Moe Lane

Mind you, this is considering the source:

Like many Democrats in Congress, [Rep. Louise Slaughter (D, NY)] praises Mr. Obama as intellectually gifted and a generous listener. But “if you are asking me if he dominates the room,” she said, “I would have to say no.”

Via Hot Air Headlines.  The rest of the article is pretty much an extended written game where the goal is to describe the President as a passive, ineffectual wimp without actually using the words ‘passive,’ ‘ineffectual,’ or ‘wimp:’ the writer succeeds, but at the expense of having to use the word ‘gentle’ in the title.  That possibly may have been too artful; I understand that the average New York Times reader is a bit delicate in his or her sensibilities (particularly when they’re being challenged), but surely they’re not that delicate?

Don’t answer that.

Moe Lane

Learning To Fly, Tom Petty

Tom Petty is… odd. Yes, yes, very original of me to say: but you do get the feeling sometimes that he’s actually an alien anthropologist and this music thing is just his hobby for when he’s between academic papers.

Which is fine.

Cold wind frets through fields
Where hops shall reclaim their place -
- Have some beer haiku.

Via Boing Boing.

I can’t quite get my eyes to register what’s happening. Very odd.

(Via Hot Air) And it’s coming from the Congressional arm of the political party that has spent the last year informing the very people that they’re now trying to galvanize into action that being against the Democratic party’s insane amount of spending means that you actually like to put your testicles in other people’s mouths.

There is a certain disconnect, here.  Which is a polite way of saying “The Tea Partiers are mad at the GOP.  They bloody well despise the Democrats.”

There was something about this Susan Estrich column on the death throes of the health care rationing bill that bugged me – and no, it wasn’t its basic point:

So what went wrong? Every Democrat I talk to has a different answer or, rather, a different person to blame. It was Nancy Pelosi’s fault or Harry Reid’s or Rahm Emanuel’s. Should have made a bigger show of reaching out to Republicans; shouldn’t have cut those deals behind closed doors. It is, I am told every day, a communications problem.

Years ago, when I was working in politics, I had a meeting with our pollsters that I’ll never forget. After a particularly detailed (and negative) survey, one of the guys who had been polling for years leaned over to me and said, “We have a very big problem. People just don’t like our candidate.” Not an ideological problem. Not a problem with his experience or positions. They just didn’t like him.

Of course, you can’t tell your candidate that the people don’t like him. So we looked at each other and shook our heads. There is only one way to translate that result. Candidate, we said to him, the people don’t know you.

The White House is trying to treat the problem with its health care proposal as a communications problem.

I happen to agree with the basic point, you see.  At any rate, I finally figured out what was bugging me about it, and it was this sentence:

Barack Obama is a great communicator.

As somebody once said of Pompey the Great: ‘Great’ as compared to whom?

Technical skill at reading a speech I’ll grant – although if I hear one more version of the Why I Am The Synthesis of The Two Sides To Whatever Problem Is Bugging You People This Week I may start a tequila IV drip – but he doesn’t particularly impress when it comes to off-the-cuff remarks, unscripted conversations, or just plain personal moments.  I’m not even sure if he’s had any of the latter where we could see him.  For that matter, the President has consciously adopted a policy of simply not being available to communicate, even with the White House press corps.  Declarations and pronouncements, sure.  Two-way interaction?  Not so much.

If I were still of the President’s party, this would trouble me.  Since I’m not, I’m just going to not put a copy on this directly on RedState and hope that’s enough to keep the Other Side from really noticing the problem.

Moe Lane

Via Hot Air, check out the racial sensitivity of MSNBC/CNBC talking head Donnie Deutsch:

‘Coconut,’ for those lucky enough to have missed it up to this point, is a derogatory racial epithet hurled against dark-skinned individuals deemed insufficiently ‘authentic.’ It suggests that the individual in question is ‘brown on the outside, white on the inside.’ When used by someone of the same ethnic identity as the slurred individual, it takes on the additional connotation of ‘race traitor;’ when used by someone of Caucasian ancestry, it typically represents an opportunity to express racial hatreds in a socially acceptable manner. The Other Side has, shall we say, a history of such things; and if we ever have that full and frank discussion of race that’s been promised the first question that I plan to ask is going to be about precisely why this is acceptable behavior among them.

About the only thing mitigating this exercise in public racism is that it appeared on the Joy Behar show, which means that almost nobody saw it anyway.

Moe Lane

PS: Don’t get mad.  Get even.

Crossposted to RedState.

Because you never know.

Thanks to CPAC, I completely missed covering this (Glenn Reynolds reminded me of the story this morning):

Authors of waterboarding memos won’t be disciplined

Bush administration lawyers who wrote memos that paved the way for waterboarding of terrorism suspects and other harsh interrogation tactics “exercised poor judgment” but will not face discipline for their actions, according to long-awaited Justice Department documents released Friday.

I would have asked Abdul Ghani Baradar whether he thought that this exoneration – which is what this is  – had anything to do with the administration’s decision to re-implement Clinton-era tactics of extraordinary rendition, but he could not be reached for comment.

Moe Lane

PS: What’s that?  You’re from the Left, and you gave money to Democrats because you thought that they would prosecute Yoo and Bybee for doing their jobs?  And now you want that money back?  Why, how profoundly silly of you.  Next, you’ll be telling farmers to give milk back to the cows.

Hey, be personally grateful it’s not ‘give bacon back to the pigs.’

Crossposted to RedState.

After commenting on this depressing article about how hard it is to fire an incompetent teacher in the LA school system (short answer: very, very, very hard. No, harder than that. No, harder than that, too), Mickey sighs:

I know this item reads like it was written in 1984 (when Gary Hart made an issue of firing incompetent teachers in his campaign against Walter Mondale). That’s because the situation in the unionized public schools has not improved markedly in 25 years. Believe me, I wish the neoliberalism of the late ’70s weren’t so relevant.

I have no desire to get into a fight with Mickey Kaus – those never end well – but I would like to suggest that perhaps he should start remembering that last sentence on future Election Days.

Eye Of The Tiger, Survivor

I know that it’s an obvious retread from last November, but I’m bumping it up early on the rotation because of… well, this. I knew that they were filming; I didn’t realize that they were panning the camera.

This is the last of the CPAC candidate interviews: I have a few more of non-candidates.  Allen West’s website is here.

Crossposted to RedState.

Which is undoubtedly how Ace of Spades will describe this, once he sees it:

“The president posted ideas of his on the White House website today. We hope Republicans will post their ideas either on their website, or we’d be happy to post them on ours, so that the American people could come to one location and find out the parameters of what will largely be discussed on Thursday,” [Press Secretary Robert] Gibbs said.

Turns out the House Republicans’ plan has been online since October and already has its own link on the White House website.

(Via @ErickaAndersen) Remember: this guy? Inner circle.

Inner.

Circle.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.