Obama

Waiting for tonight

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My typing may be a bit off today as my dog bit me last night. It was partially my fault because he snapped at me as I was taking off his leash and I smacked him in the nose. He was faster than I was and bit my hand. Bassett hounds are supposed to be mellow but I got the one exception.

I voted a week ago by absentee so that is done. California has a bunch of state propositions and I voted no on all of them except 32, which would constrain union fund raising, but it will probably lose. I was disappointed to see NRO come out against it because of some footling concern about something. I have been disappointed by NRO several times this year, first when they fired John Derbyshire. His writing is funny and wise at the same time. You probably all know the story of the dispute, in which I believe that Derb was completely correct.

We also have this small matter of a presidential election today.

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DemoThugs Rampant

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I’ve written numerous times (here, for example) about the growing tendency of the “progressive” Left to use intimidation tactics against those who dare to disagree with them. Given that this group now dominates the Democratic party, it was predictable that violence, intimidation, property destruction, and electoral fraud would come to play an increasing part in national elections, and this is now happening.

The national dinosaur media hasn’t done a very good job in reporting on these events, but some local media outlets have done much better. Watch this video (which comes via a comment from Jason in LA at the above-linked post)…it may take a few seconds to start, and it’s about 5 minutes long, but you should definitely watch the whole thing.

Here’s another story–four men in Ohio caught stealing Romney signs while driving a union-owned truck.

As I noted in the post at the first link, the son of a Wisconsin state senator was actually beaten up when he objected to 2 men stealing a Mitt Romney yard sign on the lawn

See this report from the 2004 election…J Christian Adams, an attorney and former DOJ official, says he observed SEIU union members attempting to block access to the polls by Bush supporters (identified by their bumper stickers) in West Palm Beach. And, of course, we’re all away of the decision by Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, to drop the case against members of the New Black Panther Party who were accused of committing voter intimidation in the 2008 election—even though it seems that the government’s case was basically already won.

In Virginia earlier this month, the son of Democratic Representative Jim Moran was caught on video coaching someone on how to commit voter fraud.

On television (HBO), Bill Maher said:

If you’re thinking about voting for Mitt Romney, I would like to make this one plea: black people know who you are and they will come after you

Immediately followed by “I’m kidding”..you know, it’s not really very funny. The remark is an insult to black people as a group, of course, as it feeds a stereotype of blacks as inherently violent, and it is poisonous to political dialog and to American society as a whole. (Ed Driscoll, from whom the Maher link came, said in response to the “black people…will come after you” line: “OK, but if Stacey Dash, Condi Rice, Mia Love and Star Parker are coming over, could you ask them to give me some advance notice? I really need to tidy the place up first.”)

The rage, irrationality, and lack of respect for the rights of others which has been demonstrated by so many Obama supporters in this campaign in very disturbing…but should not be surprising in view of the conduct of the “progressive” Left over the last two or more decades.

As J Christian Adams said:

Tuesday is the day you get to decide whether America is a land where a thugocracy can flourish, or whether freedom’s holy light will thrive. The founders of this great land foresaw a day like November 6, 2012. Every patriot who came before you acted. Now it is your turn.

Quote of the Day

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Charles Moore in the Telegraph:

…This sense of a people defeating appalling obstacles, through their own efforts and the hand of providence, is as old as Moses. As Conan Doyle implies, it is central to the story of the English-speaking peoples. Even today, it is what makes America new in each generation. Barack Obama does not believe in it he does not even like it. Mitt Romney does.
 
What the media see as a “gaffe” is often, in reality, a challenge to the dominant orthodoxy. In the late Seventies, Margaret Thatcher made the gaffe of questioning the motives of the Soviet Union when everyone else was mad about détente. She made the gaffe of questioning incomes policies when most people said they were the only way of stopping inflation. After a while, she piled up enough gaffes to make sure that she won the general election of 1979. In the United States in 1980, Ronald Reagan made those sorts of gaffes, too.
 
Then, as now, our entire economic system was in question. It was so serious that it put the West’s global predominance in question as well. The prize went to the candidate who raised the questions, and tried boldly to answer them, not to the one who tried to suppress them. I hope the same proves true in the United States next week.

How Obama Makes Decisions

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While searching for an old post, I ran into a post in which I’d excerpted some passages from an article on Obama’s approach to decision-making.

Ron Suskind’s book Confidence Men portrays Barack Obama as being confounded by his duties as president. Some of the scenes depicted by Suskind would be comical if they were not so tragic for America.

For example, when Obama’s experts assembled to discuss the scope and intricacies of the stimulus bill, Barack Obama was out of his depth. He was “surprisingly aloof in the conversation” and seemed “disconnected and less in control.” His contributions were rare and consisted of blurting out such gems of wisdom as “There needs to be more inspiration here!” and “What about more smart grids” and — one more that Newt Gingrich would appreciate — “we need more moon shot” (pages 154-5).

Suskind writes:

Members of the team were perplexed…for the first time in the transition, people started to wonder just how prepared the man at the helm was. He repeated a similar sorry performance when he had a conference call with Speaker Pelosi and her staff to discuss the details of the planned stimulus bill. He shouted into the speakerphone that “this stimulus needs more inspiration! Pelosi and her staff visibly rolled their eyes.”

Presidential exhortations more befitting a summer camp counselor will evoke such reactions.

In the post, I cited a study of Woodrow Wilson written by Sigmund Freud and William Bullitt:

Throughout his life he took intense interest only in subjects which could somehow be connected with speech…He took no interest in mathematics, science, art or musicexcept in singing himself, a form of speaking. His method of thinking about a subject seems to have been to imagine himself making a speech about it…He seems to have thought about political or economic problems only when he was preparing to make a speech about them either on paper or from the rostrum. His memory was undoubtedly of the vaso-motor type. The use of his vocal chords was to him inseparable from thinking.

To Obama, it’s all about the speeches, all about the hype. Despite his faux reputation as an intellectual, the man has remarkably little interest in contemplation, analysis, or problem-solving.

Thinking about Obama’s overall presidency, and especially about his performance or lack of same on the Benghazi debacle, I’m reminded of what C S Lewis wrote about his protagonist (a sociologist) in his novel That Hideous Strength:

His education had been neither scientific nor classical—merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw…

Original post with CB discussion thread, here.

RuiNation

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So a few days to go until Election Day; I guess we can call this the final heat. Texas is pretty much a red state stronghold, although there are pockets of blue adherents throughout. Yes, even in my neighborhood, there are a handful of defiant Obama-Biden yard signs visible, although outnumbered at least three to one by Romney-Ryan signs. It amounts to about three or four dozen, all told; I think that most of my neighbors prefer keeping their political preferences this time around strictly to themselves.

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