A State of the Union quiz.

Did Obama ever intone the standard phrase "The state of the Union is..." and if so, what word followed "is"? (There's a hint in the tags.)


Yes, he did, and the word was "stronger." Did you notice that "stronger" was a key word? Here are its iterations:

Tonight, thanks to the grit and determination of the American people, there is much progress to report.... Our housing market is healing, our stock market is rebounding, and consumers, patients, and homeowners enjoy stronger protections than ever before.

Together, we have cleared away the rubble of crisis, and can say with renewed confidence that the state of our union is stronger....

Our economy is stronger when we harness the talents and ingenuity of striving, hopeful immigrants....

We know our economy is stronger when our wives, mothers, and daughters can live their lives free from discrimination in the workplace, and free from the fear of domestic violence....

We know our economy is stronger when we reward an honest day’s work with honest wages....

Stronger families. Stronger communities. A stronger America.

Coincidentally, just the other day Kelly Clarkson won the Best Pop Vocal Album Grammy for her album "Stronger."

So let's just say Barack Obama wins the Best Pop Political Speech for his SOTU "Stronger."

Is Eric Cantor making a conscious attempt to talk like Barack Obama?

It really struck me today on "Meet the Press," and when I commented on it, Meade said he'd already been thinking that. I know the exact point in the transcript when the realization occurred to me. David Gregory was questioning Cantor about whether the GOP needs something more than "re-branding": "Isn't it some of the central beliefs in the Republican Party that have hurt it with the electorate?"

Cantor said (transcript, video):

David, what I talked about this week at AEI was the need for us to connect our conservative principles with helping people and making their life work again. And I've talked about a man who is a dad here in the inner city of the District of Columbia who, all he wanted was to find a safe place for his kids to learn. He's got four kids.

And he discovered, after having fought with the local school system....

I talked about working parents who are hourly wage earners who are having a tough time getting through the month right now. Those are the things that people-- that we've got to be concerned about. I don't think that Joseph Kelly, the dad here in The District of Columbia, cares one iota about re-branding the Republican or the Democratic Party.

That sentence I've boldfaced is the one that struck me as perfectly Obamaesque. The yellow highlighting marks a key Obamaesque repetition.

I think what we care about, and what he cares about, is his kids. And that's where Washington really needs to remember is these are real problems. These people are having a tough time. And we ought to be about providing relief to those who don't have a job and those who do... making their life work again...

You know, I've got a constituent, she's 12 years old, her name is Katie. She was diagnosed with cancer at age one. I mean can you imagine? That is a parent's nightmare, the worst nightmare.

And the federal government's got a role in research, in basic medical research, trying to find cures for disease. We can work together on something like that.... you've got so many millions of Americans who feel that they have become an afterthought. My purpose in saying this is we have conservative principles that actually can work for their life again....

The work-life-again combination can be switched around. The words are so generic. People have lives and the lives need to work. The GOP can make their lives work, and the GOP can work for their lives. Again.

The GOP, working for your life again, so your life can work again.

The bad science of Obama's use of the "devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms" to scare us about climate change.

How absurd to use obviously bad science to hit us over the head about our failure to react to what you claim is good science!

Why does it have to be so hard to combine science and politics?

"Today we continue a never-ending journey, to bridge the meaning of [the words of the Declaration of Independence] with the realities of our time."

The words President Obama had just quoted, in his Inaugural Address, were: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

More from the text of the speech:

For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth.  

God! God is well-represented in this speech. In addition to that "gift from God" (and "their Creator"), there's:

We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American, she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own....

We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries – we must claim its promise.  That is how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure – our forests and waterways; our croplands and snowcapped peaks.  That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God....

My fellow Americans, the oath I have sworn before you today, like the one recited by others who serve in this Capitol, was an oath to God and country, not party or faction – and we must faithfully execute that pledge during the duration of our service....

Thank you, God Bless you, and may He forever bless these United States of America.

God is the source of our rights, God makes us stewards of the environment, public servants swear oaths to God, and the blessings of God are requested.

Obama also dealt with the question of federalism, the role of federal power. There are the things we do "together," he said, listing matters that call for uniform national policy: providing for "railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce," "schools and colleges to train our workers, regulation of the "free market... to ensure competition and fair play," "care for the vulnerable," and "protect[ion] ... from life’s worst hazards and misfortune."

But then he gives attention to some conservative ideas, "skepticism of central authority," rejection of "the fiction that all society’s ills can be cured through government alone," "celebration of initiative and enterprise," and "insistence on hard work and personal responsibility."

Turning back to the left, he asserts that "preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action." Collective action is needed "Now, more than ever," he says: "My fellow Americans, we are made for this moment, and we will seize it – so long as we seize it together." Made for this moment? That's an odd phrase, echoed later with "That is what this moment requires," which comes after vague references to "outworn programs, and the need to "harness new ideas and technology," to fix: 1. "our government," 2. "our tax code," and 3. "our schools." Nothing particularly "this moment" about any of that, so this "moment" theme fizzled. Maybe it was an incorporation by reference to his huge "This is the moment" speech from June 2008.

There's more to the speech — attention to the environment, national security, "our gay brothers and sisters," and so forth, and it finally comes back to the Declaration of Independence material. We need to "lift" our "voices... in defense of our most ancient values and enduring ideals" and "embrace... our lasting birthright... of freedom."

Obama resorts to the "if there’s even one life that can be saved" rhetoric.

"If there is even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there’s even one life that can be saved, we’ve got an obligation to try."

These are his gun control proposals, including those executive actions that don't require any of that troublesome interaction with Congress.

I loathe the absurd argument that if there is only one life to be saved then we must do something. Obviously, we do not follow that logic generally. For good reason!

IN THE COMMENTS: elkh1 said:

The mother saved three lives, hers and her twin sons' by firing five shots at an intruder.

"if there’s even one life that can be saved, we’ve got an obligation to try." We must require every citizen 18 and up to own a gun for protection. 

Obama seems amenable to the NRA idea of armed guards in schools.

On today's "Meet the Press": David Gregory asked him what he thought of having "armed guards at every school in the country," adding "That's what the NRA believes. They told me last week that could work." Obama said:

You know, I am not going to prejudge the recommendations that are given to me. I am skeptical that the only answer is putting more guns in schools. And I think the vast majority of the American people are skeptical that that somehow is going to solve our problem. 

Of course, we are also skeptical that gun control is going to solve our problem. My only point here is that Obama didn't denounce the idea and treat it as crazy, which seemed to be the left/liberal spin last week after NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre made the proposal. Obama is saying that the idea deserves consideration. And to say you doubt that it's the "only answer" is to imply that it may belong in a package of items that together are the answer. In fact, later, he said: "I'm going to be putting forward a package..."



Obama went on to say that he was going to follow "the old adage of Abraham Lincoln's":

That with public opinion there's nothing you can't do and without public opinion there's very little you can get done in this town. 

That's a paraphrase. What Lincoln actually said was: "In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed." I'll leave it to you to decide who's the better wordsmith.

By the way, when did Washington folk acquire the habit of tacking "in this town" onto every other sentence? And don't you think there's an interesting difference between "opinion" and "sentiment"?

Further evidence that liberals have given up on demonizing LaPierre came from Dianne Feinstein on "Fox News Sunday" today. She's going to introduce a bill banning assault weapons and magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition, and moderator Chris Wallace asked her "Why is that more effective than the NRA proposal to put armed guards in every school?" She said:

Well, in the first place, 1/3 of America's public schools does have armed guards. 

Ha! No wonder the spin has shifted. You can't call it sheer lunacy if it's happening in 1/3 of the schools already. Too bad the liberal sentiment molders didn't check the facts first. Too bad they had a hair trigger.

On "Meet the Press" today, Obama mostly came across as the moderate, pragmatic politician I like.

Now, I'm not a sucker for mere posing, and in fact, I get suspicious when I hear what are simply assertions of pragmatism:

But generally if you look at how I've tried to govern over the last four years and how I'll continue to try to govern, I'm not driven by some ideological agenda. I am a pretty practical guy. And I just want to make sure that things work. And one of the nice things about never having another election again, I will never campaign again, is I think you can rest assured that all I care about is making sure that I leave behind an America that is stronger, more prosperous, more stable, more secure than it was when I came into office.

Well, no, I'm not going to rest assured. Much as I would love these statements to be true, they make me nervous. And that assurance came right after the most partisan thing he said in the whole interview. The moderator, David Gregory, had asked Obama how "frustrated" he was about the difficulty of getting things done with Congress. Gregory asserted that people were constantly coming up to him saying "Don't they realize, all of them, the president, Republicans and Democrats, how frustrated we all are?" And President Obama showed a little irritation:

Well, I think we're all frustrated. The only thing I would caution against, David, is I think this notion of, "Well, both sides are just kind of unwilling to cooperate." And that's just not true. I mean if you look at the facts, what you have is a situation here where the Democratic party, warts and all, and certainly me, warts and all, have consistently done our best to try to put country first.

Country first. Where'd he come up with that slogan?



Then Obama started inching away from this assertion that the Democrats are better. He shifts to more neutral boilerplate about trying "to work with everybody involved to make sure that we've got an economy grows" and "Make sure that it works for everybody. Make sure that we're keeping the country safe." Then he retreats again, making abstract concessions (in question form):

And does the Democratic party still have some knee jerk ideological positions and are there some folks in the Democratic party who sometimes aren't reasonable? Of course. That's true of every political party.

So are the Democrats better or not? He's melted into squishy blandness. And it's exactly here that he does the not-an-ideologue/practical-guy riff that appears at the beginning of this post.

What Obama said about mass murder after the Aurora massacre, at the second presidential debate.

This is interesting, considering what he's saying now, after the Newtown massacre, after reelection:

We’re a nation that believes in the Second Amendment, and I believe in the Second Amendment. We’ve got a long tradition of hunting and sportsmen and people who want to make sure they can protect themselves....

[M]y belief is that, (A), we have to enforce the laws we’ve already got, make sure that we’re keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, those who are mentally ill. We’ve done a much better job in terms of background checks, but we’ve got more to do when it comes to enforcement.

But I also share your belief that weapons that were designed for soldiers in war theaters don’t belong on our streets. And so what I’m trying to do is to get a broader conversation about how do we reduce the violence generally. Part of it is seeing if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced. But part of it is also looking at other sources of the violence. Because frankly, in my home town of Chicago, there’s an awful lot of violence and they’re not using AK-47s. They’re using cheap hand guns.

And so what can we do to intervene, to make sure that young people have opportunity; that our schools are working; that if there’s violence on the streets, that working with faith groups and law enforcement, we can catch it before it gets out of control.

And so what I want is a -- is a comprehensive strategy. Part of it is seeing if we can get automatic weapons that kill folks in amazing numbers out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill. But part of it is also going deeper and seeing if we can get into these communities and making sure we catch violent impulses before they occur.

If reelection gives special weight to Obama's policy preferences, we should hold him to what he said to the voters. Now, there's a little something for everyone in those remarks, as my boldfacing highlights. I know — because I live-blogged — that what jumped out at me was the idea of getting "into these communities and making sure we catch violent impulses before they occur." That seems spookily invasive, like the movie "Minority Report." But after Newtown, I'm drawn to ideas about identifying and stopping those who manifest dangerous mental illness. And yet, if you examine the words from the debate closely, he wasn't talking about finding people with violent impulses and doing something to control them. He was talking about the usual social welfare schemes that promise "opportunity" to "young people." If only they had enough wealth and education, violent impulses would not arise. And so mass murder becomes another reason for the economic policies he already supports anyway.

Did President Obama violate the precepts of etiquette and display raging narcissism at the funeral of Daniel Inouye?

It's pretty much what everyone is saying, notably Emily Yoffe at Slate (where one ordinarily expects support for the Prez). When I encounter a controversy at this late stage of one-sidedness, my instinct is to develop the other side. Law school class is like that, you know. If there's a case that everyone just somehow knows is rightly decided, the way to have a discussion about it isn't to remark upon its obviousness, but to figure out how someone — someone intelligent, educated, and sane — could think it wasn't right. That's what I do.

Read Yoffe's description of Obama's eulogy, which dwells on Obama's own life, growing up in Hawaii, the state Inouye represented in the Senate. Obama talks about his family vacations, where they stayed in motels, and the motel rooms had TVs, and — "as the people must have been twitching in the pews wondering where this was all going" — the Watergate hearings were on TV, and so he saw Inouye, and because Inouye did not have that typical white person look, the young mixed-race Obama was inspired to imagine "what might be possible in my own life."

A funeral for a very old person — Inouye was 88 — is not an occasion for deep mourning or soothing profound shock. It can be an occasion to look back on the era, to indulge one's own personal connections to the time and the man who has passed on. And if the President of the United States speaks at the funeral, that in itself is a phenomenal honor for the deceased. The President should not read a typical eulogy, a conventional account of the dead man's achievements and wonderful personal traits. This is something different. And when the President is specifically noted for his oratory, something special is anticipated.

No one — I submit — was "twitching in the pews wondering where this was all going." They were rapt, experiencing the gift of a unique presentation, The Story of a Boy — that boy! — and how his individual history merged with The Story of America — A Story of Race. They knew, as they surrendered themselves into the hands of our storyteller-in-chief, that they would be cared for and rewarded. The threads would come together, the yarns would be knitted into a beautiful eulogy blanket, under which Daniel Inouye could be laid to rest and all would be comforted.

How dare you snatch that comfort away by counting the "I"s and "me"s in that speech?!

Is Obama a man of "meaningful action" when it comes to gun control?

Let's go back to December 30, 1999, an article in the Chicago Tribune:

In a surreal day of political maneuvering, even for Springfield, [Senate President James "Pate" Philip] defied [Gov. George Ryan] for the third time this month, leaving the governor glowering and vowing to make passage of the [gun control] bill his priority when the spring session begins Jan. 12. ... Ryan began the day confident his last-minute push across the state had won him enough votes to prevail over his chief Republican nemesis.

But then the governor discovered that two senators who had promised to vote for his compromise bill — Barack Obama (D-Chicago) and Kathleen Parker (R-Northbrook) — had decided to remain on vacation instead of returning to the capital for the third special session since the original law was struck down on Dec. 2.

Furious, Ryan tried to track them down, hoping to send a state plane to whisk them back to Springfield. But no one was in Parker's office, and aides to Obama, who was in Hawaii, refused to tell the governor's staff how to find him....

Here's Obama's version of the story from "The Audacity of Hope" (which I was searching for evidence of his opinion on gun control):

[D]uring the Christmas holidays, after having traveled to Hawaii for an abbreviated five-day trip to visit my grandmother and reacquaint myself with Michelle and then-eighteen-month-old Malia, the state legislature was called back into special session to vote on a piece of gun control legislation. With Malia sick and unable to fly, I missed the vote, and the bill failed. Two days later, I got off the red-eye at O’Hare Airport, a wailing baby in tow, Michelle not speaking to me, and was greeted by a front-page story in the Chicago Tribune indicating that the gun bill had fallen a few votes short, and that state senator and congressional candidate Obama “had decided to remain on vacation” in Hawaii. My campaign manager called, mentioning the potential ad [incumbent Democratic Congressman Bobby Rush] might be running soon—palm trees, a man in a beach chair and straw hat sipping a mai tai, a slack key guitar being strummed softly in the background, the voice-over explaining, “While Chicago suffered the highest murder rate in its history, Barack Obama…”

(For what it's worth: Rush's son had been shot to death in October.)

Is Obama a man of "meaningful action" when it comes down to real gun-control legislation? I'm betting no. He'll talk about guns when plying liberals with lines like "cling to guns or religion" and while performing in the Theater of Grief after a momentous massacre, but when it comes to actual action, he's more the man in the beach chair and straw hat sipping a mai tai .

Obama promises "meaningful action... regardless of the politics."

Noted.

Obama's statement is...
	Meaningful and not political.
	Meaningful and political.
	Not meaningful but political.
	Neither meaningful nor political.
pollcode.com free polls

"Meaningful" was a vogue word circa 1970s. Back when people were acting as if sex outside of marriage was new idea and "pre-marital sex" seemed to be missing the point, the term "meaningful relationships" had its day. That faded over time. I'm not sure exactly how or when. It wasn't just sex but also politics that were supposed to be meaningful. One imagined wellsprings of inner satisfaction opening up. It was almost even religious. Or not religious, but spiritual. A rabbi wrote a book called "The Politics of Meaning." It turned Hillary Clinton on and made Michael Kelly write a NYT article titled "Saint Hillary."

Driven by the increasingly common view that something is terribly awry with modern life, Mrs. Clinton is searching for not merely programmatic answers but for The Answer. Something in the Meaning of It All line, something that would inform everything from her imminent and all-encompassing health care proposal to ways in which the state might encourage parents not to let their children wander all hours of the night in shopping malls.

That was written in 1993. (Michael Kelly died in 2003, in service as an embedded journalist in Iraq.) In 2008, Jonah Goldberg published a book called "Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning." In 2010, we got our all-encompassing health care, not from Saint Hillary, but from Saint Barack. We called it Obamacare, because Obama cares, cares about meaning, regardless of the politics.

Barack Obama has written 2 books. The word "meaningful" appears once in "Dreams from My Father" ("meaningful time frame") and 7 times in "The Audacity of Hope":

1. "[W]hat binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done."

2. "I have criticized the [Bush] Administration for lacking a meaningful health-care agenda...."

3. "[T]he standards and principles that the majority of Americans deem important in their lives, and in the life of the country—should be the heart of our politics, the cornerstone of any meaningful debate about budgets and projects, regulations and policies."

4. "[W]e already have hard evidence of [school] reforms that work... meaningful, performance-based assessments that can provide a fuller picture of how a student is doing...."

5. "[A lesbian] knew when she decided to support me that I was opposed to same-sex marriage, and she had heard me argue that, in the absence of any meaningful consensus, the heightened focus on marriage was a distraction from other, attainable measures to prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians."

6. "[W]here there’s strong evidence of prolonged and systematic discrimination by large corporations, trade unions, or branches of municipal government, goals and timetables for minority hiring may be the only meaningful remedy available."

7. "I wanted to call [an immigration activist group] and explain that American citizenship is a privilege and not a right; that without meaningful borders and respect for the law, the very things that brought them to America... would surely erode...."

What meaning is contained in "meaningful" for Barack Obama, specifically, and for all of us?

Something terrible has happened. Children were killed, seemingly senselessly. We are bereft of meaning. The President deems it meaningful to speak, to offer us meaning, not for why that happened, but in the future. An action has horrified us, an action in the past, which we cannot change. But in the future, actions can be taken. We can do something there in that place of hope. So meaning, meaning... where is meaning? Put it in the future, where the action is. Meaningful action.

There, now. Are you salved? Are you saved? Is there meaning?

"Marco Rubio’s Deceptively Pro-Science Answer on the Age of the Earth."

"Though asserting that science and theology disagree on the age of the earth... Rubio's opinion on the matter does slip through."

The meme-ready "I'm not a scientist, man" and the later "I'm not a scientist. I don't think I'm qualified to answer a question like that" may serve as convenient dodges, but they also indicate that Rubio thinks that science, as opposed to a theology, is the right way to answer the question, which it has.

ADDED: Rubio's answer reminds me of Obama's "above my pay grade" maneuver when asked about the humanity of the unborn. Both men said it's not my job to avoid conflict with religious people.

"Mr. President, don’t think for one minute I don’t hold you ultimately responsible for Benghazi."

"I think you failed as Commander in Chief before, during, and after the attack," said Lindsey Graham, responding to Obama's statement (at yesterday's press conference) warning Graham (and McCain) away from going after Susan Rice. Obama said that it was "outrageous" to "besmirch her reputation" and that if they "want to go after somebody they should go after me." Graham made it clear that it wasn't about going after one person in place of someone else. He was going after everyone who should be held responsible:

“I am dead-set on making sure that we don’t promote anybody who was an essential player in the Benghazi debacle,” Graham told reporters.

Graham's position is so obvious, it's weird that he had to say it, but Obama expressed himself in a very strange way. As I noted yesterday, it had an old-fashioned chivalrous quality to it, as if he were shaming Graham and McCain for picking on the gentle lady. The very idea of attacking a woman. The phrase "besmirch her reputation" evokes an image of the woman as pure and unstained. Absurd!

It's morning in Obama's Second Term America.

How are you feeling? If you didn't get what you wanted for Electionmas, how are you dealing with your disappointment? Me, I'm an optimist, and I instinctively look for the positives.

Tonight, more than 200 years after a former colony won the right to determine its own destiny, the task of perfecting our union moves forward.

It moves forward because of you. It moves forward because you reaffirmed the spirit that has triumphed over war and depression, the spirit that has lifted this country from the depths of despair to the great heights of hope, the belief that while each of us will pursue our own individual dreams, we are an American family and we rise or fall together as one nation and as one people.

I'm reading Obama's victory speech this morning, and, though I voted against him, I feel uplifted. I get a chill. Just as the writer of those words intended. Rereading them, my critical mind clicks in. A former colony won the right to determine its own destiny...? A colony? There were 13 colonies! Won the right? I read the Declaration of Independence to say that we had the right already, and we were entitled to throw off the power that oppressed us. The next phrase "perfecting our union" evokes the first sentence of the Constitution —  "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union...."— and ties it to his campaign slogan "forward" and to "you," who voted for him, propelling him forward. I've got to wonder if the idea is to move forward past the lesser perfection of the Constitution, into a system in which individuals merge into one nation, one people, one family. But you can still pursue your own individual dreams. Go ahead! Pursue them! If you can

I know some of you are thinking: If we can in this supposedly more perfect but actually terrifying system of socialism The One will move us forward into. Here are 2 expressions of that fear that went up last night on Instapundit and that struck me as excessive and over-scared. At 10:41, Sarah Hoyt wrote:

I HAVE  QUESTIONS:  We’re not a country of land or blood.  We’re a country of beliefs.  If we’ve lost that, who are we?  Who am I?  And where do I go?

And at 11:00, Glenn Reynolds put up the text of an email from a reader named Zach White:

If Obama is reelected, good hardworking people should give up and go Galt. The tipping point is the 2012 election. Will the makers finally succumb to the takers? It’s pointless to think that if America reelects the most unqualified disastrous president in recent memory, we should stand our ground and continue fighting. it’s a signal that marxist free-lunchism and free birth control for everyone trump economic well-being and prosperity in the minds of the masses. Give up. Go Galt. Protect what few assets you have left, and start to hunker down for the coming storm. America is beyond screwed, well past the fiscal insanity of a number of EU countries. Think of it this way – we sit and watch California destroy itself and wonder who could be so foolish as to remain there and dedicate himself to indentured servitude in a state headed for disaster. Why don’t those fools just leave!! Same for Venezuela. as they descend into chaos and totalitarianism, do they reject Chavez more? The answer is plainly no. The spiral down the drain is irreversible and obvious. The more the government creates misery, the more they create programs to help people cope with the misery they’ve created, and we achieve a perpetual negative feedback loop. My advice is simple – if Obama is reelected, get a lawyer and a financial advisor, cash out as much of your assets as you can, and prepare yourself for a nosedive off a cliff. anything else would be imprudent and irresponsible to yourself and your dependents. Who wants to be a Dagny Taggart dedicating themselves to a life of indentured servitude trying to correct the wrongs of a heavy handed government? i will not be volunteering. I didn’t give up on America, America gave up on me.

I read that this morning and pictured the young man in his 30s or early 40s, a man with a wife and children, reading that anything else would be imprudent and irresponsible to yourself and your dependents and actually spending money on a lawyer and a financial advisor, extracting all his cash from his retirement accounts, quickly selling the home they live in, and heading for the hinterlands to hunker down for the nose dive. The wife is distraught, the kids freak out. Dad's gone nuts. No, I'm not nuts, children. I am Galt! And I'm doing the only thing that is not imprudent!

Talk about nosedives. Get a grip, those of you who didn't get what you wanted for Electionmas. It's Obama's Second Term America, and you'll need to make the best of it. I think you've got some better ideas than cashing out and hunkering down. I know I do.

Obama's speech is "coming from his loins."

Says Axelrod, apparently noticing how... odd that sounds and adding, jocosely, "I just wanted to say loins. I wanted to see if I could get loins in the story."

Loins. From what part of Axelrod's brain does that arise? I think of the first lines of Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita": "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."

Oh. Bah. Mah.

Loins. You see that word in the Bible: "In Biblical translations, often used for 'that part of the body that should be covered and about which the clothes are bound.'"

The word is used conspicuously by God, speaking to Job "out of the whirlwind":

Who is this that darkeneth counsel
By words without knowledge?
Gird up now thy loins like a man;
For I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me.
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?

Indeed, where was Obama when Jehovah laid the foundations of the earth Axelrod laid the foundations of his presidency?

What's the point?

Drudge has everyone pointing:


(Click to enlarge.)

"'HE'S A BULLSHITTER'" goes to a Weekly Standard item, quoting Obama:

As we left the Oval Office, executive editor Eric Bates told Obama that he had asked his six-year-old if there was anything she wanted him to say to the president. … [S]he said, ‘Tell him: You can do it.’ Obama grinned. … ‘You know, kids have good instincts,’ Obama offered. ‘They look at the other guy and say, “Well, that’s a bullshitter, I can tell.”’

Nothing wrong with the word "bullshitter" in casual speech, and nothing special about a politician characterizing another politician as a bullshitter. It takes one to know one, and these politicians are all bullshitters. How could they be otherwise? What major-party candidate has ever not been a bullshitter?

But it is odd to imagine a 6-year-old child thinking "Well, that’s a bullshitter, I can tell." He was paraphrasing. Come on.

There's nothing here!

Now, quit pointing.

Quit pointing at nothing.

"You schunk my battleship!"

A propos of Obama's reference — at last night's debate — to the old kid's game Battleship.

Here's more (just picture Obama and Romney as the 2 kids):

Biden "will surely take it to Ryan on... his statement yesterday that inner-city kids need to be taught 'good discipline' and 'character.'"

Writes John Cassidy, in The New Yorker, observing that tonight's VP debate is high stakes.

Cassidy doesn't link to the Ryan statement, which — I found on my own — is part of the video that made the rounds the other day, the one that supposedly showed Ryan being "testy." (We talked about it here.) Anyway, let me put the "good discipline" and "character" remark in context. Ryan was asked the question "Does the country have a gun problem?" Ryan took the position that the problem is crime, not guns, and that we already have enough "good, strong gun laws," which we ought to enforce better.

But the best thing to help prevent violent crime in the inner cities is to bring opportunity to the inner cities, is to help people get out of poverty in the inner cities, is to help teach people good discipline, good character. That is civil society, that's what charities and civic groups and churches do to help one another, make sure they realize the value in one another.

Let's try to understand why people like Cassidy think that's outrageous (as opposed to platitudinous).  Here's Tommy Christopher at Mediaite:

What you don’t often hear spoken (out loud, anyway) is that the real problem with gun violence in America is the “character” and “discipline” of people in the “inner cities,” a very specific delineation from other city folk...

Apparently, crime in our cities has nothing to do with poverty, and systemic failures, fueled by generations of institutionalized racism, but with the character of those people. So says Paul Ryan, and so says Mitt Romney. If you’re poor, it’s because your culture is inferior.

Ryan’s assessment of “inner city” people is of a piece with the not-at-all subtle (and even out-and-proud overt) attitudes of the leading lights in the Republican Party, best exemplified by racism decoder-ring Newt Gingrich, who helpfully singled out black people as the Food Stamp-satisfied people we already knew they were talking about, and who echoed Ryan’s chatter about the low character of the inner city denizens who “have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash,’ unless it’s illegal.”

We already knew who the “those people” Romney and Ryan were talking about were, but thanks for the hint, all the same.

In this frame of mind, Ryan was talking down to black people — to use a phrase once aimed at Barack Obama himself. And let's take another look at Obama's 2007 speech to a predominately black audience:

We can’t expect them to have all the skills they need to work. They may need help with basic skills, how to shop, how to show up for work on time, how to wear the right clothes, how to act appropriately in an office. We have to help them get there.

Unlike Ryan, who looked to "civil society... what charities and civic groups and churches do to help one another," Obama thought there should be federal government programs to teach poor (black?) people to "act appropriately." The difference between conservatives and liberals is about how to solve what they are perceiving as a problem. Pointing out that there's a problem is a sensitive matter, so sensitive it might be better not to point it out at all, as Jesse Jackson's famous open-mike pushback showed.

Will Biden "surely take it to Ryan" on this issue? He might, but it's treacherous. Ryan should be prepared with something elegant to say, but I predict it won't come up because Biden's the one who's gaffe prone, and you don't want to make a gaffe about race.

"I mean, you know, the debate, I think it’s fair to say I was just too polite..."

"... But, you know, the good news is, is that’s just the first one."

All right, then. Niceness flopped, so be a jerk next time. Oh, I'm kidding. He said he was too nice. Next time he'll be nice enough.

"Barack Obama in his old community organizer role," doing "what community organizers do... rub people's emotions raw to hype their resentments."

Thomas Sowell writes the pithiest thing that I've seen about the speech Obama gave on June 5, 2007. Remember, Obama told the predominantly black audience that the federal government — motivated by racial prejudice — would not waive the Stafford Act requirement that a city chip in 10% of the amount it would receive in federal disaster aid.

[L]ess than two weeks earlier, on May 24, 2007, the United States Senate had in fact voted 80-14 to waive the Stafford Act requirement for New Orleans, as it had waived that requirement for New York and Florida. More federal money was spent rebuilding New Orleans than was spent in New York after 9/11 and in Florida after hurricane Andrew, combined.

Truth is not a job requirement for a community organizer. Nor can Barack Obama claim that he wasn't present the day of that Senate vote, as he claimed he wasn't there when Jeremiah Wright unleashed his obscene attacks on America from the pulpit of the church that Obama attended for 20 years.

Unlike Jeremiah Wright's church, the U.S. Senate keeps a record of who was there on a given day. The Congressional Record for May 24, 2007 shows Senator Barack Obama present that day and voting on the bill that waived the Stafford Act requirement. Moreover, he was one of just 14 Senators who voted against -- repeat, AGAINST -- the legislation which included the waiver.