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Rich Lowry posts a photo from the beer summit and comments on the scene. Obama walks ahead, oblivious, as police officer Crowley assists Gates down the steps at the White House.
American Thinker also posts the photo with comments, and contrasts it to a photo of Bush 43 assisting a feeble Senator Robert Byrd.
… At every stage of the entire Gates affair, Obama has provided a revealing tell. The “acted stupidly” blunder revealed that he automatically blames the police and thinks they really are stupid to begin with. It didn’t trigger a single alarm bell in his mind as he figured out what to say.
Then, the non-apology apology revealed an arrogant man who cannot do what honest people do: admit it when they make a mistake.
Now at stage three, the beer photo op looked OK. It didn’t turn into a disaster.
But then in a small moment that nobody in the White House had the brains to understand, Obama goes and send a body language message like this. …
Victor Davis Hanson speaks to Obama’s true attitude regarding race, and the spin efforts made only after the polls come out.
Perhaps the beer summit will stop the president’s slide in the polls, but I am not so sure, since the public is beginning to catch on that there is a pattern here. On matters racial, the public thought that in Obama they were getting an updated version of Martin Luther King gravitas, but they are learning it may be a more eloquent form of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton bathos.
When Obama was first asked about the Gates incident — and we know he was prepped beforehand about the question — he did not suggest a beer summit, but instead used the adverb “stupidly” to describe the police action and then went into a disquisition on racial profiling as part of his preferred “teachable moment.”
The beer thing came only afterwards, when the polls went south; had they gone north, then no beer summit. Ditto with Reverend Wright. Obama’s natural instinct was to praise the Right Reverend, and he did so in his infamous grandmother-profiling speech. The later correction and disavowal came not immediately after Reverend Wright’s National Press Club outburst, but only when polls suggested that he was beginning really to hurt Obama. Ditto again the corrections to Michelle Obama’s “not previously proud of the United States” asides. …
Charles Krauthammer comments on Obama’s arrogance in the face of his inciting racial tensions.
…This is a typical Obama. He commits an offense against the public good–he imputes racism where there was none–and then he declares it a teachable moment in which he will instruct us on tolerance, understanding, and brotherhood.
Now, he did this before. He does it over and over again. He’s found in bed last year after 20 years with a raving racist. (We had known he had been in the church of Jeremiah Wright, but we didn’t know about his racism until the middle of the campaign.) And what is Obama’s response? He gives a speech on race, another teachable moment, in which he ascribes racism to everyone–white working class, African-Americans, Jeremiah Wright, his own grandmother–except himself. And he stands there hovering above it all, teaching us the ways of tolerance and brotherhood.
Look, he may be a great president or a lousy one, but when he acts in this way, when he stands above the fray in a patronizing and condescending way, instructing us on the ways of the world, I find him insufferable.
Jennifer Rubin also posts on Gates-gate and what it reveals about Obama.
…But perhaps the starry-eyed media learned a lesson: Obama may sound smart, but he doesn’t necessarily know what he is talking about. Whether it is about Crowley’s motives, the blue-red-pill dilemma, the 4 million “saved or created” jobs, or the history of the Middle East, Obama hasn’t seemed grounded in the real world — and it shows. It’s a good lesson that “smooth” doesn’t mean “right.”
Stuart Taylor looks at the attitudes of Sotomayor and Gates regarding race.
Soon-to-be-Justice Sonia Sotomayor has called herself “a product of affirmative action” who was “accepted rather readily into Princeton” despite test scores that were lower than those of more privileged classmates due to “cultural biases built into testing.”
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., capitalizing on the avalanche of publicity he touched off by attributing to racism his July 16 arrest at his home by a white police officer, has declared that America is “racist” and “classist” and that “there haven’t been fundamental structural changes in America…. The only black people who truly live in a post-racial world in America all live in a very nice house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”
What Sotomayor and Gates share is a habit of drawing dubious lessons about race from their own experiences. …
Phillip K. Howard writes for WaPo on the one health care cost the Dems don’t want to discuss.
Health-care reform is bogged down because none of the bills before Congress deals with the staggering waste of the current system, estimated to be $700 billion to $1 trillion annually. The waste flows from a culture of health care in which every incentive is to do more — that’s how doctors make money and that’s how they protect themselves from lawsuits.
Yet the congressional leadership has slammed the door on solutions to the one driver of waste that is relatively easy to fix: the erratic, expensive and time-consuming jury-by-jury malpractice system. Pilot projects could test whether this system should be replaced with expert health courts, but leaders who say they want to cut costs will not even consider them.
What are they scared of? The answer is inescapable — such expert courts might succeed and undercut the special interest of an influential lobby, the trial lawyers. An expeditious and reliable new system would compensate patients more quickly and at a fraction of the overhead of the current medical justice system, which spends nearly 60 cents of every dollar on lawyers’ fees and administrative costs.
Even more compelling, expert health courts would eliminate the need for “defensive medicine,” thereby helping to save enough money for America to afford universal health coverage. …
Norman Borlaug in WSJ writes on what farmers can accomplish.
Earlier this month in L’Aquila, Italy, a small town recently devastated by an earthquake, leaders of the G-8 countries pledged $20 billion over three years for farm-investment aid that will help resource-poor farmers get access to tools like better seed and fertilizer and help poor nations feed themselves.For those of us who have spent our lives working in agriculture, focusing on growing food versus giving it away is a giant step forward.
Given the right tools, farmers have shown an uncanny ability to feed themselves and others, and to ignite the economic engine that will reverse the cycle of chronic poverty. And the escape from poverty offers a chance for greater political stability in their countries as well.
But just as the ground shifted beneath the Italian community of L’Aquila, so too has the political landscape heaved in other parts of the world, casting unfounded doubts on agricultural tools for farmers made through modern science, such as biotech corn in parts of Europe. Even here at home, some elements of popular culture romanticize older, inefficient production methods and shun fertilizers and pesticides, arguing that the U.S. should revert to producing only local organic food. People should be able to purchase organic food if they have the will and financial means to do so, but not at the expense of the world’s hungry—25,000 of whom die each day from malnutrition. …
The Economist reports on China’s auto industry leader.
AT A time when most carmakers are struggling to cope with the worst crisis the industry has experienced in living memory, the ambitions of Geely, China’s biggest privately owned car firm, are breathtaking. The company is simultaneously developing six modern platforms—an astonishing number even for a global giant such as Toyota—and is committed to launching nine new cars in the next 18 months and up to 42 new models by 2015. Its technical director, Frank Zhao, claims that Geely will have the capacity to make 2m cars a year by then.
Whether Geely will be able to sell anything like that number of cars is another matter. …