Mothers’ Day

May 10, 2013 By in Culture Tags: , , , Leave a comment
A pleasant spring day stroll through Wichita’s picturesque Riverside Park took us past the spaceship, and once again we were reminded of Mom.
It’s not an actual spaceship, just an antique piece of playground equipment that vaguely resembles a sci-fi B-movie version of one, but it’s real enough that a childhood imagination would take flight in it whenever Mom hauled the kids to the park on a summer afternoon. There were no children scampering up the series of ladders to the cockpit during our recent visit, a consequence of some do-gooder group’s noisy insistence that the entrance be bolted shut lest some unattended urchin injure himself on the steel artifice, and the spaceship seemed lonesome without them. We also felt badly for the children, even though they seemed happy enough playing on some up-to-date plastic-and-wood thingamajigs that looked every bit as dangerous as the spaceship, and not just because they were being denied our fondly-remembered exhilaration on an imaginary tip to the moon. Sadder yet was the realization of a societal assumption that these children didn’t have an eagle-eyed mother hovering nearby to keep them from harm.
No noisy do-gooder groups were needed to get us through childhood. Although we suffered from the usual boyish lack of risk-assessment abilities, ever-vigilant Mom had an uncanny knack for plucking us out of danger’s way at the last possible moment. It could be quite annoying, of course, but in retrospect we can see that she also allowed us a glorious degree of freedom that must have been quite nerve-wracking for the poor woman. Mom would become frighteningly ferocious when her children were threatened, a marked contrast to the ladylike demeanor she exhibited in most other circumstances, and she was no less protective when confronted with well-meaning busybodies who would have placed limits on our sense of possibilities.
Pardon us if a sentimental Mothers’ Day tribute turns into yet another political rant, but there are all manner of collectivist noisy do-gooder nonsense that would be entirely unneeded if everyone had a mother like ours. Countless children could have been spared the wasted time of Head Start programs if they’d had such a mother as ours, who sent who all her children off to Kindergarten knowing the alphabet, being able to count well past 10, having memorized the family phone number, and possessing a vocabulary that already included the word “precocious.” The one-size-fits-all nutritional standards that have lately been imposed on the schools would be unnecessary, as Mom provided healthy meals that fit each of her differently-sized children with a precision no remote bureaucracy could hope to duplicate. Mom saw to it that her children were clothed, cleaned, sheltered, and cared for, and any intrusive social worker dumb enough to think he could do any better would have been in for a hell of a time.
Spend all the trillions you can tax, print, or borrow, but you’ll never fund a program that is an adequate substitute for Mom. Fashionable opinion is fond of an old African adage that “It takes a village to raise a child,” and Hillary Clinton even used it for a book title, but it is the sort of balderdash that has kept Africa poor and backward. In truth it takes a mother to a raise a child, and preferably a good one such as ours. Fathers are important, too, and given current policies their importance might require more prominence, but we’ll return to that theme in June. This weekend should be devoted to wishing a most happy Mothers’ Day to Mom, and to all the other mothers who have done the job well.

– Bud Norman

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Insufficient Outrage

May 9, 2013 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
More information about the Benghazi terrorism attack was revealed to a House investigative committee on Wednesday, and like everything that was already known about the deadly fiasco it was damning to the Obama administration. Many questions remain unanswered, but at this point the president and his supporters can only wonder how severe the political damage will be.
It should be very severe. After bombing an odious but largely defanged dictator out of power in Libya, and without any of the congressional or United Nations approval that liberals usually demand, the administration sent American diplomatic personnel into the ensuing chaos without the security arrangements that longstanding State Department rules require. Numerous impassioned requests by the highest ranking of those personnel for more security were repeatedly denied, on cables carrying the signature of the Secretary of State, even as the ominous date of Sept. 11 approached. When a terrorist group attacked the consulate in Benghazi on that date and murdered the ambassador and three other brave Americans, normal response procedures were ignored, the president went to bed in order to be fresh for a fund-raiser in Las Vegas, and military units that might have been able to save those under attack were told stand down. Afterwards the president and other members of his administration repeatedly lied to the public that the deaths occurred during a spontaneous demonstration rather than an al-Qaeda terror attack, in service of a broader lie that al-Qaeda had been vanquished. The lie made a scapegoat out of an American who had exercised his constitutional rights by making a little-seen video about Islam, and the filmmaker was soon imprisoned on a parole violation charge that would have surely been overlooked if not for the administration’s dishonest vilification of his work. Investigations into such misfeasance and malfeasance were subsequently thwarted by administrative stonewalling and outright bullying of people with embarrassing information to divulge, and we’re sure we have left out some other disgraceful aspect of the scandal.
In our time a president was forced to resign in disgrace and another was impeached for matters that were trivial by comparison, yet it now seems unlikely that Obama will suffer no such consequences. House Democrats made a half-hearted effort on Wednesday to blame the whole matter of Republican-inspired budget cuts, even though the figures and an internal State Department investigation have refuted such nonsense, but the White House has thus far been content to act as if the matter were a minor mishap of no interest to anyone but their most embittered enemies. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously dismissed a question about her failure to investigate the incident by indignantly asking “What difference, at this point, does it make?” White House press secretary Jay Carney recently characterized the four deaths in Benghazi as something that “happened a long time ago.” Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland added a morbid twist to this insouciant line of defense by musing during Wednesday’s hearings that “Death is part of life.”
Such an audacious response might just work, given the lack of interest among much of the media. Despite the bombshell revelations from Wednesday’s hearings, the big stories of the day on the hourly radio updates were a murder conviction in Arizona and the ongoing investigation of three kidnappings in Ohio. Influential media such as The New York Times and The Washington Post have lately been paying a grudging amount of attention, but without the undisguised outrage that marked their coverage of the minor brouhahas that have afflicted past administrations. More openly partisan outlets have happily echoed the administration’s claim that any attempts to draw attention to the ineptitude and dishonesty are mere political point-scoring. It worked well enough to get the administration through the last election, although the facts known even then were infuriating to anyone paying attention, and it is depressingly possible that it will work well enough to get Hillary Clinton past the next election.
A few bold Republicans in the House seem determined to keep the story in the news, though, and the conservative media will do their best to help. These efforts might not succeed in bringing down the administration, but the president’s critics can take some solace in knowing that there is nothing about the Benghazi story that can help the president.

– Bud Norman

The Least Bad Choice

May 8, 2013 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment
Sometimes life offers only bad choices. Such was the case in Tuesday’s special election for South Carolina’s first congressional district, where the ballot offered voters a choice of Elizabeth Colbert Busch or Mark Sanford.
The district has been reliably Republican for decades, and went for Romney by 18 points in the past presidential election, but Democrats around the country were nonetheless hopeful about their chances. Such optimism was based in part on the assumed appeal of Democratic nominee Busch, a university administrator and political neophyte with a semi-famous brother, but mostly on a widespread distaste for Republican nominee Sanford, a former governor who resigned in disgrace following the disclosure of an extra-marital affair.
Other politicians have recovered from similar shenanigans, but they were Democrats and they weren’t running in a southern Republican district. Sanford’s scandal had also included official lies about his whereabouts during one liaison with his Argentine mistress, campaign money spent on a cover-up, a seeming lack of contrition, and a widely popular wife. Although Sanford used all the right religious language about repentance and redemption, he has continued the relationship with the other woman and during the campaign he was accused by his still-angry ex-wife of violating a court order by making an unapproved visit to her home. Democrats had reason to believe that Sanford could be beaten for the first time in his career.
Their faith in Busch, on the other hand, was probably misplaced all along. Her complete lack of political experience was expected to provide a refreshing contrast to the tainted career politician, but it resulted in an ineffective strategy of dodging interviews with the press, refusing to take clear stands on such important issues as the repeal of Obamacare, and amateurish stump campaigning. Being the brother of sneering cable television comic Stephen Colbert was supposed to provide a South Carolina sort of glamour and bring in national fund-raising, but it also seems to have raised suspicions that her vaguely-stated politics were secretly as sneeringly left-wing as her more famous sibling’s. Her own arrest record from her own failed marriage many years ago was politely ignored by much of the state’s media, but word seems to have gotten out enough to do some damage.
As it turned out, Sanford won again and it wasn’t very close. The most likely explanation is that voters figured they had two bad choices so they might as well go with the one who was most loudly promising to restrain federal spending. With the only other options being a Green Party candidate who was presumably to the left of Busch or not voting at all, it seems that the voters of South Carolina’s first congressional district did the best with what they had.

– Bud Norman

Pomp, Circumstance, and Tyranny

May 7, 2013 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment
The last time we were asked to address a commencement ceremony was way back in ’77, when our high school graduating class bestowed the honor. All we can remember of the speech are the jokes, the most obvious of which went over well enough, but we’re quite sure that even at such a tender age we weren’t so very stupid as to tell people not to fear tyranny.
That was the advice President Barack Obama offered to the graduates of Ohio State University on Sunday. After warming up the crowd with a few jokes of his own, mostly about football and other topics of local interest, Obama eased into his theme of citizenship. Much of it was typical commencement address fare, full of highfalutin and inoffensively vague statements about participating and persevering and so forth, and much of it was a typical Obama stump speech, extolling the many wonders of big government and such rhetorical flourishes as the Founders leaving us “the tools to do big things and important things together that we could not possibly do alone.” What caught our attention, however, was the typical swipe at the president’s critics.
“Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works,” Obama said. “They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.”
The president did not name these critics, although his audience was surely curious to know. Despite a steady diet of talk radio, conservative news outlets, and the company of fellow right-wingers, we can’t think of anyone who argues that democracy should be replaced and rule entrusted to some enlightened elite. We used to hear such talk often from our liberal friends, but that was back when a Republican was in the White House and we suspect those are not the people Obama was talking about.
There are plenty of people who argue that the government is becoming increasingly separated from the people, that it is sometimes sinister and at the root of many problems, and they make a strong case for gumming up the works, but we have never heard them say that the people can’t be trusted. We believe that certain individual rights should be constitutionally protected from the proper will, so perhaps the president meant us, but the Founders also gave us that tool and we expect that even Obama will be eager to use it when the topics of homosexual rights and abortion come back around.
If tyranny isn’t lurking around the corner, it is only because this country has traditionally been on guard against it. Immutable human nature compels those in power in to seek more power, and only the resistance of a stubbornly independent people can’t prevent them from doing so. Obama has not proved an exception to this rule of history, and it is hoped that even a stadium full of college-educated twenty-somethings will be wary.

– Bud Norman

Red Lines in the Water

May 6, 2013 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Can’t anybody here play this game? An exasperated Casey Stengel famously asked that question of his hapless ’62 Mets as they limped to a 40-120 record, but it could just as easily be asked of America’s foreign policy team.
With Syria’s mass-murdering regime under attack from various Islamist rebel groups as well as Israeli air strikes aimed at the weapons Iran is shipping through that country to Hezbollah, and with Syria making veiled threats of escalation and Iran urging its neighbors to join in the fray, now is a good time to review the administration’s evolving relationship with these countries. It all began with proper respect for Syria and Iran, of course. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went so far as to laud Syrian dictator Bashar Assad as a “reformer,” and President Barack Obama was so eager for that bound-to-be-constructive dialogue with Iran that he politely ignored a popular uprising that might have succeeded in toppling the troublesome theocracy with a bit of American encouragement. After years of being spurned the administration at last abandoned the courtship with both countries, and adopted a tougher tone in occasional statements which culminated in Obama’s now-infamous “red line” declaration.
“For the Syrian government to utilize chemical weapons against its people crosses a line that will change my calculus and how the United States approaches these issues,” Obama announced at a news conference, later adding with his best poker face that “I’ve meant what I said.”
Syrian translators probably had some difficulty figuring out what calculus had to do with it, but they had no trouble conveying to Assad the message that Obama had promised to take some sort of action or another if chemical weapons were used against the rebels. With evidence emerging that Assad went ahead and did it anyway, apparently figuring that Obama did not mean what he said, administration officials are now busy explaining why no action is going to be taken. They’re demanding an exceedingly high standard of proof that chemical weapons have been used, and it seems that nothing less than a full confession will suffice, but they’re also anonymously leaking to the press that the president’s remark was “unscripted” and accidentally left out the “nuance” that president was referring to chemical weapons attack that caused mass fatalities. Another aide offers a more fran assessment of administration attitudes, telling the New York Times “How can we attack another country unless it’s in self-defense and with no Security Council resolution. If he drops sarin on his own people, what’s that got to do with us?” Perhaps such nuances will have a deterrent effect on the likes of Assad, and be similarly frightening to any adversaries that might be tempted to cross declared lines on Taiwan, the Korean peninsula, the U.S. border and elsewhere, but it seems unlikely.
Even without a telepromptered script Obama must have known, as he promised some sort of action or another, that were no good options left in Syria. All of the rebel groups that remain in the fight are Islamist, and although the Obama administration has been happy to assist the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood in its takeover of formerly friendly Egypt it does not seem to be eager to replicate that success in still-hostile Syria. Allowing Assad to gas his way to victory is not a good option, either, but it is hard to imagine Obama rousing his himself to another Middle Eastern war, much less the nation or NATO, even with an unlikely Security Council resolution.
The Israelis might handle it, but reports indicate that they aren’t even telling the United States what they’re going to do until they’re doing it. While Syria and Iran were being treated with open-handed appeals for dialogue the Israelies were receiving finger-wagging lectures about housing policy, calls for negotiations starting at the suicidal ’67 borders, and snubs to their Prime Minister, so their reluctance to consult the administration is understandable. Conspiracy theorists will speculate about some covert cooperation, but the overting distancing that both countries are doing with one another sends a message that America cannot deter its friends any more than it can deter its enemies. Like drawing lines that are not intended to be enforced, and the continuing revelations of bungling and duplicity in Benghazi, it makes one wonder if anybody here can play this game.

– Bud Norman

You Say You Want a Revolution

May 3, 2013 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
We have resigned ourselves to the fact that winter will never end. The first week of May has brought snow, sub-freezing temperatures, yet another global warming speech by Al Gore, and a glum realization that the cold and gray will persist for the rest of our days.
The political climate is every bit as dispiriting, but even in this endless winter of our discontent we are not yet readying a musket for an armed revolution against the government. One always hopes things won’t come to that, of course, but one never knows. Revolutions have always become necessary at some point, and there are reasons to believe that many of our fellow citizens expect it to happen sooner rather than later.
One reason is a recent opinion poll conducted by Farleigh Dickinson University, which found 29 percent of registered voters agreeing that “In the next few years, an armed revolution might be necessary in order to protect our liberties.” Only 47 percent of the respondents said they disagreed, hardly a reassuring show of confidence in the safety of our liberties, with 18 percent neither agreeing or disagreeing, 5 percent saying they were unsure, and 1 percent shrewdly refusing to give any answer at all. Those not registered to vote might be more or less inclined to foresee the necessity of an armed revolution to remain free men and women, but in any case there seems to be a very sizeable minority of Americans who share this concern.
The sentiment is so widespread that 18 percent of Democrats concede the possibility of an armed revolution becoming necessary, although it is hard to say what reasons they might have. Perhaps they are worried about the possibility of another Republican administration in the next few years, or they regard the soon-to-be-bankrupt entitlement programs as liberty, or are quietly hoping that a few years of revolutionary bomb-throwing will pay off with a prestigious professorship somewhere down the line just as it did for the likes of Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, and Kathy Boudin. Regardless of the rationale, 18 percent is a significant chunk of the party of Hope and Change and all things government, and an even larger 27 percent of independents also believe a revolution might soon be required.
Republicans are most inclined to think so, with a whopping 44 percent of them agreeing with the poll’s premise, but at least they have made their many reasons loud and clear. On countless issues ranging from health insurance mandates to expanding regulatory bureaucracies to a spread-the-wealth economic program to bans on everything from that rusty old musket to big ol’ cups of soda pop, many Republicans have consistently argued that the constant and rapid expansion of government’s size and power eventually encroaches upon personal liberties to an intolerable extent. This oft-stated theory also holds that when a long train of abuses and usurpations reduce a people to despotism, to paraphrase the Declaration of Impendence, it is the right, it is the duty of the people to throw off such a government, and a good many of the Republicans we know take this very seriously.
Such insurrectionist talk is clearly taken seriously by others. The Department of Homeland Security has famously warned that Barack Obama’s election as president would unleash a wave of white supremacist violence and warned the nation’s law enforcement officials to be on the lookout for disgruntled military veterans, Army training materials explain that Catholics and Evangelical Christians are every bit as dangerously extremist as al-Qaeda’s brand of Islam, and numerous Democratic politicians have publicly fretted that those crazy Tea Party people are going to don their tri-cornered hats and take up arms. Such nervousness about a right-wing uprising are so prevalent in government that we suspect the Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who were so uninterested in the Boston Marathon bombers even after explicit warnings from the Russian government felt obliged by multi-cultural sensitivity to be snooping around some Free Republic poster instead. The view is also common to much of the media, who immediately suspect conservatism any time something blows up, and the more strident liberals of our acquaintance are downright doctrinaire about it.
Such worries, we think, are exaggerated at the moment. The Tea Party people that we know are all lawn-mowing, credit card-carrying, fastidiously law-abiding folk who are disinclined by a conservative temperament to quit their hard-earned jobs and wage an armed revolution against the government. They certainly don’t have the same romantic notions about it that Professors Ayers, Dohrn, and Boudin once had, or that the Occupy Wall Street hobos in their Che Guevara t-shirts still have. Instead they believe that prudence will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and instransient reasons, to further paraphrase the Declaration, and they don’t believe we have yet reached the point that rebellion is necessary. Not yet, anyway, and the defeat of the recent gun control bills and the resistance of many state governments to federal over-reach and the prospect of a mid-term election next year all give hope that we can avoid that point through democratic means.
When something blows up and it turns out the work of an Islamist rather than a conservative, as is so often the case, the same people can be counted on to thoughtfully consider what they have done to provoke such an unpleasant act. They never seem to ponder why a full 29 percent of their countrymen, many of them lawn-mowing and cred card-carrying and fastidiously law-abiding folk, might think it possible that they’ll need an armed revolution in the next few years. Nor do they wonder why only 47 percent dismiss the possibility. Perhaps they should give it some thought.

– Bud Norman

About Pigford

May 2, 2013 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Yesterday was “Blog About Pigford Day” throughout America, but we couldn’t resist poking fun at the president’s self-pitying press conference instead. We don’t care for the neologism “blog,” especially as a verb, but we do feel obliged to help with the day’s worthy cause of drawing attention to the Pigford story.
Pigford, in case you didn’t know, is the shorthand designation for the fiasco that has resulted from the case of Pigford v. Glickman. Timothy Pigford was by all accounts a fine fellow and a hard-working farmer who believed he had been denied assistance by the United States Department of Agriculture because he was black, and Dan Glickman was the Secretary of Agriculture at the time the suit was filed many years after the alleged discrimination occurred. Glickman is also a local boy who served several terms as our district’s congressman, and we know him to be a fine fellow despite being a Democrat, but Pigford was able to definitively prove that the discrimination had indeed happened so in 1999 the government meekly agreed to a $50,000 settlement with Pigford and 2,000 or so other black farmers who had joined the suit with similar tales. At that point the case represented a victory for fair play on the farms, a good news story hardly worth writing about, but of course it did not end there.
For the next several years the government fought off lawsuits by Hispanic and female farmers who hoped to cash in on the Pigford precedent, and that effort came to an abrupt halt when President Barack Obama was inaugurated. The political appointees of Obama Justice and Agriculture departments overruled the vehement objections of the career officials to establish a $1.33 billion fund to compensate thousands of people who had never claimed bias in court. By now more than 90,000 people have filed claims, for a tab of $4.4 billion, and many of those claims are by people who were farmed at all.
The story was a pet peeve of Andrew Breitbart, the great conservative provocateur, and after his untimely death his eponymous news organization continued to undercover the many cases of fraud that inevitably followed the government throwing around billions of guilt-ridden dollars. The efforts of Breitbart.com have successfully tugged even the almighty New York Times into covering the story, with a pretty good report that acknowledges the widespread abuse of the program, but the organization nonethless called for a “Blog About Pigford Day” in order to whip up the appropriate outrage. We’re glad to help out, even if a day late, and since we’re writing this yesterday we’ve technically met yet another deadline.

– Bud Norman

Afternoon Delight

May 1, 2013 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Most soap operas hold no fascination for us, but the occasional presidential news conferences make for riveting afternoon fare. In the latest installment of this long-running series our hunky hero’s torrid love affair with the press runs into some unexpected trouble.
The story opens with the president giving the honor of the first question to the out-going president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, which recently made a point of laughing at all the president’s jokes during its annual dinner and celebrity love-fest, and he assures the reporter that “I’m not mad at you.” After assuring the president that he also isn’t angry the reporter proceeds to ask about the “red line” that the president had declared against Syria’s use of chemical weapons and if it might “risk U.S. credibility if you don’t take military action.” The question seemed quite carefully put, as we would have demanded to know what in the world the president was thinking when declaring an ultimatum he had no intention of ever enforcing, but the president nonetheless seemed rather offended as he launched into a long-winded oration about how Syria’s use of chemical weapons would be a “game-changer” but that “By game changer, I mean that we would have to rethink the range of options that are available to us.” One can only imagine the terror this must have struck in the hearts of the Syrian dictatorship that almost certainly has been using chemical weapons, but the press was too shaken to ask any follow-up questions.
Another reporter was so impertinent as to ask the death of an ambassador and three other Americans in a Libyan embassy that had repeatedly been denied requests for added security, specifically about the widely-reported allegation that whistle-blowers who survived the terrorist attack have been prevented from coming forward, and the president cut the conversation short by explaining that “I’m not familiar with it.” He could have reprised his former Secretary of State’s sneering reply that “What difference, at this point, does it make,” which won rave reviews from the press, so we suppose this claim of ignorance represents an improvement in administration policy.
Although the president was clearly annoyed by such pesky questioning, another reporter requested a response to Republican criticism that the government had been insufficiently vigilant in following up on Russian warnings about one of the men suspected of bombing the Boston Marathon. “It’s not as if the FBI did nothing,” the president huffily replied, “They not only investigated the older brother, they interviewed the older brother.” Satisfied that law enforcement could not have done more, the president set to wondering “was there something that happened that triggered radicalization and actual — an actual decision by the brother to engage in the attacks that we — the tragic attack we actually saw in Boston, and are there things — additional things that could have been done in that interim that might have prevented it?
After a lengthy discourse along these hard-to-parse lines, the president yielded to another question. More pestering ensued, with another reporting noting the legislative butt-kicking the president had received on his gun control efforts and wondering if “you still have the juice to get the rest of your agenda through this congress?” Many commentators were immediately reminded of the “Are you still relevant?” question posed to Bill Clinton back in the golden age of presidential soap operas, and the president seemed rather testy when he responded that “If you put it that way, Jonathan, maybe I should just pack up and go home.” To quickly dash the hopes of many Americans, the president during the nervous laughter that “As Mark Twain said, you know, rumors of my demise may be a little exaggerated at this point.” The president added the “little” and “at this point” to Twain’s witticism, but he made it clear that he still had enough breath for a lengthy gripe about those darned Republicans. Insisting that “right now things are pretty dysfunctional up on Capitol Hill,” the president went on to blame the opposition for the great pain caused by the “sequester” budget cuts, the public’s failure to adequately feel the pain, and their inexplicable resistance to his demands, all seemingly to remind the press that they have no suitable alternative suitors.
The president also renewed a long un-kept promise to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, insisted that all is well the Obamacare program despite its author’s claim of a “train wreck,” expressed hope that millions of illegal Mexican immigrants will soon be able to vote for his party, and offered praise for some little-known, bench-sitting basketball player who has publicly announced his homosexuality. There wasn’t any time for economic questions, the president’s golf-and-party schedule being so very tight, but even without the always-hearted financial arguments the story book romance with the media was clearly strained. Can the relationship be saved? We’ll be eagerly awaiting the next installment to find out.

– Bud Norman

Laid-back

April 30, 2013 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment
There was an abundance of news on Monday, but two stories in particular caught our attention. Neither was at all surprising, and compared to a bench-sitting basketball player publicly declaring his homosexuality they might not seem very newsworthy, but the juxtaposition of two was fascinating nonetheless.
One was a report that President Barack Obama has thus far devoted twice as much time to golf and vacations than to meetings devoted to the economy. We spotted this at the cheekily conservative Breitbart.com web site, which was predictably indignant about the presidential schedule, and at Britain’s primly conservative The Telegraph, which seemed to find the president appallingly lazy even by British standards, but lest you suspect these right-wing muckrakers were making it up they both cited an analysis by the Government Accountability Office. The agency is famously non-partisan, which means they tend favor Democrats, and it made generous estimates of how long it takes for Obama to complete a round of golf and how much time he devotes to business while on vacation, so the muckrakers are likely understating their case.
The other item that caught our eye, appearing in Vanity Fair, took a decidedly different view. The glossy magazine for glossy readers, which recently hosted the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner after-party for “Hollywood A-listers and Washington insiders,” ran a “photographic investigation of the ‘lean-back’ president.” A fawning introduction gripes that “Barack Obama receives ample flak from critics who say that he is too buttoned-up and reserved to thrive in an office that historically has required its fair share of cajoling, socializing, and even arm-twisting,” but insists that “Obama can, in fact, be remarkably laid-back.” We’re not sure who those critics are who lament Obama’s reserve and lack of haranguing, schmoozing, and Chicago-style political tactics, although they are probably to his left, but apparently even Brietbart.com and The Telegraph have already noticed that he can be laid-back. To further emphasize the point, however, Vanity Fair’s photographer shows us the president with his feet atop the Oval Office’s historic Resolute Desk, sitting tie-less with his advisers, more shots of the feet on the desk, and another shot with his feet on some non-descript coffee table, all of which invite the reader to marvel at very cool the president can be.
There’s something to be said for a laid-back personality, which is quite endearing in poets, musicians, and certain other occupations, but it’s not a quality that is necessarily well-suited to a president. When the president is spending more time on his golf game than the economy that is laying back a bit too far. On the other hand, with this particular president the less time he spends meddling in the economy the better.

– Bud Norman

Comforting the Comfortable

April 29, 2013 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
There’s an old newspaper adage that a journalist’s job is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Journalists are so fond of such nonsense that if you spend any amount of time with them you’ll soon grow weary of hearing it. After 35 years of working with newspapers we have vowed that the next time we hear anyone repeating this balderdash we will immediately go in search of a sockful of horse manure with which to pummel him.
It’s not so much how the adage negates a superior notion that a journalist’s job is to accurately report what is going on in the world, without regard to who is comforted or afflicted or by the truth, but rather that it’s so very out of date. The phrase apparently originated with Finley Peter Dunne, who wrote an Irish-accented column as “Mr. Dooley” way back in the good old days of yellow journalism when ethnic humor was respectable and journalists were not, and we wonder what the ink-stained wretch would make of the oh-so-comfortable scribes in attendance at this past Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
You’ve heard of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, of course, even if you make a point of avoiding all that boring political stuff in the news. The annual black-tie event has joined the Golden Globes awards and the global warming alarmist movement as one of those things that every self-respecting celebrity simply must do, and it now receives the same saturation coverage as any other show-biz event. This year Vanity Fair rushed to the internet with pictures of the “Hollywood A-listers and Washington-insiders” who attended the magazine’s after-party bash at the Kalorama residence of the French ambassador, and even the most staid news outlets were similarly star-struck. New York Magazine found it newsworthy that the First Lady wore a Lacy Monique Lhuillier gown, which is apparently some sort of fancy dress, and it  could not restrain itself from adding that “damn does she look good.”
Each year’s dinner features a monologue by a well-known comedian who is expected to poke fun at both politicians and reporters, thus allowing both groups to demonstrate what good sports and regular folk they are, but tradition also dictates that a gentler brand of humor be employed regarding Democrats. This year the honor went to late-night talk show host Conan O’Brien, who hewed rigorously to tradition. One of his few Obama jokes made mention of the fact that both he and the president attended Harvard University, and he ended with a heartfelt thanks to the president for helping his hometown of Boston “heal” from the bombings at the Boston Marathon. Whatever healing powers the president exerted might not have been necessary if the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been less sensitive to Muslim sensitivities when following up on Russian warnings about the bombers, an aversion to Islamophobia that has been imposed from the very top of levels of government, but O’Brien’s partisan fun-poking should have been expected. We well recall that during the Bush administration O’Brien used to regale his television audiences by doing a presidential imitation that involved mimicking a mentally retarded person and saying “duh,” a Swiftian sort of satire that the proud Harvard man could have just as easily learned on the playgrounds of Kistler Elementary School.
The president also spoke, which is another yearly feature of the event. Tradition dictates that the presidential monologue be self-deprecating, but Obama seems unable to make fun of himself lest it be considered racist. He acknowledged an embarrassing 2-for-22 shooting performance on the basketball court during the White House Easter egg roll, but only as a set-up for a joke about the NBC ratings, and most of the jokes were aimed a political opponents such as a wealthy Republican campaign donor. The watchdogs of the press politely roared, of course, and by all accounts everyone seemed very comfortable.

– Bud Norman

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