Quotations

Obama: He’s Anything You Want Him to Be

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Two paragraphs stood out in the Spengler article linked to by Zenpundit below:

I sat in on a session with three leaders of Veterans for Obama, a group of retired young officers who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan, courtesy of the New Republic’s writer on the scene, David Samuels. With passion and enthusiasm, these young people spoke of their hopes for nation-building in Iraq. The George W Bush administration should have put twice the resources into the beleaguered country, they harangued me – not just soldiers, but agronomists, traffic cops, lawyers, judges, and physicians. The Department of Agriculture should have mobilized, along with the Department of Justice.  

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Maybe They Should Go To Church Once For the Experience

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An amusing little bit of religious ignorance from Huffington Post:

“Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God,” she exhorted the congregants. “That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.”

In other words: “Pray that we’re doing the right thing.” Wow, I can really see how that is  controversial. Clearly, Palin comes from a nest of religious fanatics.  

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Talkers and Doers

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“I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.” [NRO Campaign Spot]

I have often thought that political culture rather neatly divides between those who talk about doing things and those who actually have to get things done.

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Noonan On Palin

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Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing — who is really one of them and who is not — and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.[WSJ Online]

Palin does remind me very strongly of the women I grew up with in Texas. All them could literally ride and shoot. I have one cousin I never see because she spends every Thanksgiving and Christmas hunting. The idea that such women look weak in the eyes of “feminists” says a great deal about the defects of contemporary  “feminist” thinking.

Quote of the Day

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Above all – as in his appraisal of Obama and Hillary – Nader doesn’t talk like a spinmeister for his political team. With the post-2000 polarisation of the country and Bush Derangement Syndrome, more and more people – ordinary people, not paid campaign politicos – now conduct ordinary conversations about politics as though they were lawyers pushily trying to spin a jury for their political side. Unlike such lay people (especially Democrats, I think) who now seem to do this as a matter of course, Nader really is more or less a professional politician. But he talks like a human being, and seems to say what he really thinks. More power to him.

–Maimon Schwarzschild