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If Barack Obama wants to be remembered for the ages, he should find a way to reverse the devastation suffered by black families ever since the government decided to help. Before 1950 less than 25% of black children were born to single mothers. Now the number is close to 70%. Remember Pickerhead’s Iron Rule of government -Whenever the state tries to help, it makes the problem worse. The short form of that is – The government always f**ks up!
Deroy Murdock wonders if the fact of Barack will so something to reverse black ghetto culture.
Item: Amid crisp breezes and bright sunshine, Barack Obama took the presidential oath Tuesday, to the thunderous applause of his supporters, the cautious hopes of the loyal opposition and the well wishes of all Americans.
Item: Three days earlier, four men were stabbed, one critically, at a Brooklyn party celebrating “Notorious,” the new movie about rapper Notorious B.I.G. He released the album “Ready to Die” before being killed in Los Angeles in 1997. Rapper Jamal “Gravy” Woolard – who portrays B.I.G. – was charged with misdemeanor assault and harassment against his wife last September, the New York Post reports. “She wouldn’t stop pushing me, so I snuffed her,” he allegedly said.
Question: Will Obama’s erudition and elegance finally eclipse the corrosive, often deadly scourge of hip-hop culture and the ghetto mentality that gnaw away like termites beneath black America’s floorboards? …
Mark Steyn on the speech.
… perhaps the silliest part of the new president’s speech was this: “On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics. We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”
Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Put aside the bitter partisanship, so “childish” and “petty,” and we can all be grown up about this and do the things that need to be done. The idea of a politics conducted within less ideological and more technocratic bounds is seductive. It’s how things work in much of Europe: You have a choice between a left-of-center candidate and an ever so slightly right-of-left-of-center candidate, and, regardless of which one you plump for, you wind up with the same old smidgeonette right-of-left-of-right-of-left-of-center government. The result has been to deliver a society of permanent high unemployment, unaffordable entitlements and deathbed demographics – even before the economic downturn put more immediate question marks over the future. As Obama was inaugurated, rioters were besieging their parliaments in Iceland, Latvia and Bulgaria, the beginnings of a civil unrest that will spread inward from the fringes of the European map. …
David Warren on the lesser evil.
… To set any of the Guantanamo inmates free, on some jurisprudential technicality, is to smear one’s hands with the blood of their victims when they return to their trade. This is not a hypothetical proposition: for while the numbers are disputed, a proportion of “low risk” inmates already freed from Guantanamo have returned to action.
This is why families of 9/11 victims were outraged by the executive orders. It is why Cmdr. Kirk Lippold, who lost 17 of his men in the attack on the USS Cole (at Aden in 2000), said of the order, “It demeans their deaths.” For among the apparent beneficiaries of President Obama’s “symbolic” measure is a “suspect” in the Cole attack.
It is why American and allied soldiers, whose lives are on the line against Islamist terrorists not yet captured, must necessarily feel demoralized. Conversely, it gives them a powerful motive to overlook the niceties when another of the enemy falls into their hands.
Barack Obama is not a complete fool, and the measures he has ordered are likely to prove cosmetic. Paradoxically, many of the prisoners at Guantanamo may well now suffer worse fates than if they had remained on location untried, or been processed through the military tribunals. For they will have to be sent somewhere. No country, whose citizenship they may nominally carry, is eager to receive them. Dump them on the authorities in, say, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, and I daresay their prison conditions will not improve.
The liberal mind — now fully restored to power in the United States — is in love with symbolic gestures. It is not much enamoured of the hard prudential reasoning that is involved in choosing between two or more evils. The mystery, to me, is the consistency with which it chooses to ignore the greater evil, in order to address the lesser.
Philly Daily News Op-Ed sums it up for the non Kool-Aid drinking half of the country.
AT THE risk of sounding like I’ve been sucking on sour grapes for the past few days, let me say something that, for me at least, needs to be said:
We non-Obama voters shouldn’t be bullied into supporting our new president.
Now that I’ve gotten your attention, allow me to explain.
It’s become common since the election to hear people say “even if you didn’t vote for him, even if you don’t agree with his policies, we as Americans should all support Barack Obama.” The implication: If we love this country, we want its leader to succeed. You know, the old “If we don’t hang together, we shall all hang separately.”
We all know how well that worked with George Bush, don’t we? (In fact, haven’t we had eight years of hearing that the highest form of patriotism is dissent?) …
WSJ Editors on Obama’s lawyers’ attempted slight of hand on interrogation. Improbable as it may seem now, this is how we get another Bush presidency. If our country is successfully attacked again, the visuals of Obama sitting at a desk surrounded by grown men are bad for him. He looks like a kid who won President for a Day which includes a photo-op of him signing a bill. His people and the media were always on message with flattering cameras angles. Now the camera is looking down and he looks like a small pretend president while he signs.
Most politicians would rather do anything than make a difficult choice, and it seems President Obama hasn’t abandoned this Senatorial habit. To wit, yesterday’s executive order on interrogation: It imposes broad limits on how aggressively U.S. intelligence officers can question terrorists, but it also keeps open the prospect of legal loopholes that would allow them to press harder in tough cases.
While that kind of double standard may resolve a domestic political problem, it’s no way to fight a war. The human-rights lobby and many Democrats are still experiencing hypochondria about the Bush Administration’s supposed torture program, and their cheering about this “clean break” means they may be appeased. But the larger risk is that Mr. Obama’s restrictions end up disabling an essential tool in the U.S. antiterror arsenal. …
Lisa Schiffren with a good Corner post on Caroline Kennedy.
… this post is about Caroline Kennedy, who may or may not be depressed for whichever reason one chooses to believe was behind her withdrawal from contention for the NY Senate appointment: wasn’t going to get the job anyway, or Uncle Ted’s worsening health—or nanny and tax problems as it now seems.
I am quite gratified that our Park Avenue Princess will not be my Senator. First, because I always root for the underdog. I was really offended to see the accidental Governor Paterson, with no constituency or fund-raising apparatus of his own and a visible lack of intellectual ballast, get pushed around by the united Kennedy, Obama, and Bloomberg forces into annointing Ms. Kennedy. Notwithstanding the decent job he has done as mayor in some regards, I find Bloomberg’s characteristic bullying streak downright offensive. …
A J. G. Thayer Contentions post on the same subject.
Mr. Thayer also posts on Joe Biden’s latest gaff.
… The one blessing here is that now Biden is out of the Senate and holds what is historically the least powerful position in government, only possessing whatever power the president chooses to imbue to the holder — and Obama doesn’t strike me as the sort who would let a lot of real power slip out of his hands.
And Jennifer Rubin.
… President Obama would do well to keep Biden away from the press, foreign leaders, other senior officials, and Congress. The motto for Biden must be “do no harm.” And for Biden that amounts to doing nothing. The perfect job description for the Vice President.
Further Corner analysis on the most watched inaugural.
Scrappleface notes the War Against Terror has turned into the Case Against Terror.
… While Bush administration tactics produced nothing measurable, beyond seven years of attack-free living on American soil, the source said, the Case Against Terror will be effective, legal and morally right, thus engendering respect among those who wish to destroy America’s way of life.
“If a Khalid Sheik Mohammed, for example, knows he’s not going to be waterboarded, he’ll sense our inherent fairness and probably be more forthcoming with information.” the administration source said, “If he resists, then he knows with certainty that he’ll spend months, and perhaps years sitting in a courtroom, listening to attorneys argue fine points of process. He’ll be begging for the waterboard.”