obama took command of the race during the 10 days following the collapse of Lehman Brothers — when the Wall Street meltdown hit Main Street. Before that event John McCain was leading nationally by three percentage points. Ten days later Mr. Obama was up by five and never relinquished his lead. …

David Warren says soon Obama’s mettle will be tested.

America elected her demagogue Tuesday, after a fine rhetorical show before massed crowds, in which the candidate showed great discipline in avoiding substantial commitments, and simply painted the air with exhilarating, meaningless phrases. After successive chameleon changes in political colouration, and the successful moulting of his various radical associations, “O-ba-ma!” ended the campaign posing as a centrist — with a thick wad of reassuringly conventional Democrat policies, and one of the oldest of the old-style politicians as his running mate.

The election was no blow-out, and the result showed the same alignments across the U.S. electoral map as in the last several elections, with just a couple points seasonal swing to the left; but still sufficient balance to allow a swing back at the next electoral juncture.

Nor did it vindicate the international media declaration that, “America has moved beyond race.” If you look at the exit polls, the people who said they had voted on the basis of race, or that race was a major factor in their decision, were overwhelmingly voting for Obama. And if you add them up, they correspond approximately to his victory margins, not only nationally but in each swing state. In that sense, one could plausibly argue it was the most racist election in U.S. history. Moreover, it was an election in which 97 per cent of black voters voted for the visibly black candidate. Puh-lease don’t tell me America has moved beyond race. …

Speaking of Obama, John Derbyshire posts at the Corner.

… The sputtering-Left component of my email bag took particular exception to my calling Obama “shallow, ignorant, and self-obsessed.” How dare I? Well, let’s unpack it.

Shallow: Have you ever heard Obama say anything interesting? Me neither. I saw him on the telly the other day fielding a question about illegal immigrants. He said something like: “We can’t deport ten million people. We need to find a way to bring them out of the shadows. Thet should have to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for citizenship.” Now, here is an issue that’s of major concern to millions of Americans, who feel they are losing the nation they grew up in. It’s been argued for years at high levels of discourse, with many fine books written. (Most recently, one by our own Mark Krikorian.) Yet Obama can address it only with the tiredest, most threadbare clichés of the open-borders Left. It’s plain he has never given a moment’s real thought to the issue. Shallow.

Ignorant: Obama strikes me as a very intelligent person, but with that intelligence narrowly focused. He has spent his adult life among the tiny sub-class of black Americans who have grown wealthy, or hope to, via the affirmative-action rackets. He has never ventured outside that milieu, and I seriously doubt he knows much about life outside it. I doubt, for example, that he knows anything much at all about business, the military, science, work (other than paper-shuffling), or high culture. I’ll be glad to be proved wrong, but nothing I’ve heard him say, nor my (admittedly incomplete) acquaintance with what he’s written, refutes that.

Self-obsessed: A guy who publishes a 464-page autobiography at age 34 is self-obsessed, what can I tell ya? If he publishes a second autobiography at age 45, you can print “self-obsessed” in capital letters. (Yeah, I know, it’s a “campaign book.” The content is mainly autobiographical, though.) …

In a Sun-Times column dated five years ago, Mark Steyn tells us what it was really like the last time the media worshipped a president. And, he reminds us of the courage of George Bush.

… History is selective. We remember moments, and, because that moment in Dallas blazes so vividly, everything around it fades to a gray blur. So here, from the archives, is an alternative 40th anniversary from November 1963:

8 a.m. Nov. 2: Troops enter a Catholic church in Saigon and arrest two men. They’re tossed into the back of an armored personnel carrier and driven up the road a little ways to a railroad crossing. The M-113 stops, the pair are riddled with bullets and their mutilated corpses taken to staff HQ for inspection by the army’s commanders. One of the deceased is Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam. The other is Ngo Dinh Nhu, his brother and chief adviser.

Back in the White House, President Kennedy gets the cable and is stunned. When Washington had given tacit approval to the coup, the deal was that Diem was supposed to be offered asylum in the United States. But something had gone wrong. I use “gone wrong” in the debased sense in which a drug deal that turns into a double murder is said to have “gone wrong.”

Kennedy had known Diem for the best part of a decade. If he felt bad about his part in the murder of an ally, he didn’t feel bad for long: Within three weeks, he too was dead. Looked at coolly, there seems something faintly ridiculous about cooing dreamily over the one brief shining moment of a slain head of state who only a month earlier had set in motion the events leading to the slaying of another head of state. The noble ideals of Camelot did not extend to the State Department or the CIA. …

Noemie Emery says we should watch and wait.

Refusing to take Ronald Reagan’s famous advice–don’t just do something, stand there–conservative machers are all in a swivet, reading the leaves of the 2008 verdict, plotting to pick off this or that set of voters, opining on what it all means. Actually, just standing there seems like a pretty good option, at least for the moment, and perhaps for the next few weeks and months. Plans made right now may turn out to be useless. There are too many things we don’t know.

We don’t know yet what happened on Tuesday, and what kind of win it will be: a pivotal one, like 1932 and 1980; or a transient success–1964, 1976, 1988, 2004–that at the moment appeared monumental, but four years later had turned out not to be. How much of the glow now surrounding the Democrats is due to themselves, and how much to the nature of Barack Obama, who has a personality that comes along twice in a century, and how long will this last? Which Obama will turn up to govern, the man of moderate temperament, or the functional liberal, whose record is way left of center? …

Michael Barone thinks Obama’s win was not a win for a left turn.

… Do Obama and the Democrats have a mandate? Obama got a larger percentage than any other Democrat since 1964, and Democrats have congressional majorities comparable to those in Bill Clinton’s first two years. But their policies of protectionism and greater taxes on high earners seem ill-suited to a country facing a recession (see Hoover, Herbert). The public fisc does not appear to be overflowing enough to finance refundable tax credits, government health insurance or universal pre-kindergarten.

The half of the electorate that doesn’t remember the 1970s may be more open to big government than those of us who do. But “open to” does not equal “demand.” The decisive shift of public opinion came when the financial crisis hit. McCain approached it like a fighter pilot, denouncing Wall Street, suspending his campaign, threatening to skip the first debate. Obama approached it like a law professor, cool and detached. Voters preferred law professor to fighter pilot. This was a triumph of temperament, not policy. …

Couple of shorts from John Fund. First on the strategery of Alaska voters. Second, the accuracy of pollsters this year.

… But the real reason for his (Ted Stevens) survival appears to be tactical voting on the part of the state’s voters. GOP sources tell me word was spread that the only way to keep the seat in the Republican column and prevent a possible 60-seat filibuster-proof Democratic majority was for voters to hold their noses and re-elect Mr. Stevens. Mr. Stevens himself implied as much in the race’s only debate, held after his conviction. …

Writing in Human Events, Ted Nugent wishes Happy Birthday to the Marines.

From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, all across America and in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever America is being defended,  the world’s most exclusive gun club is the celebrating its 233 birthday today.

Born in a roughneck Philadelphia bar in 1775 on a dare to surpass standard warrior excellence, the United States Marines Corps has distinguished itself over its history as the finest military force the world has ever seen. Do not point the US Marines Corps at anything you do not wish conquer. They are the pointy end of America’s spear. …

Al Dente Blog, (where serious gastronomy meets culinary calamity), posts on a race in CO where Bacon was way ahead of Fries. Which prompted this comment;

Obviously bacon is better. It is naturally bad for you, whereas fries, which are just potatoes, have to be fried to be bad for you.

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Mark Steyn is not convinced we’re a “center-right” country.

… “The greatest dangers to liberty,” wrote Justice Brandeis, “lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”

Now who does that remind you of?

Ha! Trick question! Never mind Obama, it’s John McCain. He encroached on our liberties with the constitutional abomination of McCain-Feingold. Well-meaning but without understanding, he proposed that the federal government buy up all these junk mortgages so that people would be able to stay in “their” homes. And this is the “center-right” candidate? It’s hard for Republicans to hammer Obama as a socialist when their own party’s nationalizing the banks and its presidential nominee is denouncing the private sector for putting profits before patriotism. That’s why Joe the Plumber struck a chord: He briefly turned a one-and-a-half party election back into a two-party choice again. …

… Slowly, remorselessly, government metastasized to the point where it now seems entirely normal for Peggy Joseph of Sarasota, Fla., to vote for Obama because “I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage.” …

Michael Gerson on the decency of George Bush.

… I have seen President Bush show more loyalty than he has been given, more generosity than he has received. I have seen his buoyancy under the weight of malice and his forgiveness of faithless friends. Again and again, I have seen the natural tug of his pride swiftly overcome by a deeper decency — a decency that is privately engaging and publicly consequential.

Before the Group of Eight summit in 2005, the White House senior staff overwhelmingly opposed a new initiative to fight malaria in Africa for reasons of cost and ideology — a measure designed to save hundreds of thousands of lives, mainly of children under 5. In the crucial policy meeting, one person supported it: the president of the United States, shutting off debate with a moral certitude that others have criticized. I saw how this moral framework led him to an immediate identification with the dying African child, the Chinese dissident, the Sudanese former slave, the Burmese women’s advocate. It is one reason I will never be cynical about government — or about President Bush.

For some, this image of Bush is so detached from their own conception that it must be rejected. That is, perhaps, understandable. But it means little to me. Because I have seen the decency of George W. Bush.

David Harsanyi has expectations.

… Anyway, Obama has promised five million new, high-wage jobs in renewable energy and to stop global warming so we won’t need oil for long. Obama promises more nuclear power, as well — after some polling data assured him we like the sound of it. Obama also has promised that the “central” focus of his new nuclear policy will be “eliminating all nuclear weapons.”

It’s a little unclear if he means our nuclear weapons or the arsenal of (soon enough) Iran, Pakistan and Russia. No worries; Obama has promised to have a face-to-face and give these folks a what-for should anyone misbehave.

So, you see, we’re all here for you, man. Americans and the world. We can’t let you forget your promises. Waiting won’t be easy. It’s difficult to be patient when you sit on the cusp of Utopia.

Please don’t mess with expectations; just bring it on home.

John Fund sees off Michael Crichton.

Michael Crichton, writer of such best-sellers as “The Andromeda Strain” and “Jurassic Park,” was far more than a great storyteller. His books tackled meaty issues such as medical malpractice, airline safety, biotechnology, sexual discrimination, and global warming.

That last topic produced perhaps his most controversial book, “State of Fear,” a novel that imagined a conspiracy to exaggerate natural disasters in order to keep the developed world on edge and unsettled. A radical environmental charity stands to benefit most from this “state of fear,” and the plot’s protagonist is an idealistic young lawyer named Peter Evans who learns that the cause he has devoted his life to is rotten to the core. …

Crichton tells us how aliens caused global warming.

Townhall column on the election lessons of Michael Crichton.

Celebrated author and veritable Renaissance man Michael Crichton died this week, and upon reflection his passing brings up some interesting thoughts on Barack Obama’s historical election. Allow me to pontificate, if you will.

Crichton and Obama actually have much in common. Crichton was born in Chicago, and also attended Harvard, both for his undergraduate work and for medical school. Crichton was incredibly well-learned, with a vast knowledge base and an exceptional intellectual pedigree, and viewed American universities as important places of cultural exchange. And he too was somewhat politically controversial.

But the similarities end there. Michael Crichton was a noted libertarian. He spoke often and eloquently about the dangers of a speculative and undisciplined media, the pseudo-religious overtones of the left’s environmental fanaticism, and a perceived rejection of scientific evidence by global-warming alarmists.

Interesting post in Volokh by Todd Zywicki on the 2012 Palin prospects.

This is pure speculation, but if I had to guess, I’d predict Sarah Palin will not run for President in 2012. For personal reasons. Let’s face it–a person with 5 kids, including a special-needs child, can take off two months of her life and run for Vice-President. And let’s further face it–Vice-President is not that hard of a job. But taking off two years away from home to trudge around Iowa and New Hampshire? Honestly, I don’t know why anyone would want to do that–I read that Chris Dodd actually enrolled his kids in Iowa schools when he was running for President. That’s pretty weird, if you ask me. You have to be relatively unusual person (ok, “sick” is the word I’m really thinking of) to undertake the project of running for President. …

Zywicki also posts on the CA reactions to the gay marriage referendum. A Mormon temple in Westwood was targeted by hundreds of gays. Some carrying signs saying, “No More Mr. Nice Gay.” How cool was that?

So let me get this right–those who are upset about the passage of Proposition 8 in California have decided that the thing to do is to pick on the Mormons? So one marginalized group decides that the way to go is to vent their outrage against another marginalized group in society? Unbelievable.

Relying on Exit Polls are dicey, of course. But according to the Exit Polls, the decisive difference in Proposition 8′s passage was two reasons. First, 70% of black voters supported it. There were 10,357,002 votes case on Prop 8. The winning margin was 492,830 votes. And they were 10% of the electorate. So that means there were 1,035,700 votes cast by black voters. That right there provided a difference of 414,280 votes. If I’m doing my math right, that is 84% of the winning margin. There was an article in the Washington Post on this today. A majority of Hispanic voters also supported Proposition 8. …

Which brings us to Thomas Sowell on affirmative action and gay marriage.

… Marriage has existed for centuries and, until recent times, it has always meant a union between a man and a woman. Over those centuries, a vast array of laws has grown up, all based on circumstances that arise in unions between a man and a woman.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that law has not been based on logic but on experience. To apply a mountain of laws based specifically on experience with relations between a man and a woman to a different relationship where sex differences are not involved would be like applying the rules of baseball to football.

The argument that current marriage laws “discriminate” against homosexuals confuses discrimination against people with making distinctions among different kinds of behavior.

All laws distinguish among different kinds of behavior. What other purpose does law have?

While people may be treated the same, all their behaviors are not. Laws that forbid bicycles from being ridden on freeways obviously have a different effect on people who have bicycles but no cars.

But this is not discrimination against a person. The cyclist who gets into a car is just as free to drive on the freeway as anybody else. …

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Proud Pickerhead Papa picks #6 child for the lead. Liza, who writes a bimonthly column, is a junior at Virginia Tech. Click on the About section at the site to find her in pic from 1997 Alaska cruise.

Yes, they can. And they did. We Republicans lost big in this presidential election, and now we should respectfully hand over the bragging rights to Democrats, with hopes of snagging them back again in four years. Despite the significant loss McCain and the Republican Party experienced Tuesday, we can argue that under the circumstances it could’ve been a lot worse. And for that reason, we can’t be completely devastated.

From the beginning of this race, the media favored Democratic candidates. Actually, from what seems as the beginning of time, the media has favored Democratic candidates. During the primary season, there were 500 more stories printed in the mainstream press about the three leading Democratic candidates than there were for their Republican counterparts. …

George Bush is defended in a WSJ Op-Ed by a former member of Kerry’s 2004 legal team.

… Just as Americans have gained perspective on how challenging Truman’s presidency was in the wake of World War II, our country will recognize the hardship President Bush faced these past eight years — and how extraordinary it was that he accomplished what he did in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.

Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty — a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.

National Review symposium on where people who love freedom go from here.

Well that wasn’t good news for the Right, last night! National Review Online asked some regulars to address: “What happened to the Republican party Tuesday? Who’s to blame?” …

Jonah Goldberg
When asked if he’d run for office again, Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York City, responded: “No! The people of New York threw me out of office, and now they must be punished.” The American voters threw out the Republican party, and they were largely right to. At least in the sense that the GOP deserves to be punished. The problem is that the Democrats do not deserve to win. More on that at NRO later — and by later, I mean the next 2 to 8 years.

I think McCain did better than pretty much any other Republican candidate could have. But I think the McCain campaign didn’t do as well as they could have. I think McCain could have won. They blew an amazing number of opportunities. They mishandled Sarah Palin horribly. They were obsessed with unfair media coverage while doing very little to take advantage of it or even do anything serious about it. They inherited an enormous number of problems not of their own making, but they made even more problems for themselves than they needed to.

There will be much more said about this, but in short I think John McCain biggest problem was that the GOP had lost any sense of intellectual or ideological definition and John McCain didn’t bother to offer any definition of his own until helped by Joe the Plumber. And by then it was too little too late. …

Ann Coulter has a point of view.

… This was such an enormous Democratic year that even John Murtha won his congressional seat in Pennsylvania after calling his constituents racists. It turns out they’re not racists — they’re retards. Question: What exactly would one have to say to alienate Pennsylvanians? That Joe Paterno should retire?

Apparently Florida voters didn’t mind Obama’s palling around with Palestinian activist Rashid Khalidi and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, either. There must be a whole bunch of retired Pennsylvania Jews down there.

Have you ever noticed that whenever Democrats lose presidential elections, they always blame it on the personal qualities of their candidate? Kerry was a dork, Gore was a stiff, Dukakis was a bloodless android, Mondale was a sad sack.

This blame-the-messenger thesis allows Democrats to conclude that their message was fine — nothing should be changed! The American people are clamoring for higher taxes, big government, a defeatist foreign policy, gay marriage, the whole magilla. It was just this particular candidate’s personality.

Republicans lost this presidential election, and I don’t blame the messenger; I blame the message. How could Republicans go after B. Hussein Obama (as he is now known) on planning to bankrupt the coal companies when McCain supports the exact same cap and trade policies and earnestly believes in global warming?

How could we go after Obama for his illegal alien aunt and for supporting driver’s licenses for illegal aliens when McCain fanatically pushed amnesty along with his good friend Teddy Kennedy? …

Walter Williams discusses the credsis and capitalism.

… First, let’s establish what laissez-faire capitalism is. Broadly defined, it is an economic system based on private ownership and control over of the means of production. Under laissez-faire capitalism, government activity is restricted to the protection of the individual’s rights against fraud, theft and the initiation of physical force.

Professor George Reisman has written a very insightful article on his blog titled “The Myth that Laissez Faire Is Responsible for Our Financial Crisis.” You can decide whether we have in an unregulated laissez-faire economy. There are 15 cabinet departments, nine of which control various aspects of the U.S. economy. They are the Departments of: Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Education, Energy, Labor, Agriculture, Commerce, and Interior. In addition, there is the alphabet soup cluster of federal agencies such as: the IRS, the FRB and FDIC, the EPA, FDA, SEC, CFTC, NLRB, FTC, FCC, FERC, FEMA, FAA, CAA, INS, OHSA, CPSC, NHTSA, EEOC, BATF, DEA, NIH, and NASA.

Here’s my question to you: Can one be sane and at the same time hold that ours is an unregulated laissez-faire economy? Better yet, tell me what a businessman, or for that matter you, can do that does not involve some kind of government regulation. A businessman must seek government approval for the minutest detail of his operation or face the wrath of some government agency, whether it’s at the federal, state or local level. Just about everything we buy or use has some kind of government dictate involved whether it’s package labeling, how many gallons of water to flush toilets or what pharmaceuticals can be prescribed. You say, “Williams, there’s a reason for this government control.” Yes, there’s a reason for everything but that does not change the fact that there is massive government control over our economy. …

Daily Express, UK on Brit naturalist banned from BBC since he refused to go along with global warming ideas.

FOR YEARS David Bellamy was one of the best known faces on TV. A respected botanist and the author of 35 books, he had presented around 400 programmes over the years and was appreciated by audiences for his boundless enthusiasm. Yet for more than 10 years he has been out ot the limelight, shunned by bosses at the BBC where he made his name, as well as fellow scientists and environmentalists. His crime? Bellamy says he doesn’t believe in man-made global warming. Here he reveals why – and the price he has paid for not toeing the orthodox line on climate change. …

IBD editors say it’s been a bad year for global warming alarmists.

… As the British House of Commons debated a climate-change bill that pledged the United Kingdom to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2050, London was hit by its first October snow since 1922.

Apparently Mother Nature wasn’t paying attention. The British people, however, are paying attention to reality. A poll found that 60% of them doubt the claims that global warming is both man-made and urgent.

Elsewhere, the Swiss lowlands last month received the most snow for any October since records began. Zurich got 20 centimeters, breaking the record of 14 centimeters set in 1939. Ocala, Fla., experienced its second-lowest October temperature since 1850.

October temperatures fell to record lows in Oregon as well. On Oct. 10, Boise, Idaho, got the earliest snow in its history 1.7 inches. That beat the old record by seven-tenths of an inch and one day on the calendar. …

The Economist reports on promising cancer treatments using nanoparticles.

JOURNALISTS sometimes joke that the ideal headline for a science story would be something like “Black holes cure cancer”. Sadly, it will never happen. “Nanotechnology cures cancer”, though, is a pretty good runner-up, and that might just turn out to be true.

In fact, nanoparticles (ie, objects whose dimensions are measured in nanometres, or billionths of a metre) have been used to treat cancer for some time. But these treatments are mainly clever ways of packaging existing drugs, rather than truly novel therapies. For instance, Doxil, a medicine used to treat ovarian cancer, is wrapped up in naturally occurring fatty bubbles called liposomes. Taxol, a common breast-cancer drug, is similarly packaged with naturally occurring blood proteins in a product called Abraxane. In both, the packaging aids the delivery of the drug and reduces its toxic side-effects.

Now, however, a second generation of nanoparticles has entered clinical trials. Some are so good at hiding their contents away until they are needed that the treatments do not merely reduce side-effects; they actually allow what would otherwise be lethal poisons to be supplied to the tumour and the tumour only. Others do not depend on drugs at all. Instead, they act as beacons for the delivery of doses of energy that destroy cancer cells physically, rather than chemically. …

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Americans have much to be proud of today. The election of an African-American to the highest office in the land is an outstanding achievement. It is a testament to the open-minded tolerance of the American people; at least the majority of them.

Do you think the press and the rest of the world will stop telling us how racist we are? Maybe now they’ll notice that the American people had already moved on.

Nineteen years ago Virginia elected the first black governor in the country Then, Pickerhead was proud to vote for the Democrat Doug Wilder over the hapless Marshall Coleman. This time however, it is discouraging to see a doctrinaire leftist selected by the voters. Nothing but trouble follows in the wake of officials who use the state’s power to compel and direct behavior.

And, this is second time the Dems have given us a president who throws a baseball like a girl. What’s with that?

Many of our favorite blogs have election posts. Jonah Goldberg starts us off with a Corner post.

Look, I expect to be one of the most severe critics of the Obama administration and the Democrats generally in the years ahead (though I sincerely hope I won’t find that necessary). But Obama ran a brilliant race and he should be congratulated for it. Moreover, during the debate over the financial crisis, Obama said that a president should be able to do more than one thing at a time. Well, I think we members of the loyal opposition should be able to make distinctions simultaneously. It is a wonderful thing to have the first African-American president. It is a wonderful thing that in a country where feelings are so intense that power can be transferred so peacefully. …

Lots more from the Corner, Contentions, and the Weekly Standard Blog.

Thomas Sowell reminds us we actually do have a sound economy.

… Official data show that the output of the economy in the most recent quarter is down– by less than one-half of one percent– but at last the media have one of those two quarters required to qualify as a recession.

Whether they will get the other quarter that they need, in order to start using the word “recession” legitimately, is another story. In fact, the data-gathering process is by no means so precise that we can expect the one-half of one percent decline to hold up, since such statistics often get revised later.

It is not just a question of being able to put scare headlines on newspapers or alarmist rhetoric on television. Such things are just the prelude to massive political “change” in fundamentally sound institutions that have for more than two centuries made the American economy the envy of most of the world.

If the left succeeds, it will be like amputating your arm because of a stomach ache. …

John Stossel, using a quote from Walter Williams builds a column around who will “run the country.”

… “Politicians have immense power to do harm to the economy. But they have very little power to do good,” Williams says.

The failure to understand this is at the root of many of our problems.

“Most of life is outside the government sector,” says David Boaz of the Cato Institute. “Most change in America doesn’t come from politicians. It comes from people inventing things and creating. The telephone, the telegraph, the computer, all those things didn’t come from government. Our world is going to get better and better, as long as we keep the politicians from screwing it up.”

It’s easy to find examples of government screwing up what it should have left alone. …

David Harsanyi says we need a principled opposition.

… Barack Obama is now my president. Though I wonder if irascible Democrats who rode around with those snazzy bumper stickers reading “He’s not my president” for the past eight years realize the irony of their call for national harmony.

Let’s hope there’s none.

Winning elections is one thing; governing is quite another. It is impossible to deny that Obama ran one of sharpest, most diligent and exhilarating campaigns in modern American history or, for that matter, that the liberal wing of the Democratic Party has won a resounding mandate to run the country.

That only means we need a robust and principled opposition.

My children are continually lectured by well-meaning adults about the mystifying power culled from our differences, the strength we derive from our disparate upbringing and the power of diversity.

So why, one wonders, does this belief not extend to our politics and ideology? Why do we strive to shed individuality and become herds of devotees and shills? …

Robert Samuelson says good luck on the “tax the rich gig.”

… But the redistributionist argument is at best a half-truth. The larger truth is that much of the income of the rich and well-to-do comes from what they do. If they stop doing it, then the income and wealth vanish. No one gets it. It can’t be redistributed because it doesn’t exist. Everyone’s poorer.

This isn’t just theory. Last week, New York Gov. David Paterson pleaded with Congress to provide emergency aid to states. Heavily dependent on Wall Street for taxes, he testified, New York faces a $12.5 billion budget deficit next year and expects joblessness to rise by 160,000. Wall Street bonuses will drop by 43 percent and capital gains income by 35 percent, he estimated. People in New York would be better off if the securities industry were still booming, even if there were more economic inequality.

Americans legitimately resent Wall Street types who profited from dubious investment strategies that aggravated today’s crisis. And government properly redistributes income to reduce hardship and poverty. But that’s different from attempting to deduce and engineer some optimal distribution of income. Government can’t do that and shouldn’t try. Scapegoating and punishing all of the rich won’t do us any good if the resulting taxes dull investment and risk-taking, discouraging economic growth that benefits everyone.

Politico’s Roger Simon takes a dim view of McCain’s campaign.

As his campaign rattles to an end, John McCain has never been better on the stump. Not a natural orator, McCain finally has found his voice.

“Stand up! Stand up! Stand up and fight!” McCain thundered Monday in Blountville, Tenn. “We never give up! We never quit! We never hide from history; we make history!”

And he will make history Tuesday night. He will enter the history books either as having pulled off one of the greatest upsets in modern political history or for having run one of its worst campaigns.

As of now, he appears to be heading for the latter. Let’s take a look just at some recent examples.

How about that Dick Cheney endorsement Saturday? Wasn’t that a brilliant move with just three days to go in the race? …

The Onion says a black man has been put into the world’s worst job.