http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4688 Now we’ll see how much debates really matter. Often they don’t matter much. But the presidential debate Wednesday night might matter a great deal, not because of what the candidates said, but what the debate told us about who the candidates really are. Barack Obama was revealed to be the empty suit with a […]
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2012/10/04/the-character-test-in-the-2012-election/ The Romney the world saw at last night’s debate — confident, enthusiastic about his ideas, hopeful and articulate — is no stranger to those fortunate enough to have heard him speak in person during the past year. I reported in this space on a primary campaign breakfast in November 2011 where Romney won me […]
Homemade tragedy The country’s Arab parliamentarians managed this week to surpass even their own most strident incitement against the state that bankrolls them and guarantees their rights to subvert it. Speaking in Sakhnin at the 12th memorial to the 13 Arabs shot dead during the October 2000 riots, MKs Ahmed Tibi and Taleb a-Sanaa in […]
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=2630 Changing the debate I have not made a secret of the fact that I would vote for Bozo the Clown or Donald Duck — or even a box of cornflakes — before ever casting a ballot for Barack Obama. Not only because of his disastrous foreign policy, which directly affects me as an Israeli, […]
NO URL HERE BUT A LOT OF INSIGHT FROM MY FRIEND AND E-PAL JAN POLLER…..FEEL FREE TO CIRCULATE
Last Night the Façade Crumbled
The debate was stunning – not for Romney’s performance but for the disappearance of Obama’s aura.
For all of these years, we were told about Obama’s coolness, his oratory skills, his brilliance, and his ability to solve problems with a few wags of his golden tongue. Last night, we saw the real Obama, the one without the teleprompter, without the fawning media and the adoring crowds.
What we saw was a fearful, insecure man, a man having to perform solo. He was not up to the task. He is not up to the task and he won’t be up to the task. We saw the real Obama.
We have been conned and we know that we have been conned. We have an actor playing President reading scripts written by others, some open but most hidden in the shadows.
After watching his sad performance during the debate, we can understand why he did not meet with Benyamin Netanyahu and other world leaders. What could he say to Netanyahu? Could he say, “With my Golden Tongue I will get the Ayatollahs to be your good friends”? Could he even say “I will get them to stop the bomb project”?
Now we can understand why he ran off to Vegas after the attacks on the consulate in Benghazi. When a person doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t know what to say he runs to a familiar, comfortable place. To Obama that place is campaigning in front of an adoring audience with Teleprompters telling him what to say. That doesn’t work on the international stage, when you have to deal with not-so-friendly world leaders.
We have heard the stories about the night Bin Laden was executed, where Valerie Jarret didn’t want bin Laden executed and Leon Panetta and/or Hilary Clinton gave the go-ahead. The man does not make decisions. Those are made by others and he just presents them and takes credit for them. On stage last night, he had no one to make decisions, to tell him what to say. He had to reach inside himself and recall the mighty phrases of his past performances. They weren’t so might on stage.
There is no returning from the personal disaster that we saw last night. There is no covering up the real Obama. It is only going to get worse for him. What is he going to say about Libya? What can he say?
What can he say about his running to the campaign trail instead of dealing with these problems?
Frank Luntz had a focus group of 25 to 30 undecided voters. After the debate, only two supported re-electing Obama.
Obama is finished.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/massacre_leaves_liberals_in_tears_oHzj12IcI5XIZDbO4dGQ4K Slaughter. It was a slaughter. Mitt Romney put on the most commanding presidential debate performance of the insta-commentary era. One could literally watch, on Facebook and Twitter, hundreds of people on both sides of the political divide react in real time as the debate went on. Their reactions were identical, though their moods were […]
http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/
In the annals of moral idiocy, the Marxist British historian Eric Hobsbawm, who died yesterday at 95, will ever enjoy a conspicuous place. A gifted and prolific writer, the Egyptian-born Hobsbawm was utterly absorbed by the ideology that fired his youthful dreams of utopia. How he must have savored the fact that he was born in 1917, the year of the Bolshevist revolution in Russia which ushered in so much poverty, misery, terror, and freedom-blighting totalitarian oppression. “The dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me,” Hobsbawm wrote in his memoir Interesting Times in 2002, “I have abandoned, nay, rejected it, but it has not been obliterated. To this day, I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness.”
Indeed. Hobsbawm was adulated by an academic establishment inured to celebrating partisans of totalitarian regimes so long as they are identifiably left-wing totalitarian regimes. Although he claimed to have been victim of a “weaker McCarthyism” that retard advancement of leftists in the UK, Hobsbawm enjoyed a stellar career replete with official honors, preferments, and perquisites. He was showered with honors and academic appointments at home and abroad. His books won all manner of awards. In 1998 he was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honor. But the central fact about Hobsbawm, as about so many doctrinaire leftists, was his willingness to barter real people for imaginary social progress. If he “abandoned, nay rejected” the “dream” of the October Revolution, he never abandoned its animating core: an almost reflexive willingness to sacrifice innocent lives for the sake of a spurious ideal.
The philosopher David Stove once identified “bloodthirstyness” as the motivating force of Communism and its offshoots. Scratch a socialist and you discover a fondness for the gulag. This describes Hobsbawm to a T. In 1994, the venerable historian discussed the former Soviet Union with a television interviewer. What Hobsbawm’s position comes down to, the interviewer suggested, “is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?” Hobsbawm: “Yes.”
I think that says us all we need to know about this repellent figure who has at last gone to his reward.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/intellectuals-rally-to-eulogize-stalinist-eric-hobsbawm/print/
I wasn’t going to write about Eric Hobsbawm, the British historian who died on October 1 at age 95, but after perusing a few obituaries – and learning, from an article by the novelist A.N. Wilson, that on the evening of Hobsbawm’s death the BBC “altered its programme schedule to broadcast an hour-long tribute” – I feel obliged to weigh in. Not about Hobsbawm himself or his work, with which I am not terribly familiar, but about the appallingly widespread readiness to overlook, relativize, or rationalize Communism.
For Hobsbawm, if you didn’t know, was a lifelong Communist. As the British historian Michael Burleigh wrote the other day in the New Yorker, Hobsbawm exhibited to the end “a dogmatic refusal to accept that the Bolshevik Revolution had been a murderous failure. Asked by the Canadian academic and politician Michael Ignatieff on television whether the deaths of 20 million people in the USSR – not to mention the 55 to 65 million victims of Mao’s Great Leap Forward – might have been justified if this Red utopia had been realised, Hobsbawm muttered in the affirmative.” Burleigh did praise Hobsbawm as a historian – but how reliable a historian can you be when everything you write is distorted by ideology? Burleigh admitted himself that Hobsbawm, in his work, routinely whitewashed Communist perfidy. “Such a cosmopolitan thinker,” Burleigh wrote, “had ironically become imprisoned within a deeply provincial ideological ghetto, knowing or caring nothing for the brave Czechs or Poles who resisted Stalin’s stooges, while being manifestly nonplussed by the democratic transformations of Central Europe since 1989-90.” Nothing ironic there at all: Hobsbawm would simply appear to be one of those “intellectuals” for whom ideology is realer and more important than human beings. Burleigh closed with an apt observation: “Hobsbawm’s implacable refusal to recant his views when faced with their grotesque consequences tells us something about the belligerent mindset of the wider British Left” as well as about “the bovine complacency with which, since Mrs Thatcher, the Conservatives have allowed such dubious figures licence to dominate the soft culture of the BBC and our universities.” It’s depressing to note that Hobsbawm’s Communism didn’t prevent Tony Blair from naming him a Companion of Honour in 1998.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/presidential-debate-makes-election-alternatives-clear/print/
Forget all the pre-debate handicapping and advice about what Mitt Romney needed to do or what Barack Obama had to avoid. Last night’s debate clarified the stark choice facing American voters on November 6. On the one hand, we heard a candidate who endorses the limited government, individual rights and freedom, free market economic policies, and personal self-reliance and autonomy that the Constitution was created to protect. On the other hand, we heard a candidate who endorses big government, group rights, redistributionist economic policies, and the progressive ideal that limits freedom and empowers elites to run people’s lives. In this first debate, Romney and the Constitution clearly won, as the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth emanating from the mainstream media prove.
First, many Americans were seeing the real Romney for the first time. Contrary to the fatcat caricature the Obama campaign and its media enablers have been peddling for months, Romney was warm and jocular, and sensitive to the plight of real people who have suffered under Obama’s policies. He easily had the best laugh lines: “Mr. President, you’re entitled to your own airplane and your own house, but not your own facts.” When Obama lied about lowering taxes for the rich, Romney answered, “I have five boys, and I’m used to people saying things over and over, thinking if they repeat it enough it will be true.” He slyly reminded everybody of Joe Biden’s gaffe that the “middle class has been buried the last four years” when he said, “Middle income Americans have been buried.” Romney responded to Obama’s complaint about $3 billion tax breaks for oil companies by contrasting it to the $90 billion for green energy, landing another punch with, “You don’t pick winners and losers, you just pick the losers.” When Romney was asked about spending cuts, he said he’d eliminate programs that are not “important enough to borrow money from China” to pay for them, like PBS, with an apology to moderator Jim Lehrer. And his early jab, “trickle down government,” should enter the political lexicon.
Thank goodness Romney did not heed all the loopy advice from the right….from Peggy Noonan’s vapors to the scolding from some conservative pundits and the drivel from Henry Olsen with “open your heart Mitt” mush.And thank goodness Obama did heed the advice from his handlers and his worshipful subjects from the mainstream media. They all thought he would cruise instead of crash.
Now both sides are criticizing Lehrer who was just right and recognized what a debate should be.
Here were two men on stage with conflicting vision and agenda for the United States and the future in the most important election of our time and Lehrer let them go at each other…punch and counter punch.
How refreshing compared to the insipid moderating of previous debates.
