The Role of Government During Natural Disasters

On the Yahoo! page, I came across a story by the AP entitled "Romney faces scrutiny on aid in storm's wake."  It's basically a hit piece, designed to cast Romney as a heartless man without compassion for those suffering during natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy.  Much of the piece revolves around comments Romney made during a forum in June of last year.  I will quote the back and forth with Romney and moderator John King so that you can get a full picture of his comments:

JOHN KING: ...I was just in Joplin, Missouri. I've been in Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee and other communities dealing with whether it's the tornadoes, the flooding, and worse. FEMA is about to run out of money, and there are some people who say do it on a case-by-case basis and some people who say, you know, maybe we're learning a lesson here that the states should take on more of this role. How do you deal with something like that? 

ROMNEY: Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that's even better.

Instead of thinking in the federal budget, what we should cut -- we should ask ourselves the opposite question. What should we keep? We should take all of what we're doing at the federal level and say, what are the things we're doing that we don't have to do? And those things we've got to stop doing, because we're borrowing $1.6 trillion more this year than we're taking in. We cannot... 

KING: Including disaster relief, though? 

ROMNEY: We cannot -- we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we'll all be dead and gone before it's paid off. It makes no sense at all.

His comments only obliquely touched on federal aid during natural disasters and instead centered on how to get the U.S. out of -- at the time -- a 15 trillion dollar hole.  

Let's look now at the AP piece I cited earlier.  Here's how it begins:

WASHINGTON (AP) — There's nothing like a natural disaster to test the depth of politicians' preference for small government. 

First of all, "small" government is really a misnomer (the writer was searching for the word "limited").  Alexander Hamilton argued for instance that under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, Congress has only eighteen enumerated powers and that those powers are to be used energetically--in other words, those powers should be used to their fullest (case in point, see the Necessary and Proper Clause).  Republicans and conservatives though have themselves not exactly been clear on the distinction between small government, e.g., the government as it was under the Articles of Confederation, and limited government, so I understand the haziness here.

Let's move on:

As has been shown time after time — especially as tornadoes and hurricanes rip through politically conservative states — even the sturdiest tea party supporters become fans of government when it's doling out money to storm victims for motel rooms and other temporary housing or helping with house repairs.

First of all, last year FEMA spent 5.6 billion dollars in fiscal year 2011 -- a paltry sum when considering that the national debt is increasing on average about 1 trillion dollars every year.  The implicit idea in this snide aside is that those Tea Party crazies believe in some Hobbesian anarchy state, where government does not exist and man is in constant war with one another.

Here's a little primer for the AP:  First and foremost, governments are instituted to protect the natural rights of the governed.  It seems then that when Acts of God occur and do damage to the country on a large scale, it's the responsibility for government at some level to help out -- much like how when a fire breaks out, the fire department will come and attempt to put the fire out.  Wether the help includes solely coordination between officials closer to the ground or providing some monetary aid, it seems that government at some level has a minimum responsibility.  Which level of government should be responding, be it federal, state, or local, comes down to particular circumstances.  And it seems to be in this context where Romney was making his comments.  He was not thinking of disbanding all disaster relief programs;  instead, he was contemplating which level of government  would best handle carrying out those duties.

When one understands that those who oppose President Obama are not simply unprincipled anarchists, this all makes a little more sense.

Worth A Thousand Words

In the midst of the devastation that Hurricane Sandy is causing along the eastern seaboard, the traditional guarding of the Tomb of the Unknown Solider carries on:

(Full disclosure:  The above picture was taken during a storm in September, but it represents the idea of self-sacrifice of the soldiers guarding the Tomb at all times.)

A Racist Nation

The AP reported over the weekend that as compared to 2008, Americans are overall more racist.  Read this:

WASHINGTON — Racial attitudes have not improved in the four years since the United States elected its first black president, an Associated Press poll finds, as a slight majority of Americans now express prejudice toward blacks whether they recognize those feelings or not. 

Those views could cost President Barack Obama votes as he tries for re-election, the survey found, though the effects are mitigated by some people’s more favorable views of blacks.

Obviously, with the tide turning toward Romney, the press had to figure out some way to explain it, any reasonable explanation to the contrary notwithstanding.  The implication of this report, of course not said explicitly, is that any opposition to the president, whether consciously or not, was due in part to racism.  

But at a closer inspection, the data doesn't even merit the supposed fact of increased racism.  Aaron Goldstein takes a look at the data in the report:

The AP has come to this conclusion in part because in one question only 24% of respondents liked Blacks "a great deal" as compared to 31% in 2010. But I would point out that 45% they "neither liked or disliked" Blacks as compared to 40% in 2010. I would interpret that data and conclude that an increasing number of people do not take a person's skin color into consideration when determining if they like or dislike someone.

So racism is now something akin to the colorblind view of the Constitution, which was famously explicated by Justice John Marshall Harlan in his dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson:

But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color- blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guarantied by the supreme law of the land are involved.

And was repeated by Martin Luther King:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. 

Running Aground

Mark Helprin has a great piece in today's WSJ on Obama's now infamous "bayonets" comment from the third president debate.  Helprin on the skewed logic of Obama's implicit argument:

During the recent foreign policy debate, the president presumed to instruct his opponent: "Governor Romney maybe hasn't spent enough time looking at how our military works. You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so the question is not a game of Battleship, where we're counting ships. It's what are our capabilities." 

Yes, the Army's horses have been superseded by tanks and helicopters, and its bayonets rendered mainly ceremonial by armor and long-range, automatic fire, but what, precisely, has superseded ships in the Navy? The commander in chief patronizingly shared his epiphany that the ships of today could beat the hell out of those of 1916. To which one could say, like Neil Kinnock, "I know that, Prime Minister," and go on to add that we must configure the Navy to face not the dreadnoughts of 1916 but "things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them," and "ships that go underwater," and also ballistic missiles, land-based aviation, and electronic warfare.

But beneath the trivialities lie a serious discussion about how the lack of a navy manifests itself concerning our main competition on the world stage:

While China has risen from 56 to 78, the U.S. has descended from 207 to 114. In addition to parities, China is successfully focusing on exactly what it needs—terminal ballistic missile guidance, superfast torpedoes and wave-skimming missiles, swarms of oceangoing missile craft, battle-picture blinding—to address American vulnerabilities, while our counters are insufficient or nonexistent. 

Nor is China our only potential naval adversary, and with aircraft, surface-to-surface missiles and over-the-horizon radars, the littoral countries need not have navies to assert themselves over millions of square miles of sea. Even the Somali pirates, with only outboard motors, skiffs, RPGs, and Kalashnikovs, have taxed the maritime forces of the leading naval states.

So far from Obama being in the twenty-first century concerning military strategy, he would be a laughingstock in sixteenth century Spain.

What's the Matter with Iowa?

This from the Des Moines Register:

Ten months ago this newspaper endorsed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for the Republican nomination for president. An overarching consideration was which of the party’s candidates could we see occupying the White House, and there was no question that Romney was qualified for the job. 

Now, in the closing days of the general election campaign, the question is which of the two contenders deserves to be the next president of the United States. 

Both President Barack Obama and Governor Romney are superbly qualified. Both are graduates of the Harvard University Law School who have distinguished themselves in government, in public service and in private life. Both are devoted husbands and fathers.
American voters are deeply divided about this race. The Register’s editorial board, as it should, had a vigorous debate over this endorsement. Our discussion repeatedly circled back to the nation’s single most important challenge: pulling the economy out of the doldrums, getting more Americans back in the workforce in meaningful jobs with promising futures, and getting the federal government on a track to balance the budget in a bipartisan manner that the country demands. 

Which candidate could forge the compromises in Congress to achieve these goals? When the question is framed in those terms, Mitt Romney emerges the stronger candidate.
The former governor and business executive has a strong record of achievement in both the private and the public sectors. He was an accomplished governor in a liberal state. He founded and ran a successful business that turned around failing companies. He successfully managed the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. 

Romney has made rebuilding the economy his No. 1 campaign priority — and rightly so.

And I should add, the Register hasn't endorsed a Republican candidate for president since 1972.

The Tide Turns

Bill Kristol has some big news:

Breaking news on Benghazi: the CIA spokesman, presumably at the direction of CIA director David Petraeus, has put out this statement: "No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate. ”

So who in the government did tell “anybody” not to help those in need? Someone decided not to send in military assets to help those Agency operators. Would the secretary of defense make such a decision on his own? No. 

It would have been a presidential decision. There was presumably a rationale for such a decision. What was it? When and why—and based on whose counsel obtained in what meetings or conversations—did President Obama decide against sending in military assets to help the Americans in need?

This is getting worse by the hour now.

Unbelievable

This is getting worse and worse:

Fox News has learned from sources who were on the ground in Benghazi that an urgent request from the CIA annex for military back-up during the attack on the U.S. consulate and subsequent attack several hours later on the annex itself was denied by the CIA chain of command -- who also told the CIA operators twice to "stand down" rather than help the ambassador's team when shots were heard at approximately 9:40 p.m. in Benghazi on Sept. 11.

And then there's this revelation from Charles Woods, the father of a Navy SEAL who was killed in Bengahzi:

Woods, in interviews earlier this week, also described a series of conversations he had with administration officials at the memorial service held Sept. 14. He said that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- despite signs early on that militants were behind the attack -- pledged to him at that event that she would pursue the maker of an anti-Islam film that had been linked to other protests.

"Her countenance was not good and she made this statement to me ... she said we will make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted," he said on radio host Glenn Beck's online show, adding that she also apologized.

Woods said he "could tell that she was not telling me the truth."

Even in private, Sec. of State Clinton still relied on the "video did it" claim.  Unbelievable.

Does Not Compute

This morning on CBS, Colin Powell endorsed President Obama for a second time (he backed him over John McCain in 2008).  Here is Powell in his own words:

Summarizing the past four years under Obama, Powell said "Generally we've come out of the dive and we're starting to gain altitude." He acknowledged that problems remain, saying "The unemployment rate is too high, people are still hurting in housing but I see that we're starting to rise up." 

Turning to foreign policy, Powell said he saw "the president get us of one war, start to get us out of a second war and did not get us into any new wars. And finally I think that the actions he has taken with respect to protecting us from terrorism have been very very solid. And so, I think we ought to keep on the track that we are on." 

Powell expressed his concern about Republican candidate Mitt Romney's changing positions on international affairs. "The governor who was saying things at the debate on Monday night ... was saying things that were quite different from what he said earlier. I'm not quite sure which Gov. Romney we would be getting with respect to foreign policy." 

"One day he has a certain strong view about staying in Afghanistan but then on Monday night he agrees with the withdrawal, same thing in Iraq. On almost every issue that was discussed on Monday night, Governor Romney agreed with the President with some nuances. But this is quite a different set of foreign policy views than he had earlier in the campaign. And my concern ... is that sometimes I don't sense that he has thought through these issues as thoroughly as he should have." 

Powell also said that he has given close consideration to Romney's domestic policies. "As I listen to what his proposals are especially with respect to dealing with respect to our most significant issue, the economy, it's essentially let's cut taxes and compensate for that with other things but that compensation does not cover all of the cuts intended or the new expenses associated with defense."

But, just to cherry pick one of Powell's claims, I would ask him what proposals he has seen from President Obama that makes him believe the debt would be cut in half over the next four years?

Also, this part is nauseating:

And, despite his endorsement of a Democratic candidate in two presidential elections, Powell says he remains a Republican. "I think I'm a Republican of a more moderate mold," he said before adding, "That's something of a dying breed I'm sorry to say."

Yes, we all know those great Republicans of years long ago who gladly voted for the Democrat candidate.  Republicans not voting for the Democrat presidential selection is surely what's wrong with our politics today...

Please.
 

On the Turning Away

Hadley Arkes wonders whether we have become a different people than the one who came together to form the Constitution.  His evidence:

The historian J.G. Randall complained years ago that Lincoln and Stephen Douglas had gone through Illinois in their famous debates, unsettling the countryside, and instead of focusing on what he regarded as the “real” issues – issues such as the opening of western lands or improving conditions in factories – those two politicians agitated the countryside over that moral issue of slavery. And everyone knew that there were no answers to moral questions.

Mr. Romney, in that second debate, looked into the camera and earnestly said that fixing the economy and lifting the condition of the middle class was “what this election is all about.” But of course he must know – and he has more than intimated that he knows – that the election is about far more than that.

And yet, we hear at every election, with the voice of J.G. Randall, that “the economy” is the overriding the issue. Either the political class has come to believe that the economy drives everything else, or that it is the thing that people care about most of all.

The pundits hold to that view even as many voters persistently show that they care profoundly about other things. But there was once a time when political men seemed able to talk about the questions that ran to the root of things, and find a public that took quite as seriously, as an issue, the terms of principle on which they lived as a people.

And the haunting question is: when did we cease being that people?

I think there are many of those kinds of people left, but the number is unfortunately decreasing.  The arguments and language used by most in the political class are slowly turning more and more away from being the People who came together to make the Constitution and the Union that predated the Constitution.  Instead, we talk about the peripheral issues -- the radii if you will --, and, in the words of Lincoln, we almost never get to that central point from which all those minor thoughts radiate.

Stranger Than Fiction

The problem that dwarfs combatting radical Islamic terrorism worldwide?  Obesity.  Enjoy this:

Richard Carmona, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from Arizona, said that obesity would "dilemma will dwarf 9/11 or any other terrorist attempt." 

"Obesity is the terror within," Carmona told a University of South Carolina audience in early 2006, according to a wire report from then. "Unless we do something about it, the magnitude of the dilemma will dwarf 9-11 or any other terrorist attempt." 

Carmona made the comments when he was the U.S. surgeon general.

Carmona worried that obesity would decimate the military. Carmona said then, according to the Associated Press: "Where will our soldiers and sailors and airmen come from? ... Where will our policemen and firemen come from if the youngsters today are on a trajectory that says they will be obese, laden with cardiovascular disease, increased cancers and a host of other diseases when they reach adulthood?" 

The problem, Carmona contended, resulted from health illiteracy by the American people.
The Democratic Senate candidate is facing off against Republican congressman Jeff Flake in Arizona.

The Real War on Women

Before I read this piece by Laura Genero, a former senior government official, I hadn't yet heard this argument before:

Since the 1970s, a revolution has taken place in the professions. In the United States today, more women graduate from college and earn advanced degrees than men. While relatively few women choose degrees in computer science, information sciences, and engineering, women are on track to access -- if not dominate -- many of the other high-income professions. A glance at U.S. Department of Education statistics below shows the startling transformation that has taken place, especially in the professions, during the past four decades. Especially noteworthy is the fact that today, nearly half of all MDs are awarded to women.

When professional women marry, they usually marry other professionals. Together, many of these achievement-oriented couples are earning -- or will earn during their lifetimes -- household incomes over $250,000, which the Obama Administration now classifies as "rich." 

No wonder Obama supporters are blanketing the airwaves with campaign ads focusing on abortion, free mammogram referrals and free contraceptives. I would, too, if the goal was to distract from the President's onerous tax policies that penalize women trying to get ahead. President Obama's tax proposals may be advertised as targeting the "rich." But in reality, they disproportionately target middle-class women who heeded the messages of the last four decades, invested in themselves, and are staking a claim to high-income professions. President Obama is asking them to pay a steep price for making the right choices, especially for choosing to marry. That's not my idea of workplace fairness. It's a tax on hard work, professional achievement and the belief that "Yes, we can."

This is the real War on Women.  This line of attack should be taken up by the Romney campaign and repeated over and over again until November 6th.

Missing the Boat

Sandra Fluke, that famous 30-something law student who wanted Georgetown Law School, a Catholic-affiliated university, to give her free contraception, spoke to a massive crowd in Neveda over the weekend.  Here is a picture of the mass of humanity:

Looks like the whole "War on Women" argument is working just as well as ever...

(h/t Mark Steyn)

Pawns

I was reading through the headlines at Yahoo! and found this story, "After Libya misfire, pressure on Romney in the foreign policy debate."  A bullet point below the link to the story suggested that Romney really, really messed up about his answer regarding Libya during the debate last week.  Interested, I clicked on the story and was met with this:

As former governor of Massachusetts and an ex-businessman, [Romney] is out of his comfort zone when not focused on domestic and economic matters. 

That was evident in last week's debate when he mistakenly said Obama took weeks to acknowledge that the Benghazi assault - which claimed the lives of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans - was a terrorist attack. 

Obama, who said he had done so in a September 12 appearance in the White House Rose Garden, challenged Romney to "check the transcript" and chastised him for trying to score political points from a national tragedy. (Empahsis mine.)

Ok, let's check the transcript from the pertinent section of Obama's rose garden speech on September 12:

As Americans, let us never, ever forget that our freedom is only sustained because there are people who are willing to fight for it, to stand up for it, and in some cases, lay down their lives for it. Our country is only as strong as the character of our people and the service of those both civilian and military who represent us around the globe. 

No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for. Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.

The line in question, which was said near the end of his remarks, does not say conclusively that what specifically happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack.  He used the words "acts of terror," which suggests he is talking at a 30,000 feet level, a more generalized statement about our country and its people.  Now, for arguments sake, a person could reasonably read into this statement that what occurred in Benghazi was a terrorist attack.  But why then for the next two weeks did everyone in the administration, including but not limited to President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, Susan Rice, Jay Carney, etc., tell the American people repeatedly that what happened in Benghazi was not a terrorist attack but the result of a 14 minute video that inflamed locals to retaliate, which then, in certain accounts, was co-opted by terrorists?

And if it was a terrorist attack and had nothing to do with a video, why did Obama say this earlier in the same remarks:

Since our founding, the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. But there is absolutely no justification to this type of senseless violence. None. The world must stand together to unequivocally reject these brutal acts.

James Rosen, a Fox News correspondant, writing at the WSJ, gives us a good timeline of events regarding when President Obama gave up on the "video did it" meme:

Not until his afternoon appearance on "The View" on Sept. 25—the "two weeks" of delay that Mr. Romney alluded to in the debate—did the president offer Americans an explanation of Benghazi that made no reference to a protest over a video. The YouTube connection had figured prominently in his Benghazi pronouncements as late as Mr. Obama's Sept. 20 appearance on Univision, and even in his address to the United Nations General Assembly on the morning of Sept. 25.

And McClatchy on Jay Carney and Susan Rice:

With images of besieged U.S. missions in the Middle East still leading the evening news, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney became the first official to back away from the earlier declaration that the Benghazi assault was a “complex attack” by extremists. Instead, Carney told reporters, authorities “have no information to suggest that it was a preplanned attack.” He added that there was no reason to think that the Benghazi attack wasn’t related to the video, given that the clip had sparked protests in many Muslim cities. 

“The unrest that we’ve seen around the region has been in reaction to a video that Muslims, many Muslims, find offensive,” Carney said. 

When pressed by reporters who pointed out evidence that the violence in Benghazi was preplanned, Carney said that “news reports” had speculated about the motive. He noted again that “the unrest around the region has been in response to this video.”

Carney then launched into remarks that read like talking points in defense of the U.S. decision to intervene in last year’s uprising against Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi: that post-Gadhafi Libya, he said, is “one of the more pro-American countries in the region,” that it’s led by a new government “that has just come out of a revolution,” and that the lack of security capabilities there “is not necessarily reflective of anything except for the remarkable transformation that’s been going on in the region.”

By that Sunday, Sept. 16, the evolution of the narrative was complete when Rice, the U.N. ambassador, showed up on all five major morning talk shows to make the most direct public connection yet between the Benghazi assault and the incendiary video.
While she couched her remarks in caveats – “based on the information we have at present,” for example – Rice clearly intended to make the link before a large American audience. 

According to the then-current assessment, Rice told ABC’s “This Week,” the attack was “a spontaneous – not a premeditated – response to what had transpired in Cairo” – a reference to a demonstration triggered by the anti-Muslim video in which hundreds breached the U.S. Embassy compound there and tore down the American flag. Rice repeated the claim throughout her talk-show appearances and later blamed intelligence services for giving her incorrect information before she went on air.

Also, for anyone interested, this 7 minute video from Ed Henry of Fox News details the entire timeline.

I hope Mitt Romney and his team have put this all together so that he can make a persuasive case on Monday night on the failures of Benghazi and the entire Obama foreign policy in general.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/10/18/171933/obama-administration-officials.html#storylink=cpy#storylink=cpy

(h/t to Scott Johnson for providing many of the links)

Binders Full of BS

Democrats have been trashing Mitt Romney over his comment in the last debate regarding his "binders full of women."  But President Obama had very similar binders in 2009.  This from the Chicago Tribune back on March 29, 2009:

In a bid to get more Muslim Americans working in the Obama administration, a book with resumes of 45 of the nation's most qualified -- Ivy League grads, Fortune 500 executives and public servants, all carefully vetted -- has been submitted to the White House. 

A Funny Thing Happened Last Night

Last night was the 67th annual Alfred E. Smith Dinner, and both Mitt Romney and President Obama did not disappoint:

I always like this kind of thing in politics.  Humor and self-deprecation are especially important so that a politician does not get too high an opinion of himself.  In a certain sense, we are after all supposed to be cut from the same cloth.

Surprisingly Romney overall did better than Obama, whose stilted delivery somewhat muted the full force of the lines.  Romney best lines were aimed at President Obama.  A sample:

And by the way in — in the spirit of Sesame Street, the president’s remarks tonight are brought to you but the letter ‘O’ and the number $16 trillion.

And another:

Campaigns can be grueling, exhausting. President Obama and are each very lucky to have one person who is always in our corner, someone who we can lean on, and someone who is a comforting presence. Without whom, we wouldn’t be able to go another day. I have my beautiful wife Ann, he has Bill Clinton.

Good stuff. 

Mirage or Reality?

In its rolling 7 day poll, Gallup now has Romney up by 7, beating Obama 52-45.  I would love to believe this, but I think Rasmussen is a little more accurate, putting Romney up 49-47.

I still think with the past four years, Romney should be up by at least 15 but that's my partisanship coming out.  Whatever ends up happening in the election, it will be a close finish either way.

Thoughts on the Second Debate

This is a day late but here are my thoughts on the 2nd presidential debate:

Overall, I thought that from the perspective of an average voter, this debate was mostly a draw.  Polls showed the Obama won by anywhere from 8-10 percent, but Romney won by a landslide when it came to economic issues, which is a very good sign for him come November.

Obama came out much stronger this time, obviously listening to his advisors' advice about his major weakness in the first debate.  When the camera was on Mitt Romney, Obama looked eager, sitting at the edge of his chair, waiting to strike.

Romney was not quite as good this time around.  He had a few major misses, from missing the wide open touchdown on the Libya question (you know, the one where Candy Crowley was trying to drag the president across the goal line) to faulting the Bush Administration for not trying to help small businesses enough.  The third debate will focus exclusively on foreign policy, so hopefully Romney will be ready for a better answer regarding the president's absolute waffling over whether or not he labeled what happened in Benghazi a terrorist attack.  But I thought Romney still did fairly well considering that the "undecided" audience consisted mainly of disaffected Democrats (consider the questions and where the debate was held).

I still cringe a little when I hear Romney talking about how he will create exactly 12 million new jobs.  (Does the president directly create jobs?)  Even the "town hall" format, with the questioners asking how Obama and Romney will personally help them in their plights, is very off-putting in a country based on the idea of self-government.  Those kinds of promises tell a lot about the dominant hold that modern liberalism has had over our politics the last 60 years.

Onward to next Monday night.

The Fog Machine of War

Scott Johnson at Power Line reports on comments made by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton on why the administration blamed a video for the "protests" in Benghazi for over two weeks:

On Rice ‘grew out of a protest’ assertions: “the fog of war. The confusion you get in any type of combat situation. Remember this was an attack that went on for hours…there had to be a lot of sorting out…everyone said here’s what we know subject to change.”

Right, it took time, weeks in fact, to sort it all out.  Right?  Wrong:

Yet the State Department monitored the attack in real time. The attack never appeared to be anything other than a planned terrorist operation. There was no report of a protest. In this case the fog of politics is a helluva lot thicker than the fog of war.

Well, this seems to be getting worse by the day.

That Age Old Question

I want to focus something very important that may have gone unnoticed in the VP debate last Thursday night.  Near the end of the debate, Martha Raddatz asked Rep. Paul Ryan and Vice President Joe Biden about their views on abortion and why they hold those views.  Here is the question, which is telling in certain ways, and Paul Ryan's response:

MS. RADDATZ: I want to move on, and I want to return home for these last few questions. This debate is indeed historic. We have two Catholic candidates, first time on a stage such as this, and I would like to ask you both to tell me what role your religion has played in your own personal views on abortion. Please talk about how you came to that decision. Talk about how your religion played a part in that. And please, this is such an emotional issue for so many — 

REP. RYAN: Sure. 

MS. RADDATZ: — people in this country. Please talk personally about this if you could. Congressman Ryan. 

REP. RYAN: I don't see how a person can separate their public life from their private life or from their faith. Our faith informs us in everything we do. My faith informs me about how to take care of the vulnerable, about how to make sure that people have a chance in life. 

Now, you want to ask basically why I'm pro-life? It's not simply because of my Catholic faith. That's a factor, of course, but it's also because of reason and science. You know, I think about 10 1/2 years ago, my wife Janna and I went to Mercy Hospital in Janesville where I was born for our seven-week ultrasound for our firstborn child, and we saw that heartbeat. Our little baby was in the shape of a bean, and to this day, we have nicknamed our firstborn child, Liza, "Bean." (Chuckles.) 

Now, I believe that life begins at conception. 

That's why — those are the reasons why I'm pro-life.

I cut out the rest of his answer, which was very good and focused on the extreme nature of the Obama Administration's abortion record.  Here is VP Biden's answer:

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: My religion defines who I am. And I've been a practicing Catholic my whole life. And it has particularly informed my social doctrine. Catholic social doctrine talks about taking care of those who — who can't take care of themselves, people who need help. 

With regard to — with regard to abortion, I accept my church's position on abortion as a — what we call de fide (doctrine ?). Life begins at conception. That's the church's judgment. I accept it in my personal life. 

But I refuse to impose it on equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews and — I just refuse to impose that on others, unlike my friend here, the congressman. 

I — I do not believe that — that we have a right to tell other people that women, they — they can't control their body. It's a decision between them and their doctor, in my view. 

And the Supreme Court — I'm not going to interfere with that.

Although I didn't quote the last section where Biden said unequivocally that the HHS mandate does not force Catholic institutions to pay for contraception-related drugs (the Catholic Bishops came out in a strongly worded statement and reproached Biden for his equivocation), I want to focus on Biden's articulation of a "creed" that seems to go for high intellectual thought today:  That one can privately hold views that touch on things right and wrong but that publicly, they have no right to impose those views on anyone else.

This is a basic non-sequitor.  If this were true, law would not be possible.

What if in 1858, during the debates with Stephen Douglass, Lincoln came out and gave the exact same answer Biden gave with respect to the question of slavery?  How would we of thought of Lincoln if he said that while he privately abhorred slavery, he had no right to "impose" his views on others?

When Congressman Ryan said that he "believes" abortion to be a wrong (he made a mistake by using the word belief), he was stating that it is not only wrong for him but wrong for anyone else as well.  This view emanates from permanent truths that are bound in our nature, truths that are not dependent on the teachings of biblical revelation (though they are consistent with those teachings).  Abortion is wrong not because of some feeling or belief; and it is certainly not wrong simply because a majority of our country now believes abortion to be wrong:  it is wrong because it ends the existence of a whole class of beings on the basis of nothing more than the convenience or feelings of hardship by another group of beings.

Lincoln's statement of the true nature of slavery would be well remembered here:

"What I do say is, that no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other's consent."

It is a shame that the moderator asked this question near the end of the debate, because this is a conversation that needs to be had (the best place to start is with this book).

Politicizing Benghazi

Mark Styen (read his column about the Obama Administration's politicization of the terrorist attack in Benghazi here) has evidence that the intelligence received by the White House never indicated that a video have anything to do with the attack.  This question and answer from the weekly briefing by the State Department highly suggests that the claims about the video emanated directly from the White House instead:

OPERATOR: The next question is from the line of Brad Klapper with AP. Please, go ahead. 

QUESTION: Hi, yes. You described several incidents you had with groups of men, armed men. What in all of these events that you’ve described led officials to believe for the first several days that this was prompted by protests against the video? 

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL TWO: That is a question that you would have to ask others. That was not our conclusion. I’m not saying that we had a conclusion, but we outlined what happened. The Ambassador walked guests out around 8:30 or so, there was no one on the street at approximately 9:40, then there was the noise and then we saw on the cameras the – a large number of armed men assaulting the compound.

I wonder where this will be at by the third presidential debate.

Fool in a Chair

I haven't had time to talk about the VP debate on Thursday, but I think this about sums it up:

If a wise man goes to court with a fool, the fool rages and scoffs, and there is no peace.

- Proverbs 29:9

And this is what the debate looked like on TV:

Perspective

This is more of an aside from the post below, but I didn't want to include it there.

In talking with some people at work, I have heard the opinion voiced that we can't yet put the Obama Administration at fault regarding the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans because there is no evidence that directly links Obama to any of this (this also seems to be the general stance of the MSM too).

But we learned on Thursday that Deputy Secretary of State Charlene Lamb -- the person right below Hilary Clinton --  denied extra security to the U. S. post in Benghazi in the months prior to the attack.

So, for now, it doesn't stop with Obama -- it stops right below the Secretary of State.  But imagine if this happened during the Bush Administration.  We would constantly be hearing about how the "Bush Administration" was at fault.

It seems as though during the Bush Administration, the term administration was thought to include not simply the White House but, as it should, all the cabinet posts and top level officials in all the major departments.  But under this administration, it is implied that the person right below the Secretary of State is not within the administration.

Interesting.

A Preventable Tragedy

It's seeming more and more likely that the Obama administration shares blame in not fully doing everything it it's power to prevent four Americans in the Benghazi from being killed during a terrorist attack on September 11 (Susan Rice and Jay Carney notwithstanding).  The Columbus Dispatch has put out an editorial that puts everything in perspective:

Testimony in a congressional hearing Wednesday on the Sept. 11 outrage against the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi fueled a growing suspicion: President Barack Obama’s administration was more concerned about projecting the image of improving stability in Libya, to bolster his re-election chances, than it was about ensuring the security of Americans on the ground there. 

The fact of a successful terrorist attack against the U.S. on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks — a day, above all others, when security for American officials in volatile countries should be at its utmost — is demoralizing and infuriating. 

After months of concern by diplomats in Libya about the country’s deteriorating security, Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three embassy employees were murdered by heavily armed and organized terrorists. The possibility the government could have prevented their deaths by responding to their pleas for greater security is devastating. 

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Charlene Lamb, who helps oversee diplomatic security, acknowledged in the hearing that she had told security officials at the U.S. Embassy in the capital city of Tripoli not to bother asking for more security help after the assignment of a supplemental security team ended in August. 

Security officer Eric A. Nordstrom told Congress members he took Lamb’s refusal to mean “there was going to be too much political cost.” 

In March and July, Nordstrom cabled his superiors in the State Department asking for more security at Benghazi, which had much less protection than the embassy in Tripoli. He got no reply. 

His further comment at Wednesday’s hearing is damning: “The takeaway from that, for me and my staff: It was abundantly clear we were not going to get resources until the aftermath of an incident. And the question that we would ask is, again, ‘How thin does the ice have to get before someone falls through?’ ” 

That ice broke at 9:40 p.m. on Sept. 11, when a cadre of men stormed the consulate compound. They fired guns, threw grenades and set buildings on fire.
What followed in the ensuing weeks is an astounding display either of incompetence or dishonesty, as Obama administration officials gave constantly shifting accounts of what happened. 

For at least a week, State Department officials blamed the attack on a spontaneous demonstration against a rogue video, made in the U.S., that mocks Islam. U.S. 

Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice said onMeet the Press on Sept. 16, “What happened in Benghazi was in fact initially a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired hours before in Cairo, almost a copycat of the demonstrations against our facility in Cairo, prompted by the video.” 

That explanation came under withering scrutiny, with pundits mocking the notion of “spontaneous” demonstrators showing up armed with rocket-propelled grenades.
Even as military and intelligence officials flatly stated the obvious as early as Sept. 13 — that the attack was a planned terrorist operation — the statements of those closest to the president, including Press Secretary Jay Carney, vacillated. On Sept. 18, Carney said, “Our belief ... is it was the video that caused the unrest in Cairo... and that precipitated some of the unrest in Benghazi and elsewhere.” 

By Sept. 20, finally, Carney was declaring, “It is, I think, self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack.” 

What is equally evident is that, despite repeated concerns by diplomats working in Libya, the administration shortchanged security. And when the worst happened, it wasn’t willing to tell the truth to the American people. 

And as of Wednesday, administration officials continued to insist that the consulate had adequate security. 

The tragedy is magnified by the fact that Stevens, by all accounts, was passionately devoted to restoring Libya as a U.S. ally. He wanted to help build a democratic nation. But he wasn’t blind to the danger still posed by militant Islamists and other anti-American groups. 

The murder of Stevens and his colleagues raises serious questions about the administration’s priorities and competence.

Who's Political?

Stephanie Cutter of the Obama campaign was on CNN earlier today and said this about Libya:

STEPHANIE CUTTER: In terms of the politicization of this — you know, we are here at a debate, and I hope we get to talk about the debate — but the entire reason this has become the political topic it is, is because of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. It’s a big part of their stump speech. And it’s reckless and irresponsible what they’re doing. 

BROOKE BALDWIN: But, Stephanie, this is national security. As we witnessed this revolution last year, we covered it– 

CUTTER: It is absolutely national security– 

BALDWIN: –it is absolutely pertinent. People in the American public absolutely have a right to get answers.

So, this has only become a political topic because of Mitt Romney?  He was the one who first blamed an obscure online video for the protest  terrorist attack? He was the one whose State Department got calls weeks and months beforehand on the necessity of sending in more security (even pleadings from Ambassador Stevens himself) and did nothing about it?  He is the one declaring victories in Iraq while the number of Al-Qeada have only increased there since our draw down (attacks now average about 20 per day)?

Racists, not Radicals

I was reading about Steven Speilberg's much anticipated movie about Abraham Lincoln on Yahoo! News and came across this odd line:

In contrast to [the Republican party of] today, the Republican party to which Lincoln belonged was founded by anti-slavery activists and Republicans were often tagged "radicals."

So wait, the Republican Party of today is full of pro-slavery activists who are not radicals?  I know they didn't mean it to come out like that but it's interesting nonetheless.

Journey to Obama-Land

This story from the Daily Mail is illuminating:

When President Barack Obama stepped off the stage in Denver last week the 60 million Americans watching the debate against Mitt Romney already knew it had been a disaster for him. 

But what nobody knew, until now, was that Obama believed he had actually won. 

In an extraordinary insight into the events leading up to the 90 minute showdown which changed the face of the election, a Democrat close to the Obama campaign today reveals that the President also did not take his debate preparation seriously, ignored the advice of senior aides and ignored one-liners that had been prepared to wound Romney.

Take this for what it's worth, but I tend to believe it though.  I think VP Biden will take a different track against Paul Ryan tomorrow night.

Borked

Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the day that Judge Robert Bork was rejected for a seat on the Supreme Court.  Then-Senator Joe Biden, at the time the hapless Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy among other Democrats unfairly savaged Bork (Kennedy  waited barely 30 minutes after President Reagan had picked Bork when he gave his infamous "Robert Bork's America" speech and accused him of wanting segregated lunch counters and women to have back alley abortions).  Hadley Arkes writes that as good as Bork would have been on the Court (surely the Adarand, Grutter, and Obamacare decisions among others would most likely have been reversed), he still was a legal positivist at heart:

The tradition of natural law had always recognized the need to translate the principles of natural law into “positive regulations” that bore on the landscape and the circumstances before us. But positivism took on a different meaning when it was detached from any ground of moral truth – when lawyers and judges [like Bork] insisted that they found in the positive law itself the measure of right and wrong.

Though legal positivism may get Judge Bork to the same conclusion as Justice Thomas, the foundation on which his opinions are built is totally at odds with the natural law principles that underlie the Constitution.

An example of how the difference between the two methods manifests itself:

Robert Bork thought that legislatures were free to protect the child in the womb because he found nothing in the Constitution that barred that authority and provided a “right to abortion.” But of course the Founders understood the Constitution as a structure of power, built on certain moral premises, not as a compendium of rights. James Wilson said that the purpose of the Constitution was not to invent new rights, but to secure and enlarge the rights we already had by nature. And no one expected that it was possible to set down in the text all of those rights that the Constitution was meant to secure.

Bork’s argument against abortion would not be the argument that others of us would make, arguing for the defense of the child in the womb on the moral premises marking the natural law – the same premises that underlay the Constitution itself.

There is no doubt Bork would have been a major upgrade over Justice Kennedy, but the errors in his jurisprudence -- the key missing piece in much of what goes for originalist jurisprudence -- has still managed to affect the Court.

Even a Professor Can Lie

More lies from the Obama campaign:

Last night, the Obama campaign blasted out another email claiming that Mitt Romney's tax plan would either require raising taxes on the middle class or blowing a hole in the deficit. "Even the studies that Romney has cited to claim his plan adds up still show he would need to raise middle-class taxes," said the Obama campaign press release. "In fact, Harvard 
economist Martin Feldstein and Princeton economist Harvey Rosen both concede that paying for Romney’s tax cuts would require large tax increases on families making between $100,000 and $200,000." 

But that's not true. Princeton professor Harvey Rosen tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD in an email that the Obama campaign is misrepresenting his paper on Romney's tax plan: 

I can’t tell exactly how the Obama campaign reached that characterization of my work. It might be that they assume that Governor Romney wants to keep the taxes from the Affordable Care Act in place, despite the fact that the Governor has called for its complete repeal. The main conclusion of my study is that under plausible assumptions, a proposal along the lines suggested by Governor Romney can both be revenue neutral and keep the net tax burden on taxpayers with incomes above $200,000 about the same. That is, an increase in the tax burden on lower and middle income individuals is not required in order to make the overall plan revenue neutral.  

You can check the math that shows Romney's plan is mathematically possible here.

Again, remember that the main indictment of the media against Obama after the debate was that he didn't call out Romney's lies.

Columbus the Man

Charles C. W. Cooke explodes some of the more poplar myths surrounding Columbus Day in a piece at NRO.  Here is a sample:

Strike two: Contra Mr. Gershwin, “they” did not all laugh “at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round” — primarily because they already knew that. As Stephen Jay Gould has observed, “there never was a period of ‘flat earth darkness’ among scholars.” They had accepted the spherical theory from the time of Socrates, and it had reigned without interruption ever since. Insinuations to the contrary, still pervasive in the public imagination, derive first from 17th-century Protestant attempts to paint Catholics as backwards, and then from the 19th-century atheist movement, which picked up the falsehood and propagated it to demonstrate the supposed benightedness of the religious.

 And on the fact that Columbus really didn't do anything spectacular because the New World had already been discovered hundreds of years before:

Three strikes, but not out. The explosion of certain parts of the Columbus myth, along with some more recent discoveries about his less noble proclivities, has led many to disown the man and a few more to protest against the national holiday in his honor. Berkeley, Brown, and — ironically — Columbia universities have abolished recognition of Columbus Day entirely, while others have substituted nebulous celebrations of “diversity” on that day. Journey into any trendy progressive enclave and you will find that Christopher Columbus is persona non grata. 

This, like most political correctness, is a grievous mistake. As the historian William J. Connell argues, Columbus may not have been the first of the voyagers to discover America, but he was undoubtedly the most important. “His arrival,” Connell argues, “marks where we as a country and a hemisphere began our identity.” Unlike previous landings, Columbus’s mattered. It was the first to lead to a permanent settlement and the first enduring landing from a civilization that boasted modern ideas such as a belief in science, reason, individual achievement, and Christianity. Ultimately, Columbus’s story serves as the introduction to a story of immeasurable historical importance. To dismiss celebration of the man because he didn’t make it to America first would be akin to declaring that we must scorn Isaac Newton’s contribution to science because he wasn’t actually hit by an apple.

Cooke, however, goes off course in this assesment of Columbus the man:

Heinous as this behavior was [e.i., enslaving Indians, transporting slaves, and having his men terrorize the locals], to impose modern morality on the past is to exhibit historical illiteracy. Contrary to the picture painted by modern progressives, thePinta, the Niña, and the Santa Maria did not sail nonchalantly through a barrier of enlightened protesters — (Don’t) Occupy America! — on their way to the shore, only to ignore their modernity. Columbus was a man of his time, and we should judge him by the standards of that age, regardless of how we assess them today.

But to counter progressivism with more progressivsm ("Columbus was a man of his time") doesn't help the situation at all.  In fact, historicism, the idea that all thought is inexorably bound to the times in which that thought was conceived (which of course the idea of historicism is itself exempted), is a chief impediment to education and political philosophy.  The idea that morality is time-bound casts aside the idea of a transcendent, permanent moral order, e.g., that slavery is always wrong, etc., and in its place stands whatever might happen be the opinion of the majority at the time.

Columbus certainly had his flaws, and we can judge them just as we can judge the good he did.

Empty Chair

The New Yorker's take on the first debate:

Pretty clever.  I'm surprised.

Not Rich Enough

Well, this is a new strategy:

Mitt Romney is worth $250 million. Why so little? 

By William D. Cohan, Published: October 5 

Mitt Romney is indisputably a very rich man. And if he is elected president on Nov. 6, he will become one of the wealthiest people ever to hold the office. 

But exactly how wealthy is Romney? The figure that gets tossed around is $250 million in net worth — meaning the total value of his assets, financial and others, minus any debts. 

It’s a big number, but frankly, it seems low. Given the industry in which he made his fortune (private equity), the era when he made it (the 1980s and 1990s) and the wealth of his peers in that business (mostly billionaires), Romney should be worth a good bit more than that. 

Why isn’t he?

So instead of hammering Romney for having too much money, he is now getting slammed for not having enough of it, the implication being either Romney is incompetent in the art of making money is hiding his total net worth.  Whatever it is, this take represents the strategy that Obama deployed in the first debate:  Keep throwing stuff at the wall until something sticks.

Articles like this should signal that the Left is in full-on-panic mode.

(h/t Mollie Hemingway)

UPDATE:

A Power Line reader has done a little digging on Mr. Cohan and found that he donated $3,000 to the Obama campaign.  Mr. Cohan of course made no reference to this in his "article," and the Washington Post didn't feel the need to say anything about it either.  This is what now passes as "independent" sources of news.

In His Corner

Rob Long at Richochet has noticed that even in defeat, the media is still trying to cheer up their man Obama.  Take this story in the National Journal for instance:

The mood among Democratic commentators and political professionals shifted instantly from optimism to alarm, even anger, over Obama's performance. "Romney won the debate, and we better come loaded for bear next time," Democratic strategist Chris Kofinis told National Journal. "In the next two debates, the President needs to take the fight to Romney or he will lose this fight. It's that simple." 

MSNBC talk show host Chris Matthews asked, “Where was Obama tonight?” 

A leading Democratic public opinion firm, GQR Digital, concluded after a focus group of voters in Denver that Romney performed well, improving his personal appeal. "However," they wrote, "the research does not suggest that Romney fundamentally changed the political calculus in this election." 

To be fair, the deck was stacked against Obama, who came into the debate with a lead over Romney plus the baggage of incumbency (emphasis mine).

Wow, a leading Democrat public polling firm said that Romney's debate didn't fundamentally change anything???  Who would've thought???  (This post somewhat contradicts this claim by the way.)

And exactly how was the deck stacked against Obama?  I thought the Romney camp was imploding, Paul Ryan wanted out, and Obama was on his way to an historic victory?  Or at least that was the MSM position going into the debate...

And then there's this:

When it came to the facts, Romney grossly oversimplified his own platform, presenting himself as a Medicare-loving, regulation-supporting candidate who does not in fact want to cut taxes. It was a clear if not factual parry of Obama.

But Romney never said he doesn't want to cut taxes.  Romney was responding to the claim by President Obama that his tax cuts would add another 5 trillion dollars to the deficit, to which Romney responded that he wasn't going to cut tax rates too much that that scenario would ever happen (the 5 trillion number is false anyway -- surprise, surprise).  Even in defeat, the MSM still has to shill for their man.  

On Last Night

Mitt Romney basically took President Obama and swept the floor with him in last night's debate.  Mitt seemed confident, but not overly so, and exuded a technocratic competence on policy, which was supposedly Obama's strong suit.  Romney also displayed a sense of humor, which helped "humanize" him a little more (I hate that word but Romney did need to show the public more of who he is as a person, not the cardboard cut-out that he and his team thought Americans needed to see).  He also destroyed the caricature that the Obama campaign has been peddling the last few months:  that Romney is a evil rich guy hell bent on throwing grandma off the cliff and amending the Constitution to outlaw contraception.  The voter who just tuned in last night and got their first look at Romney will wonder why what the Obama campaign has said about Romney is so far off base.

President Obama seemed tired, dull, and uninterested.  Al Gore said that Obama was affected by the thin Denver air more than anything.  There was even a point when Obama told the moderator Jim Lehrer to move on to the next question (it came off as Obama searching for anything that would get him out of the hole he had dug in the debate thus far).  Maybe it's the effect of being in an echo chamber for the last four years or the effect of the MSM being soft on Obama during his presidency, but whatever it was, Obama was simply overwhelmed.

A little disappointing was the virtual absence -- other than Romney's vague faux 10th Amendment argument about how Romneycare is constitutional -- of the Constitution.  Romney could have brought up Obamacare and taught the public that the still unpopular law can be overturned and that the Supreme Court is not the final arbiter of the Constitution:  the people are.  I will give Romney credit for talking about the principles of the Declaration of Independence though.  This was a good first step towards educating Americans about their country.

Overall, it was a strong first debate for Romney.  I don't think Obama will be this bad again so Romney will have to continue to be at least around what he was last night in order for it to show up significantly in the polls (remember, in 2004 it was widely thought on both sides that John Kerry won against George W. Bush in the first debate).  Romney certainly needs to be ready for a better Obama the next time around. The worst thing that can happen now is either Romney or Ryan be overconfident.

The Real Speech on Race

You might have remembered President Obama's much-heralded speech on race in 2008, which supposedly condemned the racist and anti-American views of his pastor of 20 years, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.  (Oddly enough, what's not remembered about that speech is that Obama tacitly agreed with Wright that the American Founding was racist and low; Obama's only disagreement with Wright came in the idea that American has changed for the better since those times and has transcended our racist past.)  Obama's real speech on race, however, has just been uncovered by The Daily Caller, and elicits, probably, Obama's truer views on the subject of race and America.  Here is the speech in question which Obama gave in 2007 at Hampton University:

And as you might guess, the Right has pounced on it while the MSM has given it no airtime whatsoever.  In the speech then-Senator Obama riles up the mostly black crowd, letting them know that, like Kanye West said, the Bush Administration just didn't care that much about black people during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:

“The people down in New Orleans they don’t care about as much!” Obama shouts in the video, which was shot in June of 2007 at Hampton University in Virginia. By contrast, survivors of Sept. 11 and Hurricane Andrew received generous amounts of aid, Obama explains. The reason? Unlike residents of majority-black New Orleans, the federal government considers those victims “part of the American family.”

And more:

The spine of Obama’s speech is a parable about a pregnant woman shot in the stomach during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The baby is born with a bullet in her arm, which doctors successfully remove. That bullet, Obama explains, is a metaphor for the problems facing black America, namely racism. (At a similar speech he gave in April of 2007 at the First AME Church in Los Angeles to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the riots, according to a church member who was there, Obama described the slug as, “the bullet of slavery and Jim Crow.”) 

At least 53 people were killed during the chaos in Los Angeles, many of them targeted by mobs because of their skin color. But Obama does not describe the riots as an expression of racism, but rather as the result of it. The burning and shooting and looting, he explains, amounted to “Los Angeles expressing a lingering, ongoing, pervasive legacy, a tragic legacy out of the tragic history of this country, a history this country has never fully come to terms with.” 

And with that, Obama pivots to his central point: The Los Angeles riots and Hurricane Katrina have racism in common. “The federal response after Katrina was similar to the response we saw after the riots in LA,” he thunders from the podium. “People in Washington, they wake up, they’re surprised: ‘There’s poverty in our midst! Folks are frustrated! Black people angry!’ Then there’s gonna be some panels, and hearings, and there are commissions and there are reports, and then there’s some aid money, although we don’t always know where it’s going — it can’t seem to get to the people who need it — and nothin’ really changes, except the news coverage quiets down and Anderson Cooper is on to something else.”

Also, a bulletin was obtained by The Daily Caller from Trinity United Church of Christ a few months after Obama's speech, and the Rev. Wright echoed the same sentiments Obama expressed, saying the following:

“The response of the United States government to the Blacks who were drowning in Louisiana because of Hurricane Katrina was a response informed by hatred,” Wright wrote in the April 2006 the church’s newsletter. “We still see hatred. Kanye West was right! If this government really cared about Black Africans, the response would be far more than the deafening silence that we hear today.”

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

The Logic of the Left

This pretty much sums up all the arguments of the Left.

Should Obama lose in November, I imagine that there will be much hand-wringing, crying, gnashing of teeth.  No doubt there will be things said like this:  "Our country is just not good enough yet for another Obama term."

Garbage In, Garbage Out

AFSCME yesterday trotted out a ridiculous new attack ad that features a scathing attack from -- get ready for it -- Mitt Romney's garbage man.  Thus sayeth the garbage man, Richard Hayes:

My name is Richard Hayes, and I pick up Mitt Romney’s trash. We’re kind of like the invisible people. He doesn’t realize that the service we provide – if it wasn’t for us, it would be a big health issue, us not picking up trash. 

Residents do come out and shake our hands. Sometimes they give us hugs and thank us for the job we’re doing, hand us water and Gatorades. Tell us we’re doing a good job and keep up the good work. Picking up 15, 16 tons by hand, that takes a toll on your body. When I’m 55, 60 years old, I know my body’s gonna be break down [sic]. Mitt Romney doesn’t care about that.

But wait, here's a paragraph from Mitt Romney's book No Apology that someone forgot to read:

One day I gathered trash as a garbage collector. I stood on that little platform at the back of the truck, holding on as the driver navigated his way through the narrow streets of Boston. As we pulled up to traffic lights, I noticed that the shoppers and businesspeople who were standing only a few feet from me didn’t even see me. It was as if I was invisible. Perhaps it was because a lot of us don’t think garbage men are worthy of notice; I disagree – anyone who works that hard deserves our respect. – I wasn’t a particularly good garbage collector: at one point, after filling the trough at the back of the truck, I pulled the wrong hydraulic lever. Instead of pushing the load into the truck, I dumped it onto the street. Maybe the suits didn’t notice me, but the guys at the construction site sure did… (My emphasis.)

And here is the picture to prove it:

Whoops.

Nothing to See Here

Walter Russel Mead has a brilliant post on the death of the 2,000th US soldier in Afghanistan and what the treatment of this terrible milestone would be by the media if George W. Bush was still in office.

Here is a sample:

The news from Afghanistan is grim. With the latest round of deaths, we pass a milestone: 2,000 US combatants have died in what is now the longest war in American history. The milestone has been reached just as the surge in troops has come to an end without achieving the goals of pacifying the country or even launching peace talks with the Taliban. Our Afghan “allies” remain as corrupt and ineffectual as ever, with the added wrinkle that the most dangerous place in Afghanistan for US troops these days seems to be the neighborhood of US-armed and trained Afghan forces, who are shooting and blowing up their nominal allies faster than the Taliban can do it. 

This is all bad news and very disturbing, but there is a crumb of comfort to be had. Because these failures happened on President Obama’s watch, the mainstream press isn’t particularly interested in relentless, non-stop scrutiny of the unpleasant news. If George W. Bush were president now, and had ordered the surge and was responsible for the strategic decisions taken and not taken in Afghanistan over the last four years, the mainstream press would be rubbing our noses in his miserable failures and inexcusable blunders 24/7. The New York Times and the Washington Postwould be treating us to pictures of every fallen soldier. The PBS Newshour would feature nightly post-mortems on “America’s failed strategies in the Afghan War” and every arm-chair strategist in America would be filling the op-ed pages with the brilliant 20/20 hindsight ideas that our pathetic, clueless, failed president was too dumb and too cocky to have had. 

There would be no end to the woes and the recriminations. There would be the most moving and eloquent examples of hand wringing in the New York Review of Books, elegantly demonstrating that the cretinous assumptions and moral failings that led Bush into his failed Afghan policy weren’t his alone, but reflected broader, deeper failings in America itself. One is almost sorry for the sake of the authors of these diatribes that Bush is gone; the failure of our Afghan strategy is so sweeping, so unavoidable, that it would be the best possible backdrop against which to paint a stirring portrait of a failed president misleading a flawed people. What works of polemical literature have been lost, what inspired jeremiads will never be penned, what scalding portraits of America’s inherent flaws will never see the light of day because W left the White House too soon.

How the media should treat a president during wartime:

And so, while we are glad this morning that we are being spared the kind of vitriolic hatred and relentless criticism that the press would be pouring on President Bush if he were in office at this critical time, we don’t want the press to do unto Obama that which it did unto Bush. For a period after 9/11 the press was too indulgent toward President Bush; then as the post invasion situation in Iraq went all pear-shaped, the press snapped back to its natural anti-Bush animus and made up for lost time by becoming unremittingly, destructively and undiscriminatingly hostile. There is a happy medium between clueless cheer leading and attempts to destroy: it is called responsible analysis, and we could use a lot more of it. A press that neither waves pom-poms nor throws stink bombs non-stop is an important component of healthy democratic society; there are plenty of excellent reporters out there who want to do exactly that. May their tribe prosper and their numbers increase.

Whitewash

This story by Brett Stephens in the WSJ, interestingly enough, was basically buried by the MSM:

It must be tough on the left, not being able to trash John Durham. 

Mr. Durham, recall, is the special prosecutor appointed in 2008 by then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey to investigate allegations that the CIA had illegally destroyed videotapes of CIA detainee interrogations. The prosecutor's mandate was expanded in 2009 by current Attorney General Eric Holder to look into allegations that CIA officers and contractors had abused and, in some cases, tortured and killed, as many as 101 detainees thought to have been in U.S. custody. 

When Mr. Durham was first appointed, the Los Angeles Times called him the "second coming of Patrick Fitzgerald," reflecting a wish that the Connecticut prosecutor's investigation would do as much political damage to the Bush administration as the witch-hunting Chicago prosecutor's had. Encomia for Mr. Durham's competence and rectitude poured in from all quarters; the liberal New Republic called him "an effective mafia-busting prosecutor" who had "earned a nonpartisan, camera-shy, 'white-knight' reputation." 

Mr. Durham, it turned out, was all those things, which is another way of saying he's the exact opposite of the ambitious, media-obsessed and unscrupulous Mr. Fitzgerald—the man who convicted Scooter Libby of not being the man who leaked Valerie Plame's CIA identity to the media. 

What followed was an investigation that led to one exoneration after another. No criminal charges were filed in the videotape destruction case. In 2011, Mr. Durham concluded that no further investigation was warranted in all but two of the 101 detainee cases. 

The last shoe dropped on Aug. 30, when Mr. Holder announced that the final two cases—involving the death of one detainee in Afghanistan and another in Iraq—would be closed once and for all. His statement praised Mr. Durham and his team for conducting an "extraordinarily thorough" review, ranging over "information and matters that were not examined during the Department's prior reviews."

And, as Stephens notes, the closing of this case should send a striking statement to the public about the deplorable politics the Democrats were practicing during much of the Bush Administration (those who considered it self-evident that the Bush Administration was overseeing "gulags" and was committing vast "human rights violations" notwithstanding):

To the army of the obsessed who take it as a given that the Bush administration operated a vast torture archipelago, all this amounts to a giant government whitewash, bordering almost on conspiracy. If that's true, it must rank as the most politically incompetent and ideologically bizarre whitewash in history. Who knew Team Obama was shilling for Dick Cheney? And what about Mr. Durham: Was he part of the whitewash, too? 

So far I haven't seen anyone make that accusation, probably because it just won't wash. Instead, the prosecutor's final determination is being treated as a legal technicality, not determinative of probable guilt or innocence. To the true believers, the Bush administration isn't even guilty till proven innocent. It's simply guilty. Think of Casey Anthony in a trench coat.

Far From Over

Regarding the flood of recent polls that have been coming out lately that suggest a blow out in favor of President Obama, Paul Mirengoff has some numbers that, to this point, have been overlooked:

A new POLITICO/George Washington University Battleground Poll of likely voters shows President Obama leading Mitt Romney by 49 percent to 47 percent. That’s a point closer than a week ago and still within the margin of error. 

The poll shows Romney leading among independents by 4 points. It also confirms that Obama faces an uphill battle with this group. Independents give Romney a 14-point edge on jobs and an 11-point edge on the economy. And more than 60 percent of independents disapprove of Obama’s handling of the economy and spending. Romney ties Obama with this group on who is the stronger leader and leads by 9 points on who has the best ability to get things done. 

In other words, the “fundamentals” strongly favor Romney among independents. When all is said and done, this edge could quite plausibly translate into a margin of more than 4 points with this cohort.

And in another post, Steve Hayward adds in some good analysis by Roger Beckett of the Ashbrook Center on poll results the Columbus Dispatch recently published:

The Columbus Dispatch released a poll showing Obama up by 9% in Ohio. I find this unbelievable. In the Dispatch poll, 860 respondents (52.6%) voted for Obama and 669 respondents (40.9%) voted for McCain. So this poll samples 11.7% more Obama voters than McCain voters. But in 2008, Obama won Ohio by only 4.6%. This poll heavily oversamples Obama voters, and there is no way that this poll is reflective of likely voters in Ohio. 

There is a simple explanation for why it is much easier for pollsters to reach Obama supporters in the Buckeye state this year: there are over a million Obama-Phones floating around Ohio.

Again, the race is far from over.