The Frustration Of Barack O’B

Posted by Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO:

The Frustration of Barack O’B.

(with apologies to Robert W. Serivce)

There’s strange things done on a White House Run by the fellows who would be elected,
The campaign trail has it secret tales that could make half of us disaffected.
Desperate Irish Housewife  has seen some queer sights, but the queerest she ever did see
Was one frosty, cold night in the northern moonlight : she bumped into Barack O’B.

He had no Armani, no Prius, no Streisand,

And no Secret Service detail,

But he drove a dogsled and he wore a fur coat — 
The kind only Michelle would buy retail.
“Barack,” Desperate cried, “whatcha doing out here? 
Hawaiians don’t make good dog-sledders!”
“It’s that new girl,” he growled, as the Malamutes howled,
“I’ve just got to make voters forget her!”

“I’ve slipped in the polls since that Palin gal spoke,
And my mojo I’ve got to recharge.
So I bought me this sled an these dogs and this coat
And these earmuffs in size extra-large.
So now I look rugged and real, don’t you see?
A regular Admiral Peary!
Undecideds will all now come flocking to me
And I’ll take back the world blogosphere-y!

If it’s Yukon they want then it’s Yukon they’ll get
I’ll show them I’m no city slicker!
I’ll have moose, I’ll have wolves, I’ll have Great Northern Loons
All on my next bumper sticker!
Then I’ll give ‘em a speech.  You know, more hope-and-change.
They’ll forget all about ‘Miss -McCain’s- Pick!’
I’ll send her right back to the cold Wasatch Range—
Hey, do you know if sea lions wear lipstick?” 

Now things get mighty queer in Election year
And the strongest men’s judgement gets hazy.
But this candidate’s panic was so un-messianic
I feared the poor guy had gone crazy.
“It isn’t the wolves or the loons,” Desperate said,
“It’s the heart, and the brains.  She’s a keeper.”
Barack shook his head, and to himself said,
“What I need is a prettier veeper.”

Then the load on his sled seemed to move!  And it said,
“I told you, you shouldn’t’ have picked me.”
‘Joe, you just need a fire,” said Barack in tones dire.
Joe shrugged. ”Fine.   Just don’t try to lipstick me.”
Then Barack shouted, “Mush!” And all in a rush
The dogs took off over the tundra.
DIH shook her head, and to no one she said,
“The pressure this country is under!”

There’s strange things done on a White House Run by the fellows who would be elected,
The campaign trail has it secret tales that could make half of us disaffected.
Desperate Irish Housewife  has seen some queer sights, but the queerest she ever did see
Was one frosty, cold night in the northern moonlight : she bumped into Barack O’B.

The Bush Doctrines

Charles Krauthammer sets the record straight in today's Washinton Post:

Charlie Gibson's Gaffe

By Charles Krauthammer
Saturday, September 13, 2008; A17

"At times visibly nervous . . . Ms. Palin most visibly stumbled when she was asked by Mr. Gibson if she agreed with the Bush doctrine. Ms. Palin did not seem to know what he was talking about. Mr. Gibson, sounding like an impatient teacher, informed her that it meant the right of 'anticipatory self-defense.' "

-- New York Times, Sept. 12

Informed her? Rubbish.

The New York Times got it wrong. And Charlie Gibson got it wrong.

There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration -- and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today. It is utterly different.

He asked Palin, "Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?"

She responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, "In what respect, Charlie?"

Sensing his "gotcha" moment, Gibson refused to tell her. After making her fish for the answer, Gibson grudgingly explained to the moose-hunting rube that the Bush doctrine "is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense."

Wrong.

I know something about the subject because, as the Wikipedia entry on the Bush doctrine notes, I was the first to use the term. In the cover essay of the June 4, 2001, issue of the Weekly Standard entitled, "The Bush Doctrine: ABM, Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism," I suggested that the Bush administration policies of unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty and rejecting the Kyoto protocol, together with others, amounted to a radical change in foreign policy that should be called the Bush doctrine.

Then came 9/11, and that notion was immediately superseded by the advent of the war on terror. In his address to the joint session of Congress nine days after 9/11, President Bush declared: "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime." This "with us or against us" policy regarding terror -- first deployed against Pakistan when Secretary of State Colin Powell gave President Musharraf that seven-point ultimatum to end support for the Taliban and support our attack on Afghanistan -- became the essence of the Bush doctrine.

Until Iraq. A year later, when the Iraq war was looming, Bush offered his major justification by enunciating a doctrine of preemptive war. This is the one Charlie Gibson thinks is the Bush doctrine.

It's not. It's the third in a series and was superseded by the fourth and current definition of the Bush doctrine, the most sweeping formulation of the Bush approach to foreign policy and the one that most clearly and distinctively defines the Bush years: the idea that the fundamental mission of American foreign policy is to spread democracy throughout the world. It was most dramatically enunciated in Bush's second inaugural address: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."

This declaration of a sweeping, universal American freedom agenda was consciously meant to echo John Kennedy's pledge in his inaugural address that the United States "shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." It draws also from the Truman doctrine of March 1947 and from Wilson's 14 points.

If I were in any public foreign policy debate today, and my adversary were to raise the Bush doctrine, both I and the audience would assume -- unless my interlocutor annotated the reference otherwise -- that he was speaking about the grandly proclaimed (and widely attacked) freedom agenda of the Bush administration.

Not the Gibson doctrine of preemption.

Not the "with us or against us" no-neutrality-is-permitted policy of the immediate post-9/11 days.

Not the unilateralism that characterized the pre-9/11 first year of the Bush administration.

Presidential doctrines are inherently malleable and difficult to define. The only fixed "doctrines" in American history are the Monroe and the Truman doctrines which come out of single presidential statements during administrations where there were few other contradictory or conflicting foreign policy crosscurrents.

Such is not the case with the Bush doctrine.

Yes, Sarah Palin didn't know what it is. But neither does Charlie Gibson. And at least she didn't pretend to know -- while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, sighing and "sounding like an impatient teacher," as the Times noted. In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes' reaction to the mother of five who presumes to play on their stage.

9/11

This Pretty Much Sums It Up

Signs at an Ohio campaign rally. Submitted by our young miss.

And There You Have It

According to a GlobeScan BBC poll the world wants Obama to be president:

 “US Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama may be struggling to nudge ahead of his Republican rival in polls at home, but people across the world want him in the White House, a BBC poll said.

 All 22 countries covered in the poll would prefer to see Senator Obama elected US president ahead of Republican John McCain.

 In 17 of the 22 nations, people expect relations between the US and the rest of the world to improve if Senator Obama wins.

 More than 22,000 people were questioned by pollster GlobeScan in countries ranging from Australia to India and across Africa, Europe and South America.

 The margin in favour of Senator Obama ranged from 9 per cent in India to 82 per cent in Kenya, while an average of 49 per cent across the 22 countries preferred Senator Obama compared with 12 per cent preferring Senator McCain. Some four in 10 did not take a view.”

 And in related news:

 “Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, there is no consensus outside the United States that Islamist militants from al Qaeda were responsible, according to an international poll published Wednesday.

 The survey of 16,063 people in 17 nations found majorities in only nine countries believe al Qaeda was behind the attacks on New York and Washington that killed about 3,000 people in 2001.

 U.S. officials squarely blame al Qaeda, whose leader Osama bin Laden has boasted of organizing the suicide attacks by his followers using hijacked commercial airliners.

 On average, 46 percent of those surveyed said al Qaeda was responsible, 15 percent said the U.S. government, 7 percent said Israel and 7 percent said some other perpetrator. One in four people said they did not know who was behind the attacks.”

 I simply can not come up with a better reason to stop paying attention to what the rest of the world thinks. This stuff just writes itself.

What a bunch of maroons.

More Thoughts About Sarah Palin

From Bill Whittle at National Review:

"Newt Gingrich’s fire-breathing army of young reform Republicans who stormed congress in 1994 grew, in about a decade, into the party of Duke Cunningham, Trent Lott, and the Bridge to Nowhere. I watched this unfold — especially after 2004 — and time and time again, the core conservative values of discipline and responsibility were betrayed, mocked, and ignored. Restraint is not an easy sell in a society this affluent — not compared with the view of government as a bottomless bag of candy. That’s why we’re supposed to be the party of adults. 

Power corrupts, and I believe there is no power more intoxicating and corrosive than the ability to spend other people’s money at will. If Newt’s Army could go so far astray, you can bet the country was disillusioned, disappointed, and furious — not just ready for change, but eager for it, even change as ethereal and diffuse as what Senator Obama has been peddling. We lost the Senate and the House in 2006 because of this. We were going to lose the presidency in 2008 for it. And we deserved to lose it. 

And so — prior to this week — all we had was a grim determination to vote against a dangerous, socialized vision of the future. We were portrayed — largely accurately — as old, tired, out-of-touch, out of ideas, out of candidates . . . too white, too male, too square. It doesn’t matter how true or false that caricature was. That was the narrative, and there was enough of it that fit.

And then the earthquake came.

Sarah Palin is the anti-Obama: not a victim, not a poser, not riding a wave but rather swimming upstream — and most of all, not having run for president her entire life. She is the first politician I have ever seen — and I include Ronnie in this, God bless him — who strikes everyone who sees her as an actual, real, ordinary person. Immediately came T-shirts saying I AM SARAH PALIN. HER STORY IS MY STORY. There is a lot of Obama swag out there, too, but none of it says HIS STORY IS MY STORY. Hold that thought till November 5. 

She is so absolutely, remarkably, spectacularly ordinary. I think the magic of Sarah Palin speaks to a belief that so many of us share: the sense that we personally know five people in our immediate circle who would make a better president than the menagerie of candidates the major parties routinely offer. Sarah Palin has erupted from this collective American Dream — the idea that, given nothing but classic American values like hard work, integrity, and tough-minded optimism you can actually do what happens in the movies: become Leader of the Free World, the President of the United States of America. (Or, well, you know, vice president.)"

CWCID: TigerHawk

Noonan On Palin

From Peggy Noonan at The Wall Street Journal:

"Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing -- who is really one of them and who is not -- and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.

She could become a transformative political presence.

So they are going to have to kill her, and kill her quick.

And it's going to be brutal. It's already getting there."

The Real Story Behind The Palin Nomination

Quote Of The Day Redux

"Palinize: to slander and caricature a working-class female public figure for the noble advancement of liberalism."
- Victor Davis Hanson

Quote Of The Day

"When liberals start acting like they're opposed to pre-marital sex and mothers having careers, you know McCain's vice presidential choice has knocked them back on their heels."
- Ann Coulter

Sarah Works

This is a great piece by Bruce Walker over at American Thinker:

The selection of Sarah Palin works, on many levels and in many ways. McCain knew what he was doing when he picked her. Consider all the ways in which Palin helps the Republican ticket.

Women voters know not only that the election of McCain likely will lead to the nomination of Sarah Palin as the Republican nominee in 2012 or 2016, but the election of McCain-Palin may well mean that the nominee of both major political parties in 2012 will be a woman: Palin, if McCain decides not to seek another term, and Hillary, who would be the presumptive favorite for the Democratic nomination in 2012 if Obama loses in 2008.

In other words, women voters who vote in this election know that they can probably ensure that the next president is a woman, if McCain is elected. That knowledge will pull wavering women away from Obama-Biden and to McCain-Palin.

Sarah may do more than any person in modern history to close the gender gap, not only for Republicans but for conservatives. Unlike Hillary, who rode into Washington on the back of her husband, Sarah Palin created her own career. Unlike Hillary, who dwells within a small family focused on politics, Sarah has a big family and focuses on life. As a conservative, Sarah Palin sees life as more than politics, election campaigns and litigation. Her husband has a real job in the real economy. Sarah is athletic, animated, alive. Her family seems very real to us. She seems very real to us.

Sarah Palin is pro-life, which solidifies McCain's base with conservative voters, but she is pro-life with a vital twist: She has walked the walk. Women who favor the right to abortion love to point out that the male political leaders who want to limit abortion do not know what it is like to give birth, to care for an infant, or to endure the heartache of a child born with serious illnesses. Sarah knows all those things at a very personal level. When Sarah gave birth to Trig, her son with Down Syndrome, she walked the walk in a way that few people ever have had to do on the abortion question. He will grow up in a warm, loving family and his mother can tell the world, with perfect sincerity, that all human life has great worth.

She walks the walk on Iraq as well. Track joined the Army. He is going to Iraq. Sarah and Todd are laying their most precious possession, the life of their child, in harm's way for the sake of freedom. Sarah Palin, like John McCain, can tell the American people that they know precisely what sort of sacrifices we all must be willing to make if America is to be safe and free. The contrast between McCain-Palin and Obama-Biden on the personal sacrifices made for America is profound.

The criticism of her inexperience is already brewing, but Sarah can say that she has more executive experience than Obama and Biden combined. Moreover, she has been a gutsy chief executive of Alaska, which means that she has shown an ability to resist the blandishments of lobbyists which neither Obama nor Biden have demonstrated. McCain and Palin really do represent a resistance to pork exceptional in a presidential ticket.

As gas prices becomes an increasingly pressing personal issue for huge numbers of Americans, and as more and more Americans support drilling for oil as a logical way to bring down gas prices, Palin brings a strong and persuasive perspective on ANWR drilling. She loves the outdoors. Alaska is her home state, the place where her family lives. When Sarah says, as she doubtless will, that no outsider can care more about preserving the beauty of Alaska than she does, it will be hard to contradict that. So when she then says that drilling in ANWR will not damage the loveliness of that Alaskan natural wonder which she loves, then Sarah will be believed by millions of otherwise ambivalent voters. Sarah, moreover, will be able to make a very cogent intellectual argument for drilling. She knows more about this issue than Obama, Biden or even McCain. And it is an issue that becomes more important to Americans by the day.

Sarah Palin on the ticket also creates some serious problems for Democrats in planning their campaign about the Republican ticket. How, for example, will a reflexively arrogant man like Joe Biden act toward Sarah Palin in the Vice Presidential Debate? This is the same man who talked about Obama as well spoken, for a black man. How careful will Biden be when he debates Palin? The debate will be a virtual minefield for someone as callous as Senator Biden. One slip, one impolitic remark, could shift millions of votes.

Governor Palin also lives in a frontier state, a land about as far away from Washington as you can be and still hold political office in our republic. This is a theme that can resonate with voters. Delaware is right next to Washington: Biden commutes home after work. Chicago, the Daley Machine, does not seem to be much of an improvement. But Palin, and for that matter, McCain, come from another part of America completely. Alaska and Arizona are very distant from the capital whose machinations must be curbed. The image of two people from America's frontier cleaning up our nation's capital is potent.

The biggest catch, though, is Palin herself. She seems utterly genuine. Her life story sounds familiar and comforting. Her words come from her heart. Her ideas come from a mind not trapped in Beltway Newspeak. We want change? She is change. More than just change, though, Sarah Palin represents change for the better. She personifies all the goodness in America which we seem to have lost. Her election will be a shot across the bow of every entrenched politician in the federal government. As a nominee, Sarah works.

The Palin Brawl At NRO

Palin [Rick Brookhiser]

I have not had a TV to watch all week, though I have had internet, so I have followed the Palin pick entirely through the medium of the Corner.

I share the initial reservations of David, and to a lesser extent, Jay. The Palin pick shows a low opinion of the vice presidency, and it shows conservatives in a bad light.

1. The Vice Presidency. Either McCain thinks the war on terror isn't serious, or he thinks the vice-presidency isn't. Since the former is obviously untrue, it must be the latter. McCain is certainly following a very old conception of the job. One nineteenth century veep was reputedly so underutilized that he kept a tavern in his home state. But that is not our conception. Vice Presidents have grown in clout and responsibility. In the last fifty years, four former vice presidents have run for president (Nixon, Mondale, elder Bush, Gore), two of them successfully, while since Carter/Mondale, veeps have been given more and more to do. McCain, bless him, intends to do everything himself. Good luck! Perhaps the Palin pick is a sly diss both of Obama/Biden and Bush/Cheney. Palin will go to funerals.

2. Conservatives. Palin will also be assigned to pacify conservatives. On the evidence of the numerous emails reprinted here, that will be easily done. Reader after reader said that the base was now energized. You would have thought the base was energized by being in a war. If not, perhaps we need a new base.

We have shown the same color-by-numbers mindset that liberals did when they rallied to Obama. Liberals love Obama because he is a Numinous Negro. Conservatives love Palin because she has a Downs baby and an M-16. For both sides, that is all on earth ye know and all ye need to know. You might call it mystical and childish.

May I be so wrong that a hundred harpies will pluck my eyeballs.

08/30 06:26 PM

Re: Rick on Palin [Peter Robinson]

Understanding your objections, Rick, which are, as is typical of all your thought, both grounded in American history and elegantly stated, I nevertheless have a question: Who the heck should McCain have picked? The man is a working politician. No fair asking him to clasp his copy of de Toqueville to his breast as he goes down to defeat.

P.S. If my inbox is any indication, don't look up. The harpies are already circling.

08/30 10:26 PM

Re: re: Rick on Palin [Andy McCarthy]

I don't often disagree with Peter, but there is nothing elegant about Rick's assertion that "Conservatives love Palin because she has a Downs baby and an M-16." It's offensive.

It's also flat wrong. Rick's assessment is offered as an analogy to liberal love for Obama as "Numinous Negro." The comparison doesn't come close to the mark. The so-called "numinous Negro" is a story's hero figure for no better reason than complexion. His or her assumed wisdom is the treacly projection of collective, indelible liberal guilt over the dark slavery and segregation chapters in American history; beyond color, we know nothing about the character.

The contrast to Sarah Palin couldn't be more stark. Even if the only things we knew about her really were that she'd rejected the option of aborting her baby and owned guns, those would be concrete indicia of a conservative American life actually lived.

This is a real person: living through the crises and enjoyments that people and families go through, and making choices that tell us a great deal about who she is. It happens that the two facts Rick chooses to highlight provide very advantageous political contrasts to Obama, who has labored to protect a right of infanticide, and the Democrat ticket, which is hopelessly Second Amendment-challenged. But for purposes of Rick's snarky analogy, that's quite beside the point. No one is asking you to assume Palin is wise due to something so irrelevant to wisdom as the color of her skin. You can make a reliable judgment about who she is, though, by the choices she has made when confronted by life's highs and lows.

Of course, there's more. As Mark pointed out yesterday, despite living in the eye of the storm (or, perhaps, because of it) Palin is more modest and mature on "climate change" than McCain and Obama/Biden, who are captives of the green cult. She's actually held executive office — and the Governor may have started as a small-town mayor, but she was already experienced in that position when the guy at the top of the other ticket was a "community organizer" imbibing Jeremiah Wright's Black Liberation Theology and Bill Ayers' radicalism. While Obama has moved seamlessly from Chicago's corrupt political culture to Washington's earmark festival, Palin fought Arizona's Alaska's corrupt political culture and told Washington to keep its Bridge to Nowhere earmarks.

Palin has drastically cut legislative spending sprees. That is a nice contrast to the Democrat legislators on the other ticket — particularly Obama who, as Stanley Kurtz has richly documented, kept pushing for increased spending in Illinois even as an ever widening budget gap pushed the state to fiscal ruin. And Gov. Palin has concretely supported aggressively increasing America's energy resources, pushing for drilling, including in ANWR, and negotiating a $26 billion natural gas pipeline deal with a Canadian company. The opposing ticket is against drilling no matter how high prices go (Sen. Obama is only unhappy about the pace of rising prices, not the fact of them), and Obama's principal dealing with Canada has been secretly to dispatch an emissary to assure the worried government there that all his anti-trade rhetoric is just pandering. Once again, while Palin has taken concrete actions that tell you exactly where she's coming from, we are left to wonder whether Obama is lying to the Canadians or to his base.

Now I could be wrong, but I don't think Rick ever uttered the suggestion that Sen. McCain might be thought unserious about the war when McCain pushed his amendment giving Fifth Amendment rights to captured alien terrorists (during a war in which intelligence gleaned from interrogations is urgently needed); or when McCain pushed to close Guantanamo Bay, which has been an intelligence coup; or when McCain implied that President Bush's warrantless surveillance program — the penetration of enemy communications which has always been a staple of war-fighting — was illegal.

The possibility of unseriousness was not raised until McCain named as a running mate a woman who's instilled in the son she raised a love of country that induced him to enlist voluntarily in the United States Army on the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. This September 11th, he'll be deployed to Iraq to fight the war we are winning despite Barack Obama's best efforts to force a pull-out that would have given victory to al Qaeda.

I think Rick's suggestion is extremely unfortunate.

08/31 09:29 AM

Sarah Palin

I have to say that I am pleasantly surprised by John McCain's pick of Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska to be his running mate. Palin is exactly the type of conservative woman that will enable women to hold the highest offices in the nation. Just remember which party appointed the first female Supreme Court justice and black female Secretary of State. I also love the fact that McCain has taken the "historical" nature of Obama's candidacy off the table; now whichever ticket eventually wins will be historical.

Yes, Palin's political resume is not exactly overflowing but she has more executive experience than all of the candidates on either ticket. I know many have already said that her nomination removes Obama's inexperience as an issue. But I think the defining difference between them is obvious - Obama wants to be President. And in this season of thin resumes "An interesting angle from (Instapundit) reader Frank Martin:

Question: Which state borders the Former Soviet Union?

Hey, will you look at that?, 2 years of foreign policy experience."

The largest benefit I see from Palin running with McCain is that she is a conservative. If she follows her principles then this will be an inspiring and inspired choice by the McCain campaign.
Update: M'Lady, who only follows politics out of a sense of duty to yours truly, perhaps made the most salient point about the Palin selection when she said "Just exactly how many of these people have been president?"

When the legendary Cleveland sportscaster Casey Coleman was asked about a certain teams chances, when on paper it appeared they didn't have a pray, he said "That's why we play them on grass."

New Music

I get most of my new music from two sources these days; my children and NPR's All Songs Considered. I use All Songs Considered to audition songs. If I don't like the first thirty seconds I'm on to the next tune.

I can also say that I am not a fan of a great deal of the new music I hear because it just doesn't speak to me the way music did back when I became a serious listener. But every once in a while I hear something that just jumps out at me and the most recent example is a song by Jenny Lewis called "Acid Tongue". The song's harmonies, provided by Chris Robinson of The Black Crows among others, and the out front production work took an otherwise plain vanilla folk tune to a completely different level. Give it a listen here and see if you don't agree.

Acid Tongue is the second solo effort for Lewis who is also a member of Rilo Kiley. Her first solo album was Rabbit Fur Coat which garnered a great deal of high praise from the critics.

Can I Get One With A Ball Jar?

I'm sure M'Lady would like one of these; after all 'tis the season.