Month: April 2012

#rsrh Hey, just a reminder: Nancy Pelosi lied about waterboarding, and the Left let her.

Hardly a surprise on either score: after all, I’ve been telling people for years that Nancy Pelosi knew all about the waterboarding all along. So did Glenn Reynolds.  So did, in fact, did a lot of other people. So the news (via Mark Thiessen) that a new book is out claiming that then-House Intelligence Ranking Member Nancy Pelosi and then-House Intelligence chair Porter Goss were fully briefed by the CIA on waterboarding as an interrogation technique in 2002 is not a surprise.  If true, it’s very, very damning – the book is claiming that Pelosi declined to protest the waterboarding at all, while raising objections to another procedure (which implies that this old claim that she couldn’t protest is, well, another lie) – but not a surprise.

Interestingly, it may actually be more than a he-said, she-said moment here: Continue reading #rsrh Hey, just a reminder: Nancy Pelosi lied about waterboarding, and the Left let her.

RedState Review: The Tyranny of Cliches.

Jonah Goldberg has a new book out coming out tomorrow – the full title is The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas – which will be seen by many to be a sort of sequel to his previous (and very useful work Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.  I say ‘sort of sequel’ because The Tyranny of Cliches is not exactly an expansion of Liberal Fascism as it is a book that references a lot of the same events and themes as its ‘predecessor,’ only from the angle of ‘how progressives manipulate language’ as opposed to ‘how progressives manipulate history.’  Capsule review: The Tyranny of Cliches does an excellent job in puncturing several progressive delusions about their ideology, including the one about how progressives don’t really have an ideology in the first place; you want to read it.

The central message of The Tyranny of Cliches is Progressives have a consistent ideology, which they then proceed to pretend is not an ideology at all, but instead mere ‘Pragmatism.’  The reason why this is important is because ideologies can be and are rigorously questioned and challenged as a matter of course; but if one can instead get people to treat an ideological position as merely being something that ‘everybody knows,’ then it theoretically becomes easier to get people to unquestionably endorse said position.  Hence, ‘tyranny of cliche:’ cliches are of course self-contained and internally consistent thoughts* that most people in a culture understand and accept.  Having progressive ideas and concepts slip into that shared consensus would go a long way towards having those ideas and concepts adopted and used. Continue reading RedState Review: The Tyranny of Cliches.

#rsrh JTA: Jewish support of GOP highest since 1988!

…at least, that’s how JTA could have reported the news that a recent poll showed a 61/28 breakdown of the Jewish vote between Obama & Romney.  I will grant that they reported the 78/22 breakdown in 2008 between Obama/McCain… but you would think that somebody over there would have admitted that, yeah, we haven’t seen numbers this good since Bush 41’s 455 in 1988.  Of course, a person who looks at this table might have come to the conclusion that there has been a slow eroding of Jewish support for Democratic candidates.  Or that Barack Obama is probably not going to get that demographic back, either.

You know, Barack Obama is backsliding among a lot of demographics, lately. Just thought that I’d get that on the record, and all.

Moe Lane

(Also via AoSHQ)

#rsrh #FORWARD …Obama will desperately try to find a new motto when this one crashes and burns.

You know, when you’re a Democrat and Politico won’t carry your water…

The Obama campaign is out with a new web video Monday…

[snip of half-hearted attempts to parrot Democratic talking points]

…It’s part of the ongoing struggle for the Obama campaign to try to find a slogan that will stick.

…Well, you’re apparently Barack Obama.  You know: I may actually end up enjoying this election cycle.  It’s shaping up to be better than I expected.

Via @PounderFile.

Moe Lane

PS: I give this one two weeks.  Also: they should have tried “Excelsior!”  Still would have been stupid, but at least it would have suggested that there’s a member of this administration who realizes that history started before, oh, 1992 or so…

#QOTD, An Unsettling Line From @Instapundit Edition.

In reaction to Walter Russell Mead’s post about the latest round of (presumably) Muslim violence against Christians in Nigeria, Glenn Reynolds writes:

While the Knights Templar slouch toward Rome, waiting to be reborn.

Judging from the literary reference embodied by ‘slouch,’ Glenn does not wish* to see another Crusade; and neither do I.  Neither does, I think, Pope Benedict XVI.  But the final decision of whether there will be one is not exactly in any of our hands. Including the Pope’s: most of the Christians in Africa are going to be indifferent at best towards the opinions of the head of the Roman Catholic Church…

Moe Lane

*Note the verb choice.

Did Elizabeth Warren (D CAND, MA-SEN PRI) actually claim minority status for her own benefit, after all?

Alternate title: I was wrong about Elizabeth Warren.

I hate to admit being wrong, of course, but I’m pretty much stuck here. You see, last week I RedHotted a post where in passing I more or less indicated that I didn’t think that it was particularly fair to ding MA senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren for her claims of Native American ancestry. When I read the story, it seemed that she had merely repeated it as an anecdote from her family history – which is to say, something that I’ve done myself (family history claims a Huron great-grandmother; I have no evidence whatsoever for this). I also didn’t really think that it was all that big a deal that Harvard University was claiming minority status for her for a time; universities do weird things for publicity, she wasn’t running for office when it happened, and besides, Harvard stopped doing that a while back anyway. I figured that there were more important things that I could be doing with my time.

Well. This is what happens when you trust the ethical sense of a progressive politician. It turns out that Elizabeth Warren in fact claimed minority status: specifically, in the “Association of American Law Schools’ annual directory of minority law teachers” (H/T: @CoonDawg68) from 1986 to 1995 (more about this at The Volokh Conspiracy (via Instapundit), which also has some interesting details about ‘racial fraud’ as a legal concept in Massachusetts). As the Boston Herald helpfully notes, universities would have had access to this information… which, presumably, would include their hiring committees. Are we really expected to believe that Harvard University didn’t consult the AALS minority directory as part of their vetting process? In fact, are really expected to believe that the University of Pennsylvania didn’t, either? – Because I don’t, and that means, again, that I was wrong. And I’m sorry about that.

Continue reading Did Elizabeth Warren (D CAND, MA-SEN PRI) actually claim minority status for her own benefit, after all?

Awww, crud. Yeah, this *is* how Footfall started.

With mucking about in the rings of Saturn (via Instapundit).

Anyway, let me channel the spirit of Bob Heinlein for a moment and instruct the US government: if it turns out that we are just starting up an alien invasion novel, skip ahead about three hundred pages or so and just start building the damned Orion Drive spaceship now.  And never mind the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty: hell, the Soviet Union died choking on its own blood over twenty years ago, and if you don’t think that the ChiComs won’t build one themselves – and leave it in orbit afterward – well…

Moe Lane Continue reading Awww, crud. Yeah, this *is* how Footfall started.