One key fact explains the present that has come to us in Tuesday’s election: A deeply conservative Republican explaining himself without apology has won the Old Dominion by 18 percent. Virginia is bright red. It will be this way in Texas, too, where the conservative, Rick Perry, is ahead of the moderate, Kay Bailey Hutchison, by 12 percent.
The appearance of “V,”
a refried UFO show on ABC, suggests that President Barack Obama is a dangerous
alien. What’s interesting is that this new series is by a major network that
went unconscionably gaga over Obama last year.
Whatever happens tomorrow in the NY-23 race will be anticlimactic. Now that Dede Scozzafava, the Republican candidate, has dropped out, there has already been a clear and historic victory for the Conservative Party.
The Republican Party is now a third party in NY-23. The Conservative Party of New York was formed in 1962, but is the focus now of national interest. And it cannot be denied that Sarah Palin was the first major national political figure to cross the river to NY-23. The new energy heading to NY-23 is formed out of the Tea Party and Town Hall movements. We can possibly see now the fledgling beginning of a third major party in America, the Conservative Party.
The generals, the policymakers, the old men in suits, do not know if President Obama possesses the obstinacy that guided Lincoln and Churchill, and which must guide all war presidents to some degree. So writes David Brooks in his column today in The New York Times. He is referring to the attitudes of experts in think tanks and the Pentagon he talked to about Obama’s pending decision on Afghanistan. They are looking for that one good man. Brooks and Co. have been looking for him since long before 9/11, when they sat around the offices of the Weekly Standard trying to decide which countries to invade. The tin man, the cowardly lion, all of Dorothy’s children, seeking the wizard who will save them. But finding only golem, halfway now to Jerusalem.
President Barack Obama has lately been accused of “Nixifying”the White House. He’s also been compared to Jimmy Carter quite a lot and, of course, to JFK, Roosevelt and Lincoln. So far no one has compared him to President Gerald Ford. Ford was bland. He was awkward. He was always bumping his head. But he was a great and noble man and a great president because as president he did the work that needed to be done. He ended the war in Vietnam. And that is what Obama needs to do in Iraq and Afghanistan.
After discussing healthcare longer than it took the Founding Fathers to form the republic, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) this week sanctioned an idea that could likewise have historic consequences: optional federal legislation, a provision with details yet undisclosed that allows the states to opt out of the public plan.
I was once formally forbidden to talk to any student or professor at the college I worked at after helping a few students organize a conference about the killings taking place in Bosnia. When I was seen talking briefly to a student in passing on the campus later, I was fired. This at a time when I had three children under the age of 8 and my wife, on the farm with the kids, was eight months pregnant with our fourth. I worked then as a temp doing odd jobs, including cleaning toilets at a local Sara Lee factory. When we finally sold our beautiful little farm in the hills of North Carolina we had lost $40,000 and were down to our last $25. But it remains the proudest moment of my working life. Writers like to be censored. It puts even the inconsequential in league with the greatest. So I know how Glenn Beck is feeling this week: proud and honorable. Everyone at Fox should feel the same.
Being born beautiful is a condition of biological fate, like being born black like Michelle Obama or Puerto Rican like Sonia Sotomayer. To hate someone for her skin is to hate her for her biological fate. It is the same as hating them for being born Irish with red hair — some consider them witches—– or having an epicanthic fold on the eyes, as many Chinese do. Some consider them foreign devils.
This might be the purest form of nihilism. When nihilism awakened in Russia in the 1830s, it was with Russian aristocrats who had taken on the plight of the poor. The poor were slaves. Tolstoy had 12 living in the living room under the stairs. It is perfectly understandable how hatred of the rich by other rich in these circumstances came about. It became nihilism when the cause of misfortune was resolved and the hatred continued as a generic condition and became institutionalized.
Cited on a variety of Internet shops like The AtlanticWire, Newser and Lara Ebke’s Red State Eclectic yesterday was a quote from Matt Lewis, writer, blogger and commentator from Alexandria, Va. He writes in Politics Daily: “If recent elections are any guide, the Republicans' heads will tell them to choose Mitt Romney. Their hearts whisper something else. Is ‘Sarah’ the name of this siren song?”
W. McCahill at Newser says: “No matter what kind of gains Republicans make in the midterm elections next year, it’s going to be tough to unseat President Obama — and that’s why the GOP is going to choose Sarah Palin, its heart’s preferred candidate, over Mitt Romney, its head’s favorite.”
Obama is lacking something. There is no one particularly likable in his organization besides Obama himself. Any vital organization needs what historian W.J. Cash called “the man at the center.” The “man at the center” is not the man at the top. He is someone in the midst of things who brings a spirit to the group that transcends partisanship. Someone with whom most everyone in the organization and out of it can relate to. Colin Powell was a good example in the Reagan organization. Most people liked him. Most still do. But Obama has no such figure. Instead of a Powell he has given us Joe Biden, the white guy from central casting, Hillary, that Other Mother from the ’60s, and Rahm Emanuel, who frightens children and other living things.
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