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Corner Post with electrifying news about the special congressional election in Queens next week. You know, the seat that once was the location of Anthony’s Weiner.
Republican Bob Turner holds a commanding lead of six points in the latest poll in the special election to fill Anthony Weiner’s seat, conducted independently by Siena College. Crucially, he also now has 50 percent of the electorate, leading Democrat David Weprin 50-44.
Previous polls had shown him in the lead, but were potentially biased by GOP ties. This is a remarkable reversal; the last Siena poll, from August 15, placed Weprin six points ahead (though even this was considered a strong Republican showing in such a blue district). …
John Podhoretz has more on the vote in Queens.
We’ve been writing here all week about the stunning possibility that a conservative Republican named Bob Turner will upset a liberal Democrat named David Weprin in the special election Tuesday to fill Anthony Weiner’s Brooklyn/Queens district, which has a 3-to-1 Democratic registration advantage. It’s the most Jewish district in the country, and a great many of its Jews are religious Jews. In choosing Weprin to run for the seat, Democrats thought the fact that he sports a kippah would carry the day with his fellow Orthodox Jews.
It’s not happening that way, and even the notion that it would testifies to the ignorance of pols, including Jewish pols, who think religious Jews are like other ethnic voters. Weprin may be an Orthodox Jewish Democrat, but as such he is now actually in the minority among Orthodox Jews. And the commonality of their religious practice apparently does not provide sufficient cover for his being a representative of the Democratic party in the age of Obama. …
James Pethokoukis posts on the “jobs” address.
There’s been much speculation that President Barack Obama will spend $1 billion to get reelected. Turns out those guesses were off by $446 billion.
What Americans heard last night was a $447 billion political plan, not an economic one. It’s purpose was to a) fire up the demoralized Democratic base and b) show independents that Obama is trying to do something – anything – to reduce unemployment, not just slash needed “investment” like those heartless, pro-austerity Republicans. …
Michael Barone on Thursday’s speech.
Barack Obama looked and sounded angry in his speech to the joint session of Congress. He bitterly assailed one straw man after another and made reference to a grab bag of proposals which would cost something on the order of $450 billion—assuring us on the one hand that they all had been supported by Republicans as well as Democrats in the past and suggesting that somehow they are going to turn the economy around. He called for further cuts in the payroll tax (which if continued indefinitely would undermine the case of Social Security as something people have earned rather than a form of welfare) and for a further extension of unemployment insurance (perhaps justifiable on humanitarian grounds, but sure to at least marginally raise the unemployment rate over what it would otherwise be). He called for a tax credit for hiring the long-term unemployed (unfortunately, these things can be gamed). He gave a veiled plug for his pet project of high-speed rail (a real dud) and for infrastructure spending generally (but didn’t he learn that there aren’t really any shovel-ready projects?). He called for a school modernization program (will it result in more jobs than the Seattle weatherization program that cost $22 million and produced 14 jobs?) and for funding more teacher jobs (a political payoff to the teacher unions which together with other unions gave Democrats $400 million in the 2008 campaign cycle). “We’ll set up an independent fund to attract private dollars and issue loans based on two criteria: how badly a construction project is needed and how much good it would do for the country.” Yeah, sure. Like the screening process that produced that $535,000,000 loan guarantee to now-bankrupt Solyndra. And Congress should pass the free trade agreements with Panama, Colombia and South Korea. Except that Congress can’t, because Obama hasn’t sent them up there yet in his 961 days as president.
Obama assured us that this would all be paid for. But as far as I could gather, he punted that part of it to the supercommittee of 12 members set up under the debt ceiling bill. He now blithely charges it with coming up with more than its current goal of $1.5 trillion in savings by Christmas. Oh, and he’s going to announce “a more ambitious deficit plan” that will “stabilize our debt in the long run”–11 days from now. …
Barone does a good job explaining the ways we changed 10 years ago today.
Dec. 7, 1941. Nov. 22, 1963. Sept. 11, 2001. All of us old enough to remember know exactly where we were and what we were doing when we first heard the awful news. We remember the stunning feeling that suddenly everything had changed, that nothing would be the same. We remember feeling that unknown horrors lay ahead.
Ten years after Pearl Harbor, the United States was mired in a stalemated war in Korea. But the nation had won a great victory in World War II, embarked on a generation of postwar prosperity, and confronted the Soviet Union in a Cold War that would take four decades to win.
Ten years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the United States went through a wrenching debate on the war in Vietnam and had a president mired in the scandal known as Watergate. But the nation had also passed landmark civil rights legislation, embarked on a war against poverty and landed the first men on the moon.
Ten years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the changes are less dramatic and less resolved, but they touch Americans every day. Airport pat-downs, barricades outside government offices, identification checks at private buildings, searches at sports stadiums, armed security officers at public events, long motorcades with Secret Service SUVs and police outriders — all these are the legacy of 9/11.
On Sept. 10, 2001, America was on a decade long holiday from history. We were, as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, “the indispensable nation,” seemingly without any serious enemies. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the demise of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 signaled with more clarity than is usual in history the end of the Cold War. We had mostly harmonious relations with Russia and our economy was increasingly intertwined with China’s.
It was a decade with fewer military conflicts and deaths than any for more than a century. And where America did intervene militarily, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, it did so without committing appreciable numbers of ground troops or incurring significant numbers of casualties.
Even more important, as Francis Fukuyama argued in his 1992 book “The End of History,” there seemed to be no system of governance competitive with liberal democracies and market capitalism. Nazism was long gone, Marxism was dead, and democracy was making vast gains in large parts of the world.
Sept. 11 ended this holiday from history. …
Christopher Hitchens has remarks for the 10th anniversary.
The proper task of the “public intellectual” might be conceived as the responsibility to introduce complexity into the argument: the reminder that things are very infrequently as simple as they can be made to seem. But what I learned in a highly indelible manner from the events and arguments of September 2001 was this: Never, ever ignore the obvious either. To the government and most of the people of the United States, it seemed that the country on 9/11 had been attacked in a particularly odious way (air piracy used to maximize civilian casualties) by a particularly odious group (a secretive and homicidal gang: part multinational corporation, part crime family) that was sworn to a medieval cult of death, a racist hatred of Jews, a religious frenzy against Hindus, Christians, Shia Muslims, and “unbelievers,” and the restoration of a long-vanished and despotic empire.
To me, this remains the main point about al-Qaida and its surrogates. I do not believe, by stipulating it as the main point, that I try to oversimplify matters. I feel no need to show off or to think of something novel to say. Moreover, many of the attempts to introduce “complexity” into the picture strike me as half-baked obfuscations or distractions. These range from the irredeemably paranoid and contemptible efforts to pin responsibility for the attacks onto the Bush administration or the Jews, to the sometimes wearisome but not necessarily untrue insistence that Islamic peoples have suffered oppression. (Even when formally true, the latter must simply not be used as nonsequitur special pleading for the use of random violence by self-appointed Muslims.) …
Charles Krauthammer thinks our reactions to 9/11 have been about right.
The new conventional wisdom on 9/11: We have created a decade of fear. We overreacted to 9/11 — al-Qaeda turned out to be a paper tiger; there never was a second attack — thereby bankrupting the country, destroying our morale and sending us into national decline.
The secretary of defense says that al-Qaeda is on the verge of strategic defeat. True. But why? Al-Qaeda did not spontaneously combust. Yet, in a decade Osama bin Laden went from the emir of radical Islam, jihadi hero after whom babies were named all over the Muslim world — to pathetic old recluse, almost incommunicado, watching shades of himself on a cheap TV in a bare room.
What turned the strong horse into the weak horse? Precisely the massive and unrelenting American war on terror, a systematic worldwide campaign carried out with increasing sophistication, efficiency and lethality — now so cheaply denigrated as an “overreaction.”
First came the Afghan campaign, once so universally supported that Democrats for years complained that President Bush was not investing enough blood and treasure there. Now, it is reduced to a talking point as one of “the two wars” that bankrupted us. Yet Afghanistan was utterly indispensable in defeating the jihadis then and now. …