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Marty Peretz continues to see things more clearly.
… So this question arises: If Obama could not get Chicago over the finish line in Copenhagen, which was a test only of his charms, how will he persuade Tehran to give up its nuclear weapons capacity or the Arabs, to whom he has tilted (we are told) only tactically, to sit down without their 60 year-old map as guide to what they demand from Israel.
What I suspect is that the president is probably a clinical narcissist. This is not necessarily a bad condition if one maintains for oneself what the psychiatrists call an “optimal margin of illusion,” that is, the margin of hope that allows you to work. But what if his narcissism blinds him to the issues and problems in the world and the inveterate foes of the nation that are not susceptible to his charms?
Chicago will survive its disappointments and Obama will, as well. It is the other stage sets on which the president struts–like he strutted in Cairo and at the United Nations–that concern me.
I know that the president believes himself a good man. My nervy query to him is: “Does he believe America to be a good country?”
Jennifer Rubin asks some questions about Honduras policy.
… Once again we’re left wondering: What was the Obama team thinking? It’s not as if Zelaya’s relationship with Chavez was a secret or that Chavez’s record was unknown. The Obama administration didn’t get ambushed here. No, it willfully ignored inconvenient facts and applicable history as it pursued with a singular focus its effort to atone for alleged past American sins in the region and ensure that Chavez didn’t have cause to complain about the president—who likes very much to be liked by those who don’t like America. …
WSJ Op-Ed on how the teacher’s unions lost the media.
Quick: Which newspaper in recent editorials called teachers unions “indefensible” and a barrier to reform? You’d be excused for guessing one of the conservative outlets, but it was that bastion of liberalism, the New York Times. A month ago, The New Yorker—yes, The New Yorker—published a scathing piece on the problems with New York City’s “rubber room,” a union-negotiated arrangement that lets incompetent teachers while away the day at full salary while doing nothing. The piece quoted a principal saying that union leader Randi Weingarten “would protect a dead body in the classroom.”
Things only got worse for the unions this past week. A Washington Post editorial about charter schools carried this sarcastic headline: “Poor children learn. Teachers unions are not pleased.” And the Times weighed in again Monday, calling a national teachers union “aggressively hidebound.”
In recent months, the press has not merely been harsh on unions—it has championed some controversial school reformers. Washington’s schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, who won’t win any popularity contests among teachers, enjoys unwavering support from the Post editorial page for her plans to institute merit pay and abolish tenure. …
More National Review shorts.
Since 1991, every president has met with the Dalai Lama, every time the Dalai Lama has traveled to Washington. That means Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43. The Dalai Lama is traveling to Washington this month (October). But President Obama has said no. He is going to China in November, and is not willing to upset Beijing, by receiving the Dalai Lama, until after that trip. He argues that a “strong” U.S.-China relationship can only help the Tibetans. Some supporters of Tibet are grumbling about “appeasement.” They wonder what Obama will have to show for his solicitousness of China. We wonder too. We also note that Obama fears not to offend China by slapping arbitrary tariffs on its goods while fearing to offend China by receiving one of the more admirable men on the planet, speaking for one of the more persecuted peoples on the planet. Maybe Big Labor should adopt the Tibetan cause? …
George Will columns on parts of the climate change debate, and we use that to kick off a few items on current climate controversies. The pieces that follow are better organized than Will’s.
… America needs a national commission appointed to assess the evidence about climate change. Alarmists will fight this because the first casualty would be the carefully cultivated and media-reinforced myth of consensus — the bald assertion that no reputable scientist doubts the gravity of the crisis, doubts being conclusive evidence of disreputable motives or intellectual qualifications. The president, however, could support such a commission because he is sure “there’s finally widespread recognition of the urgency of the challenge before us.” So he announced last week at the U.N. climate change summit, where he said the threat is so “serious” and “urgent” that unless all nations act “boldly, swiftly and together” — “time . . . is running out” — we risk “irreversible catastrophe.” Prince Charles agrees. In March, seven months ago, he said humanity had 100 months — until July 2017 — to prevent “catastrophic climate change and the unimaginable horrors that this would bring.” …
Ronald Bailey in American.Com reports on our “uncrowded” planet. Seriously! For years Pickerhead has been fond of saying that everyone in the world, in families of four, on quarter acre lots could live in Alaska. Everyone. All 6.8 billion. Alaska has a land area of 663,248 square miles, making 424 million acres, providing 1,697 billion quarter acre lots to hold 1,700 billion families. OK we’re a little shy, but you get the idea. Everybody in the world living in Alaska. Now you know why the country looks a little empty when you fly coast to coast.
Every so often, the overpopulation meme erupts into public discourse and imminent doom is declared again. A particularly overwrought example of the overpopulation meme and its alleged problems appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch in a piece by regular financial columnist Paul B. Farrell.
Farrell asserts that overpopulation is “the biggest time-bomb for Obama, America, capitalism, the world.” Bigger than global warming, poverty, or peak oil. Overpopulation will end capitalism and maybe even destroy modern civilization. As evidence, Farrell cites what he calls neo-Malthusian biologist Jared Diamond’s 12-factor equation of population doom.
It turns out that Farrell is wrong or misleading about the environmental and human effects of all 12 factors he cites. Let’s take them one by one. …
Speaking of idiot doomsayers, John Tierney writes some more on Obama’s science czar, John Holdren.
As a long-time student of John P. Holdren’s gloomy visions of the future, like his warnings about global famines and resource shortages, I can’t resist passing along another one that has just been dug up. This one was made in 1971, long before Dr. Holdren came President Obama’s science adviser, in an essay just unearthed by zombietime (a blog that has been republishing excerpts of his past writings). In the 1971 essay, “Overpopulation and the Potential for Ecocide,” Dr. Holdren and his co-author, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich, warned of a coming ice age.
They certainly weren’t the only scientists in the 1970s to warn of a coming ice age, but I can’t think of any others who were so creative in their catastrophizing. …
The humor section starts with a great post from NewsBusters which outlines the NY Times efforts to whitewash the Denmark Debacle.
… I should also note that a supposedly heroic Michelle Obama quote in the original (“‘Take no prisoners,’ she vowed”) also got the memory-hole treatment.
The change in the dateline location is important to the point of this post. The Washington story is not an hours-later update of an older story; the location change means that it is a new story. Yet it carries the same URL as the older one out of Copenhagen (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/03/sports/03obama.html). There is no journalistically defensible reason for deleting the Copenhagen-based story. Yet it has indeed disappeared. Times searches on word strings deleted from the older item come up empty.
As if the Times needed any more blows to its allegedly still-existing journalistic integrity, this one can’t help but beg the question of who at the White House put pressure on the Times to do what it did. Why would any journalist put themselves in the position of making people wonder if they bow to the wishes of the politically powerful? The answer may be that journalism, once thought to be at least lurking occasionally in its Manhattan hallways, is officially dead at the New York Times.
NY Times admits its readers are in the dark. Scott Johnson from Power Line has the story.
… Here’s an example, from Leigh Allen of San Francisco, who said she relies on The Times to keep her informed: “I often don’t hear about the latest conflict until I read a Facebook rant from an old high school friend or talk on the phone with my mother (both in conservative Orange County, Calif.). It’s embarrassing not to be able to respond with facts when I hadn’t even heard about the issue.” Michele Cusack of Novato, Calif., said that when someone asked if she had heard the latest about Acorn, “I had to answer ‘no’ because I get all my news from The New York Times.” …