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Mark Steyn on the film and all.
… after a week and a half of peddling an utterly false narrative of what happened in Libya, the United States government is apparently beginning to discern that there are limits to what even Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice can say with a straight face. The official line – that the slaughter of American officials was some sort of improvised movie review that got a little out of hand – is now in the process of modification to something bearing a less patently absurd relationship to what actually happened. That should not make any more forgivable the grotesque damage that the administration has done to the bedrock principle of civilized society: freedom of speech
The more that U.S. government officials talk about the so-called film “Innocence Of Muslims” (which is actually merely a YouTube trailer) the more they confirm the mob’s belief that works of “art” are the proper responsibility of government. Obama and Clinton are currently starring as the Siskel & Ebert of Pakistani TV, giving two thumbs-down to “Innocence Of Muslims” in hopes that it will dissuade local movie-goers from giving two heads-off to consular officials. “The United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video,” says Hillary Clinton. “We absolutely reject its content, and message.” “We reject the efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others,” adds Barack Obama. There follows the official State Department seal of the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad.
Fellow government-funded film critics call “Innocence Of Muslims” “hateful and offensive” (Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations) and “reprehensible and disgusting” (Jay Carney, White House press secretary). Gen. Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Senior Pentagon Advisor to Variety, has taken to telephoning personally those few movie fans who claim to enjoy the film. He called up Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who apparently thinks “Innocence Of Muslims” is the perfect date movie, to tell him the official position of the United States military is they’d be grateful if he could ease up on the five-star reviews. …
… What other entertainments have senior U.S. officials reviewed lately? Last year Hillary Clinton went to see the Broadway musical “Book of Mormon.” “We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others”? The Book of Mormon’s big showstopper is “Hasa Diga Eebowai,” which apparently translates as “F*** You, God.” The U.S. Secretary of State stood and cheered.
Why does Secretary Clinton regard “F*** You, God” as a fun toe-tapper for all the family but “F***, You Allah” as “disgusting and reprehensible”? The obvious answer is that, if you sing the latter, you’ll find a far more motivated crowd waiting for you at the stage door. So the “Leader of the Free World” and “the most powerful man in the world” (to revive two cobwebbed phrases nobody seems to apply anymore to the president of the United States) is telling the planet that the way to ensure your beliefs command his “respect” is to be willing to burn and bomb and kill. You Mormons need to get with the program. …
He’s fit for campaigning, but not for governing says Michael Barone.
“[T]he most important lesson I’ve learned is that you can’t change Washington from the inside,” Barack Obama said in an interview Thursday on the Spanish-language Univision network. “You can only change it from the outside.”
A better way to put it is that Barack Obama has proved he can’t change Washington from the inside.
One case in point is the comprehensive immigration legislation Obama promised to steer to passage in his first term. The Univision interviewers, who asked tougher questions than the president has been getting from David Letterman or various rappers, zeroed in on this issue.
With a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate and a solid Democratic majority in the House in 2009 and 2010, Obama could have pushed for an immigration bill.
Instead, he acquiesced in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision not to bring such a measure to the floor. It would require some of her members to cast tough votes.
But, with Obama’s encouragement, she did bring to the floor and pushed through a cap-and-trade bill that also required some of her members to cast tough and, in some cases, career-ending votes.
Cap and trade was a favorite of gentry liberals, the kind of people Obama regularly has seen at his 200-plus fundraising events. As for the Hispanics who want immigration legislation, he’s now promising that he’ll push it in his second term. Wait in line.
George W. Bush managed to get congressional votes on comprehensive immigration bills. Obama didn’t bother.
Obama’s inability to change Washington from the inside is also on display in Bob Woodward’s latest best-seller, “The Price of Politics.”
He tells how in a meeting of congressional leaders, Pelosi muted a speakerphone as Obama droned on lecturing members on the national interest, so the legislators could get some work done. …
Jonah Goldberg show how silly the media’s treatment of the GOP has become.
… When MSNBC got an advance copy of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s convention speech, the network landed another scoop. “For four years,” McConnell planned to say, “Barack Obama has been running from the nation’s problems. He hasn’t been working to earn reelection. He has been working to earn a spot on the PGA Tour.” A fool might think this a not-exactly-veiled reference to the fact that Barack Obama plays a lot of golf, more than 100 rounds since he was elected. But MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell is no fool.
Asked what he made of the line, O’Donnell confidently replied, “Well, we know exactly what he’s trying to do there. He’s trying to align . . . the lifestyle of Tiger Woods with Barack Obama.”
Martin Bashir asked O’Donnell whether he really believed that. Couldn’t McConnell just mean what he said?
O’Donnell went into full eye-roll mode. “Martin, there are many, many, many rhetorical choices you can make at any point in any speech to make whatever point you want to make.” According to O’Donnell, McConnell’s speechwriters chose the golf reference because “these people reach for every single possible racial double entendre they can find in every one of these speeches.”
Bashir, who for a moment gave the impression of neural activity, was convinced. “Wow,” he exclaimed. “Things are getting lower and lower by the day.”
When Robert Welch of the John Birch Society insisted that Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist, Russell Kirk famously retorted, “He’s not a Communist, he’s a golfer.” Thank goodness no one knew back then that Kirk was calling Ike a sexually promiscuous half-black man. …
The latest episode in the “Perils of Lizzie” surfaced yesterday when the news broke Warren has practiced law in Massachusetts without a license. Those laws are for little people and do not apply to card carrying liberals. Daily Caller has the story.
Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren may have practiced law in Massachusetts for years without a license to do so, according to a newly surfaced report.
Republican Sen. Scott Brown — whom Warren is challenging — reminded viewers that Warren helped represent The Travelers Insurance Company on an asbestos case which reached the Supreme Court in 2009.
In May, the Boston Globe reported that Warren argued that case before the Supreme Court. “Six months after Elizabeth Warren arrived in Washington to work as an adviser to Congress, she experienced another career milestone in the nation’s capital, a seat at the US Supreme Court’s mahogany counsel table,” the Globe wrote. “The 2009 appearance was the only time Warren helped represent a party before the nation’s highest court. And it provides a rare window into a less-heralded aspect of the Harvard Law professor’s career, her time as a working attorney in the courts.”
According to the Legal Insurrection blog, this was hardly the only case Warren was involved in. “Warren represented not just Travelers, but numerous other companies starting in the late 1990s working out of and using her Harvard Law School office in Cambridge, which she listed as her office of record on briefs filed with various courts,” Legal Insurrection’s William A. Jacobson reported on Monday morning.
There’s just one caveat: “Warren, however, never has been licensed to practice law in Massachusetts.” …