Month: January 2008

Obama’s Achilles Heel?

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Coming up as he did in Chicago’s notoriously, ah, shall we say, “creative” political machine, one does have to wonder if the Rezko association is the only possible source of scandal lurking in Obama’s past or present.

I get the distinct impression that the media and even his Democratic opponents haven’t looked as closely into the potential for scandal as they might have for another candidate. Do any Chicagoboyz with more immediate experience with Chicago politics have any more insight into this?

P.J. O’Rourke on the Daily Show

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Viacom put the entire archive of Daily Show with Jon Stewart online last October. I haven’t seen many bloggers mention this, and no conservative blogger, so at least part of our readers may not heard about this yet. The Daily Show may be a bit too liberal for the taste of most Chicago Boyz contributors and readers, but there is a lot of good stuff there.

For example, there is this clip of P.J. O’Rourke presenting his new book, On the Wealth of Nations. O’Rourke has done something many eminent economists never managed or got around to, he worked his way through Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, or ‘The Wealth of Nations’, as it is more commonly called. And O’Rourke actually managed to get such a good grasp on this difficult subject matter that he was able to write a book of his own that makes it accessible to the general public.

The book is highly recommend, an excerpt from the first chapter can be found here.

(The first link to the Daily Show leads to the index page there, but it directly leads to the clip with P.J. O’Rourke, too, at least when I click on it).

Urban Archaeology: The Detroit Public Schools Book Depository

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A beautiful and interesting photo set with an explanatory blog post.

A lot of the commenters on the photos infer sad or even tragic meanings from them. I’m not so negative. Sometimes a ruin is just a ruin, and at least the warehouse can be partially recycled as an art object before it is ultimately razed and replaced by something else. It isn’t the Parthenon or even Aerojet, merely a decrepit warehouse owned by an inept municipal bureaucracy. It fits into the bigger story of Detroit’s many abandoned buildings, which is a story that interests the person who made the photos, but that is not a story that can be understood merely by looking at photos. But they certainly are nice photos.

(via John Brownlow)

Quote of the Day

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So conservatives “might” have had a point about the Clintons’ character? The Clintons “seem” to have a feeling of entitlement to power? I should say so. What conservatives saw in the Clintons wasn’t based on any remarkable and hard-to-discern insights. After all, the Clintons’ character problems were not being hidden from public view; they were, in fact, out there for all to see, often flashing in bright neon lights. Yet people like Chait were, for political and ideological reasons, blinded to the ruthlessness and corruption of the Clinton Machine. Now that the Clintons are using their tactics on an inspiring liberal figure like Barack Obama, the scales are suddenly falling from their eyes. We are now seeing the zeal of the recent converts in action.
 
Better late than never, I suppose.

–Peter Wehner

Comment:

I think it’s great that many Democrats are coming to see the Clintons as Clinton opponents do. However, if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, the people who now complain about the Clintons’ tactics will almost certainly rally behind her against the Republican candidate. Why wouldn’t they? Republicans will rally behind John McCain if he is nominated, even though many Republicans despise him.