The day's reading

 "... Islamists decide whether violent jihad should be launched against non-Muslims based on a cost-benefit analysis, not on any conviction that killing non-Muslims is immoral."

Shall we have the New York police department refrain from investigating Muslim terrorism because the Obama justice department says that's insensitive? Read it all.

Of Mafiosi and Mullahs - Andrew C. McCarthy - National Review Online

Joy

How many future historians, a hundred, two hundred years from now, will make careers out of studying President Barack Obama? I wonder if he might not turn out to be the most discussed and analyzed person in American history -- or will he, by contrast, be quickly slotted into his proper place? -- a very little man, a freak of collapsing early 21st-century American academia, pet of a whole superclass of citizens, the media, who propelled him into power by ignoring everything he was? Not that the voting public, alas, weren't dreadfully to blame.

This latest episode in his life provides us with the most delicious piece of irony and poetic justice it is possible to conceive. So he authorizes the killing of Osama bin Laden, the archfiend. Good. Congratulations. Yet the Greek-tragedy-and-hubris perfection of it seems beyond human arrangement. Of all things, what should Mr. Obama now be known for, what albatross now hangs around his neck? He who delights in his Muslim background but lacks the gravitas to really espouse any faith except the America-bashing one of his former Chicago church, he who wanted to, say, redesign NASA as a vehicle of outreach to the Muslim world and apologized for Americanness at Cairo and anyplace else that would host him, he who comes from a college world where the United States, the military and the masculine are about equally loathed, he who supported the Ground Zero mosque and wanted to try the 9/11 mastermind as a citizen with full Constitutional rights in a Manhattan courtroom -- and so on, all these noble views of course contingent upon polling data and re-election prospects -- he now has used America's most extraordinary soldiers to kill the most famous America-hating Muslim in the world. It seems he had to do it, literally. His re-election prospects could never have survived any leaked word that he had a chance to do it and passed it by. (Couldn't they?) And when it was over he had to go out and announce it to the world from the White House late on a Sunday night, just as if he were President.

I wonder if it wasn't one of the bitterest moments of his life. No, not because he "killed a fellow Muslim." I repeat, I doubt he has a real faith to speak of. But being impelled to do something because the position of the presidency is larger than himself must have been infuriating. The reason he won't get a "bump" in approval from this is not only because it's still the economy stupid, but because everyone, right or left, knows this one dramatic act is totally out of character for him. The path to it was laid down by other men in other years. Heroism, action, decision making, is the last thing he wants to be around. The order that bin Laden's body must be correctly treated according to Islamic law after being shot up -- now that is in character. And not because by it he was "burying a fellow Muslim." Rather because such a picayune, theatrical command is totally in keeping with our president's emotional background: the provincial professor accustomed to trotting out his special subject, the play-President who likes the job's little powers, the wildly inexperienced adult who wants ownership of a group project but lacks an adult sense of the grotesque. Lacks taste, simply put.

So, yes, congratulations.Good luck living it down among your friends.

It's happened

It's happened. I've looked and looked again, checked and double-checked. I've waited a day, a week, and checked again.

Remember the "Woo-hoo demographic"? Remember my unscientific monitoring of the mommy-bloggers who all loved and voted for Barack Obama, and kept his blue and red Hope badge on their sidebars forever? Do you remember my worry at the way they utterly ignored him after the twin joys of election day and inauguration day, my fear that they constituted a huge demographic able to put him back in office in 2012 no matter what, precisely because they loved the hope and the excitement and novelty, loved the idea of a better future, loved Michelle and the girls and didn't care about anything he actually did? ("Thank God it's over. I'm BORED. I need a new toaster.") I said that I waited and watched, looking for some sign that even they might at least be paying attention to his behavior, his words. Something. This was back when his returning of the Churchill bust was still a bit of a shocker, at least for those of us outside the woo-hoo demographic. What kind of ill-bred infant needs to make a gesture like that? And so much more to come.

I waited for one mom blogger in particular to take his badge down from her site. Of all of them, I followed her most, and saw her as probably among the truest-to-type of that happy, energetic, good-souled troop of people. I thought, when the day comes that she takes the Hope badge down, it may indicate that the Great God has lost someone significant, or lost people like her in significant numbers. Perhaps both. 

She's taken it down. Perhaps she just got bored with her sidebar after roughly two years, and it's silly and meaningless of me to plumb depths there. But it's happened. It was the change I was waiting for. Boo-yah.

Hello, mom bloggers! Someone? Anyone? (March 2009)

It's hate

So, now "we," the U.S.A., have decided to support a United Nations resolution demanding that there be a nuclear-weapons free Middle East -- how sweet -- and that Israel specifically should open up whatever facilities it has for inspection. No mention of Iran, which is thiscloseandgettingcloser to a nuclear bomb which it has in turn promised to use against Israel. All this, by the by, just before a meeting between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu. I guess maybe this time Netanyahu will get something to eat, and not be left alone to cool his heels in the White House while his host goes off and has dinner with his family.

All the smart people who write politics are working, right this minute, on proper, cool, yet properly anguished and deeply intellectual responses to this up-ending of a decades-old friendly American policy toward Israel. They'll have their articles up by tomorrow morning. I can save them a lot of trouble, and assure them the day is coming when they will have to simply admit: Barack Obama may not be a good old fashioned anti-Semite. After all, it seems he can put up with Rahm Emmanuel without throwing up in his mouth. But he is a good old left-wing American academic who loathes Israel and could very calmly see ... well. Let's just say the day is coming when an event will occur that will force the commentators to say: he's not naive. He's not inexperienced. He's not puzzlingly or foolishly fixated on a post-modern world where ideologies, like those of the mullahs eager to bring the Mahdi back via bombs on Tel Aviv, don't or shouldn't matter. I would venture to say, he's not even really "young."

He's a hater. Yes, maybe U.N. resolutions are toothless in themselves, and maybe there is some kind of pathetic comfort in that. But Obama has opted to change this one piece of American foreign policy specifically because he hates. I daresay in this case there is something personal in it. Benjamin Netanyahu has what Barack Obama doesn't have -- a biography. Good luck persuading him, in deeply intellectual and anguished tones, back from where he is and delights to be. Then again, maybe they won't bother trying. Maybe this is the event.

Wild-eyed

All the famous political commentators, the pundits, the Krauthammers and the Hansons and the Rubins, keep on writing, keep on predicting, as if the president will now act logically. Now he will respond, in some non-perfunctory way, to events that are not about him and his godhead. He will "cool [favorite] motifs" (like apologizing for American history), transfer Napolitano to some other job, start taking terrorism seriously, in short, grow up, grow in office. A few weeks ago, poor Max Boot at Commentary's Contentions actually praised Obama's "boffo" speech accepting the Nobel Peace prize, calling it a masterpiece and another example of the president growing in office. Two weeks later, Boot was complaining about the administration's "foreign policy incoherence."

They are all trying too hard. Where the future is concerned, I see emotional scenes. Bits of a novel or a movie. It is simple enough, to see a complete, finished man acting in character.

Twenty years of membership in Jeremiah Wright's church mean something about him. His declaring, in the very month he was inaugurated, that returning wounded veterans ought to pay for their own medical care meant something. A man like that doesn't start growing in office at forty-seven.

I see: either the withdrawal of worship -- for he is being criticized, even by his acolytes, it seems -- combined with the true burdens of the presidency will lead to private breakdown; or he'll be caught on tape expressing absolutely outrageous personal truths of a "I don't give a f --- about this country" sort -- although he might be forgiven for that, as he was for his seat in church; or he'll be caught in some sort of personal scandal overwhelming enough to utterly change the terms on which anyone looks at him: the way it is now impossible to watch Tiger Woods play mere golf. This last vision derives from an insight not my own, but the insight struck me and I've mused, let's say.

Wild eyed, I suppose. The pundits lose nothing in keeping their predictions calm and reasonably respectful, albeit still angry and stern, bewildered and sad. They might be proved right, and if not, who will notice? And they are keeping within the conventions of gentlemen's political discourse, keeping their careers safe. The funny thing is, the longer they approach this man as if he's normal, as if he's fully adult, the more professionally frustrated they are going to be by his incoherencies. Maybe they should get out to the movies more.

Ch-ch-changes

As we wade in to a new future of nationalized banks and major industries, of probable socialized health care, high unemployment, endless taxes, and just generally Animal Farm-style governance -- oh yes, achievement will be punished, and some pigs will be very much more equal than others I am sure, and nothing to do about it but try to "put boulders in the road," as Rush Limbaugh says -- it occurs to me that the destruction and disappearance of old worlds is a constant in human history. Pundits being wrong about a lot of things, including the dire results of change, is also a constant, but valuable things do vanish. Noble systems break down, useful knowledge is forgotten, new rules and systems imposed, often enough through deception or crowd hysteria or violence. People and nations witness ends that would have seemed unbelievable if seen in a crystal ball. Or in their own childhoods.

I don't compare President Obama's assault on the country to, say, the cranking up of the French Revolution (which started as an upper-class tax revolt, funnily enough), or to the sweeping of hordes of Goths into the crumbling Roman empire. Or to the sweeping of Arab Muslim hordes into Zoroastrian Persia, say. ...I only just learned about this so I get bragging rights in passing it on. It produced most curious results in history. Zoroastrian Persian diplomats stationed abroad found themselves, after a climactic battle in their homeland in 642 A.D., suddenly without a country, an emperor, or a religion to represent. Forever. A thousand years of high civilization and fearsome conquest, vanished. Those berobed and sandaled diplomats, in Alexandria, in Tripoli, must have had to find other ways to survive, for there was no point even in going home.

And Marie Antoinette went to the guillotine, and Goths sat on the throne of Augustus. Roman legions withdrew from Britain; civilized European men slaughtered one another by the millions in the trenches of World War I. And then the civilized empires which sent them to their deaths collapsed, too.

Dear me, such very massive and tragic examples, and all out of chronological order, too. One could be accused of a yowling and infantile panic. No, I don't quite compare the President's plans to all this, but in him we do have someone unprecedented. We have our first anti-American American president, who seems genuinely to want to restructure the country for his own personal pleasure and intellectual and especially academic satisfaction -- payback, even -- and power. It would be as if the former professor Ward Churchill was president. It would be as if any one of my old left-wing professors was president. He is them. No one would doubt that their attitude was fundamentally anti-American, even though like all good open-minded America-hating liberals, each lacked the true courage of their convictions, to pick up and go live elsewhere. I remember my professors scoffing at the deep-voiced young men in the back of the class who challenged them to go live elsewhere. They scoffed, so if you were bright and following along, you could take that as an assurance that the deep-voiced young men were stupid, bigoted -- conservative. But the professors never quite had an answer to the challenge. The truth was always that it is so much safer and more fun not to move, but to change the where.

So we have a president, inexperienced, aggressive in some things and passive-shabby in others (all those bows from the waist, poor, ill raised child) and indoctrinated in economic systems that are righteously, emotionally pleasing but impoverish everyone, who wants to change things. The nation has changed, has been changed, in other ways before now, in ways that to the private citizen constituted a private tragedy, or perhaps a cosmic one, or maybe didn't even come within his notice at all. Pick your changes, in chronological order or out of it. The opening of the West. The Civil War (did you lose a brother, a husband, a son? Five sons?). The presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, who also tried and greatly succeeding in laying the foundations of Barack Obama's eternally statist, planned American economy, on the grounds that there shouldn't be unfairness. On an individual, human scale, my grandfather lost his post as Republican precinct captain when FDR won office, and that was that.

And we have all survived, though who can say what's been lost. I was struck recently by the old movie Yankee Doodle Dandy, made in the 1940s but set largely in pre-World War I America. The characters are show business people, who travel the country performing and who consider a steady job of two or three weeks' salary a godsend. They live in boarding houses in the meanwhile, and when they are low on money, they sit at the bottom of the communal table and are served only noodles and maple syrup until they can pay their rent. When they can pay, they are welcome to some goulash. It's fiction, but it reflects circumstances that must once have been true. They are on their own, free (gulp) in ways that we now would not tolerate. What's been lost, if anything?

What makes Obama different and more threatening from a lot of previous American movers and shakers is not only his having bigger, more ignorant, more absurdly expensive plans, and a downright vengeful Democratic Congress willing to help him implement those plans -- and these Democrats do include people like my own Senator Dick Durbin, who viciously compared American troops in Iraq to Nazis -- but his election by a voter base that may stay untroubled by the dirt clinging to him. I believe they may remain untroubled by anything he ever says or does. His church membership and his terrorist friends didn't bother them. Now his inability in economics to add two and two, or rather his cynical relish in not adding it, does not bother them either. Some pundits think his followers will wake up when they at least realize that he has his hand in their wallets, too. I'm not so sure. I fear he may be creating the Presidency as an emotional office that only he can fill. I wonder if his voter base would notice or care if he suspended elections, "because folks are struggling, and this great country needs ... ," etc., etc.

And what makes him and his swoony voter base still more threatening is that he is imposing plans that can unravel the nation as a Western power quickly, you might say a Western-proud power, unravelled following the model of a socialist and hyper-taxed Europe, poleaxed in addition by waves of non-Western immigrants who have taken Europe up on its offers of compassion, asylum, religious tolerance, jobs possibly, but free state money forever, definitely. It's a whole world of circumstances that our man's voters do not know or care about. If someone observing Europe and liking what he saw wanted to think out a formula to quickly transform the United States into its mirror, he could hardly have come upon a more pitch-perfect scenario than this. Let the nation, well meaning and deluded, exhaust itself vomiting out imaginary money on problems that are made worse by more imaginary money; let the state control all, on the grounds that only the state can fund fairness. Let our man, freely and joyously elected, be of Muslim descent with a Muslim middle name, just for sheer irony's sake and nothing else.* A few years ago Mark Steyn wrote a book called America Alone, all about the U.S. being the last non-Muslim, un-jihadi-fied bastion on the planet. How strange to think the book could now be nearly obsolete, simply as a result of election day, 2008, and the changes thereby made. America alone? Not so much. America as a jihadi state, led by President-for-life Obama? No. (Fiction is not my strong point.) America joins the world? More likely yes, but not in a good way.

Yes. Well. In the meantime, people live, as they have with luck lived through changes before. Goth and Zoroastrian, sans-culotte and Civil War widow. Yowling and infantile though it may seem, I do think this interesting situation prompts the question, what else do you do with life when things on a grand scale are not going as you'd like?

It sounds like an idiotically selfish, whiny little question. The left preens itself on its patient George W. Bush hatred, and no doubt regards everything from Obama's blessed Inauguration Day onward as mere payback, with plenty more to come. And the end, you know, has not quite come yet. Goth and Zoroastrian and Civil War widow would not even bother to scoff at me. They would be too busy living. And who knows, in a year or two our man may have so far overreached himself that pundits who now fear him, or adore him, will be astonished at the depths of impotence to which he has fallen. Expect the unexpected, not only in the White House but in life and in history too.

Meanwhile what do you do, privately, publicly, when it looks like an entire system of liberty and prosperity whose greatest vulnerability is its need to rest on a populace educated in those things, may be bumped off that foundation by an opposing ideology that mimics the system's purposes (freedom, fairness) but can't achieve them and can't admit it? What do you do? -- write your congressman? Garden? Philosophize? There's a Roman lady in Tacitus, therefore by definition living through interesting times, who spends her time "beautifying her fish ponds at Baiae." Senator Durbin writes back, after a lag of a month or two, congratulating me on agreeing with him and explaining why it's so important to stop global warming. Before he moved up in the world, Senator Obama did the same. Senator Burris hasn't gotten around to replying -- or, to be fair, was he the one whose email link didn't work?

What do you do? I've done a few new things, lately. I've skimmed over The Federalist Papers, which I never thought to do. Did you know they were short articles, originally published in a newspaper, and each designed to answer a specific complaint about the new Constitution? They are pretty digestible. I've learned to put in words, if only for my own satisfaction, why it's not true that of course one must acknowledge and support the great leftist, progressive credo that there are "two sides to every story." No, there are not. There is the truth, which you or I may not find today -- Socrates admitted he couldn't necessarily find it, today -- but which is not the same thing as humbly agreeing it can't be known, thus inhaling the left's debate-snuffing anaesthesia so they can loudly keep the field.

Even knowing that, do you then continue beautifying your fish ponds at Baiae? I believe there is a school of thought, a human tendency, to give up (or become wise) and say that in the great unfolding pageant of human folly, no matter whatsoever the grand stupid men are doing above you, the time sometimes comes when after all, what you are doing for your own happiness in your tiny corner of the universe turns out to be the loftiest thing of all. It's the only thing you do that affects -- that pleases or displeases -- you, so you may as well carry on.

A wise reaction, mature and sophisticated, deeply Old World? Or surrender? Lin Yutang wrote books throughout the mid-twentieth century, claiming that Chinese civilization for one had long since learned to avoid the blind alleys of moral righteousness, religious certainty, of, I suppose, taking on too much personal trouble over great national ch-ch-changes. He delighted in stories of famed Chinese sages retreating to the mountains to sip tea and write poetry. When they got visitors from the folly-filled world, they would leap up and run to the nearest stream to wash the filth of the News of the Day out of their ears -- and the wisest of all could tell when the water outside his hut had been polluted by the sage upstream, already washing the News of the Day out of his own ears.

Or is such behavior indeed surrender? After all, wise and chastened and sophisticated nations full of poetic sages still have not done all we've done. And -- Rush is correct -- nothing is different about us as human beings except that we have a political and economic system which allows us to do all we can or wish to do in the pursuit of happiness. It's all worked amazingly well. As the economist Thomas Sowell emphasizes (in Basic Economics for a start), "wealth saves lives," just for a start, and there's no doubt about our wealth. There is far more to the good, for more people, going on here than can be wisely and sadly represented by the image of the innocent lady tending her fish ponds, long divorced from any concern for the fools in Rome. So why loathe and desire to change our system?

Perhaps because the most intractable human folly of all is the passion for power over one's fellow men, especially the lower orders. A system which gives them power, which incidentally doesn't tell funny stories about sages' exiling themselves and leaving government to do as it likes, is totally anathema to any human spirit that wants power. "What in the world can we do with the Napoleonic -- heroic ambition or military glory?" Allan Bloom asked in The Closing of the American Mind (1987). He meant "we" who live in a "gray," "commercial" liberal democracy, we who have made a good system, but one that lacks what democratic revolutions tear down forever: the "nobility, brilliance, and taste," nurtured by a leisured aristocracy, the "depth, seriousness, and sacredness" of a state religion. Re-reading Bloom leads to the suspicion that he and Mr. Limbaugh would not get on.

Incidentally I'd hardly call President Obama Napoleonic. He only wants to remake a country to which he has contributed nothing, as per instructions from shrivelled little academic souls he respects, and he does feed on worship. Otherwise, one can't imagine him crossing the Alps, still less winning battles. But perhaps he is a sort of little Napoleon, a little answer to Bloom's wonderment at "what we're going to do" with this aspect of the human personality that can't be kept in check all the time. What are we going to do with it? Well, occasionally it seems we're going to lose our heads and elect it to the White House, not least because we're so unused to seeing the type in action that we've forgotten it exists and that it loves to tell lies, too. Perhaps future historians will say that, right about now, two hundred or so years after the American founding, intellectuals and other grand people began fully to realize that the American system, unchanged, could leave them in a desert of impotence forever. Imagine being wise and educated, imagine knowing what's best for Bodo the peasant, or Bodo the NASCAR fan, and never, ever, being able to impose it on him because he votes in the same dreary old system year after year, because he has money and more than enough to eat, and possibly a gun. You can almost hear the roar of frustration, from a large segment of humanity. What to do? The answer, historians may notice, was for the roarers to fall down in joy before a little Napoleon, and work like mad to see him re-open closed doors and reforge old chains, before Bodo fully grasped the malice bubbling in the situation.

What an extraordinary thing that Bodo's major hobby these days has turned out to be the internet, with all the opportunities for independent news-gathering, fact-checking, scathing commentary, and protest planning it affords. It would be as if Hussite and Wycliffite and Roundheads all had a thousand printing presses at once. What do you do -- what does he, Bodo, do -- with individual life when things on a grand scale aren't going as he'd like? Just as there seems to be a personality type that retreats wisely into the mountains to contemplate plum blossoms and folly, there is another that does not. There is another that, in its own way, may be just as infected with the lust for personal power, power over its own person, as is its better, its Napoleonic counterpart. The comfort of this thought might be ruined by its triteness, were it not for the fact that we can cite a powerful text in support of it. Who was it who said something like "I have never believed that one part of mankind was born to be ridden?" No, it went like this: "the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately." And dear me, the speaker was none other than Thomas Jefferson.

Of course, he was talking about an official priesthood. But then, of what else are we talking?

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*"Obama would fail security clearance," Daniel Pipes.org, Oct. 21, 2008.

Did you know? (Obama helps the UN shield Islam from criticism)

This article comes from The International Free Press Society, October 22, 2009:

"On October 1, 2009, the Obama administration in conjunction with the Egyptian government, introduced an anti-free speech measure to the United Nation’s Human Rights Council (HRC). It was adopted the next day without a vote.

"Earlier this year, when the United States sought a seat on the HRC, it was a controversial decision. Many who found the HRC neither credible nor useful, opposed the move. Yet, others were more optimistic that America could change the HRC from within. Perhaps the U.S. could spur debate stemming from its opposition to China, Sudan, Libya, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia on critical human rights votes.

"Little evidence suggests that Americans on either side of the aisle contemplated the US entering the ring and supporting the opposition’s anti-freedom measures. Yet now, the current administration has done worse: it’s leading the charge.

"The draft resolution, misleadingly titled 'Freedom of Opinion and Expression' includes two troubling components. First, it calls on nation states to take 'effective measures' to address and combat 'any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence'. It expresses concern and condemnation of 'negative stereotyping of religions and racial groups'. It further attempts to construe this as an international human rights law and obligation. Second, it recognizes the media’s 'moral and social responsibilities' and the 'importance' that its potential voluntary code of conduct could play in combating intolerance.

"This resolution appears to stem from, and constitute a step toward, the Organization of Islamic Conference’s resolution to 'combat defamation of religions'. The OIC’s resolution would ban outright the 'defaming' of religions, speech critical of religion (even if accurate), and open discussion about any negative consequences resulting from the implementation of religious beliefs (such as Sharia law).

"Though both resolutions mention 'religions' generally, the context and references of the resolutions make them almost certain to apply only or disproportionately to Islam. Indeed, the defamation of religions resolution singles out treatment of Islam. Yet not surprisingly, the OIC has blatantly refused to curtail hate speech against Jews or Israel.

"Further, it is the nature of religion to include a component of exclusivity, thus making it impossible to express one’s theology accurately without making 'defamatory' remarks against another theology. For example, merely preaching that Jesus is the son of God can be viewed as an inflammatory remark and an affront to Islam. Additionally, the wording of this resolution makes its violation subjectively determined and comes dangerously close to outlawing certain emotions, such as hostility toward Islam or Muslims.

"Critically important is the resolution’s attempt to internationalize norms on speech, potentially usurping fundamental constitutional rights. Strict constructionists of the US constitution view the constitution as 'the supreme law of the land' (as the constitution expressly states), whereas those who view the constitution as 'a living, breathing document' might not. But even under a strict construction, when the US signs a treaty, the treaty becomes binding on the US. Though this UN resolution does not constitute a treaty, it is fair to presume that because it is a US-led initiative, the US should be bound by it.

"Also problematic is the resolution’s attempt to make the restriction of free speech a human right. In fact, it is free speech that constitutes a human right and not its restriction. Ideologies, ideas and religions do not, and should not be afforded 'human rights'. They should be fair game for criticism, analysis, open debate and discussion. Religions and ideologies cannot be 'defamed'. Once ideologies are afforded protection from criticism, it is in direct contradiction to individual human rights."

Continue reading the full article here.

Sometimes, scenes of fiction flash through my mind: don't you think, if all his plans and policies had gone beautifully -- and they still may succeed, and far more of them have gone far more beautifully than any one could have imagined a year ago -- don't you think the triumphant young god-President would have loved to take his second oath of office on a Koran and not a Bible?

The peace prize

So President Obama gets the Nobel Peace Prize. Just like that. Normally I would go to the blogs and the forums to find out what all the bright people are thinking, but here is my gut reaction first: someone is trying to make a fool of this man. He can do that all on his own -- we all can do that on our own, that's the human condition -- but I do believe, even if the prize givers are serious, then they can have no idea what damage they've just done him at home.

What should you do?

Iran has a president who wants to rain nuclear bombs on Israel because it's filled with Jews, and he's got -- or is very close to getting -- the weaponry needed to do it. We've got a president filling an office which might stand athwart the murderer's ambition, -- but who is himself an academic popinjay and a moral cripple.

I wonder what will happen next?

Can he become heroic, truly -- ironically -- change, truly grow up? Oh, not so as to wade into foreign affairs brandishing a big stick, but simply enough to say, this at least shall not happen on my watch?

And what should you do?

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Read more: Dog feces ice cream, by Mark Steyn

Iran's not so secret secret, National Review online

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And finally, reprinted from the New York Post:

Excerpts from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu's address yester day to the United Nations General Assembly:

NEARLY 62 years ago, the United Nations recognized the right of the Jews, an ancient people 3,500 years old, to a state of their own in their ancestral homeland. I stand here today as the prime minister of Israel, the Jewish state, and I speak to you on behalf of my country and my people.

The United Nations was founded after the carnage of World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust. It was charged with preventing the recurrence of such horrendous events. Nothing has undermined that central mission more than the systematic assault on the truth.

Yesterday, the president of Iran stood at this very podium, spewing his latest anti-Semitic rants. Just a few days earlier, he again claimed that the Holocaust is a lie.

LAST month, I went to a villa in a sub urb of Berlin called Wannsee. There, on Jan. 20, 1942, after a hearty meal, senior Nazi officials met and decided how to exterminate the Jewish people. The detailed minutes of that meeting have been preserved by successive German governments.

Here is a copy of those minutes, in which the Nazis issued precise instructions on how to carry out the extermination of the Jews. Is this a lie?

A day before I was in Wannsee, I was given in Berlin the original construction plans for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Those plans are signed by Hitler's deputy, Heinrich Himmler, himself. Here is a copy of the plans for Auschwitz-Birkenau, where one million Jews were murdered. Is this too a lie?

This June, President Obama visited the Buchenwald concentration camp. Did President Obama pay tribute to a lie?

And what of the Auschwitz survivors whose arms still bear the tattooed numbers branded on them by the Nazis? Are those tattoos a lie?

One-third of all Jews perished in the conflagration. Nearly every Jewish family was affected, including my own. My wife's grandparents, her father's two sisters and three brothers, and all the aunts, uncles and cousins were all murdered by the Nazis. Is that also a lie?

YESTERDAY, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this po dium. To those who refused to come here and to those who left this room in protest, I commend you. You stood up for moral clarity, and you brought honor to your countries.

But to those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency?

A mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man who denies that the murder of 6 million Jews took place and pledges to wipe out the Jewish state. What a disgrace! What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations!

Perhaps some of you think that this man and his odious regime threaten only the Jews. You're wrong. History has shown us time and again that what starts with attacks on the Jews eventually ends up engulfing many others.

THIS Iranian regime is fueled by an ex treme fundamentalism that burst onto the world scene three decades ago after lying dormant for centuries. In the past 30 years, this fanaticism has swept the globe with a murderous violence and cold-blooded impartiality in its choice of victims. It has callously slaughtered Moslems and Christians, Jews and Hindus and many others.

Though it is comprised of different offshoots, the adherents of this unforgiving creed seek to return humanity to medieval times. Wherever they can, they impose a backward, regimented society where women, minorities, gays or anyone not deemed to be a true believer is brutally subjugated.

The struggle against this fanaticism does not pit faith against faith nor civilization against civilization. It pits civilization against barbarism, the 21st century against the 9th century, those who sanctify life against those who glorify death.

The primitivism of the 9th century ought to be no match for the progress of the 21st century. The allure of freedom, the power of technology, the reach of communications should surely win the day. Ultimately, the past cannot triumph over the future. And the future offers all nations magnificent bounties of hope.

BUT if the most primitive fanaticism can acquire the most deadly weapons, the march of history could be reversed for a time. And, like the belated victory over the Nazis, the forces of progress and freedom will prevail only after a horrific toll of blood and fortune has been exacted from mankind.

That is why the greatest threat facing the world today is the marriage between religious fanaticism and the weapons of mass destruction.

The most urgent challenge facing this body is to prevent the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Are the member states of the United Nations up to that challenge? Will the international community confront a despotism that terrorizes its own people as they bravely stand up for freedom?

Will it take action against the dictators who stole an election in broad daylight and gunned down Iranian protesters who died in the streets choking in their own blood? Will the international community thwart the world's most pernicious sponsors and practitioners of terrorism?

Above all, will the international community stop the terrorist regime of Iran from developing atomic weapons, thereby endangering the peace of the entire world?

The people of Iran are courageously standing up to this regime. People of goodwill around the world stand with them, as do the thousands who have been protesting outside this hall. Will the United Nations stand by their side?

Ladies and Gentlemen, the jury is still out on the United Nations.

WE want peace. I believe such a peace can be achieved. But only if we roll back the forces of terror, led by Iran, that seek to destroy peace, eliminate Israel and overthrow the world order. The question facing the international community is whether it is prepared to confront those forces or accommodate them.

Over 70 years ago, Winston Churchill lamented what he called the "confirmed unteachability of mankind," the unfortunate habit of civilized societies to sleep until danger nearly overtakes them. He bemoaned what he called the "want of foresight, the unwillingness to act when action will be simple and effective, the lack of clear thinking, the confusion of counsel until emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong."

I speak here today in the hope that Churchill's assessment of the "unteachability of mankind" is for once proven wrong. I speak here today in the hope that we can learn from history -- that we can prevent danger in time.

In the spirit of the timeless words spoken to Joshua over 3,000 years ago, let us be strong and of good courage. Let us confront this peril, secure our future and, God willing, forge an enduring peace for generations to come.

NEW YORK POST is a registered trademark of NYP Holdings, Inc.

***************

Winston Churchill ... the man whose statue Barack Obama removed from the Oval Office and gave back to the British ambassador in his first week in office. Not a hopeful sign, but perhaps, perhaps he can still grow up.

"Or what about -- no presents, because of unemployment?"

I adore my beloved Mapp and Lucia novels, but it pains me to realize that the great and glorious Lucia would logically have voted for Obama. Her economic sense was non-existent. And her attitudes toward the masses precisely mirrored his: lordly, condescending, and damaging all at once, with that veneer of inauthentic noblesse oblige laid over. " 'We must help little lame dogs over stiles,' " she tells Georgie, who sensibly does not favor the higher taxes that will be needed to do all she wants to do for the lame dogs.

But even he doesn't always get it, either. When they get married, he encourages her to announce that they don't want any wedding presents, " 'because of unemployment.' " She agrees, but then picks up her pen to write a dress making order for " 'that good little milliner's in the High Street,' " to send business her way.

Ah well. I suppose this is why it's called escapism. Au reservoir.

Hello, mom bloggers! Someone? Anyone?

Herewith, a deeply unscientific survey, and thoughts on women, and voting, and when or if they'll all wake up.

I still nose about the Mom Blog world, even though I stand in amazement at how gigantically dull most of it is. Bless their hearts, the mommies who blog are all so sweet, and so bland and so full of energy. They post pictures of their kids and their living rooms and their vacations, and sometimes are really funny. They enthuse endlessly over each other, and, good entrepreneurs that they all are, they pant to make money. (So did I, I've just decided all the networking is not worth the sacrifice of writing time. Then again ... you be the judge.) For them, it's contests and giveaways galore, and commenting galore on other women's blogs -- stopping by to say hi! -- in the attempt to Drive Traffic to Your Site. I'm still taken aback by how many blog about blogging about blogging about blogging. It's why I for all practical purposes unsubscribed to the Mom Bloggers Club, even though, being member #280 or something, you could say I was almost present at the creation. It seems to have become a pretty big deal.

The popular mom bloggers tell a good story, are indeed rewarded with a good amount of traffic, and can boast perhaps twenty or thirty regular and admiring comments per entry. These better ones all seem to have adopted a certain tone for their work: a faux-raunchy (or maybe genuinely raunchy) vocabulary, a sarcastic, sitcom-ready voice that combines bathroom humor with wacky revelations and scriptedly heartfelt appeals to the reader's understanding. My life is so crazed. Just a mom trying to make sense of it all. Smiling out loud. Speaking my mind (and getting whumped for it) since 1970. Wiping ass and loving it ....

And these women, who otherwise fixate on the personal for 363 days of the year, all love Barack Obama. Or at least they did, when he was in the news and they had reason to think about him. He still is in the news, you say? He's making news? What, you mean the socialist legislation, the half-nationalized banks, the nationalized health care plans? The returning of Winston Churchill's statue to the British ambassador? The secret letter to the Russian president, the $900 million to Hamas? The Polish missile shield? How about the string of Cabinet appointments gone awry? Oh. Oh, no. The mom bloggers who loved him really aren't interested in all that. They'll still carry his blue-and-red "Hope" campaign poster on their sidebars, but to them, Barack Obama has evidently not been in the news since Inauguration Day, and before that he was last in the news on Election Day. Remember when he won? Booyah! was the reaction then. It's a beautiful day!!!!! I am so friggin' HAPPY!!! Doesn't everything just seem better? Woo hoo!

My unscientific survey comes in here. I "lurk" in their world, and I watch and wait for some one of these fine women to say something about President Obama now. I don't even ask them to have second thoughts. Maybe they like the stimulus package, or all that money for Hamas. Even if they don't, it's only been six weeks or so since he took office. They may be giving him the benefit of any doubts. I just look for them to notice he's alive. To say something to each other. Anything. They shouldn't be afraid to mention him -- they all loved him.

They don't peep. Nothing. One mom blogger, one among thousands to be sure, said frankly in a post dated November 5th, "Thank God it's over. I'm BORED. And now for the important stuff: I need a new toaster." And below was a picture of her toaster. I'm sure she's a fine woman.

I'm sure she's a fine woman, and I'm frankly worried that she speaks for the thousands. I'm worried that she speaks for our future. If I am not mistaken, quite a chunk of Obama's voters last November answered to this, what I might call the "Woo hoo!" demographic: the white, middle class, middle aged suburban woman. Fifty-six percent of all women voters opted for Obama, white or not, middle class or not; seventy percent of single women chose him.

I see the mom blogger demographic inside that 56% as especially powerful and especially scary. These are women full of energy, interested in new technology, happy and vibrant people. These are the household spenders that marketers target, these are the moms running your kids' PTAs. (Don't forget where Sarah Palin came from.) Why they fell in love with Barack Obama I can't say -- novelty, symbolism, the fact that he talked about hope and moms hope for stuff for their kids, so he seemed right -- but I worry about the fact that he seems in turn to have so fallen out of their lives since he won. If this is the way these women approach the world, then Barack Obama literally can do no wrong. In four years, he'll be just as attractive to them again as he was in November of 2008. Why not? In four more years he will still be able to talk about hope and he'll still be black. His kids will be older, too, and that will help. Today they are adorable little girls; in four more years the older girl will be on her way to being a babe. Moms love that. If the economy is still in a sink, and with his policies running it it will be, he could be in like Flynn. Please, please vote for a better future. Four more years! Woo hoo!

It almost gives a bad odor to the whole concept of the vote for women. What a shocking thought. I wonder what the old rationale against it was? Why, of course. Do a penn'orth of research -- lookee-uppee, the mom bloggers would say -- and learn that one of the things men and women feared about female suffrage was that women would choose foolishly in the voting booth by heeding their emotions rather than by thinking things through and being logical. How absurd! As if men don't vote their emotions!

But men also don't fuel a whole world, a universe of dad blogs. Oiling crankshafts since 1966 .... No. So they escape my lurker's scrutiny and my lurker's worries. Maybe, in the days before female suffrage, men voters did the same, did whatever men do to make sure people don't know their emotions. Shut up, I dare say.

Strangely, the moms have shut up, now, too. They don't talk about him, they don't acknowledge his existence, his plans, his actions. Why? What's percolating, if anything? I keep my eye on one mom in particular, who for a variety of reasons is my barometer of the Woo hoo demographic's political mood. I wait and watch for her to quietly, ever so quietly, take down the blue and red "Hope" badge from her busy and ad-filled, award-filled sidebar. If she ever does, and for what it's worth, -- you will have heard about it here first. You be the judge.

I give up, what was the big story of the week?

Open Salon's theme for Saturdays/weekends is big story, "your take on the big stories of the week." I must confess that, with Saturday looming tomorrow -- or rather not looming but sort of puffing up nicely, since I have the day off, pillowing up like the pillow I intend to sleep late on, or like a puffy warm pancake you might make for a treat for yourself at 10 am on a glorious Saturday -- with Saturday at any rate being tomorrow, I am left to wonder what I would post on, if I knew the big stories of the week.

Now there's a confession. I don't much follow the "mainstream media" anymore, so I don't know what it considers important recent affairs. I've been busy with my first week at a new job, but I don't present that as an excuse for wandering attention. I simply have, at long last, almost entirely abandoned the mainstream media deliberately, as an intellectual choice. This will sound either comically lofty or comically pathetic, probably depending on one's political views, but there it is. And as I seem to recall quoting the Chicago Tribune or Newsweek even when I was a dutiful girl diarist of thirteen or fourteen, having untied the apron strings and gone floating now does feel odd.

It's the internet revolution to blame, of course. I've noticed. But I started seriously and utterly drifting away from the media this summer, when professional journalism's deification of Barack Obama went into hyperdrive; and after one thing and another, the last straw was a news broadcast on ABC radio just a few days ago. The breathless teaser "new revelations on Obama's links to Blagojevich coming up at 4:00" was followed only by the announcement that the President-elect's staff, and his lawyer, had discovered no wrongdoing or impropriety of any kind where Senate-seat selling in Illinois was concerned.

That was the news, announced by one of the old Big Three networks, by Charles Gibson himself. The Chicago Tribune repeated it in its headline of Wednesday, December 24: Internal review clears staffers: Emanuel role called innocent, appropriate. If you want to delve into this story's paragraphs 8 and following on page 13 -- right across from Obama's farewell to grandmother and Lincoln Bible set for inaugural -- you may plow through a few hints at discrepancies and "inconsistencies" regarding the headline's baptismal cleansing of Obama. "Craig said Balanoff told Jarrett that Blagojevich mentioned the possibility of the governor becoming Obama's secretary of health and human services," etc. (this is paragraph 19). How many people are heroic enough to parse that? It's what's "above the fold" that matters. Internal review clears Obama. Everything's fine. The end. If Barack Obama were a Republican, if he were Hillary Clinton, if he were any other person on the planet, a story like this would have been pursued so fiercely that his very inauguration would now be in doubt.

So, I get my news elsewhere. It's not pique. This is serious. I have no reason to trust or be interested in what interests the professional people who have essentially long since given themselves over to celebrating and chronicling Barack Obama's magnificence, plus the happy life of the Obama royal family. (My my, when will they buy that puppy?) What are the courtiers not reporting while they carry on doing their jobs as if this were North Korea and Dear Leader's life and splendidness was the joyous All? George Will (I satisfactorily disclose myself thereat, I suppose), puts it well when he says the twenty-first century's new technology simply "allows people to choose their own universe of commentary, which takes us far from the good old days when everyone had the communitarian delight of gathering around the cozy campfire of the NBC-ABC-CBS oligopoly" ("Reactionary liberals assault the media," Townhall.com, December 7th, 2008).

Yes, I choose my own universe of commentary. I don't see why what I know, or what falls within my notice, is any less significant than what paid courtiers know, or are willing to transmit.

Here's some of my universe. Tom Wark over at Fermentation is talking about direct sales of liquor to retailers, restaurants, and consumers, something wholesale distributors do not like and fight against tooth and nail in every state legislature they can, frankly, buy. Test your current-events savvy: what do you know about Granholm v. Heald (2005)?

A few days ago, another commentator in my personal universe had a striking thing to say. He said, whenever some people are dependent on the government to live their daily life, they will also inevitably look around, inevitably see people who are better off than they are -- probably because they themselves are not dependent -- and will inevitably believe "the system is rigged." And then what or who, or whose promises, will they vote for? A striking summation, and yes, from Rush Limbaugh.

I had also never heard before -- not until I abandoned newspapers this summer and started getting my news wherever I like -- of the related theory, attributed it seems to science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, that once enough people in a democracy learn to vote themselves goodies out of the national treasury, the democracy is in simple account-book trouble. If you google "Robert Heinlein vote themselves goodies" you can find a bare-bones discussion site, bbsfreetalklive, from August 2006. Here one "Mikehz" teaches that a republic is meant to enshrine laws that prevent people from democratically voting to bleed the nation white, as well as from voting private rights, like the right to smoke, away from their fellows. This is an entirely new idea to me, and I'm a college graduate. Is "Mikehz" to be trusted? Is Charlie Gibson? One makes me think; the other announces what Barack Obama's lawyer says.


What else do I know this week? Willow Manor has introduced me to a gorgeous painting, Our Lady of the Fruits of the Earth, by an artist I had never heard of before, Frank Cadogan Cowper (1877-1958). At Open Salon, Dr. Amy Tuteur of Skeptical O.B. writes most interestingly of medicine, most recently of "vaccine rejectionism" among parents for whom this faith "is about the parents and how they would like to see themselves, not about vaccines and not about children." And then just this week I read Stanley Kauffmann's article in Horizon's Spring, 1973 issue, about Sergei M. Eisenstein's classic silent movie Battleship Potemkin. The amount of film the genius director shot was originally meant to comprise a huge project called The Year 1905, "dealing with the events of the earlier, unsuccessful outbreak against czarism, ... but in the cutting room it was the Potemkin story alone that emerged."

More? There's a sumptuous design blog called Diana: Muse. Her post of December 24th explains who wrote the lyrics to O Holy Night (he was a wine seller, answering his parish priest's call to write a poem for Christmas Eve), and then leads readers to a Christmas recording of the song that I had never heard of, Leontyne Price's 1961 collaboration with Herbert von Karajan and the "silky" Vienna Philharmonic. Another design blog, This is Glamorous, is a portal into -- I believe this -- a lifetime of exploration in design, fashion, and lovely things generally. And then that same issue of Horizon had an article by Peter Quennell on Johnson's and Boswell's journey through Scotland, which reminds me that I've still got the Life of Johnson sitting on my shelves, unabridged, dipped into but not read.

It could be argued that we can all tot up a list of favorite blogs and books, and fritter away our lives in trivia while important things are happening in the world. But what important things, and according to whom? I take it there's something going on in Gaza; a headline about ultimatums from Israel to Hamas crops up from AP when I log into my e-mail. Is AP staffed by the same people telling me that Dear Leader has been cleared by his own internal review? Thanks, I'll look into any Middle East stories on my own later.

The trouble with choosing a universe of my own commentary, a la George Will, is that so far the loss of my business, or yours, hasn't put a dent in the mainstream professionals' power to define events. It's claimed that no one pays attention to them, and it's true their revenues are falling and they are laying people off and declaring bankruptcy. But curiously, they remain entirely relevant. I can look at Diana:Muse and enjoy myself and feel privately liberated, but come January my President will still be an untried man of impoverished thinking whose short path to power was fanatically carved out and protected for him by professional mainstream journalism. My fellow voters who "just want change" did the rest. He'll have four or possibly eight years to impoverish the country as any other pampered, jejune left-wing academic could only dream of doing. And there was nothing anyone could do about his deification, except vote long after it had been accomplished -- which looked like a pitiful and so very antique option amid the joy-filled hysteria. Conservative talk radio, the lively and questioning blogosphere, could follow events but in the end lacked the official credentials to shape events. And look to lack it for a long time to come. Their competitors are not going to hand out press passes to them.

So what is the point of the free citizen not paying attention to an information system that can deliver the American presidency to its own, manufactured god? Ignoring this power is not the same thing as having a comparable power. For the moment. Perhaps, just perhaps, this era and this victory will prove mainstream journalism's last hurrah. I suppose that if they really do run out of money, through you and I no longer forking over our 75 cents a day to follow the news of their careers, they will have to close up their multiple shops and this enormous leftist voice will be stilled. And then ... what will be the news of the day?

Whatever we say it is. How odd. This week, liquor laws, the battleship Potemkin, Leontyne Price, and the poetry of Placide Cappeau de Roquemaure (O Holy Night). Next week, who knows? Nietzsche is supposed to have said, and I forget where I learned this, that the newspaper had replaced the prayer in daily middle-class life. If he was right, that speaks volumes on what we have wanted The News to provide for us every day: a communion, a worldview, a sacrament, always fresh, right, and repeatable. Above all, relevant. Can a million completely personal universes of commentary really provide all that?

It will have to. I've started mine. Not only because -- if -- the "MSM" is in its fevered death throes, but because the alternative for as long as it survives is to look forever out the windows of its house, someone else's house, someone who isn't particularly concerned with the state of the foundation and absolutely doesn't care what you think of the view. No, I'll be going, if you don't mind. Don't get up -- I'll see myself out.

The big picture

The history major in me likes to look at national or world events and try to shape them, for my own satisfaction, into a big, probably much too intuitive picture, one that explains trends or the Movement of Peoples in terms that are emotional (no need for too terribly painstaking research -- and who knows, it might be true) but tidy (that takes care of that). Perhaps I ought to be writing more fiction, or perhaps I have spent too much time reading large survey history books with grand themes and titles, and too much time taking the same kinds of classes years ago in college. Books and classes like these always end so neatly, and before they end the books, especially, always seem to gloss over real human tragedies and failures with many reassuring summations. In the long run all this was for the best, they say, or couldn't be helped, or at any rate all this is now explicable in some large and tidy way. There's little sadness in a survey, and I like that. I am, in short, the general reader.

Do I dare try it myself? Big survey views aren't necessarily wrong. Once in a while, talented people can do a bit of summing up, and can get it largely right with the basic tools of good background knowledge and human sympathy and imagination at their disposal. I may not be one of those people, nor am I about to dare some huge summing up. But here are a couple of trends or movements, along with the ingredients in them which some future talent may be able to click together like a puzzle in a very satisfying way: satisfying enough for the general reader and the professional both to nod and say, "in a way that's probably close to the truth."

One trend, from abroad, is that the French (of all people) are in the process, so the wine bloggers tell us, of becoming neo-prohibitionists and of "demonizing" -- of all things -- wine. Wine cannot be advertised on the internet in France. Any writing on wine, in newspapers, magazines, or on-line, must be accompanied by the equivalent of our idiotic surgeon general's warning as to its pernicious possible effects on health. This means that any innocent little wine-and-food pairing column in any French daily paper must be followed, every single time in every single paper, by the warning paragraph mandated by the state. This is in France, long home of wine and of all things sensuous, joyous, and wonderful. In addition, free wine tastings are very likely going to be banned in France. This means that large and (I presume) traditional professional events like the "en primeur barrel tastings in Bordeaux and the Vinexpo wine exhibition" either will not be held or will have to have fees set for admittance and tasting (Decanter on line, 10/31/08). This is completely new.

Why on earth would the French travel down this road? -- suddenly reacting to wine as Dracula reacts to garlic and sunlight? Power-mad bureaucrats making laws, health-faddists obeying whatever internal dictates drive them; or, is it the case that a people are slowly, intuitively relinquishing one of their most prized possessions, before their abstaining Muslim fellow citizens can attain majority status in the country and then insist that it be done on religious grounds?

A proper historian would shrug at such a silly connection, and would point to dozens of complex factors driving history every day of the year, and changing what they drive every day of the year. But someone writing a survey, five hundred years from now, might note the timing of this strange trend and say this was not a coincidence -- or maybe that it was at least an interesting one. It's a bit like approaching the solution to a murder mystery. There's a body in the library, and a knife on the garden path outside. Yes, there are dozens of other factors and clues. But fundamentally, here are two things that go together and make something wrong. Something strange is happening. There's a connection.

Another strange trend comes closer to home, and forces me to write once again about the junior Senator from Illinois. (The one who, after something like 143 days in office, decided it was time to seek the Presidency.) The mania of the mainstream press for him has been so naked and so delirious that I think even they will look back on 2008, the year of his deification, and wonder just exactly what they were about. Their worshipping and promoting the ambitions of Barack Obama, combined with his popularity all over the world, leads me to suspect that perhaps, in the big picture, what he means to many journalists is their redemption from being hated as Americans. September 11th brought home to us a little slice of the world's hatred of us, and journalists, every bit as American as the citizens they lecture, don't like being hated. The rest of us have been more able to withstand the fact of it because we recognize that maybe the hater has the problem, not us. We recognize that no one has the right to kill us because of who we are. The press doesn't seem to be so sure.

September 11th was a long time ago -- seven years, although it seems like longer, partly I think because after a few months or so, images of the day dropped rather suddenly from public view -- but ever since the delivery of that lesson, that haters can and will strike even New York City (New York! where so many thinking people and journalists live!), our powerful media has had no firm proof to offer the world that they are not like us, and should be excused associations with us. They long to prove categorically that they are different, right-thinking. George Bush's re-election by us, never mind his first election, and of course the war in Iraq not sufficiently opposed by us, have gone far to driving them frantic with chagrin at this proofless-ness. What can they do?

They have found Barack Obama, and so found what they can do. Deify the one candidate for the Presidency who is not only a committed socialist but also exemplifies the academic left's contempt for the Constitution, boasts friends and mentors who like to blow up the Pentagon, and has belonged to a racist, anti-American church for twenty years. Deify the one candidate who brags that he wants to "fundamentally change America." The more damning details have come to light about Obama, the more the media have protected him. The more they have learned about him, the more they have understood he is exactly what they want. Lots of factors come into play in this little slice of history, to be sure, but I agree with the general conservative-pundit assessment that this is emotional. I'll go further, and match up the body in this library with the knife on the path outside. The American press says to the hating world: here. This is our gift to you. We'll do our part to make him our leader. How perfect, the subconscious whispers, that he's even by way of being Muslim. Love us. We're not like them.


These are my two intuitive, big-picture, and unprovable theses on two strange trends of the past year or so. The French are acting as if they hate wine. The American press makes mass obeisance to the first anti-American presidential candidate, ever, and guide and protect his path to power. Why? Sometimes it's the very history books -- non-surveys, this time -- laying out a dozen or eighteen separate reasons contributing to this or that epochal change, which finally seem less convincing than a simple A to B emotional leap. (Perhaps this is why human beings are so susceptible to conspiracy theories about anything. They're easy to grasp, too, and don't require any more research than you care to do.) I read the fine serious books on history and sometimes think, come now, these eighteen factors cannot all have joined together in this place and time and among these people, and impelled them to do or think as they did precisely then. People, if they are not automatons, paint their lives with a bit broader brushes than that, don't they?

All of the foregoing may also explain why I blog, rather than get important papers full of painstakingly accurate and original information published in the William and Mary Quarterly, &c. I hugely respect the compiling of that information, and at long last I realize that that is what magazines and book publishers are buying and selling, not my brand of (with luck) charming speculation. But I also like the phrase that I once came across in William Manchester's biography of Winston Churchill. One of Churchill's gifts, he said, was the "zigzag streak of lightning in the brain," -- confident, inexplicable, but correct intuition. Heaven knows I don't claim to have it, but it's nice to think that there's a place for some pale imitation of it at some level of historical analysis. Maybe even here. Provided it just zigs and zags usefully, and doesn't fry the circuits.

Why are there liberals?

Of course, liberals will be appalled and offended at the question. One may as well ask, they will say, why are there trees or clouds or people. And why are there conservatives? But their genuflections before the child-king do, ah, render them culpable to a little friendly curiosity.

Call me a slow learner, but I have only just in the last week listened to Rush Limbaugh's radio show for the first time, Rush ("talent on loan from God") who has been on the air for who knows how many years. Though repetitive, it is great fun, even downright addictive. But I can't listen to it at work because I suspect it would drive customers away. The people who buy wine would probably tend not to want to hear Rush eviscerating the Messiah, Lord Obama, on entering their quiet and good-smelling domain. And therein lies a tale.

Rush likes to try to explain liberals, as do other media figures of his stamp -- Jonah Goldberg in Liberal Fascism, or most of the fun people contributing to the site Townhall.com for example --
in a variety of ways. I've been collecting "tropes" on the subject. One of the latest, from Thomas Sowell, suggests that liberals tend to be sheltered and petted souls, celebrities, highly paid journalists, federal judges, big important professors, "or what have you," who have never matured and lived a life of painful trade-offs and disappointments out in the real world. Year to year survival is not their concern, so they can devote themselves to Obama-esque abstractions which they fancy should make life better, more just, for the little people who they dimly realize are busy, not with abstractions, but with surviving. They rarely meet anyone unlike themselves, but they tend to live in big, bustling urban areas and this fosters within them the illusion that they are at the vital center of things.

That's one of the friendlier tropes. A less kind one is that liberals, especially Obama, are all frankly socialists or Marxists who know exactly what they are about, are outraged by "inequality," and desire the personal power to redeem this flawed world by recreating the United States as another Cuba, living out the Marxist abstractions of From Each According to his Ability, To Each According to his Need, and Jail for Those who Disagree or would like to keep their own Money or manage their own Property. Or not be taxed to death. ...or they may just want power.

A third trope is that liberals, especially intellectuals and artists, despise American "exceptionalism," for whatever reasons shuddering at the possibility that the country's founding on individual freedoms protected by a government deriving its authority from the consent of the governed, has indeed fostered the nation's peace and well being. Liberal intellectuals would much rather feel, according to this trope, that any nation's well-being comes from obedience to brilliant Them.

Want more? Yet another explanation for Why Liberals Exist -- moving down the ladder from celebrities and academics -- is simply that the core constituencies believe as they are told. Burt Prelutsky, one of the fun people contributing to TownHall, said this. Poorer blacks, he thinks, accept that government must solve their problems and create a better world (with other people's tax money) because they've been told for decades that this is so. Middle class blacks accept it because their ministers tell them to. Jews accept the idea of the regulatory nurse-state "helping" people because this sounds like social justice, and social justice is most religious Jews' substitute for Judaism; for non-religious Jews, social justice, a la the Democratic party, is religion.

These are all interesting ideas -- tropes, what an intellectual word -- but they don't necessarily fit the nice liberals who enter the wine shop, for the sake of whose feelings I hit the "Mute" button while I'm listening to Rush. I've heard them. Nice people. They say, smiling:

Oh ... we're not the type to listen to that station. Without going crazy ....
Oh, I can't wait to listen to the speeches tonight. The governor of a five-and-dime state, who will be president when a seventy-two year old, cancer-ridden ....
Heh ... we just got back from Alaska. Gas there is the most expensive in the country. She didn't do much about that, did she, while she was 'reforming'....
...and if you're a conservative, and always setting yourself up as better than other people, how do you have a pregnant teen daughter? Shouldn't your values have affected your family in some way?

These are nice, ordinary Americans who are neither isolated intellectuals nor movie stars nor highly paid smug journalists nor flat-out Marxists. They are not necessarily blacks or Jews. One was a woman. They are of all age ranges. Their loathing for Sarah Palin is visceral. Equally so is their continuing excitement, turning fierce now that he seems to be in trouble in the polls, about Obama. A few weeks before Palin arrived on the scene, one young white man bought a bottle of champagne the morning that the Senator was officially to cinch the nomination at the Democratic national convention. "Me and my friends have been waiting a long time for this," he said. He couldn't possibly have explained what. It's visceral.

No, none of the above proffered explanations for "why there are liberals" fit them. They, of course, would say Well of course we're liberals. Decent people are.

So I've spent some time thinking about what I can add to the collection of ideas, based on what I see and hear. Great big important explanations stretching back toward history or philosophy or economics don't seem to fit my nice customers either. Choosing one of two basic beliefs about human nature -- either that it can change and improve through enlightenment and forward thinking, or that it remains forever flawed and in need of guidance by tradition and experience -- is not something they have consciously done. Apparently no community college professor ever startled them at nineteen with the pronouncement "You can have either freedom or equality, you can't have both," prompting them to choose their political affiliations accordingly. They don't see themselves as bought off by Franklin Roosevelt, who created the American welfare (more taxes) state in the 1930s, (says Rush) so as to permanently bind the American people to the Democratic party as clients rather than as free citizens responsible for themselves. They don't fret about being classic liberals ("hooray for the free market") or Progressives ("you must reduce your carbon footprint for the good of all, and if you don't we'll make it a law").

The good people who come into my wine shop are simply emotional liberals. They are as rock-ribbed Americans as "the conservatives." They work hard, are good neighbors, watch football, pay their taxes, eat and sleep and read, love their families, and aren't home studying Saul Alinsky every night. I've come to the conclusion that what liberalism gives them, as they look at the flawed world where Ability and Need go begging, is a feeling of interior power -- grace, perhaps -- a confidence that they understand the wicked, slimy workings of the great, even if they can't always do very much about them right now. It's a satisfying bolt of psychic electricity connecting them with divine truth and with a future when the truth shall be vindicated and all flaws corrected. It's a jolt connecting them with each other now.

This is why they relish emotional bumps, inconsistencies, hypocrisies, or even surprises of circumstance -- the conservative woman's pregnant, unwed teen daughter! -- anywhere near political candidates or ideas that are illiberal. To them, politics is an emotional radar tuned to eternal abstractions, eternal problems, injustice and greed, the fact that there are rich people. If you are unlike them, if you lack the radar or interpret its reports in some other way, then you may as well be among the slimy great. If you are going to muck about in concreteness and dull old daily life and personal choices and such, then they'll pay you back in kind: every circumstance of your life is therefore a potential joke and a corruption. Liberals, on the other hand, even a candidate like Obama, can attend the church that he did for twenty years and be excused. His emotional commitment to an abstract Justice, to "Hope" and redemptive "Change," is what matters. He's got the radar. He lights up the radar. We won't talk about taxes.

Coming to the profound conclusion that liberals are emotional, unreasonable, sounds too trite for words. Any sensible liberal is going to say the same of conservatives. Both sides use the same language and make the same complaints about the other and about themselves. They're divisive. They're not rational. We don't do a good job telling our story. The mainstream media are biased.

But listening to Rush is quite a lesson, if nothing else in exposure to the just plain old bold statements of a man who comes to similar conclusions, but without apology. There is a corollary to the conclusion about liberal emotionalism, which I can just hear him whispering in a marvelous portentous rumble: their world view is not benign. And yes, both sides could say this of each other, especially liberals since they've mastered the smear that conservatives are wealthy and heartless. But in their case, whether they are sheltered movie stars or my nice wine shop customers, it's true. Their worldview is not benign, and this is a startling conclusion to come to about fellow 'Mericans. A future filled with hope and change, when all injustice and inequality will be wiped away by the imposition of wealth redistribution schemes (taxes) that have been historically proved to impoverish everyone just for a start, is not a benign future.

It's odd. Throughout the modern era liberals were quite right to ask the good questions they did: why must kings always govern, or why should men of property, only, vote. But I suspect their basic problem now is that logically there is nothing much of their fundamental work left to do. You can't extend the vote to children (probably); certainly you can make something like gay marriage or abortion pet issues, but that neither reduces hereditary privileges nor shrinks government's reach into life or the market, nor reflects the people's wishes. Those were classic liberalism's jobs. There is nothing left to liberal politics but emotion and the search for power, somewhere. And, for all that electric jolt of interior grace running through them and connecting them intuitively with a perfected future, I don't think my wine shop customers would be any too thrilled if really aggressive wealth redistribution schemes kicked in now, pulling a lot of tax money out of their pockets now, even if it was all for the sake of hope and change. I don't think they'd realize what was going on. To them, untoward events are by definition caused by the slimy great -- by power, by inequality, by conservatives. My high school-age children have been taught that conservatives are the ones who want a powerful government to control more of everything.

"Moral guardians of the permanent revolutionary attitude." In his book Citizens Simon Schama defined the French Revolution's Jacobins, the left-est of the left, thus. My wine shop customers aren't Jacobins, nor are the bloggers out there displaying Obama's blue-and-red "Hope" portrait as a badge of moral superiority, but anyway it must be satisfying to have a version of that attitude always simmering, always ready to ladle out. They're very proud. (How many conservatives would walk into a Starbucks -- or a wine shop -- hear National Public Radio, and then relieve themselves of some comment to the effect that of course they don't listen to that?) Obama's simple embodiment of their pride in understanding injustice is what has deified him. Important political commentators who think that the Democratic party has only been able to win elections by becoming centrist had better re-think that analysis.

I'm not sure what would ever change their attitudes. Being mugged, perhaps, as the old joke goes. Not that I require them to change. But it must be difficult for them to see a future of perfect human behavior and righted injustices forever spiraling out of reach, every time their fellow citizens vote improperly. Yesterday an opinion column in the Chicago Tribune demanded that, in these days of financial worry, the government take steps to limit greed (Jim Wallis, "It's the Morality, Sinner," September 19, 2008). Last night someone in the wine shop said that we shouldn't buy advertising on WLS radio, because the demographic there makes no sense for us to reach. "It's a very conservative, right-wing station -- the kind of people who listen to Rush Limbaugh." And he rolled his eyes and gestured that it would be of course distasteful to elaborate.

I just said "Oh really?" because I couldn't think of a quick riposte that would tie up an equal number of ignorant assumptions, unspoken insults, and self-congratulation as that statement did. What's a clever and accepted way, a trope, to dismiss left-wing liberals based on the talk show hosts they like and the beverages they may not? And yet, he's got a point, the very point I began with, an emotional point. I hit the Mute button on Rush myself, when I'm there. Why? I spare their emotions. It's only disturbing -- revealing? -- that the emotion involved, among these nice liberal caring people, is so like hate.

My two cents

I fancy myself as not liking politics, but perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps I do. At any rate, before too much time goes by, I thought as a responsible citizen and voter enjoying the great rights of free speech, I may as well contribute to the discussions on Barack Obama.

I can lay claim to at least having heard of him before quite a few other people happened to do. A good five or six years ago and more, signs with his odd-looking name popped up on lawns in my old suburban Chicago neighborhood. Since the neighborhood is "changing," as we put it politely, I assumed he was a local politician running for local or at most state office, possibly even running cynically on the strength of an impressively African-sounding name.

And of course he was running, on a name that happened to be his own, and of course in time he won, election to the United States Senate no less. My family and I watched his speech after his senate victory that night and, I will say this though I suppose to some good souls it will make me look a troglodyte, I have not willingly listened to or read anything written by Barack Obama since.

That night he talked, and he talked, and he talked, to adoring supporters in a hotel ballroom, as all winning candidates do. He was locquacious and poised, joyous, obviously. I don't remember what he said. But as the speech went on, we turned to each other in the privacy of our living room and began to laugh.

If this were a short story, now would be the time for the narrator to make clear that the laughter was the nervous, frightened laughter of two bigots appalled at fresh proofs that the world was changing. But we're not bigots. It was the laughter of two intelligent people amazed that this talking man, now elected to a seat of great power, could not hear himself, could not slow down, stop, listen to himself talk endlessly and endlessly about himself, and himself, and then about himself.

I joked at his expense. "And I remember!" I preached in sweeping gestures to the television, "one day, when I was only a boy of ten, that I saw ... a cat outside a polling place. And the cat was black and white. And I knew, when I saw that cat ... that my grandmother was right. And that one day racism and prejudice would end ...." And my husband laughed and I went out to the kitchen to get something to eat.

A bigoted troglodyte, taking refuge in laughter at an appallingly changed and threatening world? I don't think so. Rather, a voter, disgusted at the explosive, complacent inanity of a man who was now my United States Senator. And, later, virtually God, deified by the media. A few years ago I visited out-of-state cousins who are probably more often Democratic voters than I am. "What do you think of Barack Obama?" one asked excitedly. To her, he was new material.

I looked at her. "Oh, you mean God?" I said. Everyone laughed, even though my response came out ruder than I meant it to. I meant it to sound bantering. "Honestly, whenever we see him on television," I explained, "we just say 'Oh look, there's God.' And we change the channel." Everyone laughed some more, and that was the end of that little out-of-state conversation. I did not mean to quash it -- I don't think I did -- but there is no pleasant way of saying, "I don't think of him because he's hysterically overexposed and not interesting enough to think about." The corollary thought is so obviously What's your problem?

The only interesting thing about him is the way he is adored, especially by the media, of course. You could be illiterate and know he is adored simply by the frequency with which his picture, always a flattering one, has appeared on the front pages of newspapers and magazines since that first victory speech in Illinois. And what is even more interesting about him, this spring, is the way he has been forgiven. The God who is forgiven -- what an intoxicating and mysterious package to elect to the presidency.

Forgiven what? The revelations about the absurd and vicious church that he belonged to for twenty years, about its racist pastor and its creed and Obama's happy support of both, should have ended his career. With those revelations, I thought the empty man had been filled in. So this is what he thinks. So this is why he says nothing of substance. The very idea of a man's simply asking to become commander in chief of an integrated armed forces -- supposing that were a job separate from the presidency -- in wartime, while wallowing in a toxic anti-American spiritual bath, should have been perfectly incredible. That the position of commander in chief is bound up with the presidency and that he is going on seeking it and has been forgiven and given more air time and allowed to seek it, would seem to past generations a symptom of wide-ranging social insanity. In past generations, this would have made the Democratic party a disgrace. The candidate would have been a disgrace. He still is.

But something in the society has changed. Previously, I like to think, upon these revelations his opponents would have refused to debate with him, his staff would have quit; all would have said, whatever the nation's problems, a candidate with any respect for the electorate or himself does not start his race rigidly intellectually loathing the country. And yet now all such past understandings are no matter. Hillary Clinton -- who should have joined the Republican party on the spot, become John McCain's running mate, and left the Democrats with their God -- cannot shun Obama for fear, probably, of herself seeming narrow-minded. He goes on, joyous and talking, and winning.

Something has changed, some definition of what constitutes respect for the electorate. Yes, yes, I know the nation and its policies and history are open to criticism and debate, and patriotism does not mean a mindless, pop-eyed salute and a growled "Love it or leave it." But, facts like Obama's church and his friends and, yes, his wife's inability to feel proud of her country until it embraced God, all paint Barack Obama into a corner where he clearly wanted to be until perhaps he realized that the whole nation does not necessarily always enjoy life in this corner, nor pay much attention to it from day to day. But forgiveness for his, shall we say, gaffes has also come from this corner, and that is why his career is not over.

The one truth that Obama's candidacy has proven about American society is that the statistics are right: one fourth of all Americans hold a college degree. That must be true. That's why he has been forgiven, and has continued to collect endorsements from other politicians -- itself a disgraceful thing -- and more importantly to win primaries. He is familiar. A brief shock -- "controversial pastor," etc. -- but no, we know him. A generation or two ago, we would not have, not because of his skin color but because a generation or two ago, one fourth of us did not graduate college. Now we do. He's your professor, and mine. We've heard, from freshman year, the things that Obama heard in his corner, things he was not revolted by, things avowed by his pastor and his friends and his wife. America the cesspool, the corrupt, the enslaver, the brutalizer of nations, the vast capitalist arena where dog eats dog and the children go to bed hungry and oil refineries block the sun. Oh, we might have been a little uncomfortable with this at first, because if we looked out the window in college we could see the sun shining after all, but the professor was there to assure us he was right, he had books, and our uncomfortableness was a normal and necessary response to profound challenge. We grow, and growth is painful. Right? Remember?

Why else, indeed, does Barack appeal so much to the young? Already naturally righteous, most of them are also students. They hear every day from polished, well-spoken men the things that have echoed in Barack's corner for years. He may be the most exciting and yet familiar adult in their lives. Electing your prof to the White House, and he's young and black. Way cool.

His supporters of any age may argue with me, at this point, that I've freely admitted to not paying any attention to his words or ideas, but have only accused him of being unfit for office because he listened for a very long time to a man whose sulfurous and peurile attitudes he has already repudiated in no uncertain terms. Yes, I plead guilty. I ignored Barack Obama from the night of his senate victory speech because I couldn't believe how shallow he was, and I stupidly reasoned that after his six-year term, we would hear no more of him. Carol Moseley Braun was another photogenic, black first-time Senator from Illinois who made a lot of gaffes and then disappeared after six years. Somehow, no one marked her for the presidency. No one made her God.

I've written of what I deign to call "interesting" things. Another interesting thing to contemplate is what might happen if Barack Obama loses the election in November. He may lose, and he may even lose big. Three quarters of the American population are still not college graduates, and may not find Obama challenging but familiar. For all we know, John McCain may enjoy a Reagan- or even only a Nixon-size victory. If that should happen, I fear we are going to have some stunned and angry worshipers in that corner, clawing themselves in despair at the way people will vote.