Seems [person 1] does not take sides. [Person 2] makes discussions seem a matter of taking sides.
(From a Usenet discussion.)
Quotations
Quotes of the Day
We have all read it, but it really needs to be rolled around in the mouth a few times, to appreciate it, and what it tells us about our self-anointed political messiah:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them… And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Did the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy somehow brainwash our messiah-in-waiting and place these words on his lips? Be sure to alienate as many voters as possible all within the span of one sentence, Senator.
Mark Steyn‘s pithy summing-up:
…this guy seems weirdly disconnected from everything except neo-segregationist Afrocentric grievance politics and upscale white liberal condescension. Not much of a coalition.
The problem with Sen. Obama is he is raising so much damn money he is probably going to win.
UPDATE: No one has commented on this last link, about the fundraising. Patrick Ruffini has been following this issue, and he has me worried.
Quote of the Day
When it comes to things like NAFTA, there seem to be only two possibilities. Either Obama’s anti-NAFTA talk is a ruse to fool the rubes, or his coterie of distinguished economic experts is a ruse to fool a different batch of rubes.
(I usually don’t quote Reynolds, because I assume that almost everyone who reads this blog reads Instapundit, but this line was too good not to quote.)
UPDATE (2/29/2008): One of the reasons this quote hit home for me is that I watched Larry Kudlow interview Austan Goolsbee, one of Obama’s “distinguished economic experts,” a couple of times. On both occasions Goolsbee came across as a partisan hack, trying to square the circle of Obama’s socialist and populist economic policies by pointing out marginal pro-business positions Obama had taken — e.g., Obama favored accelerated depreciation or whatever. But on the big issue of marginal income-tax rates Obama favors raising tax rates by, at first, repealing Bush’s tax cuts. He also favors raising or eliminating the income cap on the Social Security payroll tax. Why would a competent economist such as Goolsbee favor such anti-growth policies? The obvious answer is that Goolsbee is a partisan. He may also be interested in a government position if Obama wins. Caveat voter in any case.
Quote of the Day
One can agree or disagree with his peripheral positions, but political orthodoxy is political death. If those who are in a hissy fit about Sen. McCain would rather have Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, they will get Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton — how delightful to go to jail for building your house on land once visited by an exotic moth — and they will wake up to a great regret, as if in their drunkenness they had taken Shrek to bed.
But, guess what? Even if, as the country veers left, living conservatives gnash their teeth and dead ones spin in their graves, a small class of conservatives will benefit. And who might they be? They might be those whose influence and coffers swell on discontent, and who find attacking a president easier and more sensational than the dreary business of defending one. They rose during the Clinton years. Perhaps they are nostalgic. It isn’t worth it, however, for the rest of us.
(via Jim Miller)
Quote of the Day
Once the US squandered its post-Sept. 11 leverage with Pakistan it was left with only bad options for coping with the nuclear-armed jihadist incubating country. And these too, it has ignored in favor of the chimera of democracy and elections.
After Sept. 11, President George W. Bush declared war on the forces of global terror and their state sponsors. But as the years have passed since then, he has done more to lose the war than he has to win it simply by ignoring it.
Bhutto’s murder is not a sign that elections and democracy frighten al-Qaida and therefore must be pursued. It is a sign that the Taliban and al-Qaida – together with their supporters in the Pakistani military and intelligence services and Pakistani society as a whole – don’t like people who are supported by the US. Her assassination was yet another act of war by the enemies of the West against the West.
If democracy and freedom are the US’s ultimate aims in this war, the only way to achieve them is to first fight and win the war. Bhutto – like her Palestinian, Egyptian and Lebanese counterparts – was a sideshow.