February 26, 2015

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Ben Domenech in the Federalist writes about how the undying enmity of Wisconsin’s left/liberals created the national candidacy of Scott Walker.

Brandon Finnigan outlines how the Wisconsin left chose to pursue the recall fight, with county-by-county analysis which illustrates how Walker united the right in response:

“The attempt to boot Walker by Wisconsin progressives and labor activists accomplished a rare feat: absolute party unity. But instead of unifying Democrats enough to unseat him, it created a brief moment where libertarian, establishment, Tea Party, and traditional conservative members of the Republican Party united to defend him… The Democrats spent millions of dollars and thousands of hours digging, scooping, ad-cutting, and hammering. They threw the kitchen sink at the guy in 2012, threw their neighbor’s sink at him in 2014, and now nobody on the block will let them inside to pee… Had the Democrats not targeted Walker with a recall, that massive fundraiser network, the national profile, the party unity, and his highly developed get-out-the-vote team almost certainly wouldn’t exist. He may have still won re-election, but he would be just another Midwestern Republican governor who enacted reforms and faced push-back, not the conservative folk hero of a party longing for a win.” …

 

 

Charles Cooke in National Review has an interesting take on the Media’s “gotcha” questions for Scott Walker. He mentions Chris Hitchens – and we get reminded how much he is missed.

… To grasp just how farcical this game is, one needs only to run an eye across the list of those who are now feigning high dudgeon. Yesterday, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Obama’s former adviser David Axelrod pretended to be surprised at Walker’s remarks: “I don’t know why there is confusion,” Axelrod proclaimed, indignantly. Really? At present, Axelrod is running around the country promoting a book in which he confesses bluntly that Obama’s well-documented objections to gay marriage were nothing more than opportunistic lies. In 2008, Axelrod recalls in one chapter, “opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church.” In consequence, he adds, Obama “accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me, and modified his position to support civil unions rather than marriage, which he would term a ‘sacred union.’” Elsewhere, Obama would tell audiences that, being “a Christian, . . . my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman”; and that, “as a Christian — for me — for me as a Christian . . . God’s in the mix.” Axelrod’s admission that this was baloney will sell him a lot of books.

Such suspicions are routinely expressed on the left. At various points during Obama’s tenure, public figures such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Bill Maher have openly suggested that President Obama is either an atheist or an agnostic, and that he is merely pretending to be a Christian to placate the rubes in the middle of the country. “You know who’s a liar about [his faith],” Maher suggested last year, “is Obama. He’s a drop-dead atheist, absolutely.” “Our new president,” Christopher Hitchens toldFrance 24 in 2009, “I’m practically sure he is not a believer.” Richard Dawkins, meanwhile, has noted correctly that this theory is popular among progressives. “Like many people,” he averred in 2014, “I’m sure that Obama is an atheist.” These statements lacked the modesty of Scott Walker’s effective “dunno.” In fact, they were far, far harsher. And yet they were met with relative indifference. Are we to conclude that the bien pensant class considers it to be more honorable for a person to suggest that the president of the United States is lying than to say that he does not know and does not care? …

 

 

More on the media hoard’s treatment of Walker from Ed Morrissey.

… Over the past week, media reporters have tried to hold Republicans accountable for any personal attacks by anyone on Barack Obama, going out of their way to demand that GOP candidates defend Obama’s honor — especially Scott Walker, who has emerged as a top-tier candidate in the early campaign. This trend reached its nadir when two reporters from the Washington Post, Dan Balz and Robert Costa, demanded that Walker answer whether he thought Obama was a Christian — despite the fact that Walker has never brought up that topic. When Walker scolded them for their irrelevancies, the media instead took it as Walker “othering” Obama.

Here’s what Walker said in response to the question:

“I don’t know. . . . I’ve actually never talked about it or I haven’t read about that. I’ve never asked him that. You’ve asked me to make statements about people that I haven’t had a conversation with about that. How [could] I say if I know either of you are a Christian? To me, this is a classic example of why people hate Washington and, increasingly, they dislike the press. The things they care about don’t even remotely come close to what you’re asking about.”

 

 

Conservatives have no reason to mourn the Chris Christie collapse. Jennifer Rubin posts on what happened. 

… It is not hard to see how Christie lost the inside track with donors and establishment Republicans. His reputation as a lively, blunt, competent and inclusive Republican seems like a distant memory. He is now seen as erratic, gaffe-prone and lacking substance. This is the antithesis of what his natural audience (businesspeople, moderates, big donors, discerning independents) looks for. He seems to have morphed into a moderate version of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) minus the foreign policy acumen, or perhaps the reincarnation of the 2012 version of then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry. There are lessons here for all the 2016 contenders.

First, you cannot win the presidential nomination on personality. You have to be able to get in front of a room of donors, across from an interviewer or in front of a crowd and sell yourself as a man with a plan — how to win, how to govern, how to appeal to non-Republicans, how to bring the party together. You can dazzle them with wonkery, as Bush is doing, or impress supporters with grit and focus, as Walker does. But you cannot vamp your way through a presidential race. In a long campaign, recycling the same shtick (be it Jersey guy or tea party rabble-rouser) wears thin, especially when there is no interesting agenda being offered.

Second, running for president takes a unique combination of humility and hubris. …

 

 

Kevin Williamson starts out the humor section for the end of the week with a post on Marie Harf. Who’s that, you ask? Does “jobs for jihadis” ring a bell? Trouble is, even thought she is a hoot, the juxtaposition of jihadist terror with an airhead like her in our government is terrifying.

Marie Harf, the cretinous propagandist and campaign veteran installed by the Obama administration at the State Department — the misfit who plays Messy Marvin to Jen Psaki’s feckless Pippi Longstocking — has called down upon herself a Malibu mudslide of mockery and derision for suggesting that what’s really needed in the war against the Islamic State et al. is better employment opportunities — “jobs for jihadis,” as her critics put it. She later explained that her observations unfortunately were “too nuanced” for the simple minds of the dunderheads who twice elected her boss president of these United States. That a member of the Obama administration should say something stupid about world affairs is about as newsworthy as Joe Biden’s being creepy and handsy with women in public, but Harf’s particular breed of wrongness is worth considering inasmuch as it illuminates one of the principal reasons that we are not winning — and will not win — what we insist on calling the “war on terror.” …

 

 

Continuing our humor section, we have John Podhoretz asking when the media will point out that Joe Biden is a moron. This was the other moron’s first big decision as president and what did he do? He offered up a national joke.

It was just another Tuesday for the vice president of the United States, and another week in which the mainstream media turned their genteel eyes away from the highly questionable conduct of the figure of low comedy whom tragedy might make our president.

On Tuesday morning, Joe Biden was photographed placing his hands in a cringe-inducingly inappropriate manner on the shoulders of a much younger woman — the wife of the about-to-be-sworn-in secretary of defense — and keeping them there . . . and keeping them there . . . and keeping them there . . . for 28 full seconds.

When Biden let her go at last, you could see Stephanie Carter relax her shoulders a little after having had them tensed up while he rested his hands upon them. Go watch it on YouTube. Some enterprising director will surely adapt the scene for one of those found-footage horror movies — “Paranormal Activity VI: The Bidening.”

Biden’s day of creepiness was far from over. In the afternoon, he spoke at the White House summit to combat violent extremism and made reference to the people of Somalia, who have suffered for decades under the yoke of warlords and Islamists.

Of the Somalis living in his home state of Delaware in the capital of Dover, he said this: “If you come to the train station with me, you’ll notice I have great relationships with them because there’s an awful lot driving cabs and are friends of mine. For real. I’m not being solicitous. I’m being serious.”

The thing is, he was being serious.

He was actually claiming to possess special knowledge of the woes of Somalis from having taken rides in their taxis. Aside from the offense provided by the some-of-my-best-friends-are-black trope here, does anyone actually believe that Biden has ever let a cab driver, Somali or otherwise, get a word in edgewise? Or anyone else, for that matter? …

 

 

Late night humor from Andy Malcolm.

Meyers: Joe Biden was seen massaging Ashton Carter’s wife as he spoke. How’s the new Defense Secretary gonna protect us from ISIS if he can’t protect his own wife from Joe?

Fallon: Michelle Obama has banned boxed macaroni and cheese from the White House. It’s been tough on Joe Biden. He couldn’t make his wife any jewelry for Valentine’s Day.

 

 

The NY Times from 30 years ago was just as dumb as today’s. Here’s a Times article from Dec. 1985 on laptop computers.

… Was the laptop dream an illusion, then? Or was the problem merely that the right combination of features for such lightweight computers had not yet materialized? The answer probably is a combination of both views. For the most part, the portable computer is a dream machine for the few.

The limitations come from what people actually do with computers, as opposed to what the marketers expect them to do. On the whole, people don’t want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours they would rather spend reading the sports or business section of the newspaper. Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so. …

… But the real future of the laptop computer will remain in the specialized niche markets. Because no matter how inexpensive the machines become, and no matter how sophisticated their software, I still can’t imagine the average user taking one along when going fishing.

 

And the cartoons are very good today.