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Mark Steyn doesn’t believe the literary agent who claimed Obama was born in Kenya.
… When it comes to conspiracies, I’m an Occam’s Razor man. The more obvious explanation of the variable first line in the eternally shifting sands of Obama’s biography is that, rather than pretending to have been born in Hawaii, he’s spent much of his life pretending to have been born in Kenya.
After all, if your first book is an exploration of racial identity and has the working title “Journeys In Black And White,” being born in Hawaii doesn’t really help. It’s entirely irrelevant to the twin pillars of contemporary black grievance – American slavery and European imperialism. To 99.99 percent of people, Hawaii is a luxury vacation destination and nothing else.
Whereas Kenya puts you at the heart of what, in an otherwise notably orderly decolonization process by the British, was a bitter and violent struggle against the white man’s rule. Cool! The composite chicks dig it, and the literary agents.
And where’s the harm in it? Everybody does it – at least in the circles in which Obama hangs. At Harvard Law School, where young Barack was “the first African-American president of The Harvard Law Review,” there’s no end of famous firsts: As The Fordham Law Review reported, “Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995.” There is no evidence that Mrs. Warren, now the Democrats’ Senate candidate, is anything other than 100 percent white. She walks like a white, quacks like a white, looks whiter than white. She’s the whitest white since Frosty the Snowman fell in a vat of Wite-Out. But she “self-identified” as Cherokee, so that makes her a “woman of color.” Why, back in 1984 she submitted some of her favorite dishes to the “Pow Wow Chow” cookbook, a “compilation of recipes passed down through the Five Tribes families.”
The recipes from “Elizabeth Warren – Cherokee” include a crab dish with tomato mayonnaise. Mrs. Warren’s fictional Cherokee ancestors in Oklahoma were renowned for their ability to spear the fast-moving Oklahoma crab. It’s in the state song: “Ooooooklahoma! Where the crabs come sweepin’ down the plain.” But then the white man came, and now the Oklahoma crab is extinct, and at the Cherokee clambakes they have to make do with Mrs. Warren’s traditional Five Tribes recipe for Cherokee Lime Pie.
A delegation of college students visited the White House last week, and Vice President Biden told them: “You’re an incredible generation. And that’s not hyperbole, either. Your generation and the 9/11 generation before you are the most incredible group of Americans we have ever, ever, ever produced.”
Ever ever ever ever! Even in a world where everyone’s incredible, some things ought to be truly incredible. Yet Harvard Law School touted Elizabeth “Dances with Crabs” Warren as their “first woman of color” – and nobody laughed. Because, if you laugh, chances are you’ll be tied up in sensitivity-training hell for the next six weeks. Because in an ever-more incredible America being an all-white “woman of color” is entirely credible. …
National Review piece on how Oprah cratered her career.
She didn’t see it coming. One day, Oprah Winfrey turned around, and her nationally syndicated show was sliding in the ratings, and her audience was fleeing en masse. And it happened soon after a day she thought was one of the best in her life.
Isn’t that how all the giants fall? When they least expect it?
It was the day Oprah announced she was backing the African-American candidate, then-senator Barack Obama, over the highly qualified and experienced woman candidate, then-senator Hillary Clinton.
It was the first time that Oprah put her brand on a political candidate. And her audience was expecting a very different choice.
Oprah appeared on Larry King Live in May 2007, flush with pride, and was asked the questions lots of women in her audience had on their minds.
“Is there a side of you, the woman side, that would lead toward a Hillary?” King inquired.
“Well, I have great respect for Hillary Clinton,” Oprah said. I think I’ve said this before, and it’s true: Because I am for Barack does not mean I am against Hillary or anybody else.”
So much for the sisterhood!
And so much for that Oprah honesty that her mostly female — and mostly white — audience had come to expect all of those years.
Oprah had chosen the less-qualified, less-experienced black man over the more-qualified, more-experienced white woman. It didn’t take long for Oprah to feel the backlash.
Hell hath no fury like millions of women scorned. …
Pickerhead wonders where this David Brooks was for the last four years.
… In Europe and America, governments have made promises they can’t afford to fulfill. At the same time, the decision-making machinery is breaking down. American and European capitals still have the structures inherited from the past, but without the self-restraining ethos that made them function.
The American decentralized system of checks and balances has transmogrified into a fragmented system that scatters responsibility. Congress is capable of passing laws that give people benefits with borrowed money, but it gridlocks when it tries to impose self-restraint.
The Obama campaign issues its famous “Julia” ad, which perfectly embodies the vision of government as a national Sugar Daddy, delivering free money and goodies up and down the life cycle. The Citizens United case gives well-financed interests tremendous power to preserve or acquire tax breaks and regulatory deals. American senior citizens receive health benefits that cost many times more than the contributions they put into the system.
In Europe, workers across the Continent want great lifestyles without long work hours. They want dynamic capitalism but also personal security. European welfare states go broke trying to deliver these impossibilities.
The European ruling classes once had their power checked through daily contact with the tumble of national politics. But now those ruling classes have built a technocratic apparatus, the European Union, operating far above popular scrutiny. Decisions that reshape the destinies of families and nations are being made at some mysterious, transnational level. Few Europeans can tell who is making decisions or who is to blame if they go wrong, so, of course, they feel powerless and distrustful.
Western democratic systems were based on a balance between self-doubt and self-confidence. They worked because there were structures that protected the voters from themselves and the rulers from themselves. Once people lost a sense of their own weakness, the self-doubt went away and the chastening structures were overwhelmed. It became madness to restrain your own desires because surely your rivals over yonder would not be restraining theirs.
This is one of the reasons why Europe and the United States are facing debt crises and political dysfunction at the same time. People used to believe that human depravity was self-evident and democratic self-government was fragile. Now they think depravity is nonexistent and they take self-government for granted.
Neither the United States nor the European model will work again until we rediscover and acknowledge our own natural weaknesses and learn to police rather than lionize our impulses.
John Podhoretz says cool it on the Jeremiah Wright stuff. Just have everyone look at Obama’s record.
Yesterday’s breathless campaign hysteria arose out of a not-really-much-of-a-scoop from the broadsheet across town: A rich guy in Omaha wants to spend a lot of money defeating Barack Obama.
Stop the presses. Eek.
Said rich guy sought the advice of a controversial consultant (who’d very much benefit from getting the rich guy’s commission) on a strategy. The consultant proposed reviving the 2008 controversy over Obama’s relationship with his egregious pastor, Jeremiah Wright.
You’d have thought, from the mainstream-media tweets yesterday morning, that the mere act of mentioning Obama and Wright in the same breath was nothing less than a hate crime in itself. How dare anyone mention the president in the same breath as the anti-American demagogue who officiated at his wedding, baptized his children and gave him the title of his second book.
For those of us who enjoy seeing such folk sputter and squirm, the idea of a Wright attack against Obama instantly seemed rather piquant. But it only took a moment’s reflection to see how senseless and even stupid such an approach would be.
First, the sheer quantity of facts and figures and issues from Obama’s actual presidency that can be used to argue against a second term are far more devastating. …
Alan Dershowitz says it’s time to drop the murder charges against Zimmerman.
A medical report by George Zimmerman’s doctor has disclosed that Zimmerman had a fractured nose, two black eyes, two lacerations on the back of his head and a back injury on the day after the fatal shooting. If this evidence turns out to be valid, the prosecutor will have no choice but to drop the second-degree murder charge against Zimmerman — if she wants to act ethically, lawfully and professionally.
There is, of course, no assurance that the special prosecutor handling the case, State Attorney Angela Corey, will do the right thing. Because until now, her actions have been anything but ethical, lawful and professional.
She was aware when she submitted an affidavit that it did not contain the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. She deliberately withheld evidence that supported Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense. The New York Times has reported that the police had “a full face picture” of Zimmerman, before paramedics treated him, that showed “a bloodied nose.” The prosecutor also had photographic evidence of bruises to the back of his head.
But none of this was included in any affidavit.
Now there is much more extensive medical evidence that would tend to support Zimmerman’s version of events. This version, if true, would establish self-defense even if Zimmerman had improperly followed, harassed and provoked Martin. …
Jennifer Rubin posts on the Mormon obsession.
The New York Times’ Jodi Kantor has a piece on Mitt Romney’s Mormonism. It is largely sympathetic and reveals, despite Kantor’s thesis that everything you need to know about Romney boils down to Mormonism (hmm, funny how the New York Times ignored and deplored similar inquiries about candidate Barack Obama in 2008, but what do you expect from the liberals’ paper of record?), that his religiosity is identical to those of other faithful people. (“He prays for divine guidance on business decisions and political races .?.?.” or “‘He is an unabashed, unapologetic believer that America is the Promised Land.’”). Perhaps if the liberal media did not treat religious people like Margaret Mead approached natives it would seem less strange.
The piece is a troubling, and in many cases a bizarre, attempt to picture Romney as “The Mormon candidate,” a standard that would repel most Americans if applied to another faith. Take for example this sentence: “He may have many reasons for abhorring debt, wanting to limit federal power, promoting self-reliance and stressing the unique destiny of the United States, but those are all traditionally Mormon traits as well.” Now substitute a different religion: “He may have many reasons for abhorring debt, wanting to limit federal power, promoting self-reliance and stressing the unique destiny of the United States, but those are all traditionally Jewish traits as well.” You see, it comes across as rank bigotry when we talk about other religions.
And since Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is also a Mormon, how would one explain that he is unbothered by big government and not all that interested in curtailing the debt? …
Randy Barnett, who led the court charge against the health care act, has a good post in Volokh on our foolish drug war.
There are so many reasons why drug prohibition is objectionable, it is hard to enumerate them all. In my Utah Law Review article, The Harmful Side Effects of Drug Prohibition, I try to systematically survey just the “consequentialist” arguments against this socially-destructive social policy. If I were to revise this article today, I suppose I would emphasize even more than I did how destructive the “War on Drugs” has been to the black community, perhaps especially because of the incarceration of thousands of black men, depriving their children of fathers, but also because of how the black market profits from the illicit drug trade supports the gang structure that preys upon the community and sucks up its kids. Then there is the differential enforcement of drug laws in minority communities. And I would emphasize how the abnormal profits to be made from black market drugs is systematically destroying the entire political culture of Mexico. All this to stop some people from getting high.
But, as I said, the problem with assessing the War on Drugs is that there are so many harmful “side effects” of drug prohibition that it is difficult even to know where to begin. This article is my effort to be as comprehensive about these effects, yet still be accessible. Here is the abstract: …
Here’s Penn Jillette with his reasoning for ending the drug war. The language here is a little rough, but he was exercised about the juxtaposition of the people in jail with the nonchalant attitude of the president.