Yes, the stupid party

Why It's Called "The Stupid Party": GOP Turns Fight Against The Horrors Of ObamaCare Into A Process Story

You know why the GOP loses a lot? Because it deserves to.

Yesterday a bunch of Republican Senators went around to the various Sunday shows and instead of talking about why it's imperative ObamaCare be repealed because of the damage it's doing, they decided to make it about how much they hate Ted Cruz. Some Republicans went as far as to offer Fox News Sunday Host Chris Wallace what he termed, "opposition research" on Cruz.

I think DrewM is right on two key points. First, too many of the Republicans in Congress talk of legislative minutia that is of interest only to insiders. As a result, they miss their chance to convince voters to support them.

Then there is the cowardice factor:

You know why Cruz is so popular? Because he's actually fighting. Maybe it's a losing fight, maybe it's a fight to raise money (though let's not pretend he's the only one doing that) or to raise his popularity (the sight of professional politicians accusing anyone of self-aggrandizement is too precious) but at least he's fighting.

The same thing happened when Rand Paul filibustered over the issue of Presidential authority to order drone strikes anywhere against anyone. Even non-libertarians had to admire his willingness to take on a tough issue.
That said, I think "fighting" conservatives are still fighting the last war in the effort to defund Obamacare. Their opposition is couched in ideological language and American's are not very ideological. Plus, our ideology does not enjoy the support it once did.

To wit:

The usual mantra of "No socialism, Free Enterprise!" just seems inadequate in the face of the current economic realities.

Key fact number one. As Obama moves toward "socialism", he does so at the behest of the "capitalists". It is not as if he is sending paramilitary gangs to take over successful, profitable businesses. Obama, like Bush before him, is compelled to act because the capitalists screwed the pooch, crapped the bed, and then muttered "maybe my bad" when their recklessness sent the financial system off a cliff.

The broad public knows this, and that makes it hard to win them over with cheap slogans about socialist bogeymen.

Related:

Conservatives and messaging

GOP future: It's not the "messaging"

Thinking about thinking, creativity and, innovation

Several recent items that serve as variations on a theme.

Who knew that the classic Eames recliner owes its origin to the US Navy’s search for a better splint in WWII?

All Technology is Assistive Technology

In 1941, the husband-and-wife design team, Charles and Ray Eames, were commissioned by the US Navy to design a lightweight splint for wounded soldiers to get them out of the field more securely. Metal splints of that period weren’t secure enough to hold the leg still, causing unnecessary death from gangrene or shock, blood loss, and so on.

The Eameses’ unpainted wood splint, curved at its edges to keep the leg from falling off, with a targeted set of slots and holes for tying secure restraints.

The Eameses had been working on techniques to mold and bend plywood, and they were able to come up with this splint designconforming to the body without a lot of extra joints and parts. The wood design became a secure, lightweight, nest-able solution, and they produced more than 150,000 such splints for the Navy.

Over the next decade, the Eameses would go on to refine their wood-molding process to create both sculpture and functional design pieces, most notably these celebrated chairs:

Graham Pullin, in his book, Design Meets Disability, cites this story as an example of a seemingly specialized design problema medical aid for disabled soldiersthat inspired a whole aesthetic in modernist furnishings. The chairs that launched a thousand imitators, and a new ethos of simple, organic lines in household objects.

I’ve posted before about David Gelernter’s ideas on creativity which I think apply here.

Killing Creativity

David Gelernter argues in The Muse in the Machine that creativity has three distinctive traits:

1. At base it “is the linking of ideas that are seemingly unrelated.”

2. It is not an incremental process, rather inspiration comes as a bolt from the blue.”

3. It occurs “in a state of unconcentration.” Hence, “hard work does not pay. You can’t achieve inspiration by concentrating hard, by putting your mind to it.”

Gelernter’s framework demonstrates why the nose-to-the-grindstone approach is a drag on creativity:

A. Ideas cannot be linked until the mind acquires them in the first place. Hence, study and reflection are critical.

B. It allows no time for broad study. Yet that is the only way to increase the chances that the right unrelated ideas will be linked. (As Jacques Barzun puts it, “abundant reading develops the original mind.” )

C. Intense focus allows no time for relaxation and reflection. There is not enough time spent in a state of unconcentration-- the state where inspiration occurs.

The mythic stories of scientific discovery support Gelernter's thesis. There are no better examples of the role of relaxed reflection than Archimedes in his bath or Isaac Newton beneath the apple tree.

Next we have an incisive critique of brainstorming:

Brainstorming Is Not Very Creative

Brainstorming has three serious flaws that prevent it from being very effective as an idea generation method: people shouting out ideas is less creative than people writing ideas individually; reserving judgment and prohibiting criticism reduces creativity; and decision makers tend to choose moderately creative ideas over highly creative ideas. The first is easily resolved. The second two are fatal. All three of these flaws have been found and tested through clinical research by individuals and groups that have nothing to gain by finding flaw with brainstorming. Let’s look at the research.

As the author notes the “no criticism” rule works against what we now know about how real creative collaboration works.

Peter Drucker wrote that, in his experience, when anything important was accomplished, it was by “a monomaniac with a mission.” Conventional brainstorming is a poor method to find such people. A delicate flower who cannot defend their idea is not the sort of relentless monomaniac who will drive a project forward in the face of the inevitable obstacles.

Finally, there is this:

It’s Not ‘Mess.’ It’s Creativity.

Our findings have practical implications. There is, for instance, a minimalist design trend taking hold in contemporary office spaces: out of favor are private walled-in offices and even private cubicles. Today’s office environments often involve desk sharing and have minimal “footprints” (smaller office space per worker), which means less room to make a mess.

At the same time, the working world is abuzz about cultivating innovation and creativity, endeavors that our findings suggest might be hampered by the minimalist movement. While cleaning up certainly has its benefits, clean spaces might be too conventional to let inspiration flow.

The minimalist office reflects an antiquated view of work and thinking. It might be fine for work that involves sequential, machine-like thinking (but wouldn’t a machine be even better?) but is wholly unsuited for the lateral thinking that Gelernter is writing about.

This calls to mind C. S. Lewis:

And all the time-- such is the tragicomedy of our situation-- we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that our civilization needs more 'drive' or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity'. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. we make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. we laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the gelding be fruitful.

Which helps to explain the persistence of brainstorming exercises. Executives, having eliminated the prerequisites of creative thinking, must “bid the gelding be fruitful”. Even though the sessions provide little benefit, they at least provide the illusion of action.

Politics over excellence at U. Va.

A Record for the University of Virginia?

According to a story that appeared after the death of Ronald Coase, both Coase and James Buchanan were deliberately pushed out of the University of Virginia for political reasons....

The University of Chicago is said to hold the record for the largest number of Nobel Prizes won by its faculty. Judging by these account, UVA may hold the record for the largest number of (future) Nobel Prizes lost.

Well, well, well

Appeals court overturns DeLay conviction, acquits him

For the second time in the last few years, a high-profile corruption prosecution against a Republican member of Congress has collapsed. This time, it’s Tom DeLay that gets to celebrate, as an appeals court not only overturned his conviction but ordered an acquittal.

Good read

Lee Stranahan:

Duping The Idiots: The Left’s Frankfurt School Denialism

For a decade, the Southern Poverty Law Center and others on the left have been trying to hide and distract from one of the main origins of both radical academia and media hostility towards capitalism: the ideology of cultural Marxism and Critical Theory that arose from the Frankfurt School.

Political Correctness didn’t appear out of thin air…

The SPLC and others dismiss the facts about the German think-tank and its subsequent influence in America as a conspiracy theory. Understanding these attacks is an object lesson in how the left creates self-sustaining mythology by demonizing the people who dare expose their ideology while misdirecting their own followers as to the real story behind liberal ideas.

Like I said

Skip Bayless thinks you need to hear his opinion on everything. But he is not interested in what you think.

Skip Bayless, ESPN2 “First Take” co-host, may be the most hated man in sports

Bayless is stoic as he watches football and waits for Tebow to come in off the bench. He occasionally checks e-mail, but on this night he shuns Twitter. He has more than 1.1 million followers but mostly avoids reading the feedback there. On Twitter, the nice ones ask him to kill himself; the nasty ones say they’ll help him do it.

“It’s like the Wild West,” he says. “Every other response is a death threat.”

Related:

Why do journalists love twitter and hate blogging?

Twitter seems more useful as a way for insiders like Kurtz to extent their brand and magnify their voice.

The agony of the push media guild

That’s what the internet has done to the people who make their living in the old media. Once they lived in a quiet world where they talked and every one else listened. Their work was rarely criticized. Sometimes they heard but they did sometimes hear whispered praise or demurrals from other guild members but it was all very civilized.

Now, unfortunately, the great unwashed have a voice and the push media do not like what they hear.

He joked his way to an important truth

I think most big-time media personalities labor under the same delusion. They think they are smart, funny, and wildly popular. The horrible thing about the new media is that they (sometimes) find out that it just ain't so.

David Frum is a monster

Bryan Preston

The Fall of David Frum

There’s a malevolence to the way Frum trolls conservatives and exploits tragedy that precludes belief that adulthood would make a difference. He is an adult, who is also a nasty piece of work.

Let's not forget that Frum is a serial offender.

Six weeks that saved the world

Originally posted 10 August 2012

In this post, Rev. Donald Sensing makes a powerful case that 6 June 1944 is the most critical day in Western history:

The awful stakes of D-Day

There are many "pivot" days in human history, when the course of human events swung in a new direction because of discrete actions. It is hard to find another moment in all history when so much rested on an outcome of one day as rested on the success of the Allies' landings on Normandy. In military history, no other day in American history compares. The only single day that comes to mind for me right now is the day of the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, when an Athenian army repelled a Persian landing force. The entire future of Western civilization and the idea of democracy itself lay in the balance. And yet even that may day not stand alone as D-Day does because the Persians persisted and the later battles of Plataea and Salamis were probably even more important. So there was no "one day" of paramount importance in the Persian War, even though it was almost certainly the most important war of ancient times.

The success at Normandy validated the strategic assessment of Churchill in the dark days of June 1940:

This is not the decisive point and this is not the decisive moment. That moment will come when Hitler hurls his Luftwaffe against Great Britain. If we can keep command of the air and if we can keep the seas open, we will win it all back for you.

It was an astute judgment but it seemed like wishful thinking to the French. Their generals assured the government that "in three weeks, England will have her neck wrung like a chicken." France made peace with Hitler and left Britain to stand alone.

There is no D-Day in 1944 unless Britain remains defiant and unconquered in the summer and fall of 1940. As Churchill understood, the first crucial battle in the liberation of Europe would take place in the skies over England.

The great French Army was very largely, for the time being, cast back and disturbed by the onrush of a few thousand armoured vehicles. May it not also be that the cause of civilisation itself will be defended by the skill and devotion of a few thousand airmen?

(Speech to Parliament 4 June 1940)

On 1 August 1940, Hitler issued Directive No. 17:

The Luftwaffe will use all the forces at its disposal to destroy the British air force as quickly as possible.

The RAF proved equal to the great challenge. Throughout the summer and fall they battled the Luftwaffe in hundreds of actions in the first great air campaign in history. The Germans never attained control of the air over southern England; without air superiority no invasion was possible.

On 15 September, Hitler put Operation Sea Lion-- the invasion of England-- on hold.

Der Führer had suffered his first strategic setback. Britain remained undefeated and unbowed. The great triumphs that came in the years that followed were only possible because of that momentous victory in 1940.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few

Like the battle of Midway, the Battle of Britain stands out from the most other military turning points in the modern era. Sedan, Verdun, Stalingrad and Normandy were struggles contested by armies numbering in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. The Battle of Britain was on an altogether smaller scale. A few thousand pilots and ground support personnel were the first and mainline of defense against Hitler and his war machine.

As Churchill put it:

The odds were great; our margins small; the stakes infinite

The free world can give thanks that England prevailed against those great odds.

This website let’s you follow the course of the campaign as it unfolded.

Battle of Britain Day by Day

Related:

Six weeks that saved the world (II)

Terry McAuliffe and his priorities

Bryan Preston:

9-11 Made Terry McAuliffe Feel Like a ‘Caged Rat’ Because He Couldn’t Fund Raise

When most Americans were unifying, mourning, focused less on politics than on keeping our families safe and avenging our losses, Terry McAuliffe was angry that the terrorist attack had gotten in the way of his fundraising soirees.

The man is a true patriot

RTWT

Smart piece on Howard Kurtz's new show

Jack Shafer:

Kurtz moves from CNN to Fox with the same old song

After “Reliable Sources” host Howard Kurtz parted ways with CNN in June [2] and announced the move of his Sunday morning TV act to Fox News Channel, he had a chance to retool the media-news-and-criticism formula he purveyed on the network for 15 years. Instead, he has dressed his old CNN show in Fox bunting. In the Sept. 8 debut, he recruited members of the “Reliable Sources” stock company (David Zurawik, Nia-Malika Henderson, Lauren Ashburn, and Michelle Cottle) to chat with him about the week’s news. The new show even appears in his old CNN time slot, 11 a.m. The only new thing about the show is its name, “MediaBuzz.”

I was surprised that Fox News just repackaged the old and lame "Reliable Sources" for their new media program.

Once again we see the Murdoch method at work: never let excellence get in the way of doing it cheaper. (See: Cable news, vox populi, and professional sleaze).

The Telegraph skewers John Le Carre

John le Carré: a painfully dated figure with the political views of a cartoonist

No, it is the glaring contradiction between the nuance and moral complexity of a le Carré novel and the jarring simplicity of his views, however sonorously he might express them....

For a master novelist, he talks about current affairs in the simple terms of a cartoonist. His opponents are lunatics and that’s that. One of his essays is entitled simply: "The United States of America has Gone Mad."

Siege of Vienna

First posted 12 September 2003


In the summer of 1683 the Ottoman Turks advanced up the Danube, occupied Hungary, and, in July, laid siege to Vienna. They had 200,00 men and over 300 cannon. The defenders of the city numbered less than 22,000 only 6,000 of whom were regular soldiers; the remainder were civilians pressed into service at the start of the siege.

The relief of the city was complicated by European politics. Louis XIV of France hoped to gain German territory on the Rhine while the Hapsburgs were occupied in the east. To that end, he worked to create am anti-Hapsburg alliance with Hungary and Poland which would deny Austria aid against the Turks. (Incidentally, the Ottoman artillery were commanded by a Frenchman, a former Capuchin no less).

By September, conditions were desperate inside the city- low supplies, disease, and weakening defenses. The Hapsburgs had raised a relief army of only 21,000. But, fortunately, Poland had spurned Louis's maneuvers and sent an army of 24,000 under their King John Sobieski.

On September 12, the two relief armies and the forces inside the city attacked the besiegers. The critical moment came in mid-afternoon when Sobieski sent his cavalry into the heart of the Ottoman camp. The battle became a rout. The next day the Polish king wrote his wife: "the Vizer took such hurried flight that he had time to escape with only one horse."

He also noted the Turks "left behind a mass of innocent Austrian people, particularly women; but they butchered as many as they could." Separate from that slaughter, the Ottomans had sent 67,000 Austrians east as slaves and 14,000 girls to the harems of Constantinople.

Sobieski's troops captured the Ottoman battle flag ("The green standard of the Prophet") in the fighting. This he sent to the Pope with the message "Veni vidi, Deus Vicit" ("I came, I saw, God conquered").

The lifting of the siege is usually marked as the turning point for the Ottoman empire. For centuries they had advanced against Europe, conquering the Byzantium empire, capturing lands in the Balkans and islands in the Mediterranean. After 1683 they began 250 years of retreat. (Funny how many of these critical turning points find the Poles fighting on the right side).

Today is the 330th anniversary of the lifting of the siege.

Solidarity

Originally posted 31 August 2003



On this day in 1980 the Polish communist government agreed to the demands of the striking workers in the Gdansk shipyard. Workers would have the right to organize freely and independently

The strike marked the beginning of the end of communist rule in Eastern Europe. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are, rightly, given the greatest share of credit for winning the Cold War. But Lech Walesa and John Paul II played indispensable roles.

In the 70s many experts believed that continuing the Cold War was pointless-- the Communists weren't so bad, not every society valued Western style freedom, cowed populations accepted what they could not change. Solidarity and the Poles put the lie to such talk.

In the long twilight struggle against Stalinism, the workers of Poland were the first light of sunrise.

Is this Syria's future?

Bill Gertz:

U.S.: Al Qaeda-linked Group Behind Benghazi Attack Trains Jihadists for Syrian Rebel Groups

Ansar al-Sharia running training camps in Benghazi and Darnah

U.S. intelligence agencies earlier this month uncovered new evidence that al Qaeda-linked terrorists in Benghazi are training foreign jihadists to fight with Syria’s Islamist rebels, according to U.S. officials.

Ansar al-Sharia, the al Qaeda-affiliated militia that U.S. officials say orchestrated the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound and a CIA facility in Benghazi, is running several training camps for jihadists in Benghazi and nearby Darnah, another port city further east...

Disclosure of the terror training camps also bolsters earlier intelligence assessments that Libya, following the death of Muammar Qaddafi, is now a focal point for al Qaeda terrorist activity in North Africa.

Miley Cyrus and the Disney Model

Matt Purple:

Miley Cyrus and the Tackiness of Moral Outrage

The primary reason everyone is furious at Cyrus is because we were first introduced to her as a child star on the wholesome Disney Channel show Hannah Montana. Since then she’s done everything from struggle with drug use to star on a risque episode of Two and a Half Men. But last night’s lurid performance, a parade of Cyrus’s devalued sexuality through our living rooms, made her loss of innocence official. The entertainment industry has done with Cyrus what it does with most young child stars, and especially female ones: Tear them away from their parents, chew up all their moneymaking potential, then spit them out damaged and morally adrift. As the New York Times put it (and rightly so), Cyrus is someone “to whom no one has apparently said ‘no’ for the last six months or so.” Our expectation of Cyrus was that she was an innocent role model, and now that she’s betrayed that expectation, we feel morally outraged.

G. K. Chesterton,

Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which your are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. ... It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal and that you are a paralytic.

As I Was Saying

David Gelernter:

Evil is easy, good is hard, temptation is a given; therefore, a healthy society talks to itself.

Such ritual denunciations strengthen our good inclinations and help us suppress our bad ones. We need to hear them, and hear good acts praised, too. We need to hear the crowd (hear ourselves) praising good and denouncing evil.

Goodness is unnatural, and we need to cheer one another on.

"Unresolved Evil" (1998)

Who really killed the radio star?

Daniel J. Flynn argues that AM is dying from self-inflicted woulds

AM Radio, Signing Off

An autopsy of a great American medium.

Criminals and moral responsibility

Criminal Justice Quote: Self-Deluding Criminals

They blamed bad luck, coincidence, unforeseen circumstances--the victims shouldn't have been there, the cops shouldn't have shown up. The inmates could not explain what they did in terms of their own moral choices; they had to explain it in terms of forces beyond their control.

The detective and the rule of law

Allan Griffith::

Detective Stories, Democracy, and Rule of Law

In his classic book on Golden Age mysteries, Murder for Pleasure, the critic Howard Haycraft makes the claim that the detective story can exist only in a democracy. The reason for this, he states, is that autocratic governments don’t care about punishing the right person, the individual who actually committed the crime. And of course autocratic governments don’t provide any protection for individual rights, whereas in a democracy there are strict rules of evidence and other means of protecting the rights of individuals.

Stephen Koch, Double Lives:

An essential tenet of the NKVD was that the system needed the arrest, torture, and death of thoroughly obedient-- therefore 'innocent'-- people, since without random terror, the innocent would never be afraid, and (even ideologically) the Soviet state was made coherent by fear. From this perspective, some of the motiveless malignity falls into place.

This point is the central premise of the British series Foyle's War which is set in World War Two. The very British detective takes it as a given that murderers must be caught and punished even when thousands are dying in the war.

A scumbag is dead

Jacques Vergès

Jacques Vergès, who has died aged 88, was a controversial French barrister and one of the most secretive public figures in France, where he was known as “the Devil’s advocate” for his willingness to defend terrorists, war criminals and dictators.

For many years suspected by the French DST (counter-espionage service) of being involved in international terrorism, Maître Vergès always denied this allegation. But in 1995 East German secret police (Stasi) files were leaked in Paris, and they disclosed the lawyer’s long-standing links with the terrorist group led by “Carlos the Jackal”. His Stasi code name had apparently been “Paula”.

During the Reagan administration, CIA dismissed the idea that the Soviet-bloc was supporting terrorist groups. We now know that they were doing exactly that:

When Vergès returned to Paris in 1979 to resume his legal practice his first prominent clients were two members of the Revolutionary Cells, a group of West German terrorists based in Frankfurt, two of whose members had been arrested in possession of explosives in France. One of his clients, Magdalena Kopp, received a four-year prison sentence. She happened to be the mistress of Carlos, who promptly started a bombing campaign solely to obtain her release....

While these attacks were going on Vergès offered his services to the French government as a mediator with the Cells, one of whose members was also a Stasi agent.

Albert Murray, RIP

A nice appreciation by Larry Kaufman:

Murray was himself a humane and learned man, with an abiding love for America’s diverse range of literary and musical expression.

RTWT.

The Omni-americans is an extraordinary book and makes my list of most influential books.

Why should anyone take The Nation seriously?

Washing White

The Nation Persists in Espionage Denial

One conclusion we have reached is that many of those who continue to write historical nonsense about Soviet espionage and communism are not consciously dishonest. It is not a matter of them knowing the truth and lying about it (although there is some of that). More frequently, we are dealing with intellectual “true believers,” ideological zealots who are mentally incapable of accepting or processing information that undermines their historical world view. To use a metaphor coined by the historian Aileen Kraditor, it is as if they wear special glasses that can only see what conforms to their world-view. Information that contradicts their fiercely held view is denied, explained-away, or, most often, simply ignored.

A recent example of espionage denial is James M. Boughton’s review of Benn Steil’s The Battle of Bretton Woods, published in The Nation magazine. A former Indiana University professor and historian of the International Monetary Fund, Boughton has long denied that Harry Dexter White ever cooperated with Soviet espionage; a section of In Denial was devoted to exposing his fallacious arguments. Similarly, The Nation has a long history of refusing to accept that such left-wing icons as White, Alger Hiss, or Julius Rosenberg could be guilty as alleged. Not until 1995 did it offer a concession about Rosenberg, although even then it resisted the claim that he was a major atomic spy. While The Nation has published letters-to-the-editor objecting to its distortion of history, such communications cannot lay out in detail just how mendacious its authors are and how much evidence they ignore.

It is also worth noting that the long-time editor of the Nation was not only a long-time apologist for the Rosenbergs, Hiss, et. al. He is also a long-time professor of journalism at Columbia and chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review.

Watergate: Even the bad guys deserve due process

The Watergate Cover-Up Trial: Justice Denied?

As a result of some recent discoveries I made while researching a book on the Watergate trials, my concern has been vindicated. It turns out that the notion that “no man is above the law” somehow didn’t apply to judges or prosecutors involved in the cover-up trial. Documents I have uncovered indicate that the efforts to punish the wrongdoings of Watergate led to further wrongdoing by the very officials given the task of bringing the Watergate defendants to justice.

The new documents suggest that defendants in the Watergate cover-up trial, held before Judge John Sirica, received anything but a fair trial. Indeed, they suggest prosecutorial and judicial misconduct so serious –- secret meetings, secret documents, secret collusion -- that their disclosure at the time either would have prevented Sirica from presiding over the trial or would have resulted in the reversal of the convictions and the cases being remanded for new trials.

Unlike the White House, John Sirica and the Watergate Special Prosecutors were able to keep their misdeeds under wraps when it mattered.

West v. Radosh, Horowitz, et. al.

Ronald Radosh writes a lengthy review of Diana West’s American Betrayal:

McCarthy On Steroids

Radosh does a thorough job demolishing West’s arguments and her facts. He explains why he felt compelled to take on the book here:

Why I Wrote a Take-Down of Diana West’s Awful Book

while David Horowitz explains why Frontpage Magazine ran the review here:

Editorial: Our Controversy With Diana West

Diana West replies here:

If Frontpage Lies about This, They'll Lie about Anything, Pt. 2

Radosh is somewhat overwrought in his criticism, but he is sount on the main issue. West pushes her argument way beyond what the evidence supports. She is quick to blame communist subversion for bad outcomes to the exclusion of other causes. Radosh offers several examples in his review.

A further example is found in the first excerpt she posted at Breitbart:

Why Did FDR Fail to Relieve MacArthur and 151,000 Troops Fighting the Japanese in the Philippines?

Could the decision to abandon US forces to death or the horrors of Japanese POW camps by giving uninterrupted priority to the Red Army have had anything to do with the influence of the scores of Soviet agents and assets within reach of the levers of power inside the US government? How about the man driving military supply policy, the man behind Lend Lease?

I know of no serious military historian who believes that there was ever a chance that the US Navy could have relieved the Philippines in the spring of 1942. Those troops were not doomed because communists diverted resources into Lend-Lease for the USSR. They were in a hopeless position because the Imperial Japanese Navy was more powerful that any and all forces that could be mustered against it.

Max Hastings puts it bluntly in Inferno:

The US Navy would have suffered a catastrophe had it attempted to assist Wainwright in the face of overwhelming Japanese air and naval strength.

The modern journalist

They stick to their narrative like a barnacle on a rotting ship.

From the comments here:

The Ghost of Stephen Glass Haunts the Halls of The New Republic But Mostly Just Offers Them Advice on How to Cook a Story

Egypt and the Army War College

War College connection gives U.S. influence in Egypt's struggle

When the Egyptian military removed the country’s divisive but democratically-elected president, Mohammed Morsi, the action was led by a general who had studied for almost a year at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle.

The close personal relationships General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi developed through his time at the War College could help the U.S. influence the course of events there, according to retired Col. Stephen Gerras, who teaches at the college.

I wrote this a while back:

Since World War II, the US military has used its schools to strengthen our alliances and to integrate allies into our military structure. Students from allied countries can be found at all levels-- from the service academies to the war colleges. Similarly, each branch opens the doors of its war college to members of the other branches.

The benefits are obvious. It is much easier to cooperate with Peru on counter-insurgency if the Peruvian generals have been exposed to American doctrine and methods. The cooperation can be even more effective if some of the officers know each other from their time in the classrooms at Leavenworth or Newport.

In many cases, study at the American military schools helps foreign officers in their quest for promotion. Over the long-term this strengthens the ties with allied forces: the top ranks of their services are populated with graduates of our schools.

One more not so innocent victim of McCarthyism

How a Stealth communist wrote the New Deal National Labor Relations Act, and Hid his True Beliefs

Florida's Nifong

A must read article on Angela Corey

Angela Corey’s Checkered Past

Corey's history is the sort of juicy story that the MSM claims they love.

Yet, somehow, they are wholly uninterested.

No bias, you understand. Just, well, SHUT UP!

Rick Scott and Pam Bondi have a lot of explaining to do.

Variations on a theme

Joseph Epstein

Worldliness, alas, pales and very quickly stales. It is a fine thing to know the score; but the problem is, the score is always changing.

Harvey Mansfield

What Bowdoin produces in its students, according to the study, is a certain "knowingness," a word that nicely captures an attitude I see a lot of at Harvard. Students have learned that to see means to see through, instead of to have a good look.

Michael Kelly

Knowingness, of course, is not knowledge—indeed, is the rebuttal of knowledge. Knowledge was what squares had, or thought they had, and they thought that it was the secret of life. Knowingness is a celebration of the conceit that what the squares knew, or thought they knew, was worthless. In The Graduate the career advice ("Plastics") of a family friend, Mr. McGuire, to Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, is classic square knowledge. Benjamin's mute disdain toward that advice—and his elaborately played out disdain for all that McGuire and the Robinsons represent—is classic anti-square knowingness.

You can see in this example the problem that a return to square poses: anti-square is so much easier and more fun. Knowledge, even on McGuire's level, is notoriously difficult to acquire. Sixteen years of hard, slogging schoolwork, and what do you know? Not enough to carry on ten minutes of intelligent conversation on any subject in the world with any person who actually knows something about the subject. Knowingness, though—a child can master that. (Can and does: there is an obvious inverse relationship between age and knowingness; the absolute life peak of knowingness generally arrives between the ages of twelve and sixteen for females, fourteen and eighteen for males—whereas, as these cohorts can attest, grown-ups don't know anything.)

This is why Benjamin Braddock had to ignore, with prejudice, Mr. McGuire. McGuire may have been a fool, but he was, in the limited area of business and economic trends, probably a knowledgeable fool. Had Benjamin been obliged to respond to McGuire's advice in terms of knowledge, he would have been utterly lost—he would have been the one exposed as a fool. But for Ben—and more to the point, for the movie's audience—knowingness offered a lovely way to not only counter McGuire's knowledge but also trump it. Ben didn't have to know anything about McGuire to show himself intellectually (and aesthetically, and even morally) superior to McGuire. He only had to know that what McGuire thought he knew was a joke and McGuire was a joke because—because the McGuires of the world are definitionally jokes, and if you don't understand that, I can't explain it to you, because you are a McGuire. That's knowingness, and for no-sweat self-satisfaction you can't beat it.

Photon Courier

Why is theory (which would often more accurately be called meta-theory) so attractive to so many denizens of university humanities departments? To some extent, the explanation lies in simple intellectual fad-following. But I think there is a deeper reason. Becoming an alcolyte of some all-encompassing theory can spare you from the effort of learning about anything else. For example: if everything is about (for example) power relationships--all literature, all history, all science, even all mathematics--you don't need to actually learn much about medieval poetry, or about the Second Law of thermodynamics, or about isolationism in the 1930s. You can look smugly down on those poor drudges who do study such things, while enjoying "that intellectual sweep of comprehension known only to adolescents, psychopaths and college professors" (the phrase is from Andrew Klavan's unusual novel True Crime.)

Harvey Mansfield:

Political correctness with its present-minded exactness, its not quite selfless objectivity, and its esoteric jargon is science for non-scientists.

Robert Heinlein:

The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.

"Shut up", they explained

Instapundit:

Like Obama, when Holder says “conversation,” he means “shut up while I lecture.”

Flashback to the Duke lacrosse case:

It is embarrassing to be caught short on facts by the audience you intend to lecture. Preachers and priests do not go to the pulpit to debate; they go to preach and admonish.

Leonard Garment, RIP

Leonard Garment, former adviser to Richard Nixon at height of Watergate, dies in NY at 89

Garment lived an interesting and eventful life which he wrote about in an incredibly engaging memoir.

Barbara Walters adds to her legacy

Michael Moynihan:

It's good to see The View getting back to its Rosie O'Donnell-era roots by hiring a dumb, unfunny conspiracy theorist

Moneyball: Now you know the rest of the story

Steve Sailer:

Moneyball A's celebrate 28th year as PED pioneers

Everybody knows that the Oakland A's baseball team are plucky underdogs who use advanced statistics to outsmart the big budget teams, as Brad Pitt showed when playing Oakland general manager Billy Beane in 2011's hit movie Moneyball.

Of course, when statistical analysis isn't enough (and when is it?), the A's just cheat, like they've been doing since Jose Canseco came up in 1986.

The iconoclast as willing idiot (UPDATED)

Jack Shafer is a contrarian. That usually makes his media column a valuable read. But in his latest offering, he pushes so hard against the conventional wisdom that he comes off as obstinately perverse.

In praise of tabloid TV

If you read HLN’s transcripts from Nancy Grace’s shows about the Zimmerman case, you’ll absorb enough information about how the criminal justice system works to write a MOOC on how to defend or prosecute a murder case. Most of what a layman needs to know about police investigations, police interrogations, witness rights, evidentiary standards, jury selection, and courtroom strategy can be found in Grace’s shriekings and those of her commentators. A week’s worth of her Zimmerman coverage probably contains as much civic education as any half-dozen Frontline documentaries on PBS.

Any one who has watched Nancy Grace in action knows that this is bull.

First, Frontline documentaries actually uncover and convey information to their audience. The cable tabloid shows are all about holding an audience when you have little or no information to impart.

Related:

Cable news, vox populi, and professional sleaze

Cable news: get it fast, get it wrong

Media's Shifting Business Model

Nancy Grace differs from her sleazy competitors only in the particular and malignant bias she brings to the story. When Grace sets her sights on a defendant, truth and fairness go out the window. The facts presented and the commentary are as fair and balanced as a Stalinist show trial.

UPDATE:

Jay Rosen replies to Shafer here:

Criticizing CNN: Goodbye to that

Also Dan Gilmor:

CNN’s transition is now complete. The entire channel is basically a version of the Nancy Grace show.

Which raises a question for Comcast, et. al. Why  are cable customers forced to pay for both networks when they have merge-morphed into the same channel?

James Joyner:

Shafer is right: journalism is a first and foremost a business and ignoring the wants of the audience is a surefire way to go out of business. But, at some point, you’re no longer in the news business at all. And it’s quite possible CNN has reached that tipping point.

Hey, MSM! The Watergate lessons still hold true

Today's news:

Lookout List’ Not Much Broader Than Originally Thought, Contrary to Reports

Acting IRS commissioner Danny Werfel on Monday told reporters that the now-infamous “Be On The Lookout” list was far broader than was originally disclosed in the Treasury Department inspector general’s report. Reports from outlets including the Associated Press, which I cited in my original report, and now Bloomberg News, confirmed Werfel’s account, indicating that various versions of the list not only included terms like “tea party,” but also “progressive,” “Occupy,” and “Israel.”
=========
Based on the lookout list examined by NRO, however, it is inaccurate to say that progressive and liberal groups were subjected to the same or similar scrutiny as tea-party groups, or even that a surprisingly broad array of criteria was applied to screen applications for tax exemption.

Those useful lessons:

We also have the same bread crumbs the Washington Post followed when they were the only paper on the Watergate trail:

If they’re clean why don’t they show it? Why are there so many lies? I’ll tell you why. Because you’ve got them.

The last four days make this David Halberstam quote especially pertinent:

Time was on the side of Woodward and Bernstein. A story like Vietnam or Watergate has a balance of forces of its own. At first the charges are deniable, the existing structure holds, powerful men with powerful positions can keep their troops in line. All the weight is on one side, and reporters like Woodward and Bernstein are a tiny minority, seeming puny by comparison. But there is the momentum, The denials slowly weaken, events undermine the denials so there have to be more denials, and each denial is a little weaker than the previous one. … Slowly the people who are issuing denials lose credibility, and the reporters begin to gain credibility.

Our corrupt press

This is why Comcast/MSNBC should have sent David Gregory to Cleveland.

David Gregory tries to read Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian out of the journalism club

It's obvious yet so few are willing to say it

Why Latinos All Vote GOP

It’s gratitude for the amnesty bill signed by Reagan in the 1980s.

This logic brought to you by your local establishment GOP stooge.

Amanda Knox

Barbie Latza Nadeau on the latest twists of the case:

Italian Court Explains Why It Overturned Amanda Knox’s Acquittal

This is a stubborn fact that the American media often ignores:

Rudy Guede, a native of the Ivory Coast, was convicted for his role in Kercher’s murder in October 2008 in a fast-track trial that lasted just one month. Even though he was tried alone, he was convicted as one of a group of assailants, and was never considered by any court to have acted as a lone wolf.

If Guede did not act alone, then who was with him? The investigation did not turn up any evidence of another intruder in Meredith Kercher's apartment.

Romney-Rubio

The Republican Oblivion Tour

The Veiled Anti-American Sentiment of Open Borders Politicians

Look, many of us are willing to accept that there is a targeted and finite labor shortage in specific sectors. But to suggest that at a time when there are millions of Americans looking for jobs, there is also a labor shortage that even the 55 million new immigrants and guest workers in this bill cannot satisfy, is simply asking us to suspend our commonsense.

What is really driving this indefatigable push for mass amnesty, precipitous immigration, and open borders is the desire on the part of big business for an endless supply of cheaper workers – be it low, middle, or high skilled. As the inimitable Thomas Sowell explains in his recent column, Economics vs. Need, we all have desires that are communicated in terms of “needs.” The Ag industry says it needs millions upon millions of immigrant workers. But that need, especially to the degree to which they are exaggerating it, is nothing more than a desire for government to guarantee them a maximum wage support, much like the price support scheme they are getting in the upcoming farm bill.

Rick Santorum and the Type A voters

Symbolism is important, too. As Santorum observed, it matters that a candidate secures the endorsement of average people and puts a spotlight upon them. This is really Politics 101, but somehow a lot of Republicans have forgotten it, deeming it silly or condescending. (Or maybe they’re worried their opponents will label them condescending.) It’s not that the Romney campaign was utterly devoid of such supporters, but he didn’t use them effectively. And he had a tendency to say things that played into his biggest weakness, like the “47 percent” comment, or his observation that he was “not concerned about the very poor.” There was more to the context of these remarks than the killer sound bites extracted by the media and Obama’s campaign team… but when will Republican candidates learn that they don’t control the transmission of “context?”

Marco Rubio can save his career by answering two simple questions

1. What was the name of the idiot aide?

2. At what time did you fire him?

Rubio aide on immigration: Let’s face it, some American workers just can’t cut it

UPDATE:

Looks like Rubio would rather be temporary buds with Chuck Schumer than have a future with the GOP.

Who knew that Kristie Kreme was his role model.

Rubio Doubles Down into Disaster

This Aide to Marco Rubio Really Isn’t a ‘Star Performer’

History is a trickster (UPDATED)

In 2008 Ross Douthat wrote an essay in the Atlantic on Hollywood's nostalgia for the 1970s. In it he noted that "the thing that actors and directors seemed to miss the most about the 1970s—the mood of the decade, the mix of paranoia and pessimism and ambivalence about America itself."

The ’70s were in many ways dreadful years for America, but they’re remembered much more fondly in the film industry. There’s no surer way to establish your artistic (and political) bona fides than to name-drop a ’70s movie—whether it’s George Clooney bringing up All the President’s Men (1976) while promoting Michael Clayton, or Stephen Gaghan remarking that of course he was “thinking about The Parallax View and also Three Days of the Condor” while making Syriana. The suggestion is always the same—that the age of leisure suits and sideburns was also the high tide of politically engaged filmmaking, before the studios embarked on the relentless pursuit of the blockbuster and the Reagan reaction pushed American culture steadily to the right.

So now, Hollywood has a public mood suffused with "paranoia and pessimism". The only problem is, the emblematic figures of the age are not glowering old squares like Nixon, Mitchell and Haldeman. The Second Golden Age of Decline is happening under the unwatchful gaze of Hollywood favorites Obama and Clinton.

UPDATE:

Ed Driscoll notes that Hollywood might get a bigger does of pessimism than they bargained for.

Hollywood ‘Completely Broke.’ But That’s Good News, Right?

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

"It all started with a third-rate break-in into a reporter's computer..."

June 18, 1972 Revisited?

GOP future: It’s not the “messaging”

This is an insightful analysis by a semi-insider of the Romney campaign.

Gabriel Schoenfeld: A Bad Day on the Romney Campaign

In my e-book, A Bad Day on the Romney Campaign, I try to account for a long chain of mistakes that led the campaign to misfire in the middle of the national-security crisis that erupted in Cairo and Benghazi on September 11, 2012. As I attempt to show, the errors made in that episode did not happen in a vacuum. Rather, they were one of the consequences of a vision of American politics embraced by Romney and his top strategists. The problem before them in the quest for the presidency was, at its core, conceived of as an advertising and marketing challenge.

That vision of politics failed and the consultants Romney hiredif not political consultants as a classare now fighting for their livelihoods, if not their lives. “Should We Shoot All the Consultants Now?” was the title of a panel discussion held at a recent conservative conclave. As that blunt question makes plain, at least some Republicans comprehend that turning politics into nothing more than a subsidiary of the advertising and marketing business, as the Romney campaign attempted to do, is the path to repeated failure.

Yet so strong is the Republican death wish that the RNC’s blueprint for the future is more of the same.

But the trouble is that the consultants are deeply entrenched in the Republican Party. And they are using their entrenched position to fight to retain their grip on resources and power. Evidence of their struggle can be found in the Republican National Committee’s Growth & Opportunity Project, the official Republican autopsy on the Romney campaign.

The RNC postmortem does not beat around the bush. Politics, in its vision, is the art of best matching a candidate’s positions to the preferences of voters as those preferences are revealed in polls and focus groups. To this end, great weight is placed in the report on the urgency of gathering ever more information about the electorate. In particular, explains the report, “we need to know what language is most likely to motivate a donor or a voter and convert them into a vote for Republican candidates.” To discover exactly the right collection of wordsthe magical incantation for getting votes, the “use of data and measurement is critical.”

Yes, indeed. Let’s have more of the stuff that did not work last time.

But wait, this time it will be different because… BIG DATA!!!

To implement this technocratic vision, the RNC recommends that the Republican Party become a “data-driven” party. To accomplish this, a high priority must be that “voter and volunteer data, fundraising and donor data, digital data, consumer data, and media habits” all be integrated, analyzed, and made accessible to candidates by means of “application programming interfaces (APIs).” These APIs in turn can be used to “facilitate more user interfaces (UIs) to address all manner of campaign function and level of sophistication including file selections, modeling and analysis, and the feedback of touch-point and response to marketing initiatives.”

Such technobabble continues for pages of the report.

The RNC’s “vision’ is not just bad, unprincipled politics; it is also short-sighted, ignorant marketing.

Our country’s greatest presidents, from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan, did not need to bend to the whims of the electorate. By dint of their principled statesmanship, they bent the electorate to their will. They educated it. They persuaded it. They brought it along. They certainly did not need application programming interfaces to get elected and to accomplish what they accomplished. Nor did Abraham Lincoln need to hire a “messaging professional” to write the Gettysburg Address.

Advertising great Bill Bernbach would agree whole-heartedly:

We are so busy measuring public opinion that we forget we can mold it. We are so busy listening to statistics we forget we can create them.

If we are going to talk about politics and marketing, Bernbach has couple of lessons the GOP might want to ponder.

I think the most important element in success in ad writing is the product itself. And I can’t say that often enough. Or emphasize it enough. Because I think a great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it’s bad.

Advertising doesn't create a product advantage. It can only convey it.

Mary Wells Lawrence, another legend of advertising and marketing agrees:

Great advertising, the kind that works, almost always comes out of the product you are going to advertise

It is no surprise that the RNC and its consultants want to ignore these fundamental insights. They cast a bad light on the GOP consultant-pundit class and the campaign they ran in 2012.

For instance, you don’t need to crunch through terabytes of data to know that President Obama’s greatest vulnerability was the economy and jobs. The Romney campaign made this issue #1.

The fatal flaw in this strategy was simple: Mitt Romney was the worst possible candidate to raise that issue. His ties with Bain Capital and the off-shoring jobs was a tremendous negative and made him less than credible as a tribune for the American worker. His frequent gaffes (“I like to fire people”) made the problem worse.

This is not Monday morning quarterbacking. Romney’s vulnerabilities on this point were apparent over a year before the election:

Numbers that should scare Mitt Romney and the tools at Fox News

These numbers also suggest that Romney could be terribly vulnerable to Obama in the general election. Big donors might like his resume, but voters might find it repellent. His personal connections to outsourcing, Wall Street, and management snake oil could prove fatal.

I think we might have seen a a preview of the problem here in Pennsylvania in 2010. At the end of the campaign, the Sestak campaign hit Pat Toomey hard on the "jobs to China" issue. It seemed to get traction. Toomey ran 3.5 percentage points behind Corbett (the Republican candidate for governor). He squeaked out a win (51%-49%) against an underfunded candidate in a profoundly Republican year.

So that makes it look like Pennsylvania is out of reach for Romney.

Even more scary for the GOP is the way that Toomey under-performed across the board. He trailed Corbett in blue-collar Democratic counties like Allegheny and Beaver. He also saw a similar drop-off in hard-core conservative areas like Adams and Armstrong counties.

That suggests to me that Romney might have a problem recapturing all the Bush states that flipped in 2008 (like Ohio).

The issue that fired up the conservative base was Obamacare. Here again, Romney could not take full advantage of this issue because he had signed Romneycare as governor of Massachusetts.

Despite these two enormous weaknesses, the “professionals” kept telling us that Romney was the most electable candidate in the primaries. This does not reflect well on the “professionals” professional competence.

Once again, not everyone was fooled by the emperor’s new clothes (see here.)

Is it unfair to mention that some of the professionals who are promoting the Big Data solution had a hand in this:

The Unmitigated Disaster Known As Project ORCA

Orca aground: Romney’s high-tech ‘Get Out the Vote’ failure

Related:

Conservatives and messaging

Conquest's Law

Some leaks or more equal than others

Jack Shafer:

Edward Snowden and the selective targeting of leaks

Yet even as the insults pile up and the amateur psychoanalysis intensifies, keep in mind that Snowden’s leak has more in common with the standard Washington leak than should make the likes of Brooks, Simon and Cohen comfortable. Without defending Snowden for breaking his vow to safeguard secrets, he’s only done in the macro what the national security establishment does in the micro every day of the week to manage, manipulate and influence ongoing policy debates. Keeping the policy leak separate from the heretic leak is crucial to understanding how these stories play out in the press.

Secrets are sacrosanct in Washington until officials find political expediency in either declassifying them or leaking them selectively. It doesn’t really matter which modern presidential administration you decide to scrutinize for this behavior, as all of them are guilty. For instance, President George W. Bush’s administration declassified or leaked whole barrels of intelligence, raw and otherwise, to convince the public and Congress making war on Iraq was a good idea. Bush himself ordered the release of classified prewar intelligence about Iraq through Vice President Dick Cheney and Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to New York Times reporter Judith Miller in July 2003.

I think he is exactly right with his conclusion:

The willingness of the government to punish leakers is inversely proportional to the leakers’ rank and status, which is bad news for someone so lacking in those attributes as Edward Snowden. But as the Snowden prosecution commences, we should question his selective prosecution. Let’s ask, as Isikoff did of the Obama administration officials who leaked to Woodward, why Snowden is singled out for punishment when he’s essentially done what the insider dissenters did when they spoke with Risen and Lichtblau in 2005 about an invasive NSA program. He deserves the same justice and the same punishment they received.

Related:

Do we know there's a war on?

The looking glass war

Mark Steyn is still right

He wrote this last year after Mohammed Merah murdered seven people in France.

Lather, Rinse, and Repeat

The killer of French schoolchildren and soldiers turns out to be a man called Mohammed Merah. The story can now proceed according to time-honored tradition:

Stage One: The strange compulsion to assure us that the killer is a “right wing conservative extremist,” in the words of NRO commenter ExpatAsia, echoed by Chrisman and Galt’s Bain. Up north, this view was shared by Canada’s most prominent establishment Jew and the Liberal Party attack poodle Warren Kinsella (whom NR readers may recall from my free-speech cover story, which mentioned the groveling apology he was forced to make to “the Chinese community” after an unfortunately sinophobic cat joke). The insistence that the killer was emblematic of an epidemic of right-wing hate sweeping the planet is, regrettably, no longer operative. Instead, the killer isn’t representative of anything at all.

So on to Stage Two: Okay, he may be called Mohammed but he’s a “lone wolf.” Sure, he says he was trained by al-Qaeda, but what does he know? Don’t worry, folks, he’s just a lone wolf like Major Hasan and Faisal Shahzad and all the other card-carrying members of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves. All jihad is local.

On to Stage Three: Okay, even if there are enough lone wolves around to form their own Radio City Rockette line, it’s still nothing to do with Islam. I’m sad to see the usually perceptive Ed West of the London Telegraph planting his flag on this wobbling blancmange.

And then, of course, Stage Four: The backlash that never happens. Because apparently the really bad thing about actual dead Jews is that it might lead to dead non-Jews: “French Muslims Fear Backlash After Shooting.” Likewise, after Major Hasan’s mountain of dead infidels, shooting Raises Fears For Muslims In US Army Likewise, after the London Tube slaughter, British Muslims Fear Repercussions After Tomorrow’s Train Bombing Oh, no, wait, that’s a parody, though it’s hard to tell.

This is exactly the sequence we saw after the bombing at the Boston Marathon. With the brutal murder of Pvt. Lee Rugby, the perpetrators surrendered on the scene so we didn't have time for stage one. But the MSM followed steps two through four like well trained lab rats in a familiar maze.

Compare and contrast

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
"The Valley of Fear"

American Narcissus

Obama said that he liked being surrounded by people who expressed strong opinions, but he also said, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.” After Obama’s first debate with McCain, on September 26th, [campaign political director Patrick] Gaspard sent him an e-mail. “You are more clutch than Michael Jordan,” he wrote. Obama replied, “Just give me the ball.”

Related:

Benghazi: The high price of rampant knowingness

Bryan Preston busts a concern troll

If the Dems Really Believe Republicans are Going to ‘Overreach’ on the Obama Scandals, Why Don’t They Just Let Them Do It?

If Axelrod et al really believed that the scandals would result in real Republican overreach, they would just let it happen. Just sit back and watch the fun. Pop some popcorn. Because it would save his pal Barack and all their mutual friends from the quagmire they’re all in. And because he’s paid to help Democrats, not Republicans. Just follow the money that flows to Axelrod, and observe common sense.

If his enemy is destroying itself, why would Axelrod get ever think of getting in its way? Hm, Dave? Why? Where did that altruistic streak come from all of a sudden?

With all this “overreach” noise, David Axelrod is acting guilty, as if he has something to hide.

Nixon had to pay for his dirty tricks and cover-up

The IRS gets to use tax payer dollars.

‘Rogue’ IRS agent who wrote threatening letters gets promotion

President Obama may have promised “to hold the responsible parties accountable” for the Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative non-profit groups, but one of the agents at the center of the scandal was recently promoted, an IRS source tells The Washington Examiner.

UPDATED: IRS tax exemption/Obamacare exec got $103,390 in bonuses; Did Obama OK them?

Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS executive in charge of the tax exempt division in 2010 when it began targeting conservative Tea Party, evangelical and pro-Israel groups for harassment, got more than $100,000 in bonuses between 2009 and 2012.

More recently, Ingram was promoted to serve as director of the tax agency's Obamacare program office, a position that put her in charge of the vast expansion of the IRS' regulatory power and staffing in connection with federal health care, ABC reported earlier today.

Lois Lerner gets taxpayer funded vacation – paid administrative leave

What do you give Lois Lerner, an arrogant IRS official who totally blew her fifth amendment rights during congressional testimony? IF you are Obama, you give her a nice tax payer funded vacation of course.

"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."

Jerry Pournelle indirectly makes Orwell's point by bringing up inconvenient but relevant facts that are normally left out of MSM stories of the IRS scandals.

Ground Games and Education Credentials

It comes as no surprise to anyone who studies such matters that the IRS hounded Tea Party and Patriot get out the vote organizations, and President Obama won re-election largely through the operations of Democratic get out the vote activities. When I was in the campaign management business, I always stressed the importance of what we called the ground game – getting voters willing to vote for your candidate actually to do so.

-------

The Obama election strategy was to attack Romney and discourage Republican voters. Since it was obvious that the 2010 Congressional election was dominated by the Tea Party and Patriot groups, and had been obvious since 2004 that Patriot and Tea Party Get Out the Vote organizations were the shock troops and mainstay of the Republican ground game, it took no Presidential order to get the unionized IRS public employees to understand the stake they had in this game – even if the IRS Acting Commissioner had more recorded official visits to the White House than the Secretaries of State and Defense combined during the year leading up to the 2012 election.

Battle of Midway

Some great stuff over at the Naval History blog.

Sharing the Naval History Narrative: Battle of Midway

I blogged about Midway here, here, and here.