Monthly Archives: August 2008

More Craziness In Denver

The anarchists and other kooks who have assembled in Denver appear to have their hands full with the Denver police. Photojournalist Zombie has posted a terrific photo-essay about a lengthy encounter between the protesters and the police that took place earlier today. Zombie was swept up along with the protesters, who got the worst of it. In another encounter, a group of pro-tolerance demonstrators–well, actually they were trying to levitate »

How Did Michelle O. Do? Your Turn

On the AOL News site, the question of the day is whether Michelle Obama’s speech last night advanced her husband’s candidacy. Somewhat to my surprise, the initial response from AOL readers is one of skepticism. You can express your own opinion by voting in the poll. This content requires the most recent version of the Adobe Flash Player. Get this version below:Get Flash UPDATE: Some time tomorrow the poll will »

Talkin’ Joe Biden, Iran counts its blessings

Barack Obama selected Joe Biden as his running in part because of Biden’s alleged expertise with regard to foreign policy. As I demonstrated here, though, Biden has been anything but expert when it comes to Iraq. In fact, he has either been wrong or confessed error on every major decision pertaining to Iraq. As Michael Rubin shows, Biden has fared no better when it comes to Iran. According to Rubin: »

The Truth Hurts

A group called American Issues Project created this excellent ad on Barack Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers. The ad is being run on local television stations in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and Michigan: Obama has responded to the ad the way liberals often react to free speech that they don’t like: he is trying to shut it down: Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor said Obama supporters have inundated stations that are airing »

Daughter, sister, wife, mother — pre-feminism comes to the Democratic convention

Michelle Obama is an accomplished woman. She graduated from Princeton and from Harvard Law School. After that she practiced law at a top Chicago firm. Then, she took on a prominent role as a lawyer for a major hospital. Yet last night, at least according to the transcript of her speech, she mentioned none of these accomplishments [note: she alluded briefly to having gone to college and law school and »

Credit Where It’s Due

The most impressive performance turned in at the Democratic convention last night was by one of the Obamas’ children. When Barack appeared on-screen at the end of his wife’s speech, he delivered his usual gaffe, announcing that he was in St. Louis when in fact he was in Kansas City. At the end of the bit, his daughter gave him chance to retrieve the error by asking, “What city are »

Respect, Obama Style

Michelle Obama, from her speech last night: Among them, she said in prepared remarks: “that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say you’re going to do, that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don’t know them, and even if you don’t agree with them.” Barack Obama, speaking yesterday; note how long the »

Make Room For Daddy

The Democrats excel at bathos. Their quadrennial conventions have become exercises in bathos, superbly well done. In one of his letters, Saul Bellow’s Herzog explains Eisenhower’s victory over Stevenson with the proposition that “the general gave us low-grade universal potato love.” The bathetic stories on display at the convention provide the objective correlative to “low-grade universal potato love.” The bathos facilitates populist rhetoric and socialist economics. In his remarks last »

Michelle Obama: How Did She Do?

Beats me. She needed to say she loves America, to talk about our servicemen and to praise Hillary Clinton. She did those things. The style wasn’t smooth; she often seemed rushed and edgy, but I don’t think many people will hold that against her. What mostly struck me was how over the top the finish was, with Barack appearing on video and talking to his very cute daughters. I doubt »

Phillippe Sands’ distortions exposed

We wrote here about the testimony of former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, chaired by Rep. Jerry Nadler. Feith testified along with Phillippe Sand, the author of a book which accuses the administration (especially Feith) of hostility towards the Geneva Convention and of devising the argument that detainees at GTMO should not receive any protections under »

What To Make of Teddy K?

Ted Kennedy made an emotional appearance at the Democratic convention tonight, and reprised the last line of a speech he gave, to great applause, in 1980: “The work begins anew, the hope rises again and the dream lives on.” But what, exactly, is the dream? The dream of Democrats occupying the White House and again being able to parcel out jobs in the Executive Branch, as best I can tell. »

Energy Policy for the Ignorant

As we’ve often said, the Democrats prey on ignorance. Often they know better and are being cynical; sometimes it’s because they are ignorant themselves. A shocking example of the latter case was revealed yesterday when Nancy Pelosi appeared on Meet the Press. Mrs. Pelosi declared herself a major advocate of natural gas as an energy source, but then revealed that she is ignorant of the fact that natural gas is »

Here Come the Crazies!

The Democratic convention is getting underway, and so far the focus has been on all the wrong places. A crowd of demonstrators has showed up, marched around Denver, confronted policemen, and generally made fools of themselves: The invaluable Zombie has much more: I keep wondering when the voters are going to start noticing that the Left has gone stark raving mad. The world of show business has united almost monolithically »

The case against socialized medicine

Health care reform may have receded slightly as a campaign issue this year, as focus shifts to even more immediate concerns like the cost of filling our cars with gas. Although a bad employment picture can cost some Americans their health care coverage, it may also be true that the goal of guaranteeing coverage to every American sounds more like a luxury and less like a moral imperative during bad »

Twelve

Andrew Breitbart takes the occasion of the Democrats’ instigation of class warfare against John McCain to dwell on the meaning of “the inconvenient Obama” (i.e., Obama’s half-brother George). Breitbart summons up an imaginary McCain ad he calls “Twelve” responding to Obama’s ad “Seven” regarding McCain’s houses: Mr. McCain, of course, would be publicly eviscerated if he funded an ad campaign called “12” – as in the amount of dollars a »

What’s the matter with the Democrats?

The radicalization of the Democratic Party occurred under the rules adopted by the McGovern-Fraser Commission in the aftermath of the Democrats’ disastrous 1968 convention in Chicago and culminated in the nomination of George McGovern as the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972. In Party of Defeat, the invaluable new book by David Horowitz and Ben Johnson, the authors date the dissolution of bipartisan unity over support for the war effort in »

Talkin’ Joe Biden, the Foreign Relations Committee years

Last night, I argued that Joe Biden’s performance on the Senate Judiciary Committee recommends him more highly for a spot on reality television than for the number two political job in the United States. Far from demonstrating any statesmanship during his decades on this Committee, Biden presided over the deterioration of the judicial confirmation process, which he transformed into a vehicle (in Scott’s words) for the “character assassination of his »