GOP bombs Womenistan

September 26, 2012 5 Comments

The other day after work I heard a report by Ari Shapiro on All Things Considered.  He was gauging voter sentiment in the swing state of Colorado.  One interviewee who made the cut was a female business owner.  She expressed her indecision thusly (emphasis mine):

“I don’t know that I can, in good conscience, vote for the Republican Party. I mean, it just – it seems to me that they don’t think much of women. But I don’t know if I can vote for the Democrats, because I don’t know that they think much of small business people. So, you know, the things that I hear from both sides, they do affect me. But there is, you know, it’s like a tug of war at this point. I don’t know who to vote for.”

I wish Ari Shapiro would have had the mind or maybe the time to pursue the vague yet provocative claim that Republicans “don’t think much of women.”  What must GOP women make of this statement?  The real story should be how Democrats’ continue to cobble their coalition with the same shopworn, cartoonish tropes for the past four decades.

It’s my fervent hope that voters such as the woman interviewed will think clearly and come to shake off the manipulative “war on women” narrative when they enter the booth come November.

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Dependency and entitlement: whose head stuck in the sand?

September 22, 2012 4 Comments

The 47% video has highlighted a sharp difference in worldview between conservatives and advocates of fairness/social justice.  The deep outrage we’ve seen within the latter group suggests an unwillingness to accept that entitlement and dependency are real phenomena stemming from human experience.

Just as with Mr. Obama’s “You didn’t build that” snippet, we could get lost in parsing what Mr. Romney meant.  But the stakes are different here.  If Mr. Obama is culpable for his quote, it is more a matter of worldview than of character.  But if Mr. Romney is guilty in the way sensationalists claim, then we must believe that he has a shriveled heart that is little more than a black lump of coal.  This is just absurd given his sacrifices and dedication to family, church, and country.  So we can and ought to dismiss this cartoon version of Romney.

The real question is not whether all of the 47% feel entitled and are dependent, but whether anyone in the group could be characterized as such.  Of course no one really thinks grandma or a worker retired on disability suffer from a sense of entitlement.  But this is precisely the interpretation mainstream journalists have been running with all week.

Such a hard prosecution is one half an insidious double standard.  On the one hand, the commentariat is completely okay suggesting that affluent Mr. Romney is out of touch, doesn’t care or relate to everyday struggles, or even that he wants to “pull the ladder up” behind him.  On the other hand, it’s utterly unthinkable to suggest that even one poor or working class person might be beholden to entitlement or dependency.  Per the dictates of political correctness, to do so would be an unconditional surrender to the worst bias and stigma.

This rule cannot persist.  Lest we go the way of Greece, our public discourse must accommodate some way of talking about these very real problems.  Rich, poor, and middle class folks are created equal in a real sense.  Across the dividing lines, all have intuition and faculties of reason.  The discipline of economics operates on the assumption that we are all rational creatures, agents who, whether consciously or not, respond to incentive.  We couldn’t escape it even if we tried.  Yet, big government politicians and guilt-ridden journalists would rather ditch this common sense understanding of humanity for the comfortable materialist fantasy that they took up at university and never quite abandoned.

There are all sorts of ways to describe the perils of incentive that effect the wide umbrella of welfare and entitlement transfers the federal government offers: rent seeking, moral hazard, tragedy of the commons, crowding out, rising expectations.  People’s behavior changes in response to conditions.  The sputtering, moribund economies of many European social democracies attest to what happens when workers secure the right to too generous a menu of entitlements.

Those who have seized on the 47% comments have highlighted a dangerous state of denial in our country.  Dependency and entitlement are heavy clouds that threaten to burst cultural and economic disaster on us.  The way some react to these words though make it seem as if their heads are stuck in the sand.

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Mitt eats vegan burrito in his “Darkest Hour”

September 19, 2012 Leave a comment

In the wake of the great, surreptitiously recorded Romney fundraiser video, the media continue their long stumble in the wilderness. Rather than press on policy, they pursue the “process story.” Just look to the Washington Post, which in declaring “Mitt Romney’s Darkest Hour,” proceeds to analyze how analysis will lead to soul searching and second-guessing (these in themselves being more analysis). This is supposed to doom Romney–but not definitively.

At Yahoo News, Holly Bailey continues her embedded coverage on the Romney plane. She maintains the edgy style that Ron Fournier sullied the Associated Press brand with in 2008: ditching the pretense of neutrality for moody framing devices and the liberty to issue gut calls.  Ever out to paint Romney as dry and lame, the most valuable detail in one of Bailey’s recent reports was what Romney had for breakfast: a vegan burrito.

What madness is this: using so many words to say nothing at all. Good thing newsprint today is made of electrons instead of wood pulp.  It lessens the waste.  All too many journalists dwell on trivia while major questions, such as what President Obama really intends to do about this anemic recovery, go unasked, let alone unanswered.

Higher up at Yahoo News, the slide continues apace. Once, stories from AP, AFP, and Reuters populated the front page. Now, almost every “news” link there takes the reader to one of Yahoo’s many branded blogs.  And from the looks of things, the leanings of recently sacked political editor David Chalian are still intact. It was he who remarked over an open mic during the Republican National Convention, “They are happy to have a party with black people drowning.”

Away from the open mic, writers signal subtle derision toward the Least Favored Candidate.  A blogger at Christian Science Monitor’s Decoder Wire responds to Romney’s 47% remarks with an “Umm, OK.”  Follow that with a cherry-picked characterization of the governor as a “plutocrat.”

So is the revelation of the 47% video Romney’s “Darkest Hour?” Conservatives seem to be shrugging it off well enough. Per Bailey’s report, Romney was all smiles, burrito eating aside.

One might point to pseudo-conservative David Brooks’ disappointment with Romney.  He compared  the governor to Gilligan’s Island character Thurston Howell, III.  This led MSNBC’s Dave Weigel to tweet, “When you’ve lost David Brooks, you’ve lost middle America.” A responding tweet set the record straight: “BS. When you’ve lost Brooks, you’ve lost weaselly coastal elites.” After all, David Brooks is the Alan Colmes of All Things Considered: a weak ideological opponent trotted out to slake the blood lust of a partisan audience.

The mainstream media will continue to bury Romney with process stories as long as the news industry’s systemic jet stream will allow it.  But neither apocalyptic visions, ad hominem attacks, nor mundane meal descriptions will satisfy undecided voters who want to make a real, informed decision come November.  Those who look beyond the superficial potshots to answer questions of character and policy will find Mr. Romney to be wholly worthy as our next commander-in-chief.

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Atkin built that: Obama-MC Hammer mashup

September 17, 2012 Leave a comment

Back in July I noted that “You didn’t build that” reminded me of MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This.”  In case you caught a deep desire to see those two things mashed up, fear not.  It has been done.

This video by Hugh Atkin was shared by fellow WordPress blogger Nice Deb yesterday.

 

“U Didn’t Build That” is a pop culture and political humor gem.  I really love the dig at red-headed stepchild Google+.

Some justice might be done if the video could garner maybe even 10% of the views of internet meme juggernaut Gangnam Style.  A little levity to crack the armor of progressives’ Shining Knight would do wonders for a nation beholden to such an ugly and seemingly interminable political news cycle.

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Carter’s Turn

September 16, 2012 1 Comment

You may recall that a couple of years ago President Barack Obama reached out to claim a piece of the Reagan legacy.  TIME even declared that 44 had a “bromance” with the Gipper.  How sweet.

Just a couple of weeks ago, President Obama was buoyed by Bill Clinton’s fiery, crowd-winning speech at the DNC.  But now with several U.S. embassies besieged or breached in recent days, it’s the memory of Jimmy Carter’s presidency that’s sticking to our present commander-in-chief.

President Obama’s recent Egypt-is-neither-ally-nor-enemy gaffe is especially remarkable given that Egypt’s allegiance to the U.S. has been a cornerstone of Middle East peace since the Carter administration.

Yes, Carter’s tenure was pretty awful.  But we should not forget that he deregulated some American industries in his time.  If you’ve enjoyed an affordable airline flight or a tasty microbrewery beer lately, you can be thankful for the few pro-market decisions he made.

In Obama’s three and a half years, we’ve seen a stiff reluctance to help American enterprise.  And in the foreign policy realm, he really hasn’t made the world like America any better.  His Nobel Peace Prize is still waiting for its justification.

Instead of leaving our economy or our national security to chance, let’s opt for a surer hand in November.  Let’s elect Mitt Romney.

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Imbibe your worldview

September 13, 2012 Leave a comment

Boy are politics ugly right now.  Let’s take a little break and grab a drink.  Maybe a coffee, a cola, or just some good old H2O.

Some months ago, as I was driving along my usual northern California avenues, I spied a beer delivery truck with a remarkable exhortation on its side: “Follow your folly . . . ours is beer.”  I thought to myself, there is a worldview captured in an advertising slogan.  The words are pithy and compelling to some targeted subset.  Whether they have an immediate, gut impact, or seep into our subconsciousness after repeated exposure, we’re not supposed to think too hard on them.

I thought it’d be fruitful to record more of these kinds of slogans as I came across them.  I haven’t been especially diligent in the task, but I’ve collected a couple more.  For whatever reason, they’re all tied to beverages.

Some mornings when I need a little pick me up, I get a coffee at the student-run campus coffee house.  Who knows how many times I blankly stared past the words on the paper insulating sleeve before they registered: “Brew what you believe.”  In this case, the convictions have something to do with the value of organically-grown products and “fair trade” practices.

Many folks support this kind of enterprise because they want to help impoverished, small-time farmers in the least-developed countries (LDCs).  But these boutique brands often do more harm than good by orienting producers toward transient, unsustainable, and distorted markets.  Accordingly, I am not really keen on the coffee vendor’s slogan.

So is there some drink-related catch phrase to which I might yet give mental assent?  Currently, Pepsi has a nice billboard on my morning commute.  You may be familiar with their latest marketing message: “Live for now.”  There is a certain appeal to this, if you’re at all aware of the “mindfulness” techniques and philosophy that have made their way from Eastern metaphysics and praxis into Western mind-body understanding.  Certainly, focusing on the present has a salubrious effect against anxiety and stress.  But then again, there is great value in looking to learn from the past and planning for the future.  Pepsi needs to clarify their position before I’m sold.

For now, the closest thing I might find to a beverage brand whose mantra I’d endorse would be the Credo House of Theology.  Yes, I visited Dan Kimball’s cool coffee-house-attached-to-a-church a few weeks ago, but from how Greg Koukl describes it, Credo sounds pretty dreamy to me.  So if they would package their own coffee and hatch a clever slogan, I’d go with that.

As for our chicken friend’s new java fix in today’s comic, you might find a little delight in the trademark expression of one civet bean vendor: “Kopi Luwak: Good to the last dropping.”

Can you think of any pithy worldview branding that has managed to capture your allegiance?

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The Gipper on Obama’s Cold War mind warp

September 9, 2012 3 Comments

How about that Democratic National Convention?  While the Left heaped praise on Bill Clinton’s speech, media generally opined that President Obama’s was muted and relatively unimpressive.  No promise of a sweeping agenda, but a plea to hang on because things are moving in the right direction.  Never mind that, per the historical record, the recovery should be moving much more briskly.

One of the most memorable moments of the President’s speech came when he attacked Mitt Romney for being “stuck in a Cold War mind warp.”  As he tells it, Governor Romney wants to return to a time of “blustering and blundering.”  This is a rather unfortunate way for President Obama to describe the most significant–and a greatly triumphant–chapter in American history.

Think of the man who had the biggest role in leading America to victory in that nearly five decade showdown between freedom and tyranny: Ronald Reagan.  His greatest speech (transcript and YouTube) was called “A Time for Choosing.”  In it, he reminded Americans of their country’s exceptional worth and the tremendous stakes of a prolonged conflict with the Soviet Union.  In retrospect, Americans today can rightly claim a fulfillment of what Reagan called “our rendezvous with destiny.”

But for the media and Democrats, “blustering and blundering” suffice for a label.  The tendency on the Left has always been to trivialize national security concerns.  At the heart of the liberal worldview, communists, jihadis, and so on are ultimately well-meaning, misunderstood types.  But Reagan had it right.  There have been and will continue to be dire times when serious foes will work to end our way of life.  Appropriately, these moments are “a time for choosing.”

This past Spring, Mr. Obama made a choice of sorts when he announced his flexibility for Mr. Putin after the election.  Granted, Russia is not the committed ideological foe it once was, but it has hardly been a global Boy Scout either.

There is another way in which Obama erred by his “mind warp” comment.  The Cold War was not just an arms race, but the ultimate game of statist one-upmanship.  Recall Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.”  The world’s superpowers were out to win prestige in every arena, including who could build the biggest, shiniest welfare state.  In large part, the heavy expenditures and extensive central planning required for this contest buried the Soviet bloc.  Even social democracies like the once mighty Great Britain had to change their tack.

In America, the 1970s shocks of the OPEC crisis and stagflation disabused many of the welfare state utopia.  President Reagan proclaimed the following decade: “In this crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”  And in the 1990s President Clinton conceded, “the era of big government is over.”  And in the time since, conservative governments from Scandinavia to Canada have improved their economic fortunes by shifting policy to the right.

Of course there are those who still haven’t gotten the memo.  It would seem that President Obama, who has yet to demonstrate meaningful concern for the debt, is one such person.  When it comes to engorging the superstructure of the welfare state, Mr. Obama has shown himself to be the one stuck in a Cold War mindset.

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The half-life of racism

September 8, 2012 2 Comments

Attorney General Eric Holder made a bit of a splash when speaking at Columbia earlier this year.  He told the audience at his alma mater that he could not imagine a time when the need for racial preferences like affirmative action would cease.

So at what point does racism stop mattering in American life?  Perhaps you’ve entertained this question before.  If government, civil society and churches have been laboring against this great sin for decades, is there anything to show for it?

Surely, in 300 years, after our great-grandchildren are deceased, the old, nasty attitudes so prevalent before the Civil Rights era will have been expunged.  But if not, there will be sophisticated equipment–maybe like a Star Trek tricorder–to empirically identify any remnants.

For now, we are lucky to have wagging tongues like Chris Matthews to tell us when someone is being racist.  Or, we can just as well heed the dire warnings of speakers at this year’s Democratic National Convention.

Anyone who genuinely seeks a substantive discussion of issues, such as our raging national debt or the proper scope of federal government, has required a little patience in dealing with smokescreens thrown up by progressives and Democrats.  We know these as racism, the war on women, homophobia and so on.

The identity politics fiefdom built on these “wedge” issues is troubling in how it treats people in need as abstractions, not individuals.  The long history of progressive prescriptions affirms the ineffectiveness of promises perennially extended toward these abstracted victims.  President Johnson launched a “War on Poverty” in the 1960s, but the numbers of poor and dependent have reliably increased in the decades since.  Why should we think that President Obama, in spending ever more sums on the same problems, will change that?

While some conditions haven’t improved, there has been tremendous progress on societal attitudes.  Among those born after the tumult of the 1960s, the ideal of “equality” crowns the paramount virtue of “tolerance.”  But many remain beholden to the hope that just a little more money to social programs, a little more Ad Council propaganda, will actually change conditions for the abstraction.

What if these well-intended moves crowd out the healthy habits and cultural capital necessary to the success of the individual?  These, not the wasteful expenditures of federal welfare programs, are what can change conditions on the ground.  But to assess this soberly will require a little distance from the crooning promises of “Hope and Change” or MSNBC’s alarmist cries of “racism!”

Would it be safe to say that, in America today, we’re beyond the half-life of racism or patriarchy?  Existential struggle against oppression need not trump every policy consideration.  As I noted recently, a diverse lineup of thought leaders in media and at this year’s Republican National Convention have given us hope that we’re past that point.  For the sake of true progress, and the issues that really matter, I hope November will reflect a similar move among the population at large.

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Muffin consumption pivotal issue in 2012. Really?

September 5, 2012 1 Comment

A writer who teaches at Columbia managed to file another subjective, liberal polemic with the New York Times the other day.  In the piece, the author invokes the memory of her deceased, Korean immigrant father to denounce . . . you guessed it, Mitt Romney.

And the decisive issue for Asian immigrants in 2012?  How one eats a muffin.

This time, the opinion writer drags us along an arc strewn with references to airline peanut packets and Burberry scarves, whatever those are.  She arbitrarily parks the words “Anglo-Saxon” in the vicinity of Ann Romney’s name, in a bald attempt to evoke from her readers whatever animus may have been deposited by past ethnic studies professors.

As for breakfast habits, the writer would have us believe that, for miserly immigrants like her father, they’re a game changer:

I can only imagine what he would have had to say about a presidential candidate so heedless he eats only the top off a muffin. No matter how loyal a Republican, my father would likely have declared Mr. Romney a very silly, profligate man — not the kind of man to be trusted with his precious tax money. Perhaps his vote would have gone to a Democrat for the first time ever. Politico has declared the Asian-American vote “key for both parties.”  Will muffin-top-gate cause other immigrant parents to join their Democratic-leaning children?

This passage, besides being an unrealistic fantasy, betrays the totalizing tendency of liberals.  That is chiefly, the conflation of private behavior with public obligations.  If a police officer tucks in his daughter at night with a tender kiss, does he become too gentle to chase and pin down a violent suspect the next day?  In the same way, how a businessman spends his own earnings has no connection with his performance at his day job.

Indeed, it was President Clinton who called Romney’s business record “sterling.”  Car elevators and the alleged discarding of muffin bottoms don’t erase the over 100,000 jobs and healthy profit Romney generated at Bain; neither do they negate his tremendous service to the Salt Lake Olympics.

And since we’re counting, let’s not forget all the penny-pinching, middle class markers of Mr. Romney: his “cheap” kitchen light bulb fix, the family vacations in a wood-paneled station wagon, and his regular trips flying economy class, even at the risk of air rage fisticuffs.

The appropriate scrutiny for this election is not on what a businessman does with privately-purchased muffins, but what a public steward like President Barack Obama has done with the people’s money.  An added $6,000,000,000,000 to the debt, the failed $800 billion stimulus (check the graph here), support of green flops like high speed rail and Solyndra, and an otherwise total lack of leadership on the federal budget make a better case for profligacy than any half-eaten baked breakfast good ever could.

If we’re going to talk muffin waste, Barack Obama has wantonly discarded untold dumpster loads of them, in the belief that he could always tax the muffin-rich or inflate his way out of the muffin debt.

So there we have it.  A mainstream publication continues to avail itself as a platform for utterly unconvincing liberal carping.  It would have been genuinely interesting to have an honest exposition of what ideas animated the writer’s allegiance to the Democratic party.  For now, the consuming public must be content with a couched, self-referential diatribe of cross-generational rebellion.  That, and whatever else the enlightened editors toss our way.

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2016 and RNC: increasingly visible, minority conservatives buck liberalism

August 30, 2012 3 Comments

This past weekend, I saw Dinesh D’Souza’s 2016: Obama’s America.  It was playing on some 1,000 movie screens.  And this upcoming weekend, it will open up on a thousand more.  There’s been considerable coverage now that it’s broken into the weekly box office top ten.  Not only that, it’s at least the fifth highest grossing political documentary of all time.  Watch out, Michael Moore!

I have offered some critical words about D’Souza’s past work.  Just the cover of his 2011 tome, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, comes off as a psychoanalytical potshot.  But given the election year excitement and buzz, I thought I’d give 2016 a try.

Dinesh D’Souza travels the world to learn about Obama’s roots. 2016themovie.com

The film is well-produced, and acclaimed Hollywood veteran Gerald Molen can be thanked for that.  The music, not overbearing or manipulative as we might expect for a political documentary, lends an air of excitement and intrigue befitting the cosmopolitan journey.  After all, this is D’Souza’s “reading” (as my wife put it) of Obama’s globetrotting, cross-cultural upbringing.

D’Souza lays out a comprehensive case in the course of 90 minutes; undoubtedly, he has done his homework.  Polished graphics and dramatic cuts of D’Souza retracing Obama’s footsteps through Indonesia, Hawaii, and Kenya add grit and a kinetic potency to his “anticolonial” thesis.

A recent AP Fact Check–which Breitbart’s Big Journalism has answered–takes exception to some of D’Souza’s claims.  But the finer points of what Obama was exposed to at prep school or what his father’s old associates believe about Israel pale in comparison to the the core fact that the AP fact checker perhaps willfully overlooked.  This is the odd trajectory his white, American, maternal side of the family put him on.

Looking beyond the film for a moment, we can see the root of that strange trajectory.  President Obama’s maternal grandfather, Stanley Dunham, named his daughter after himself.  Of course, people mostly know her by her middle name Ann.

Back in the film, we see Ann’s radical values–adopted early in life–play out.  She rejects her Indonesian husband Lo Lo Soetoro because he cozies up to an American oil company and comes to oppose communists.  This telling is hardly the kind of “logical stretch” that AP’s fact check would have you believe the film is built on.

D’Souza’s most important revelation may be Obama’s “founding fathers.”  How he comes to know one of these guiding lights is particularly telling.  Young Barack’s grandfather Stanley Dunham  introduces a peculiar personal friend to be his mentor: card-carrying Communist (no. 47544) Frank Marshall Davis.

At one point in the film, D’Souza refers to Obama’s ideas as “alien.”  As cringe-inducing as this may sound, it is not a prelude to a radical right rant.  Neither is it a racist code or dog whistle.  After all, D’Souza is a mixed race immigrant from the global South.  That Barack Obama is black is merely an asterisk to the long-raging ideological struggle that lent his mother and grandfather strange ideas most Americans reject.

As important as D’Souza’s revelations are, we’ll find in 2016 a deeper significance.  It’s a film where a South Asian immigrant stars in a winsome, provocative telling of his own life as it contrasts with Obama’s.  During one prominent segment, D’Souza invokes the expert testimony of a fellow biracial academic, Shelby Steele.  Liberal Hollywood doesn’t hand us such a substantive, diversely-cast film everyday.  Sure, there’s Harold and Kumar, if Asian-Americans being depicted as stoners is somehow a good thing.

What 2016 accomplishes by featuring such thought-provoking minority conservatives is something neither the media, academia, nor the rest of our liberal cultural elites can stand.  This film is a very “brown” critique of the liberal worldview, and something I deeply appreciate as the son of a Southeast Asian immigrant myself.  Just as D’Souza relates his own college experience to spotlight the strange thinking of some Americans, I can recall absurd liberal expectations that I encountered as a college student of color.

Minority conservatives are to be found not just on screen, but on stage, at the Republican National Convention.  Speakers like Nikki Haley, Artur Davis, Condoleezza Rice and Susana Martinez have this year voiced their rejection of liberalism while affirming all that makes America powerful, decent, and good.

Nothing threatens the liberal worldview more than when its objects of sympathy and concern stand up, call it for what it is, and reject it.  As important as it will be in getting out the 2012 conservative vote, 2016 is,  perhaps more significantly, another nail in the coffin of liberal ideas whose time has passed.

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