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Jennifer Rubin wonders if there is any chance there is adult supervision left in the White House.
It is not clear if anyone in the White House with independent judgment or common sense is left. Judging from the administration’s decision to go all-in for anti-gun legislation you’d have to conclude the answer is no. Not only has President Obama expended capital on something that could have proved successful (e.g. entitlement reform), he’s headed for an embarrassing defeat. It will not go unnoticed that the initiative most likely to succeed (immigration reform) is the one in which he is the least involved (other than to toss spitballs into the Gang of 8 deliberations designed to spook Republicans).
To recap Obama’s year: He began with a hyperpartisan, uber-liberal inaugural address that got rotten reviews. He then got whittled down to spare all but a sliver of the top income earners from expiration of the Bush tax cuts. He dumped Susan Rice from consideration as secretary of state, to his base’s dismay. Then he proceeded to nominate surely the most dull-witted secretary of defense in history, forcing Democrats to defend a gaffe-prone purveyor of noxious sentiments about our only real ally in the Middle East and giving Republicans a rare occasion for agreement. He has failed to put out a budget and has been scrambling to catch up to the Gang of 8. Iran and North Korea are threatening to make his “world without nukes” into a real-life James Bond movie in which every crackpot villain has one or two. But the president is running around the country pleading for gun-control measures — which a good number of Senate Democrats won’t support. …
More on the gun control debacle from Rich Lowry writing in Politico.
… The gun control debate has shown the president again to be hopelessly detached as a legislative mechanic and ineffectual as a shaper of public opinion. Before writing rhetorical checks that his own party’s majority leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, couldn’t cash, the president might have at least consulted with the wily old son-of-a-gun about what was plausible and adjusted accordingly. He might have taken into consideration Reid’s ribbon-cutting ceremony with National Rifle Association honcho Wayne LaPierre at the ClarkCountyShootingPark in Las Vegas in 2010. …
… The gun control debate has subtly shifted away from Newtown even though the president keeps bringing his case back to that atrocity. Nothing that happened in Newtown had anything to do with background checks. No background check law will ever prevent someone like Sandy Hook gunman Adam Lanza’s mother from buying guns unless the parents of children with Autism-like symptoms are to be banned from owning firearms.
What we are talking about now is trying to keep guns out of the hands of common criminals. This is obviously a worthy and important goal, although the most direct means of doing it — stop-and-frisk policing in areas where gun crime is most likely to occur — is anathema to the same people who say we have to do everything we can to save even one life.
The president’s push for new gun laws looks, at this juncture, like a complete fizzle. He has failed to sway red-state Democrats and failed to maintain the heightened public support for new gun control laws. The most concrete effect of his advocacy has been, if the anecdotal evidence is to be believed, to stoke increased gun purchases on fears that the government wants to ban guns. He set out to lead a great crusade for gun control and ended up the best friend the gun industry ever had.
Mark Steyn on the “Vigilance Vigilantes.”
He who controls the language shapes the debate: In the same week the Associated Press announced that it would no longer describe illegal immigrants as “illegal immigrants,” the star columnist of the New York Times fretted that the Supreme Court seemed to have misplaced the style book on another fashionable minority. “I am worried,” wrote Maureen Dowd, “about how the justices can properly debate same-sex marriage when some don’t even seem to realize that most Americans use the word ‘gay’ now instead of ‘homosexual.’” She quoted her friend Max Mutchnick, creator of Will & Grace “Scalia uses the word ‘homosexual’ the way George Wallace used the word ‘Negro.’ There’s a tone to it. It’s humiliating and hurtful. I don’t think I’m being overly sensitive, merely vigilant.”
For younger readers, George Wallace was a powerful segregationist Democrat. Whoa, don’t be overly sensitive. There’s no “tone” to my use of the word “Democrat”; I don’t mean to be humiliating and hurtful: It’s just what, in pre-sensitive times, we used to call a “fact.” Likewise, I didn’t detect any “tone” in the way Justice Scalia used the word “homosexual.” He may have thought this was an appropriately neutral term, judiciously poised midway between “gay” and “Godless sodomite.” Who knows? He’s supposed to be a judge, and a certain inscrutability used to be part of what we regarded as a judicial temperament. By comparison, back in 1986, the year Scalia joined the Supreme Court, the chief justice, Warren Burger, declared “there is no such thing as a fundamental right to commit homosexual sodomy.” I don’t want to be overly sensitive, but I think even I, if I rewound the cassette often enough, might be able to detect a certain tone to that.
Nonetheless, Max Mutchnick’s “vigilance” is a revealing glimpse of where we’re headed. Canada, being far more enlightened than the hotbed of homophobes to its south, has had gay marriage coast to coast for a decade. Statistically speaking, one-third of 1 percent of all Canadian nuptials are same-sex, and, of that nought-point-three-three, many this last decade have been American gays heading north for a marriage license they’re denied in their own country. So gay marriage will provide an important legal recognition for an extremely small number of persons who do not currently enjoy it. But, putting aside arguments over the nature of marital union, the legalization of gay marriage will empower a lot more “vigilance” from all the right-thinking people over everybody else.
Mr. Mutchnick’s comparison of the word “homosexual” with “Negro” gives the game away: …
… I had the good fortune of meeting at the end of his life Hilton Edwards, the founder of Ireland’s Gate Theatre. Hilton and the love of his life, Micháel MacLiammóir, were for many years the most famously gay couple in Dublin. At MacLiammóir’s funeral in 1978, the Taoiseach and half the Irish cabinet attended, and at the end they went up to Edwards, shook hands, and expressed their condolences — in other words, publicly acknowledging him as “the widow.” This in a state where homosexuality was illegal, and where few people suggested that it should be otherwise. The Irish officials at the funeral treated MacLiammóir’s relict humanely and decently, not because they had to but because they wished to. I miss that kind of civilized tolerance of the other, and I wish, a mere four decades on, the victors in the culture wars might consider extending it to the losers.
Instead, the relentless propagandizing grows ever more heavy-handed: The tolerance enforcers will not tolerate dissent; the diversity celebrators demand a ruthless homogeneity. Much of the progressive agenda — on marriage, immigration, and much else — involves not winning the argument but ruling any debate out of bounds. Perhaps like Jeremy Irons you don’t have “strong feelings” on this or that, but, if you do, enjoy them while you can.
The Daily Beast lists Roger Ebert’s 10 best movie reviews; and his best pans.
… He loved the movies, and loved writing about them—and he was damned good at writing about them. His reviews were a unique combination of scholarly, witty, occasionally sarcastic, and masterfully entertaining. His ability to craft an exhilarating rave of a film was equally matched by his stinging zingers. As we remember him, here’s a look back at what one lifelong admirer considers his 10 best reviews. Plus, no retrospective on Ebert’s work would be complete without a roundup of his most biting takedowns.
E.T.—The Extra-Terrestrial
“This movie made my heart glad. It is filled with innocence, hope, and good cheer. It is also wickedly funny and exciting as hell. E.T.—The Extra-Terrestrial is a movie like The Wizard of Oz, that you can grow up with and grow old with, and it won’t let you down. It tells a story about friendship and love. Some people are a little baffled when they hear it described: It’s about a relationship between a little boy and a creature from outer space that becomes his best friend. That makes it sound like a cross between The Thing and National Velvet. It works as science fiction, it’s sometimes as scary as a monster movie, and at the end, when the lights go up, there’s not a dry eye in the house.” …
… “Was there no one connected with this project who read the screenplay, considered the story, evaluated the proposed film and vomited?” —from Last Rites review, November 19, 1988 …