A new petition on Change.org calls on the [Nobel] committee to present the prize to Hillary for her work around the world for President Obama and Bill Clinton for his post-presidential international involvement.
“President and Mrs. Clinton have had a lasting impact upon promoting peace in this world. Both have reached out to the poor and economically deprived nations of this world and emphasized the need for tolerance for women’s and minority rights,” reads the new petition.
Well, shag it. Giver her the Nobel for her non-accomplishments as Secretary of State, and a Best Actress Oscar for her performance at the hearings.
This blog, noting that that Nobel backward spells LeBon, hereby presents some Duran Duran to Hillary.
Because, like a 1980s British hair band, “What difference at this point does it make!?”
“In an age of spin, Clinton offers feeling and authenticity. Her message is consistent–unshakeable, in fact, no matter the evidence–but she commands daily attention by her on-the-spot, invective-rich variations on the theme. Her lunatic counterfactual art is more appealing than the banal awfulness of the Reliable Sources. See is a Method Actress in a production that will close in a couple of days. She stands superior to truth.”
I was gonna fix the security, but Ambassador died
I was gonna tell the American people, Ambassador died
I was gonna have Ms. Rice come clean, but talking points fried!
Ambassador died, Ambassador died, Ambassador died.
[To Congress] LaDaDaDaDaDa
I was gonna spring Nakoula from the can, cuz Ambassador died
I was gonna honor the other dead man, cuz Ambassador died
I was gonna ‘splain about the two ex-SEALs, and I know why!
Ambassador died, Ambassador died, Ambassador died.
{To Congress} LaDaDaDaDaDa
I was gonna ask me the Turkish envoy, cuz Ambassador died
I was gonna find me a Syrian gun-toy, cuz Ambassador died
I was gonna plumb me a Taliban death-ploy, and I know why!
But, of course, the ripped-from-context quote is “What difference, at this point, does it make?” It’s already being seized on by National Review and Fox News and The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard and Glenn Beck’s Blaze and Michelle Malkin’s Twitchy and the Free Beacon and, of course, Breitbart. There’s already a popular hashtag, #whatdifferencedoesitmake. . . .
Will the wingers be able to turn this decontextualized soundbite into a deceptive sign of Secretary Clinton’s indifference?
This is an Andrew Breitbart/James O’Keefe tactic, but its use is not limited to O’Keefe and the carriers of the Breitbart torch — this is a mainstream GOP tactic.
Quoting what a Democrat says is a tactic! An Andrew Breitbart/James O’Keefe tactic! A mainstream GOP tactic!
The point seems to be: Anything that is bad for Democrats is wrong. These unfair “tactics” include (a) direct quotes, (b) facts and (c) math.
SEN. JOHNSON: Yeah. The point I’m making is a very simple phone call to these individuals I think would have ascertained immediately that there was no protest prior to this. I mean, this attack started at 9:40 p.m., Benghazi time, and it was an assault . . . Why wasn’t that known? And again, I appreciate the fact of the transparency of this — of this hearing, but why weren’t we transparent at that point in time?
SEC. CLINTON: Well, first of all, Senator, I would say that once the assault happened and once we got our people rescued and out, our most immediate concern was, number one, taking care of their injuries . .. getting them into Frankfurt, Ramstein . . . to get taken care of, the FBI going over immediately to start talking to them — we did not think it was appropriate for us to talk to them before the FBI conducted their interviews, so — and we did not — I think this is accurate, sir — I certainly did not know of any reports that contradicted the IC talking points at the time that Ambassador Rice went on the TV shows.
And, you know, I just want to say that, you know, people have accused Ambassador Rice and the administration of, you know, misleading Americans. I can say, trying to be in the middle of this and understanding what was going on, nothing could be further from the truth. Was information developing? Was the situation fluid? Would we reach conclusions later that weren’t reached initially? And I appreciate the –
SEN. JOHNSON: But Madam Secretary, do you disagree with me that a simple phone call to those evacuees to determine what happened wouldn’t have — wouldn’t have ascertained immediately that there was no protest?
I mean, that was — that was a piece of information that could have been easily, easily obtained –
SEC. CLINTON: Well, but Senator, again –
SEN. JOHNSON: — within hours, if not days.
SEC. CLINTON: Senator, I — you know, when you’re in these positions, the last thing you want to do is interfere with any other process going on. . . . Now, we have no doubt they were terrorists, they were militants, they attacked us, they killed our people, but what was going on and why they were doing what they were doing is still — is still unknown.
SEN. JOHNSON: No, no, no, no, I’m — I — again, we were misled that there were supposedly protests and then something sprang out of that, an assault sprang out of that. And that was easily ascertained that that was not the fact –
SEC. CLINTON: But could — but, you know –
SEN. JOHNSON: — and the American people could have known that within days, and they didn’t know that.
SEC. CLINTON: And — with all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans.
SEN. JOHNSON: I understand.
SEC. CLINTON: Was it because of a protest, or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.
Well, gosh, I can think of a few reasons why it matters. First, it mattered enough for the Obama administration to send Susan Rice to five different Sunday talk shows to insist that the sacking was a spontaneous demonstration of anger over a months-old YouTube video, while saying that there was “no evidence” that it was a terrorist attack. On one of those appearances, the president of Libya told US audiences the exact opposite — that it was the work of terrorists and that they had a pretty good idea of who they were. If it didn’t matter, what was Susan Rice doing when she tried pushing that meme, which the White House had to abandon within days as leaks within State and CIA made plain that there was no demonstration?
It also matters because Barack Obama at the time had been bragging about crippling al-Qaeda while on the campaign trail. That false narrative made it seem as though State and our intel community couldn’t have possibly known that the sacking would have occurred, and got blindsided by a grassroots reaction to the video. Instead, it turned out to be a planned terrorist action about which the US embassy in Libya had warned State for months, repeatedly requesting more security.
The Democrats did not respond to getting their teeth kicked in by George Bush in 2004 by embracing civility, by congratulating the President on his re-election. They doubled down on outrage. They fought the President on his second-term agenda tooth-and-nail.
That worked out rather well for them, all things considered.
This is exactly right. You must know your antagonist. You must study his successes, and you must also study your own failures.
One of the great blunders of the Republican Party is that as soon as the 2004 election was over, they began looking ahead to 2008 when they were sure that they would be running against Hillary Clinton. How many anti-Hillary books were published in 2005-2007? So many Republicans bought into the Hillary-as-Antichrist message that in March 2008, when Rush Limbaugh launched “Operation Chaos” — aiming to turn the Democrat nomination fight into an absolute deadlock — his phone lines lit up with dimwit callers who had let themselves be convinced that Barack Obama was actually the lesser of two evils.
Dumb! Dumb! Dumb!
I remember it well: I saw exactly what Rush was doing. It was pure genius, and if enough Republican voters had listened to him — especially in Indiana and North Carolina — “Operation Chaos” may have resulted in such a vicious bloodletting within the Democrat Party that they never would have recovered from it. For want of a nail . . .
Well, there’s no point recounting the history of everything that went wrong the past five years. But it exposed a fundamental problem of the conservative blogosphere: It developed during the Bush years, amid the Global War on Terror, and its accustomed task was to defend the president and the war effort against the Left. As far as fighting elections, conservative bloggers had 2004 as their basic model — the patriotic Republican incumbent vs. the treacherous Democrat challenger — and this proved a poor template for future conflicts.
In general, by 2009, too many Republicans didn’t have any useful memory of how to be the Opposition Party. The experiences of 1964 and 1974 were remembered only by a graying generation of Elder Statesmen types who, unfortunately, were neither tech-savvy nor culturally attuned to the 21st century. The long 12-year Reagan-Bush ascendancy had been followed by a brief two-year loss of power after the 1992 election, but then the latent vigor of the Party Reagan Built came bouncing back with the 1994 “Republican Revolution.” Dole predictably lost in 1996, and the Lewinsky-inspired impeachment drama of 1998 threw the GOP off its game, but by 2003, they were back on top, controlling the White House and both houses of Congress.
Accustomed to success, to acting in defense of power, Republicans (and by extension, many conservative spokemen, including bloggers) were unaccustomed to the task that faced them after Democrats won Congress in 2006 and captured the White House in 2008.
Ah, but Rush Limbaugh knew what he was doing! Rush had risen to talk-radio superstar status during the low ebb of Republican fortunes in the wake of Bill Clinton’s 1992 defeat of George H. W. Bush. In fact, it is now often forgotten that Limbaugh supported Pat Buchanan’s challenge to Bush in the 1992 primaries. Limbaugh knew that Bush was doomed to defeat in 1992, and that the key was to give conservatives a cause worth fighting for. After Bush lost, Limbaugh’s show became the focal point for the Republican opposition that triumphed in 1994.
It should be pointed out, by the way, that Limbaugh is old enough to remember the true Wilderness Years of the GOP, the post-Watergate era of 1974-78, when such eminent figures as William Rusher, publisher of National Review, thought the Republican Party was done for and were ready for Ronald Reagan to lead a third-party movement.
Too many have forgotten that history — if they ever bothered to learn it in the first place — and no one under 40 has any real direct memory of it, so that there is a sort of “Generation Gap” within the conservative movement. If you don’t remember where you were when Saigon fell (I was a sophomore at Lithia Springs High School) or the Berlin Wall came down (I was a 30-year-old sports editor for the Calhoun [Ga.] Times), it’s impossible for you to understand the Cold War mentality, the petri dish within which the post-WWII conservative movement was incubated.
Conservatism was originally and fundamentally about foreign policy: Are we going to stand up to these godless Commies, or not?
Trying to get Americans to listen to conservative ideas on domestic policy has always been much more difficult, and we are really now back to an era that precedes my own birth, which I know only from history books and from tales of old-timers like M. Stanton Evans. We’re back to the Truman era, when the godless Commies who threatened America were clandestine subversives who called themselves “liberals.”
Really, it’s in some ways much worse now. Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss were traitorous stooges of Moscow, but today’s “liberals” pursue a Bolshevik agenda of strictly domestic origin. The disciples of Howard Zinn, Saul Alinksy, Bill Ayers and Frank Marshall Davis are most certainly Marxists, and we should not be afraid to call them what they are. Hell, “neo-Marxism” is the fashionable style for young hipsters.
Are we going to stand up to these godless Commies, or not?
UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein reacts to Andrew J. Patrick, describing Obama’s agenda as “a malicious attack on our individual sovereignty and an intentional plan to undermine our constitutional republic and replace it with an beneficent police state peopled by industrious worker bees, helpfully directed and nudged toward happiness by a permanent ruling elite.” Basically, Sweden, with better weather and uglier people.
Last night, I saw a post at an anti-Palin blog that had more than 200 vitriolic comments about the woman they called “the Creature from Lake Lucille.” More than four years after Sarah Palin was the Republican vice-presidential candidate, she still inspires frothing rage from the Left.
Congratulations Mr. President on your second inaugural.
Saying that makes some of you really enraged. I said the same on twitter shortly after his official swearing in. Several of the replies were embarrassing and atrocious. Some accused the man elected by a majority of Americans of treason. Some accused him of willfully destroying the nation.
I believe the President’s policies are destructive and will harm our economy, our nation, and our sense of national self long term. I believe his policies have the effect of turning us into subjects of the government, not citizens in charge of it. Because of his expansion of the social safety net funded through class warfare, Mr. Obama’s policies will cause too many Americans’ fortunes to rise and fall with those of the government, unable to chart a course for themselves apart from government.
But I do not think the President means to do this maliciously. I do not think he is treasonous. I do not hate him. I am not outraged by it.
As soon as I saw that, my attention focused on one sentence: “Some accused him of willfully destroying the nation.”
Erick Erickson didn’t title his post “David Limbaugh Is Wrong,” or “Don’t Listen to That Idiot David Limbaugh.” He merely dismissed as “embarrassing and atrocious” anyone who agrees with Limbaugh’s argument that Obama’s “War on the Republic” is deliberate.
As to how one should deal with Monday decorously, I took a vow of silence: I simply wouldn’t say a damned thing about Re-Coronation Day.
Didn’t watch it on TV. Didn’t blog about it until it was over. The last time I checked, I still had the right to remain silent. “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,” and what conservative could possibly say anything nice about America’s public humiliation?
That’s what we’re dealing with here: A stain on our national honor, the negation and antithesis of everything that makes our country great.
Americans should be outraged by it, and we should not be dismissing their expressions of outrage as “embarrassing and atrocious.”
Ordinary Americans don’t always express themselves in such eloquent and measured phrases as meet with the approval of the elite, but why is it that no one on the Left ever bothers to chastise the commenters frothing with rage at Sarah Palin, whereas Erick Erickson feels the need to scold Republicans who don’t like Barack Obama? Why is Erickson embarrassed to be associated with these Republicans, when no one on the Left ever bothers to notice the non-stop messages of hate emitted by the immoral monsters who constitute the Democrat Party’s grassroots? My answer:
The problem, really, is that Republicans just don’t hate Democrats the way Democrats hate Republicans.
Most Republicans are born and raised Republicans, and are spiritually attuned to the sentiments of bourgeois respectability that are core values to the decent, honest people the GOP represents. By contrast, Democrats owe their power to the vilest dregs of humanity — corrupt union goons, Marxist academics, criminals, drug addicts, sexual perverts and race hustlers — who have no respect for the values of decent, honest people.
We do not have to lower ourselves to their level. We merely have to tell the truth about who the Democrats are. People who voted for Obama (or any other Democrat) should be ashamed of themselves.
The GOP’s ridiculous defensive flinch reflex — “Oh, no! Somebody said rude things about Democrats!” — is symptomatic of a larger problem: Republicans let liberals dictate the terms of debate.
If liberals say the problem is that Republicans lack “civility,” then the GOP is beset by hall-monitor types telling us to watch our language. If liberals say the problem is Republicans need to appeal to Latinos, we’ll hear a lot of sermonettes from the open-borders crowd. If liberals say Republicans are losing because of gay-rights issues, we’ll be told to drop our pants and bend over to demonstrate our support for sodomy.
At what point will Republicans figure out they’re being scammed? Liberals lie constantly, routinely and habitually, but never do they lie so predictably as when they’re giving advice to Republicans.
Mitt Romney lost the presidential election. His defeat cannot be blamed on “outrage pimps” (Erickson doesn’t name names, so we don’t know if he meant that term to apply to David Limbaugh or Mark Levin or Michelle Malkin). Nor can the GOP’s problems be excused by scolding people who say rude things about Obama on Twitter.
Katie wasn’t offering any “congratulations, Mr. President” sentiments there, so maybe she’s one of those “humorless, angry opponents,” eh?
Here’s the point: All Sarah Palin had to do is put up an MLK Day post on Facebook, and the haters swarmed all over her without anyone in the Democrat Party noticing or complaining. Democrats don’t get any “civility” lectures from their liberal spokesmen. They just win elections.
Democrats hate Republicans with the heat of ten thousand suns. When are Republicans going to give themselves permission to hate back?
“You know, I feel like I should pinch myself right now, Wolf. I can’t believe I have this vantage point of history in the making . . . It’s good to be the President. It’s almost like being a rock star on every street corner of Washington on this day.”
Our nation is being destroyed, and the press corps is reduced to the role of partisan pom-pom girls for The Great Destroyer. Meanwhile, the alleged leaders of the opposition have no clue of how to rescue themselves from their current condition of helpless impotence. The search for any reason to smile amid this catastrophe — which I blame entirely on the gross ineptitude of the overpaid dimwit fratboys running the Republican Party — turns up precious few nuggets of encouragement:
The bimbo was a guest Monday on Anderson Cooper’s show on the Third-Place Cable News Network With Lower Ratings Than MSNBC (The One That People Only Watch When They’re Stuck in Airports). Her “brand” is even more irrelevant than her failed father, assuming that such complete irrelevance is even possible.
