Right Wing Nut House

I don’t get it. What earthly good is it doing, raising the issues surrounding the candidacy of Sarah Palin for Vice President among the “professionals” who ran John McCain’s horribly mismanaged campaign?

I put pros in quotes because this latest dust-up is all about the gigantic egos of the principles in this scrum - a quite unprofessional attitude that helps no one except the opposition . And also because the McCain campaign will go down as one of the worst managed campaigns in history, rivaling Michael Dukakis’s nightmare of a run and the quixotically inept campaign of George McGovern.

But it is mostly ego driving Bill Kristol, Schmidt, Scheunamann, and the rest of the losers who refuse to stand up and say “I blew it.” Admittedly, such an admission is hard to make when one’s reputation, and hence, livelihood, is based on success at the polls. But you don’t have to be a brilliant strategist to see that the McCain campaign was poorly managed - slow to respond to the day-to-day jousting with the Obama team, not to mention a questionable overall strategy, curious ad buys, poor decisions on staffing state offices, and a host of other missteps that doomed McCain almost from the start.

And that’s not even mentioning Sarah Palin. Readers of this site know that when she was chosen, I was jubilant, believing it was a real game changer. But subsequently, it became painfully obvious that not only wasn’t she ready for the national stage, but the way the McCain camp was “handling” the Alaska governor guaranteed that her inexperience would remain an issue for the entire campaign.

Stacy McCain refuses to come out and say Palin wasn’t ready, but in her defense, he blames everyone else for Palin’s own missteps:

Palin would have been solid gold in any impromptu encounter with reporters on the campaign trail. Putting her into one-on-one interviews with the network anchors — eager to draw blood with “gotcha” questions — was a stupid blunder on the part of the campaign.

To schedule those interviews, and then to arrange sessions to “prepare” her for them, was to imply that she was incapable of handling the interviews without the “expert” assistance of the Team Maverick brain trust which, of course, had committed her to these interviews in the first place.

Am I the only one who sees that the problem with how Palin was “handled” had nothing to do with Palin and everything to do with the handlers? She is being made the scapegoat for the failures of others.

Stacy knows full well that running on a national ticket is not a game for the inexperienced. It is absolutely true that Palin was “mismanaged.” But the Couric interview showed that no amount of managing or coaching would have helped. She was as green as grass and Couric bored in as any experienced interviewer would have. Is Stacy saying that it is Couric’s fault that she asked questions that just about any experienced politician would have been able to finesse but that Palin couldn’t handle?

Palin was indeed, inexperienced and not ready for the Big Show. There is nothing wrong with her innate intelligence. She’s no dummy and has shown that when’s she’s well briefed, she can more than hold her own in debate.

But it takes more than brains to demonstrate readiness for national office and more than a good briefing to have a handle on issues. Palin wasn’t only inexperienced in dealing with the national press. Her biggest lack of experience came from not having immersed herself in the nuance and details of policy, personalities, and politics - a failing that she will no doubt correct if she is going to run in 2012. Such immersion gives depth to a politician’s personae and authority to their words.

Palin will do better if she runs again. But she won’t be able to lose the “diva” label unless Kristol, Schmidt, et al stop talking about the campaign as if it were all about them. Their incompetence elected Barack Obama and gave us the dumbest, densest Vice President in history (Funny no one does a hit piece on the horribly gaffe prone Joe Biden and his friends in the credit card industry who have made him a wealthy man.) And yet, here they are, snarling, sniping, and acting like 12 year old little girls at a slumber party who break off into little cliques dishing dirt on someone across the room:

“Steve Schmidt has a congenital aversion to the truth,” Scheunemann said. “On two separate and distinct occasions, he speculated about about Governor Palin having post-partum depression, and on the second he threatened that if more negative publicity about the handling of Governor Palin emerged that he would leak his speculation [about post-partum depression] to the press. It was like meeting Tony Soprano.”

Schmidt said Scheunemann’s charges were “categorically untrue.”

“It is inappropriate for me to discuss personnel issues from the campaign,” Schmidt continued. “But suffice it to say Randy is saying these things not because they’re true but because he wants to damage my reputation because of consequences he faced for actions he took.”

Schmidt is alluding, without saying so directly, to the stories that emerged after the campaign that Scheunemann had been fired.

Scheunemann said Schmidt did try to fire him but added: “I’ve got a pay stub through November 15th.”

The questions about Scheunemann being terminated are central to the larger battle about who was trashing Palin, something that quickly came to the surface in the back and forth between Schmidt and Kristol on Tuesday.

All of this came about as a result of an article in Vanity Fair about Palin that is so bad, much of it has to be a lie, or at least an exaggeration. No human being I know is as bad as the portrait painted of Palin in that article. No one could achieve the success she has in her career if she was truly as monstrous as the person described.

But beyond the description of Palin, one wonders why now? Why a hit piece more than 3 years before the election?

Two reasons come to mind: 1) Palin is such a polarizing figure that anything written about her sells copy; and 2) There is a growing recognition among liberal elites that Obama is heading for a one term presidency unless they can destroy each and every Republican challenger who emerges.

It’s no accident that the name “Carter” is being whispered more and more around Washington to describe Obama. Stimulus isn’t working, debt is skyrocketing, people may like Obama but support for his policies is tanking, largely due to the realization of how much his programs are going to cost us.

Republicans are liked even less but individual politicians are ranked much higher. Trying to destroy Palin, Romney, Huckabee, and anyone else who may emerge in the coming months could be the only way Obama gets a second term.

Why Kristol and Schmidt think the Democrats need a hand in that process is a mystery.

Yeah, I know. Riehl and I are usually at each other’s throats but in this case, his thinking mirrors my own thoughts when I first read about this story:

This is the stuff of apparatchiks and Politburos, not a healthy, ethical free press. ABC will become the Obama network to sell his health care plan for an entire day.

I was going to start by saying, unbelievable. But given the media’s coverage of Obama from the primary to November, it may not be as unbelievable as it should. This is the single most dangerous thing for this Republic I’ve seen from their dysfunctional relationship since Obama announced and they fell in love. Health care reform is a major issue that will ultimately impact every American living and to be born. If anything, we need a balanced debate by a media that hasn’t picked a side.

I’m not even sure it’ll help Obama as much as he may think, but the principle here is even more important. I don’t know if ABC will cave, but if they offer Republicans a half hour at the end, or an hour some other night, it is not the same thing. This can’t be happening here.

What Mr. Riehl is rightly incensed about is the news that broke this morning that ABC will, in effect, join the executive branch of government and act as an appendage to the Obama PR machine to sell his - and his alone - health insurance plan.

From Drudge:

On the night of June 24, the media and government become one, when ABC turns its programming over to President Obama and White House officials to push government run health care — a move that has ignited an ethical firestorm!

Highlights on the agenda:

ABCNEWS anchor Charlie Gibson will deliver WORLD NEWS from the Blue Room of the White House.

The network plans a primetime special — ‘Prescription for America’ — originating from the East Room, exclude opposing voices on the debate.

The RNC sent a letter to ABC News President David Westin that sounds almost plaintive in its complaints:

As the national debate on health care reform intensifies, I am deeply concerned and disappointed with ABC’s astonishing decision to exclude opposing voices on this critical issue on June 24, 2009. Next Wednesday, ABC News will air a primetime health care reform “town hall” at the White House with President Barack Obama. In addition, according to an ABC News report, GOOD MORNING AMERICA, WORLD NEWS, NIGHTLINE and ABC’s web news “will all feature special programming on the president’s health care agenda.” This does not include the promotion, over the next 9 days, the president’s health care agenda will receive on ABC News programming.

Today, the Republican National Committee requested an opportunity to add our Party’s views to those of the President’s to ensure that all sides of the health care reform debate are presented. Our request was rejected. I believe that the President should have the ability to speak directly to the America people. However, I find it outrageous that ABC would prohibit our Party’s opposing thoughts and ideas from this national debate, which affects millions of ABC viewers.

In the absence of opposition, I am concerned this event will become a glorified infomercial to promote the Democrat agenda. If that is the case, this primetime infomercial should be paid for out of the DNC coffers. President Obama does not hold a monopoly on health care reform ideas or on free airtime. The President has stated time and time again that he wants a bipartisan debate. Therefore, the Republican Party should be included in this primetime event, or the DNC should pay for your airtime.

Not even granting the GOP the courtesy of giving them a half hour to respond? What’s with that?

Obviously, ABC saw the reasonably good ratings for NBC’s genuflecting coverage of the show featuring Obama in the White House, hosted by the obsequious Brian Williams and wanted a piece of that action. But at what price to their integrity? Williams may have bowed and scraped like a serf from the Middle Ages acknowledging his lord but that was just silly press worship of Obama.

If this story is true (and Drudge has been known to exaggerate things in the past), it’s a game changer. This isn’t anything like the networks offering time to the party holding the White House. It’s different than presenting biased coverage in favor of the president. There is nothing stealthy about it at all. This is putting a huge media conglomerate at the disposal of the executive branch in order to achieve the president’s policy goals.

A one trillion dollar program that will fundamentally alter not only our health care system but re-order American society itself and we are only to be presented with one side of the debate? Riehl has it right; why not just rename ABC, OBC and get on with it.

It’s not like the Republicans don’t have a viable alternative. About a month ago, they released “The Patient’s Choice Act” that totally eschews the so-called “public option” in favor of a federalized, tax friendly approach that even Democratic critics called “comprehensive.”

Now, I have serious problems with the GOP plan. It is hardly perfect. And I suspect ABC will, at some point, offer the GOP some kind of rebuttal, although as the RNC letter points out, fat lot of good it will do when ABC will be promoting the hell out of this program and the details of the Democratic plan.

But health care is really not the issue here. The issue is the crass, obvious, dangerous, and radical manipulation of the media to serve the ends of government and not serve the people. ABC News should immediately alter the program to include opposition voices to what the Democrats are proposing or cancel it altogether.

And if they don’t, I wonder if any journalists at ABC will take the honorable route and resign?

UPDATE: ABC NEWS RESPONDS

No, the Dems are not paying for the airtime. And ABC assures us that they will pick the audience members and that they will give a fair hearing of all sides of the debate.

Fine. One question: WHY DO IT FROM THE FRICKING WHITE HOUSE?

To that end, ABC News announced plans to broadcast a primetime hour from the White House devoted to exploring and probing the President’s position and giving voice to questions and criticisms of that position. We hope that any American concerned about health care will find our efforts to be informative, fair and civil.

Second, ABC News prides itself on covering all sides of important issues and asking direct questions of all newsmakers — of all political persuasions — even when others have taken a more partisan approach and even in the face of criticism from extremes on both ends of the political spectrum. ABC News is looking for the most thoughtful and diverse voices on this issue. ABC News alone will select those who will be in the audience asking questions of the president. Like any programs we broadcast, ABC News will have complete editorial control. To suggest otherwise is quite unfair to both our journalists and our audience.

Third, there already has been extensive coverage of the upcoming health care debates, on ABC and elsewhere, and there will be much, much more. Indeed, we’ve already had many critics of the President’s health care proposals on the air – and that’s before a real plan has even been put before the country.

In the end, no one watching, listening to, or reading ABC News will lack for an understanding of all sides of these important questions.

No mention of the fact that they will get all day access to the White House with GMA and WNT getting to host from there.

And a program devoted “to exploring and probing the President’s position and giving voice to questions and criticisms of that position” starts from the premise that the Democrat’s program will be discussed, not alternatives - just “questions and criticisms.”

No doubt there will be some pointed questions about the cost of the program. But my question above remains; why put this on at the White House? Why not someplace like Constitution Hall or some other place that would have real meaning.

It still smacks of partisan shilling in my book. And as my friend Lionheart points out in the comments, if Bush had tried this, many on the left would have hit the roof.

The world can be too real at times, what with a possibly stolen election in Iran, an economy teetering on the edge of an abyss, and Joe Biden in charge of…anything.

That’s why a digression into fantasy is just what the doctor ordered today. Of course, there’s nothing in the world that defines fantasy better than Hollywood movies.

In the past, my forays into top ten lists for films have featured original music scores, villains, one liners, and Star Trek rankings. Today, I’d like to pay homage to the bread and butter of all Hollywood action films, the fight scene and my 10 favorites of all time.

You will probably disagree with many of my choices. I am not into martial arts films nor have I seen a a lot of films in the last 5 years or so. No matter. My attempt here was to engage in some pleasant reveries, going over as many movies in my mind that I could, and pulling out fight scenes that thrilled me, or surprised me, or have become so much a part of the experience in viewing the film - especially those I’ve seen several times - that I have become intimately familiar with the way the action unfolds and “bits” that the actors, directors, and fight choreographers put into the action to enhance the realism of the battle.

What make a good fight scene? In my opinion, believability is a good start but not a pre-requisite. One of the better “fight scenes” that I can recall is the pie fight in The Great Race. Timing the thrown pies was absolutely crucial in that scene as was expert editing. But believable? Not hardly.

The use of furniture and other objects can also enhance a fight scene but again, is not necessary. Another great fight sequence is from Red River where it’s just John Wayne and Montgomery Clift going at it hammer and tongs.

Those two are in my “Honorable Mentions” for my list but don’t rise to the level of excellence of those I have selected. That’s because beyond anything else, a good fight scene must give you a visceral reaction to to the war taking place on screen. You must feel the blows. Or, be so transported into the moment that you feel yourself in the fight itself. Then, there are a couple of scenes on my list that are just so wonderfully choreographed that the delight is in observing the craft itself. The scene almost becomes a dance with characters executing marvelously difficult feats while getting their brains beat in.

I have placed the scenes in a rough order regarding how much I enjoyed them. You are invited to make your own lists or tell me what a dope I am in the comments.

10. Philo Beddo vs. Jack Wilson - Any Which Way You Can

Using the entire town of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the bare-knuckled brawl between Clint Eastwood and muscleman William Smith is one for the ages. The movie is incredibly silly but the fight is a real bone cruncher, smash mouth, ass-whuppin’ crowd pleaser. The “I owe you one” theme that runs through it was pretty original too.

9. Li Mùbá vs Yù Jilolóng - Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Not the best swordsmanship or the best moves. But no one can dispute the dream-like beauty of watching Zhang Ziyi and Chow Yun Fat fly effortlessly through the air, fight on the thinnest of tree branches, with the moon in the background giving the entire scene a marvelous blue wash that enhances the surreal nature of the battle.

8. Corporal Melish vs. the Bald Nazi - Saving Private Ryan

The best, most realistic knife fight ever filmed. Melish appears to have the upperhand until slowly, painfully, and terrifyingly, the bad guy turns it toward the GI’s chest. “No, no. wait,” pleads Melish as the blade hovers an inch from his heart. Bad guy shushes him soothingly, like trying to stop a baby from crying as the blade sinks in.

Not ranked higher because sometimes, I just can’t watch due to its intensity.

7. John Wayne et. al - McClintock!

Has there ever been a funnier fight scene? Tough to decide between this one and the pie fight in Race but Mclintock! wins for sheer inventiveness. The slide into the claypit was hysterical as was the reaction from the Indians whose unison turns of the head watching people slide down the chute was priceless. Kudo’s to Maureen O’Hara for doing the stunts herself - including getting a dunking on what she described later as a very cold day.

6. Rudolph Rassendyll vs. Count Rupert of Hentzau - Prisoner of Zenda (1937)

Ronald Coleman was forgettable as a swordsman. But the final duel between he and Douglas Fairbanks was classic Hollywood with banter back and forth and Fairbanks, slashing and dashing, shucking and jiving his way off screen, finishing with a spectacular swan dive into the moat to make his escape.

We are not sorry he wasn’t captured.

5. Bruce Lee vs. Bolo - Enter the Dragon

As I mentioned at the outset, I am not enamored of martial arts films. But the speed, athleticism, power, and grace of Bruce Lee had to be recognized somehow. Bolo, a master martial arts fighter in his own right, supposedly “played down” to Lee’s inferior level. It doesn’t matter. This was showmanship at its finest and Lee’s work influenced several generations of fight choreographers.

4. Captain Love vs. Alejandro Murrieta (AKA “Zorro”) - The Mask of Zorro

The scene played out marvelously over the trappings of the gold mine with both Antonio Banderas and Matt Letscher whacking away at one another, cutting and thrusting, the clang of steel on steel very realistic. They looked like they really wanted to kill each other. Some good stunts too as the adversaries leapt from one level to another, precarious footing forcing them to fight with a desperate abandon. It was perhaps the most realistic sword fight (as was the one between Anthony Hopkins and Stuart Wilson playing Don Rafael) I can recall, although the sword fighting in the Michael York version of The Three Musketeers was probably closer to reality. In that film, it was no holds barred as the duelists used every underhanded technique to gain an advantage.

Still, for pulse pounding action, I’ll take Zorro.

3. Rocky Balboa vs. Apollo Creed - Rocky

Up until the time Rocky was made, there were only a handful of fight movies that were realistic (John Garfield was a great actor but a boxer he was not). But the Creed-Balboa fight was epic, believable, and the ending that saw Rocky losing the fight but finally finding the manhood to say “I love you” to Adrian is among the best moments in any sports movie ever made.

The bout was so well done from first punch to last - the sound of glove on flesh was very good, with different sounds for different parts of the body that were struck. Excellent cutting contributed to the realism as did the react from fighters when the blows landed. “Cut me, Mick” is one of the great lines in movie history.

2. Sean Thornton vs. Will Dannaher - The Quiet Man

If Every Which Way But Loose featured a fight that played out throughout the entire town of Jackson Hole, it had nothing on the donnybrook between John Wayne and Victor McLaglen which went over the hills, through the woods, across the river, into the town of Innisfree and concluded with perhaps the best straight right in film history. That punch sent Dannaher through the door of the pub all the way out into the street. “Homeric” as Michaleen Flynn would have said.

Some might find the Irish stereotypes in the film off putting. Speaking as someone with 100% Irish in my background, I loved it.

1. Robin Hood vs. Guy of Gisbourne - The Adventures of Robin Hood.

There have been better sword fights - perhaps even the other classic Errol Flynn - Basil Rathbone duel on the beach in Captain Blood was more precisely choreographed. Other fights have been more intense, more realistic. But none, in my opinion, has been more entertaining or thrilling to watch.

Rathbone, a very serious actor, took fencing lessons for months prior to the shoot. Flynn was not so serious but his tremendous athleticism made him seem even better than Rathbone. Of course, what makes the scene one of the true classics were the asides spoken back and forth to each other as they were locked in mortal combat:

Sir Guy of Gisbourne: You’ve come to Nottingham once too often!
Robin Hood: When this is over, my friend, there’ll be no need for me to come again.

Sir Guy of Gisbourne: Do you know any prayers, my friend?
Robin Hood: I’ll say one for you!

It just doesn’t get any better than that.

Couple that with the sharp editing, the dramatic lighting, and the stirring score by Eric Korngold and you have a masterpiece of film making and a perfect climax to a great film.

I’ve written a couple of posts about the Iranian election, taking up the same meme being advanced everywhere else, that the contest was stolen in a clumsy and obvious fashion. Not once did I stop and think how that meme got started and who was pushing it. Nor did I think very hard about the analysts and experts who were advancing their own views on why the election was rigged. Who are they? What do they really know?

The fact that almost everyone seemed to have come to the same conclusion - Middle East experts, ex-Iran hands from State, journalists who have lived and worked in Iran, and especially ordinary Iranians whose emotional reaction to the loss of the “reform” candidate Mousavi tugged at our sympathy - was a powerful motivation to hop on board the rigged election bandwagon and fire away at the regime, at the Revolutionary Guards, and especially at Supreme Leader Khamenei for denying the Iranian people their triumph.

But, is there a possibility that we’re all wrong, that Ahmadinejad really won the election going away?

As I said in this post on Saturday, I am not an expert on Iran, Iranian politics, or the political culture there. All of us in the blogosphere, and the overwhelming majority of national analysts and pundits who are advancing the stolen election meme, depend on the handful of people who we have designated either through their demonstrated expertise or a perceived wisdom that may be useful or not, for our “analysis.” There can’t be more than a couple of dozen of us who are writing about this who know what we’re talking about and have independent sources of information that would justify the kind of faith we have all invested in this story. The rest of us are mostly just parroting the analysis of others while sometimes presciently, sometimes ignorantly, throwing our two cents of speculation in for good measure.

Iran is an enormously complex country, whose people are about as familiar to us as someone who would alight from Alpha Centari. So too, their politics, their government, and the workings of their political system. Cook County, Iran is not. This is a political culture as foreign to us any on earth what with the volatile mix of religion, politics, mysticism, and fear. So looking at the thousands of blog posts, articles, and the hours of TV speculation on the election in a rational manner leads to the inescapable conclusion that, while it is a good bet that the election was indeed rigged, the possibility that President Ahmadinejad actually won the election cannot be entirely dismissed.

Is it possible that all the “experts” we are quoting and listening to have gotten it wrong? Is it possible that some of these same experts are pushing the idea of a stolen election as part of their own agenda? Is it possible that the opposition in Iran is doing the same?

Is it possible?

Sure it is. But you’d never know it if you read the blogs, the MSM, or listen to the discussion on the TV news nets.

Perhaps it’s my contrarian nature that has been energized by reading a few articles that have advanced the idea that Ahmadinejad won and that, as Abbas Barzegar, a PhD candidate in religious studies at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia wrote in the Guardian on Saturday, we westerners are engaging in some wishful thinking about Iran that just isn’t true:

On Monday night at least 100,000 of the former prime minister’s supporters set up a human chain across Tehran. But, hours before I had attended a mass rally for the incumbent president that got little to no coverage in the western press because, on account of the crowds, he never made it inside the hall to give his speech. Minimal estimates from that gathering have been placed at 600,000 (enthusiasts say a million). From the roof I watched as the veiled women and bearded men of all ages poured like lava.

But the failure to properly gauge Iran’s affairs is hardly a new phenomenon. When the 1979 revolution shattered the military dictatorship of America’s strongest ally in the region few experts outside of the country suspected that the Islamic current would emerge as the leading party.

[...]

For over a week the same social impulses of anti-corruption, populism, and religious piety that led to the revolution have been on the streets available to anyone who wanted to report on them. Ahmedinejad, for most in the country, embodies those ideals. Since he came into office he has refused to wear a suit, refused to move out of the home he inherited from his father, and has refused to tone down the rhetoric he uses against those he accuses of betraying the nation. When he openly accused his towering rival, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanji, a lion of the revolution himself, of parasitical corruption and compared his betrayal to the alleged deception against the Prophet Muhammad that led to the Sunni-Shia split 1,400 years ago, he unleashed a popular impulse that has held the imagination of the masses here for generations. That Rafsanji defended himself through Mousavi’s newspaper meant the end for the reformists.

In the last week Ahmedinejad turned the election into a referendum on the very project of Iran’s Islamic revolution. Their street chants yelled “Death to all those against the Supreme Leader” followed by traditional Shia rituals and elegies. It was no match for the high-spirited fun-loving youth of northern Tehran who sang “Ahmedi-bye-bye, Ahmedi-bye-bye” or “ye hafte-do hafte, Mahmud hamum na-rafte” (One week, two weeks, Mahmoud hasn’t taken a shower).

These are not the wild words of a religious fanatic endorsing Ahmadinejad but the measured tones of someone applying knowledge of his home country to a political event. He would never get a gig on CNN but does that fact delegitimze his argument? Barzegar acknowledges the possibility of fraud but believes the election outcome as announced is a more likely scenario.

Just because he is a voice in the wilderness, does that make his analysis any less viable than those advancing the stolen election theme? Measuring the relative merits of someone’s opinion when trying to decide who to believe should take into account many factors, not the least should be an intimate familiarity with the subject at hand. Barzegar would seem to pass that test with flying colors.

Then there is the poll out today by The New America Foundation and the Roper The Center for Public Opinion, taken between May11-19 in Iran, that reveals a huge wellspring of support for Ahmadinejad - on the order of 2-1:

The breadth of Ahmadinejad’s support was apparent in our preelection survey. During the campaign, for instance, Mousavi emphasized his identity as an Azeri, the second-largest ethnic group in Iran after Persians, to woo Azeri voters. Our survey indicated, though, that Azeris favored Ahmadinejad by 2 to 1 over Mousavi.

Much commentary has portrayed Iranian youth and the Internet as harbingers of change in this election. But our poll found that only a third of Iranians even have access to the Internet, while 18-to-24-year-olds comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups.

The only demographic groups in which our survey found Mousavi leading or competitive with Ahmadinejad were university students and graduates, and the highest-income Iranians. When our poll was taken, almost a third of Iranians were also still undecided. Yet the baseline distributions we found then mirror the results reported by the Iranian authorities, indicating the possibility that the vote is not the product of widespread fraud.

I, too, look upon polls taken in a state as oppressive as Iran with a jaundiced eye. But pollsters can be tricky. They are very good at determining a respondent’s true feelings:

Some might argue that the professed support for Ahmadinejad we found simply reflected fearful respondents’ reluctance to provide honest answers to pollsters. Yet the integrity of our results is confirmed by the politically risky responses Iranians were willing to give to a host of questions. For instance, nearly four in five Iranians — including most Ahmadinejad supporters — said they wanted to change the political system to give them the right to elect Iran’s supreme leader, who is not currently subject to popular vote. Similarly, Iranians chose free elections and a free press as their most important priorities for their government, virtually tied with improving the national economy. These were hardly “politically correct” responses to voice publicly in a largely authoritarian society.

The information is compelling. But then, the poll was taken three weeks before the election and while Mousavi would have a lot of ground to make up, such swings are possible - especially since we witnessed the surge for Mousavi beginning at just about that time.

Then there’s Flynt Leverett, senior fellow at The New America Foundation quoted on Spiegel Online:

Leverett: I would have been surprised if he had lost. The Western media overstated the surge of his main opponent Mir Hossein Mousavi over the last couple of weeks. They missed almost entirely how Ahmadinejad was perceived to have won the TV debate, for instance. There was an extraordinary amount of wishful thinking of American and Western policymakers - unfortunately, that had a strong impact on the media coverage over the past few weeks.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Some people in Washington already express scepticism with the results, though.

Leverett: I am a little surprised by the margin, too. But that makes me more comfortable about the overall validity of the election. Look at the irregularities Mousavi is citing now: that they ran out of ballot paper in some polling precincts, that they did not keep some polls open long enough. There is no way such things could change the overall outcome which is clearly in favor of Ahmadinejad.

Defending one’s organization’s work is not unheard of in the think tank world. But he makes a couple of interesting points about Mousavi’s complaints that I hadn’t considered.

One poll and a couple of pieces of analysis claiming that Ahmadinejad won against the torrent of information, speculation, and analysis that says a fraud was perpetrated: Is it enough to sway your thinking?

It should be enough to make you question everything you read from here on out with at least the same healthy skepticism we should always use when examining anything we read or hear about a subject with which almost all of us have little or no direct knowledge.

UPDATE

Juan Cole takes a closer look at the poll I mentioned above and finds it wanting. He points out that Ahmadinejad’s 2-1 advantage is actually much less than it would appear. The incumbent was favored by only 34% of Iranians while Mousavi got 14% of the vote. Undecideds and “none of the aboves” appeared to get the rest.

In essence, the poll is a lot less compelling than I thought but still an interesting piece of evidence that support for Ahmadinejad is not a mirage.

So Captain Phillips is free and unharmed and the pirates are killed or captured. Good news all around, although I think Michael Shear of WaPo gave new meaning to the phrase “gushing coverage:”

It was one of the earliest tests of the new American president — a small military operation off the coast of a Third World nation. But as President Bill Clinton found out in October 1993, even minor failures can have long-lasting consequences.

Clinton’s efforts to land a small contingent of troops in Haiti were rebuffed, for the world to see, by a few hundred gun-toting Haitians. As the USS Harlan County retreated, so did the president’s reputation.

For President Obama, last week’s confrontation with Somali pirates posed similar political risks to a young commander in chief who had yet to prove himself to his generals or his public.

But the result — a dramatic and successful rescue operation by U.S. Special Operations forces — left Obama with an early victory that could help build confidence in his ability to direct military actions abroad.

Some victory. The US Navy against 4 pirates in 15 foot launch. And by all accounts, the Navy SEAL’s acted in response to the Captain trying to escape - brave felow, him. He no doubt realized once he was clear that the pirates would be toast.

The significance here is not a “victory” but rather that the president proved he can pull the trigger. By authorizing the use of force not once, but twice, the president showed that when American lives are threatened, he will act. That should bolster his reputation somewhat with a suspicious military:

The operation pales in scope and complexity to the wars underway in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Obama’s adversaries are unlikely to be mollified by his performance in a four-day hostage drama.

Nonetheless, it may help to quell criticism leveled at Obama that he came to office as a Democratic antiwar candidate who could prove unwilling or unable to harness military might when necessary.

And as Obama’s Democratic predecessors can attest, a victory — no matter how small — is better than a failure.

Obama’s two Democratic predecessors were notorious for their seeming inability to pull the trigger on military action at times. The question of whether Clinton could have killed Bin Laden will haunt this country for many years while his Haiti operation, where US troops were prevented from landing by a couple of hundred armed irregulars, was seen at the time as an embarrassment. The Kosovo operation suffered from a lack of will to commit ground troops and end the conflict swiftly. For Clinton, a man who headed an administration that Buzz Patterson found first hand to have nothing but contempt for soldiers in uniform (Patterson and other military personnel assigned to the White House were ordered not to wear their uniforms), the inability to give the “go” signal was the result of a Viet Nam era distrust and disgust of the mlitary.

Carter was just plain inept - a dithering, hand wringing Commander in Chief who surrounded himself with pacifists - and his inability to come to a decision about the hostage rescue (it was an on again, off again operation) while previously assisting anti-regime forces in Iran and Nicaraugua to overthrow American allies, emboldened the Soviets at the time to expand their influence dramatically around the world, not to mention invade Afghanistan. The Communists figured correctly they had nothing to fear from Carter.

So our friends on the left will excuse us if we have our doubts about Mr. Obama’s ability to act decisively when the chips are down and American lives are at stake. The manner in which he handled the hostage situation is a good start toward allaying those fears.

Now, however, comes the hard part. It is time for the United States to take the lead and mount a military operation that will wipe out the scourge of piracy. If no one will help, we should do it ourselves although I think it likely that most nations are ready for such a move. And such an operation cannot be simply a raid; from what I’ve read from experts, it must be a sustained campaign that involves not only the navies of the world but also special forces to infliltrate the towns and villages along the coast where the pirates live and destroy their ability to cause trouble. This means destroying their boats, the docks, the gasoline dumps, interdict and confiscate weapons, and take other actions against targets that allow the pirates to operate.

But this situation is not as easy as simply going after terrorists or high seas criminals. Alas, our president will no doubt see the other side of the coin as well; that the pirates are simply acting in “self defense” or responding to unbearable provocations from western fishing trawlers:

This from Crooks and Liars:

I wonder which principled member of our corporate media will point out that, in the big picture, the Somali pirates are acting in self-defense?

Yes - a VERY big picture, fer sure. Meanwhile, the author quotes from a story in The Independent that gives a pass to the pirates due to (wait for it) western imperialism:

In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

Coud this be true? Der Spiegel tells it a little differently:

Somali fishermen have another problem: toxic waste. Initially dumped on land, toxic waste was increasingly dumped at sea after the collapse of the regime of former President Siad Barre in 1991. Because the country has no coast guard, for the past 20 years the Somali coastline has had no protection against European ships dumping waste at sea. Although hard evidence was rare, there have been periodic and mysterious incidents. In early 2002, tens of thousands of dead fish washed ashore at Merca, south of Mogadishu. The causes remain unclear.

In the spring of 2004, fishermen spotted two large containers floating in the water near Bosaso. Whether they were deliberately tossed overboard or accidentally fell of a container ship in rough seas is unclear. The Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004, which also reached the African coast, unearthed dozens of containers of toxic waste and deposited the waste along the Somali coast. According to a United Nations report, many coastal residents suffered “acute respiratory infections, heavy coughing, bleeding gums and mouth, abdominal haemorrhages, unusual skin rashes, and even death.”

Experts and environmentalists have long been aware of the problem. In 2006, a team of specialists sent to the region to investigate discovered nine toxic waste sites along 700 kilometers (435 miles) of coastline in southern Somalia.

The UN envoy to Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, said last October that the UN has “reliable information that European and Asian companies are dumping toxic waste, including nuclear waste, off the Somali coastline.”

Clearly, there’s problem here and it’s not western imperialism or even grasping capitalism; Somalia has no government. The jackals of the world take advantage of that. And the UN - even though they are aware of the problem - do nothing. And when something newsworthy comes out of all of that, wake me up.

Rapacious businessmen are taking advantage of the chaos in Somalia by bullying the few Somalis who try and make a living as fishermen and dumping toxic waste - including some low level nuclear waste - along the shore where there was already a problem thanks to the Somalis themselves dumping waste on land. There is some evidence that the Mafia are making a killing by contracting with firms to dump their waste off the Somali coast.

Now just to set the record straight, there is absolutely no evidence that 300 Somalis have died of exposure to nuclear waste nor has their been a clear link established between the dumping of any toxic waste and the death of any Somali.

Here’s a Greenpeace scientist:

A senior scientist with Greenpeace Research Laboratories in Great Britain, David Santillo, says while it would be difficult to prove that exposure to industrial waste is the sole cause of such health problems, he believes there is a link.

“It could well be that some of those health effects are a result of exposure to radioactive material and in that case, for some people, regrettably, the prognosis could be very devastating,” he explained. “There could be people who simply would not recover.”

Obviously, the key to ending piracy and the illegal dumping is for Somalia to form some kind of government - a task that has been beyond their capabilities for going on two decades. The UN is in its usual throwing-its-hands-in-the-air- mode of doing nothing and spending a lot of money showing it. If ever there was evidence needed that the UN is not only a useless organization but one that actually makes matters worse, the situation in Somalia is it.

Meanwhile, our intrepid Somali pirates know they have western liberals on their side as long as they can show that the reason they board ships, terrorize people, take crew members hostage, kill with impunity, and barter for ransom is because they are only acting in “self defense” against rancid capitalists and western governments who allow the practice of dumping and illegal fishing with a wink and a nod. This appeals to many on the left who will now see the problem as a question of “fairness” and will agitate that the president forgoe knocking the stuffing out of pirate infrastructure in favor of a “negotiated” solution. Piracy will continue, hostages will still be taken, governments and businesses will still be forced to pay ransom - but liberals will feel better about the whole thing.

Sure, let’s negotiate; just as soon as their isn’t a ship, a dock, or a boathouse left standing in those villages and towns that assist the pirates in their lawlessness. And capturing and hanging a few pirates wouldn’t hurt either.

Does the president have the judgement to pull the trigger on this, a much more problematic operation where civilians are likely to be killed and the loss of American life is probable? That will be Obama’s first real “test” and not some quick thinking by a brave captain and the dead eye marksmanship of our SEAL’s.

UPDATE

Once again, the fusion of great minds is evident as Ed Morrissey agrees with me:

This should actually be the next mission for the US Navy after freeing Phillips. We don’t need a quarantine and inspection to identify some of the boats and ports in question; I’d bet dollars to donuts we’ve already identified most of them. Our next step after killing the pirates on the lifeboat is torpedoing their ships in their home ports without inspections or even warnings. Somalia’s failed state can’t impose order on these areas, but if the pirates become a liability rather than an asset to these facilities, they’ll get the heave-ho soon enough.

In the future, we don’t need the lawyers and the FBI negotiators, and we especially don’t need to legitimize Somali “elders”, either. Iklé has that right; piracy is not a bank robbery. The entire point of piracy is to capture ships in territory where no nation can claim sovereignty and therefore work outside the civil law. The proper response to that is military, not some notion of cops and robbers. When pirates find out we’re serious, and when enough of them wind up at the bottom of the ocean, they’ll think twice about seizing American or Western shipping.

I’m not so sure the townsfolk have the strength to give the pirates the “heave ho” which is why I recommend taking Ed’s idea and expanding it by sinking all boats, destroying every dock, every business that caters to the pirates. Yes, it is horrible that we would be destroying very poor people’s ability to make a living. Spreading some green as compensation for legitimate boat and business owners would help there. But it has to hit home to everyone in those towns and villages that the pirates are more than a liability.

I got the idea for this post from a piece on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood entitled “Bond Forever, Bourne Forgotten” where John Scott Lewinski reports on Entertainment Weekly’s “All Time Coolest Heroes in Pop Culture.”

The list is a triumph for conservative values - with some notable exceptions. Placing Harry Potter at #4 was probably a sop to the success of the franchise but the “kids as heroes” theme is more suited to Saturday morning TV than iconic film making. True, Harry fights evil but the last couple of films he has demonstrated a debilitating introspection bordering on narcissism where he wonders whether he is, in fact, as evil as the dark lord who wants to kill him. As Potter reaches adolescence, he is cursed with the doubts and confusion that roil the psyche of most teenager’s and cause all kinds of trouble including bad decision making and an attraction to “the forbidden.” While this makes for excellent filmaking (the movies are an example of pop culture at its best), I question whether Potter should be included on such a heroic list.

Heroes do not question their motivations. By definition, moral clarity is is at the center of their heroic nature and is why the life lessons their deeds impart are so important. There are no tragic heroes in EW’s list which is probably as it should be. Hollywood’s Dream Machine has had our heroes living happily ever after for 100 years and any break with that tradition has been usually met with audience resistance.There are exceptions, of course, but few producers wish to back a project where a nearly pure hero meets their end.

There a few others on the list that should raise eyebrows including Nancy Drew (#17), Bufffy the Vampire Slayer from the TV series (#8), Roxy Brown, Pam Greir’s Blaxploitation film character (#13) and Sydney Bristow from Alias (#20). Not coincidentally, they are all women which, I believe, cheapens Ellen Ripley (Alien) high ranking (#5). Out of that bunch, I might have put Greir’s character in the bottom 5 and tossed the rest. It appears that an ubiquitous form of political correctness infected this list to some degree but not so much as to totally delegitimize it.

Others on the list are mis-ranked in my opinion. Jack Bauer at #16? Superman (Christopher Reeves) at a lofty #3? Christian Bale’s Batman at #18? And perhaps the most egregious mis-ranking of all - Gary Cooper’s Will Kane from High Noon at a lowly #14. By contrast, aside from the aforementioned Superman at a much too high #3, there is Han Solo at #7, Mad Max at #11 and Captain Kirk at #12. I would have crowded all of those selections somewhere near the bottom with the exception of Solo who I would place somewhere between 10-15.

Of course, it’s all in fun and we shouldn’t get too exercised over a few additions made for politically correct reasons or a few mis-rankings due, no doubt, to the personal preferences of EW editors.A few months ago I took a stab at a “heroes list” by developing my “10 Favorite Mythic Heroes of all Time.” The list was almost entirely made up of literary and legendary heroes with a couple of exceptions including John Wayne who appears nowhere on the EW list and featured the pulp fiction icon, Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter of Mars as my #1 mythic hero.

I didn’t consciously seek out mythic heroes who reflected my conservative values but my choices could hardly have been otherwise. Running down the EW list, I was amazed to find that to one degree or another, most of the icons on that list held to the best of conservative values to see them through their ordeals. Aside from having no trouble identifying which side they should be on in the struggle of good versus evil, most of the heroes on that list demonstrated core beliefs that are usually ascribed to conservatism.

Perhaps the most obvious trait in most of these heroes is their desire to bring order to chaos by battling the agents of evil. A related theme is their desire to preserve traditional society (or the status quo) as recognizable evil seeks to alter society (or community) for the worse. It bears mentioning here that conservatives are not against change as long as it is firmly rooted in values and traditions of the past. The change being sought by most of these heroe’s antagonists would be achieved after tearing down tradition and fomenting an alien way of life that would be demonstrably inferior to what it was replacing.

The “lone hero” motif is also prevalent among the chosen. This has been a staple of Hollywood for as long as the film industry has existed and hearkens to an American past where icons like Daniel Boone, Davey Crockett, Kit Carson, and the lone Mountain Man battled Mother Nature and native Americans in order to bring white civilization and justice to the frontier. One can argue how heroic in real life those men truly were but their mythic status, sealed by eastern writers in the cheap dime novels of the time (the “Hollywood” of the 19th century) who fictionalized their exploits to a public eager for American heroes, gave us larger than life figures to look up to and admire.

This kind of rugged individualism - in many cases on the list, man against “the system” or a pitiless bureaucracy - is perhaps the most celebrated conservative trait in American history. So it is not surprising that so many heroes in the EW rankings would be of that mold.

Our heroes on the list also celebrate a belief that human nature is a constant and that a just moral order is necessary for a society to survive. Evil exists because unless his passions are governed by enduring moral precepts, man gives into the temptation to try and dominate his fellows. This is what historian Page Smith referred to as a “Classical Christian Consciousness” that has been at the heart of conservatism since the founding of the republic. John McClane may be a foul mouthed lout, but his fight with terrorists is as much a battle against nihilism - a concept alien to his strong identity as a New York City cop - as it is to save his wife. Jack Bauer may be a thuggish brute but his sense of duty is eternally connected to his belief that society must be protected from the Visigoths that seek to sack and burn America.

This is not to say there are no heroic liberals in pop culture who probably should have been on that list. I would have included Neo from the Matrix franchise whose selflessness and desire to sacrifice himself for the greater good represents the best values that a classically liberal hero should aspire. Another liberal icon not on the list would be Jason Bourne (actually a totally made up character having little in common with the literary figure created by Robert Ludlum). But Bourne exhibits a brave and compelling sense of self sacrifice and personal morality even if he is wildly conflicted about the moral ambiguity of being an assassin.

And that brings me to the #1 hero on the EW list. James Bond is the anti-Bourne - at least as far as how the two characters have been transferred to celluloid. In his Big Hollywood piece, Lewinsky makes some salient points about the two heroes:

Damon or Greengrass seem obsessed with attacking the James Bond films and the character himself every chance they get. Mixing up a bitter soup of professional envy at Bond’s legacy and success, personal insecurity at producing movies beholden to Bond and (of course) self-righteous political arrogance, both artists froth at every opportunity to brand Ian Fleming’s creation a soulless killer. Ignoring Bond’s efforts to battle terrorism and global crime, they stamp him a militarist imperialist misogynist.

That’s a lot of “ist”s to heap on a fictional character, and the Damon/Greengrass vitriol festival seems unwilling to turn the same critical eye toward their own non-corporeal screen creation. While Robert Ludlum’s character is an impressive and skilled killing machine, the movie Bourne is gloomy, bitter, self-absorbed and motivated only by personal revenge and the desire to be left alone (a trait of questionable heroic value).

But Bourne fights predominantly middle-aged white men in suits who are part of the military and intelligence establishments. Combine that with the character’s inherent narcissism, and he’s the perfect screen hero for the hard left.

But EW left him out of their Top 20 — a decision that could indicate Bourne is already fading into also-ran spy status as Daniel Craig and the Bond franchise flourish

Ian Fleming and Robert Ludlum crafted the personaes of their two heroes in very different times. Ludlum especially would have been horrifically disappointed in the way Hollywood brought his brooding, conflicted, and yet gentle and compassionate David Webb/Jason Bourne to the screen.

The most egregious sin was making Bourne a real assassin and not the CIA cutout who was created to smoke out the world’s #1 terrorist - Carlos the Jackal. Ludlum, an actor and producer, had little or no knowledge of real CIA operations which is why his villains always worked for rogue elements in the government and intelligence services usually manipulated by some faceless corporation. But the cutout Bourne (who never assassinated anyone, only taking credit for the killings by others through a complex gaming of the terrorist underworld), battled inner demons caused by his amnesia more than any regret at the lives he was forced to take when he went on the run with his beloved Marie. It was she (who he ended up marrying and not leaving at the bottom of some river in India) who never stopped believing that at bottom, he was a good man and not a cold killer. (See the miniseries The Bourne Identity from 1988 which is more faithful to the literary Bourne in many respects but which suffers by featuring the rather tepid performance of Richard Chamberlain in the title role.)

By contrast, the last two actors to play James Bond have nearly gotten the character right (and the early Sean Connery efforts also reflected an identity closer to Fleming’s vision than the clowns who played him subsequently). Both Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig have a certain coldness about them that Fleming would have accepted. Brosnan was a little more playful than the literary Bond but had a much more pronounced sense of fatalism than any other actor who has portrayed the icon. Craig, on the other hand, obviously read and absorbed the literary Bond better than all of them; The sense of danger when he enters the room (that was an aphrodisiac to women), the smoldering violence that exists just below the surface, and a Jack Bauer-like sense of duty all combine to make Craig’s portrayal ring truer than other Bond portrayals on screen.

But the movie icons Bourne and Bond also reflect differences in the cultural touchstones each uses to exhibit their heroic qualities. Early incarnations of the screen bond fought the criminal enterprise SPECTRE which exceeded even the KGB in evil intent. Only later did Bond join the cold war and battle communists which is not inherently a conservative motif but given the times, certainly represented the thinking of most conservatives as opposed to most liberals. Bond was battling the evil of communism and, like Jack Bauer, had a clear moral mandate to kill while fighting that war.

Bourne, on the other hand, kills solely in self defense and not for any greater good - unless you believe exposing CIA operations a “greater good” as most on the left clearly do. There is also no moral certitude in what he does unless you consider his personal desire for revenge against those who “turned him into an assassin” after he had volunteered to be one a moral justification for going after Treadstone and Blackbriar. Bourne becomes the epitome of liberal angst and uncertainty by first, wanting to apologize to the families of his victims and on top of that, refusing to take personal responsibility for his own life choices in volunteering to “save American lives” by becoming a killer. It’s not his fault he’s an assassin. It’s Treadstone’s. And while this loopy logic might sit well with many on the left, it weakens his moral arguments to take down the rogue operations while negating any claim Bourne might have to the kind of moral superiority over his enemies that Bond clearly demonstrates.

Bond does not lose sleep over killing his targets although his internal conflicts are paralyzing at times. I think that Judi Dench’s “M” is the perfect foil for Craig’s Bond in that she appears to program Bond to carry out his missions by expertly pushing his psychological buttons. In the end, Bond performs and succeeds due to his own innate abilities and trust that his cause is just. It is anachronistic in these times but that’s what makes him so effective. Inevitably, his belief in himself is his greatest weapon.

Admittedly, Bond is #1 more because of enduring popularity of the films and legendary status of the character, not because his actions are animated by conservative principles. But for all the complaining we conservatives do about Hollywood not making movies with conservative themes, the “coolest heroes” on the Entertainment Weekly’s list remind us that such is not always the case.

With Democrats retreating on some of President Obama’s agenda items, the President went on TV last night to try and drum up some grass roots support for his budget and bail out policies.

It’s getting to be a tough sell - both for Congress and the American people. I thought the president did a good job of presenting his case, boiling down complex ideas and concepts into digestible chunks. He did less well in responding to some very pointed questions from the press on AIG, the mess at Treasury, and the building perception that he is taking the country somewhere it doesn’t want to go.

But all in all, I’d grade Obama’s performance a solid B-. And I’m sure, he’d take that grade and run given the dismal fortnight his Administration has endured.

It struck me watching our president last night(and was reinforced after reading the transcript), that President Obama knows about as much economics theory as I do - perhaps less. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t matter because my knowledge of the “dismal science” is slightly above that of a three toed sloth and trying to come to grips with what our government has been doing lately is something akin to watching the above mentioned sloth attempt to climb down from a tree; an extremely slow process with no guarantee I’ll ever make it.

Surely the president couldn’t have been serious when he said this:

Finally, the most critical part of our strategy is to ensure that we do not return to an economic cycle of bubble and bust in this country. We know that an economy built on reckless speculation, inflated home prices, and maxed-out credit cards does not create lasting wealth. It creates the illusion of prosperity, and it’s endangered us all.

The budget I submitted to Congress will build our economic recovery on a stronger foundation so that we don’t face another crisis like this 10 or 20 years from now.

We invest in the renewable sources of energy that will lead to new jobs, new businesses, and less dependence on foreign oil. We invest in our schools and our teachers, so that our children have the skills they need to compete with any workers in the world.

We invest in reform that will bring down the cost of health care for families, businesses and our government.

And in this budget, we have — we have to make the tough choices necessary to cut our deficit in half by the end of my first term, even under the most pessimistic estimates.

Returning to “an economic cycle of bubble and bust” is, I’m afraid, historically unavoidable. If you are going to have free markets, you are going to have periods of prosperity and periods where the markets “correct” imbalances. If Obama wishes to repeal the business cycle, he will need to throw the idea of free market capitalism under the bus - something he has shown great eagerness to do.

As for the rest, how renewable energy companies will avoid being caught in the business cycle he doesn’t deign to tell us. Presumably, these companies will be subject to the same market forces that all other start ups are which means most will fail while the precious few winners will thrive. And since no western country has yet figured out how to get the cost of health care under control without rationing, it’s no wonder that Obama didn’t mention it since most Americans would recoil at some of the practices found in nation’s as diverse as Canada and Japan.

But all this is beside the point. With most inside the beltway pundits having determined Obama’s “honeymoon” is over, the president’s ability to dominate the agenda and pretty much get almost everything he wants is slipping away. His personal popularity remains very high which counts for a lot (despite his supporters ignoring his request for the most part last weekend to sign up their neighbors for Obama’s army). The three million contributors to his campaign are still there, waiting to be activated to put pressure on Congress to enact his ambitious and ruinously expensive agenda. So far, they have been quiescent. It is way to soon to tell whether it’s because the Administration hasn’t made a supreme effort to motivate them or because they were a mirage all along. We shall see.

Even if the president can’t get his supporters off their duffs to lobby for him and even if his short lived honeymoon may be coming to an end, the president still has one weapon in his arsenal that he will apparently continue to use in order to get his budget passed.

And that weapon is fear:

At the end of the day, the best way to bring our deficit down in the long run is not with a budget that continues the very same policies that have led us to a narrow prosperity and massive debt. It’s with a budget that leads to broad economic growth by moving from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest.

And that’s why clean energy jobs and businesses will do all across America. That’s what a highly skilled workforce can do all across America. That’s what an efficient health care system that controls costs and entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid will do.

That’s why this budget is inseparable from this recovery: because it is what lays the foundation for a secure and lasting prosperity.

The fact is, his budget does continue “the very same policies that have led us to a narrow prosperity.” It just shifts the wealth around a bit. To believe that this will lead to an era of “save and invest” is ludicrous. And if it does, our prosperity will be very narrow indeed. Will Obama’s budget change people’s attitudes about “maxing out their credit cards” and piling on debt? I would say that a psychiatrist is called for at the White House if our president believes that.

The “save and invest” model was excellent for the 1950’s and 60’s when America was the workshop of the world and manufacturing was such a huge component of our economy. The American brand was so dominant that people could afford to put something away every week at 2-3% in a savings account because economic growth wasn’t as dependent on spending. Dollars churned through the economy mostly in the same community they were invested.

But we don’t make much here anymore and markets are now global. The economy is based - for better or worse - on consumer spending. More savings and investment would be very good as well as the notion that Americans shouldn’t go into hock up to their eyeballs. But what Obama is calling for is a massive reordering of economic priorities. And since he can’t realistically expect his budget to do that, he is simply fear mongering when he tries and connect the budget to the recovery.

It’s the only weapon he has used since he took office to get what he wants. He successfully frightened Congress into passing his stim bill (which no one read). He has used the specter of economic collapse to bail out his friends in the UAW. And he has deliberately fostered the notion that everyone agrees with him that all of these steps are necessary to “save” the economy. Opposition to his policies are politically motivated and insincere with the GOP hoping for catastrophe.

It has been effective in the past so why not go to the well again on the budget? But his act may be wearing a little thin with Congress and the people themselves may be tiring of listening to their own president trying to scare them into making it his way or the highway.

One thing appears certain - he has a helluva fight on his hands with a budding coalition of Republicans and blue dog Democrats who may eschew Obama’s fear mongering for crafting a budget that they can be re-elected on in 2010. By then, all the fear mongering in the world by the president will not hide the damage he has done to the economy or the violence he has done to the free market.

Since there isn’t a ghost of a chance that the Times would ever publish a letter in its entirety written by me, I thought I would use my position as associate editor of American Thinker to respond to Bob Herbert’s laughably ignorant call for another airport in the Chicago area to be located south of the city.

To briefly sum up Mr. Herbert’s column, he believes that the jobs that would be created at the proposed airport near Peotone, Illinois would be just the ticket to get the economy moving on the terminally economically ill south side of Chicago. His fantasy airport would include minimal taxpayer financing, little chance for corrupt contract letting, little chance for political interference, and is just the thing to relieve traffic congestion at O’Hare.

My response:

To the Editor:

I want to congratulate Bob Herbert on his new job as Chief Shill and Water Carrier for Representative Jesse Jackson whose proposal to build an airport south of the city near Peotone, IL was highlighted in Mr. Herbert’s column of March 13 (”Flying Blind in Chicago). I sincerely hope Mr. Herbert will have time to keep writing columns for your newspaper as he has given me endless hours of amusement with his deadpan comedic take on many issues and personalities. Rep. Jackson would very much like to be a senator and to have the august Mr. Herbert promoting the project he hopes to use to ride to Washington will no doubt assist him greatly when it comes time to campaign for the slot being vacated by Roland Burris in 2010 - and perhaps sooner if Mr. Burris can’t get his story straight about his contacts with our late lamented governor Rod Blagojevich.

As for Mr. Herbert’s promoting the Peotone airport, I found several of his observations regarding the efficacy of such a project curious, if not shockingly ignorant. I realize that Mr. Herbert, living as he does in the New York City area, no doubt sees us here in far off Chicagoland as some exotic form of animal life. I can assure Mr. Herbert that such is not the case, that we all get up in the morning and put our pants on one leg at a time just as he does in New York — that is, if they’re still wearing pants there. We may be a little behind fashion wise out in the sticks so I wouldn’t want to jump to any conclusions.

But Mr. Herbert made some claims about the proposed Peotone airport that I would like to address, namely:

It has long been known that a third airport is needed in the Chicago metropolitan area…

Mr. Herbert is correct. It has long been known by those in favor of buying up a stupendous amount of the richest, most fertile farmland in the world - 24,000 acres which is more than 3 times the size of O’Hare - for an airport that the FAA claims is not needed. It is also a well known fact that a third airport is needed if Jesse Jackson, Jr. is going to be elected Senator from Illinois. And it is well known among certain well connected Illinois businesses and politicians that we need another airport for continued graft and corruption.

It may shock Mr. Herbert and readers in New York, but Illinois does not feature the cleanest politics in its state and local government. Surprising as it may be, we have had some minor problems from time to time with the honesty and integrity of our politicians. Scientists studying this problem point to many of our pols secreting an adhesive substance on their fingers that money can’t help but stick to - especially when that money belongs to the taxpayer. It is not a terminal illness but debilitating nonetheless as it gets in the way of good, clean government.

I’m sure Mr. Herbert was unaware of these facts when he wrote this:

The airport would be financed and built by two firms with vast airport experience: LCOR, which owns and operates International Terminal 4 at Kennedy Airport in New York, and SNC-Lavalin, which has financed and operates airports in Europe, Canada, South America and elsewhere.

Um…yes. But financing the actual construction of the airport is a small part of the cost involved. Current plans call for massive amounts of road building, infrastructure improvements, not to mention some kind of mass transit plan that would have to be implemented to get people from the city out to Peotone 40 miles away. 

Illinois pols are licking their chops at the prospect of so much loose cash to be spread around.

Then there’s this bit of nonsense:

There are many advantages to this project, in addition to the private funding. The airport would be specifically designed to serve low-cost carriers that cannot afford to build and operate their own terminals. They would arrive and depart at “common-use” gates that are far more economical.

Another feature of the airport design is that it is “market driven,” meaning that it would be relatively small when it opened and could easily be expanded as demand increased.

Those “low cost carriers” are already using other airports in the region. And the idiocy of building a small airport 40 miles from downtown Chicago that could “easily be expanded” begs the question; why build infrastructure and roads for a major airport and then open a facility designed not to relieve O’Hare congestion but simply steal revenue and traffic from other small towns like Rockford, Champaign, or even Gary, Indiana which has just received FAA permission to build another runway?

The FAA is keen on expanding the airports in Milwaukee and Gary, rightly believing that this is the regional answer to O’Hare’s problems. The airlines are against Peotone not because, as Herbert believes they “are not interested in seeing low-cost competition flying in and out of a spanking new airport, especially one with enormous growth potential…” but because they have crunched the numbers and know that future traffic will be down and there is no need to have an airport with “enormous growth potential.” It is an utter fantasy to believe that Peotone would ever grow large enough to justify major carriers moving there.

Finally, Herbert is being too kind to some politicians when he says, “Simply stated, the politicians can’t get their act together.”

Is he serious? Mayor Daley has his act together just fine and will oppose a third airport in Peotone to his last breath. It’s no act, either. Daley and Jackson hate each other with a passion and Hizzoner will not only do everything in his considerable power to deny him the Democratic nomination for Senator but will fight any loss in revenue from O’Hare. Currently, there is an $8 passenger fee that streams into Daley’s hands for everyone flying in and out of O’Hare. There are also extraordinarily lucrative concessions at the airport - food, shops, parking, limos, taxis, buses, and the motherlode that comes in from towing cars from in front of the terminal left by people who didn’t believe the signs and helped their grandma with her bags anyway. These concessions represent not only cash, but marvelous opportunities to reward cronies - cronies like Barack Obama’s friend Tony Rezko who had a minority front for him so he could open restaurants in the terminals.

And Daley, who is expanding O’Hare to the tune of $15 billion and who is rubbing his hands together in anticipation of getting billions in stim money to help him finance it, will make it a cold day in hell before any other wasteful airport project gets in the way of funding his own albatross of an airport project.

Jesse Jackson, Jr. knows all of this - knows that he can claim that Peotone will set new standards for government cleanliness and incorruptible contracting all he wants but in the end, the state will be stuck with a white elephant of an airport, sprawling in the middle of nowhere and the dirty politicians and their cronies will feast as they always feast on whatever taxpayer money is allocated for this boondoggle.  

If Mr. Herbert wants to kiss up to Rep. Jackson, that’s his business. But perhaps he should learn a little of Illinois politics before he spouts off about things of which he knows little or nothing.

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

CNBC’s Rick Santelli hit a raw nerve with his rant against President Obama’s mortgage bailout plan on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade - a 10,000 volt charge of energy and anger that hit the internet with a force that transcended politics and spilled over into popular culture.

His words fell like a jackhammer on the hearts and souls of conservatives who had been struggling in recent weeks to define what was making them so uneasy about President Obama’s “savior based economy.” At stake; the soul of America - the very essence of what makes us different from other countries. Self reliance, personal responsibility, a belief that individuals count for more than the group, and a well developed sense of justice and fair play are being thrown under the bus. They are being tossed in favor of a bail out culture that spits on self reliance, sneers at personal responsibility, lumps Americans into manageable (and malleable) groups of victims, and penalizes those who play by the rules.

These are not the attributes that have animated the American heart since our founding. Rather, it is those cornerstone ideals mentioned above that make up the crux of what it means to be an American. And these values are under attack by a president who is using the economic crisis as an excuse to fundamentally alter the relationship between the governed and the governors - a change that the president never mentioned during his run for the presidency and is accomplishing by means of executive diktat and legislative fiat.

By destroying “American exceptionalism” - a concept that has come under increasing attack by the left over the years - the president, vigorously backed by his base of democratic socialists, is seeking to elevate the importance of government over the primacy of the individual - as clear a violation of the intent of the Constitution as anything President Bush ever did in the name of protecting us. The President may not be shredding the Constitution but he his tearing asunder the spirit of our founding document. What will be left after he is done will be a lifeless husk, a shadow of the way the Founders saw themselves and how we, the inheritors of their dreams, have betrayed their fundamental beliefs about man’s relationship to government.

President Obama apparently believes it is necessary to destroy who we are to save us. Most conservatives disagree. I don’t doubt the president has the best of intentions. Perhaps he even thinks that what he is proposing is not that radical, not so fundamentally abhorrent to I believe a majority of Americans. It is certain he thinks he is doing it for our own good.

But in his determination to solve our severe economic problems, he appears willing to seek solutions that undermine the fabric that sustained our ancestors through even tougher times than these. He is using a nuclear bomb where a scalpel is called for. And the question of whether there will be much of a patient left after he is done goes unanswered.

Mr. Santelli’s rant - a bracing, emotional explosion that elevated flagging spirits and galvanized the hearts of netwise conservatives - is a fine catalyst but to what end? A “tea party” is being planned for several cities on July 4 but realistically, can you say that this is the beginning of a mass movement to oppose the Obama Dependency? Frankly, I see no evidence that millions of people are moving in that direction. And by the time the 4th rolls around, how many who are so excited today will show up?

I don’t doubt the passion Mr. Santelli has generated among conservatives. I just doubt its staying power. To have any effect at all, millions must stand up and make their voices heard. So far, I don’t hear them. In fact, by large majorities, the American people are extremely uneasy about what Mr. Obama is doing but are either so in thrall to his personae or so frightened of losing their jobs that they are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Of course, the president stokes this fear at every opportunity - something about which even Bill Clinton is becoming concerned.

But we are seeing only the beginning of massive government intervention and takeover of the economy. What will the majority of people say when Treasury Secretary Geithner finally comes up with details of his plan for TARP II that may cost taxpayers more than a trillion dollars? or Stimulus, The Sequel? Or this mortgage bail out plan that currently stands at $75 billion but that some administration-friendly economists say could run closer to $200 billion? And don’t forget the health insurance plan that will almost certainly have a price tag in the hundreds of billions.

For each, there will be Obama out front, telling us we must have this spending plan or that bail out measure or all is lost. He will slam these bills through Congress in the first 6 months of his presidency because after that, even his own party will balk. By then, it will be way too late - the transformation of America will be complete and it will just be a matter of administering what America will have become; a series of dependent duchies with the federal government dictating the winners and losers in our economy while overseeing a massive transfer of wealth.

It can’t be stopped. Conservatives don’t have the votes. All we can do is rant like Mr. Santelli. But after the feel good rhetoric and the shot in the arm, we are left with a Red Bull rush - a splash of energy and excitement that will eventually fade and leave us feeling groggy and sluggish. Not for all of us, of course. But if conservatives are expecting to build mass opposition to the president using Mr. Santelli’s outburst, that would be wishful thinking indeed. Such a cause needs organization, volunteers, and most of all, money.

Michelle Malkin is trying and if anyone can keep the right at an emotional high, it’s her. But so much more is needed to make an impact that I fear even such noble efforts are a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

When ordinary Americans in their millions become involved, I will be glad to hop aboard the bandwagon and wave the bloody shirt from the battlements. Until then, I think I’m already crashing from my Santelli Energy Drink and feel like taking a nap.

UPDATE

Eeeesh - re-reading this piece, I see that it came out much more negatively than I was actually thinking. Sorry - don’t feel like a massive rewrite but allow me a few points that I should have made above.

1. It is early yet. Much of my negativity is based on the idea that I don’t see the kind of mass groundswell of support beyond the environs of the conservative internet (including social networking sites). I may yet be proved wrong if this is actually the beginnings of a mass movement against dependency.

2. One side benefit is that this will probably serve as a catalyst to organize the right side of the internet in ways that we can only guess at now. I would watch a couple of websites like The Next Right and Rebuild the Party to see how those very smart folks latch on and try and lead this movement.

3. It was not my intent to dampen spirits just as it was not my intent during the campaign when I wrote gloomy analyses of McCain’s chances to discourage anyone from voting. Those who will make the argument that I am trying to spoil the party should really grow up a little. I am a rationalist and am offering my opinion, seeing the situation with gimlet eyed reason and skepticism. I will be overjoyed if I am wrong. But dreaming of a mass movement and creating one out of nothing are two different propositions. We want our dreams to come true but there is a gargantuan amount of work to be done in order to realize that dream. It can’t be done in months. But it very well may bear fruit in 2010.

Remember the controversy in Washington a few years back when a white aide to Mayor Williams made the mistake of saying “niggardly” when talking about the amount of federal funds allocated for some program?

Do you remember how some racialists hit the ceiling and Williams was forced to fire his aide?

Washington, DC’s black Mayor, Anthony Williams, gladly accepted the resignation of his white staff member, David Howard, because Mr. Howard uttered the word ‘niggardly’ in a private staff meeting.

Webster’s Tenth Edition defines the word ‘niggardly’ to “grudgingly mean about spending or granting”.  The Barnhard Dictionary of Etymology traces the origins of ‘niggardly’ to the 1300’s, and to the words ‘nig’ and ‘ignon’, meaning “miser” in Middle English.  No where in any of these references is any mention of racial connotations associated with the word ‘niggardly’.

In other words, it’s a perfectly good and useful word.  But there is the unfortunate coincidence that it starts with the same four letters as the word “nigger”.  The news media are so loathe to use the “N” word, that they’ve been substituting the phrase “racial slur”, as in “…they mistook the word ‘niggardly’ for a racial slur…”

Washington, DC’s population is 60% black, and it’s citizens have been very critical of Mayor Williams for “not being black enough” — especially because he hired several well-qualified whites to help him run this troubled city.

It was a perfect example of political correctness in the media plus the conniving racial grievance mongers who knew full well that “niggardly” is a perfectly acceptable word, does not have anything to do with race, and the farthest thing from Mr. Howard’s mind when he uttered it was to make a racial slur.

Reality, intent, and Webster’s Dictionary matter little to the racialists. It is their mission in life to gin up outrage over anything that could possibly be construed as racist - even when it is clearly and definitively not.

For we are not talking about the redress of a grievances but rather the exercise of power - raw, in your face, power for power’s sake. When Al Sharpton announced that the New York Post cartoon depicting two white police officers who have just shot a chimp with the caption “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill” was worse than the “nappy headed ho” comment by Don Imus, you knew that the writing was on the wall and the New York Post was in trouble.

And, despite the fact that the cartoon had nothing to do with Obama (it referred to the recent story about a chimp that was shot dead by police after it mauled a woman), the racialists, and their white toadies who saw an opportunity to attack Post owner Rupert Murdoch, put the pedal to the metal and came out in full throated howls of outrage over this “slurring” of Obama.

Here’s the offending cartoon:

The chimp does not resemble the president which is the usual practice for racist cartoons. Besides, anyone with half a brain and who follows the news knows full well Obama did not write the bill. The cartoon refers to the fact that the chimp was mentally ill hence, the idea that the person (people) who wrote the stimulus bill - Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid - should have their heads examined.

There were no lack of warnings before Obama was elected that this would be the tactic of the left to stifle dissent. I wrote at the time they would be crazy NOT to use the race card as early and often as they could. It is the most powerful political weapon the left and the Democrats have at their disposal and it is something their opponents cannot hope to counter or match.

It appears that the mostly white Huffington Post  got the ball rolling as their excellent but partisan political reporter Sam Stein wrote the initial article decrying the portrayal  of Obama in such a fashion. It was picked up by the netnuts and before you knew it, Al Sharpton was in front of the Post building carrying on about the “racial smear.”

It was all over cable news in a matter of hours. Condemnations emanated from the usual quarters in media and academia - all pretending that the cartoon was about Obama and not a crazy dead chimp who had mauled a woman.

The point had absolutely nothing to do with the cartoon but that opposition must be squashed and opponents of the administration intimidated. What surprised me is that it was done with Nazi-like efficiency. Old Joe Goebbels couldn’t have carried it off better.

Like a grotesque Kabuki dance where everyone knows their parts and what movements they should make, this self-orchestrated gaggle of left wing zealots appeared almost out of nowhere, all saying the same thing, all trying to shame the Post into a humiliating retraction. Today, they succeeded - to a certain extent:

It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill.

Period.

But it has been taken as something else - as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism.

This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize.

However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past - and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback.

To them, no apology is due.

Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon - even as the opportunists seek to make it something else.

The Post, I’m afraid, is dreaming. A cartoon will never be “just a cartoon” as long as there are dishonest, unscrupulous, greedy (donations to Sharpton’s personal piggy bank of an “activist group” probably surged so that the good Reverend will no doubt buy himself a couple of additional $3000 suits), and shameless partisans who will seek to use the excuse of President Obama’s race to invent, exaggerate, or or simply lie about any criticisms of the president they believe they can get away with employing the race card.

Unfortunately, for the vast majority of Americans who don’t follow the news closely, they will more often than not be successful. The only way to stop this slide into authoritarianism is for the press to do its job and act as unbiased referee between those in power and those in opposition.

A vain hope given how in the tank the press is at this point for Obama.