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Gerard Baker thinks the demonstrations against the Olympic flame have a refreshing time warp about them.
There’s a nostalgic quality to the angry demonstrations that have greeted the arrival of the Olympic flame in Europe and the United States this week.
For some time now the modern wisdom that has brought young malcontents on to the streets of London, Paris and San Francisco has held the US and its dependable ally Britain to be the root of all evil. Governments from Beijing to Caracas could trample their citizens into the ground and you wouldn’t fill a telephone box with people upset about it. But call for the heads of the warmongers Bush and Blair and a million pairs of brave feet would take to the streets to support you.
So it’s a quaint departure for those same crowds, albeit in much smaller numbers, to protest loudly against the actions of men for whom tyranny is a chosen method of governing rather than a silly label attached by adolescent-brained politicians.
The mêlées this week actually have real historical resonance, an echo of the Cold War. They are a reminder of the days when the Olympics were a battlefield in the great ideological struggle of the time. The US-led boycott of Moscow in 1980 and the Soviet Union’s retaliation in Los Angeles four years later were in the end no more than gestures, as meaningful as all the other Games of the era when the two superpowers fought for gold medals as keenly as they fought for the affections of Third World leaders.
The 2008 version of the battle is lower key but this little struggle is a mirror on the most important simple political fact of our times – the global struggle for supremacy between liberalism and its enemies. …
Mark Steyn has a look at the idiots we have let loose in our schools.
Is American public education a form of child abuse? The Washington Post’s Brigid Schulte reported this month on a student named Randy Castro, who attends school in Woodbridge, Va. Last November at recess he slapped a classmate on her bottom. The teacher took him to the principal. School officials wrote up an incident report and then called the police.
Randy Castro is in the first grade. But, at the ripe old age of 6, he’s been declared a sex offender by Potomac View Elementary School. He’s guilty of sexual harassment, and the incident report will remain on his record for the rest of his school days – and maybe beyond.
Maybe it’ll be one of those things that just keeps turning up on background checks forever and ever: Perhaps 34-year-old Randy Castro will apply for a job, and at his prospective employer’s computer up will pop his sexual-harasser status yet again. Or maybe he’ll be able to keep it hushed up until he’s 57 and runs for governor of Virginia, and suddenly his political career self-detonates when the sordid details of his Spitzeresque sexual pathologies are revealed.
But that’s what he is now: Randy Castro, sex offender. The title of the incident report spells out his crime: “Sexual Touching Against Student, Offensive.” The curiously placed comma might also be offensive were it not that school officials are having to spend so much of their energies grappling with the first-grade sexual-harassment epidemic they can no longer afford to waste time acquiring peripheral skills such as punctuation.
Randy Castro was not apprehended until he was 6, so who knows how long his reign of sexual terror lasted? …
Barack Obama has been caught dropping some “bon mots” you would have expected his spoiled wife to say. This seems bound to have a telling effect on his campaign. Many of our favorites have things to say. Roger Simon is first.
Excuse me for finding Barack Obama a disingenuous creep. The candidate has now been widely quoted as saying as per rural America: “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” …
Power Line is next.
… Obama stands revealed as a bigot of the elite, high-minded variety. With respect to embittered anti-trade sentiment to which Obama refers, the bitterness is one to which he himself caters. …
… Barack Obama’s arrogance has been evident for some time, and it’s no shock, perhaps, to learn that he shares this bigoted opinion, common among urban liberals, of people who live in “small towns.” But to actually express it, in public, at a campaign event, is stunningly stupid. Nevertheless, Obama did it …
Contentions’ Jennifer Rubin.
… This raises several questions. First, is the Clinton campaign minimally competent so as to be able to make this into the quote for the next 10 days in Pennsylvania and convince voters there and elsewhere Obama is a sneering snob? Second, if that is these people’s reason for adopting an uninformed view on trade what is his explanation for embracing protectionism? Third, just how many religious voters and NRA members could there be in Pennsylvania, Indiana, North Carolina, Kentucky and West Virginia? …
… So here we have the essential Obama, a walking paradox between the postmodern hip-Ivy-Leaguer who sneers at middle-class America’s supposed prejudices and parochialism, while at the same time courting an anti-Enlightenment, prejudicial demagogue like Jeremiah Wright. For free trade or anti-free trade? For 2nd-amendment rights or not? Post-religious or pious and fundamentalist? For public campaign financing or not? A uniter of various groups or someone who sees America in terms of “theyâ€? Straight-talking or someone who evokes “context” to explain away the inexplicable?
Again, we will see more and more of these condescending statements of the Michelle Obama strain, more and more of Revs. Wright, Meeks, Lee and others peddlers of division like them, and more and more clues to a long hostility to Israel—in what will eventually become the most disastrous chapter in recent Democratic history.
And pundits keep wondering why Hillary won’t give up?
… If you’re running as a glamorous blank slate on which people project their own utopian fantasies, you’ve got to be very careful not to give the game away – especially when the game turns out to be the usual clichéd elite disdain for the great unwashed. I mention in the current issue of NR how odd it is that Michelle Obama is in many ways more condescending on the stump than Teresa Heinz Kerry. Now her husband’s at it, too. As Ed Driscoll says:
Leave it to Obama to make John Kerry’s Brahmin hauteur seem earnestly goofy in retrospect. …
… Obama’s astonishing sentence offers a syllogistic string of superciliousness: Gun ownership is equated with religious fanaticism, which is said to accompany hatred of the other in the form of opposition to immigration and support for trade barriers. It drips with an attitude so important to the spiritual well-being of the American liberal — the paternalistic attitude that says, “Oh, well, people only do thing differently from me because they are ignorant and superstitious and backward†— that it has survived and thrived despite the suicidal impact it has had on the achievement of liberal political goals and aims. …
The Captain – Ed Morrissey.
… What makes this so breathtaking is the mindless, casual way in which Obama reveals his snobbishness and elitism. We saw hints of this from Michelle Obama, in her assertions about never being proud of her country until her husband ran for President. (Soren Dayton has more on this.) We had not seen it from Obama himself in such a blatant and unmistakable manner. The matter-of-fact style in which he spoke this shows the unthinking contempt he has for people he has never engaged — an acceptance of stereotypes without questioning them that shows his own bigotry, not to mention foolishness and poor judgment.
At times, we have remarked that Obama only really performs well with a script. Once he has to speak extemporaneously, not only does he fare worse as an orator, but he tends to get lost and make unforced errors. It’s hard to imagine one worse than this. It’s all the worse because it’s not a gaffe in the normal sense, but a revealing moment that shows how Obama really views Americans. With this statement, it’s not hard to understand why he sat in Jeremiah Wright’s church for 20 years and heard nothing that moved him to dissent. …
ChiTrib editors take a dim view of Carter’s trip to Hamas.
… Carter hasn’t said publicly why he may be going. Maybe the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize laureate is convinced he can turn Mashaal into a peacenik. He better talk fast: Hamas is undertaking the most significant military buildup in its history, according to recent reports.
Or maybe Carter can’t resist a public and obvious rebuke to the Bush administration’s policy of isolating and weakening Hamas.
Mashaal and his cronies are overseeing the descent of Gaza into further violence, misery and hopelessness, all because they can’t envision a Middle East where Palestinians and Israelis can live side by side in peace.
Can a Nobel be revoked?
Shorts from John Fund.
If you’re wondering where the current airline mess came from, WSJ Editors think it’s congress.
… After the Federal Aviation Administration fined Southwest Airlines more than $10 million last month for inspection lapses, Congress rounded up the usual scapegoats for some hearings. FAA officials told the House Transportation Committee that the Southwest situation was “an isolated problem, not a systematic one.” But James Oberstar, the Minnesota Democrat who chairs the panel, was unpersuaded.
“It’s clear we have a structural problem at the FAA,” declared Mr. Oberstar, to nationwide headlines. “I fear that complacency may have set in at the highest levels of FAA management, reflecting a pendulum swing away from vigorous enforcement of compliance, toward a carrier-favorable, cozy relationship.”
The regulators got the message and went into panic mode. As is wont with government bureaucracies like the FAA, it proceeded to swing the pendulum waaaay back in the other direction – and hasn’t stopped. An industry-wide “audit” commenced, and FAA inspectors set about finding something – anything – awry with an aircraft to show Mr. Oberstar and other Congressional overseers that the agency was up to the job of enforcing federal maintenance requirements to the letter. …
Volokh spots yet another problem with our ethanol foolishness.