Month: September 2012

Ambassador Susan Rice’s grim, vaguely bigoted, Libyan point-defense.

You may be wondering why the Obama administration (in the guise of UN Ambassador Susan Rice) is claiming that last week’s protests and murders in the Middle East were spontaneous, ad hoc exhibitions of ire against an obscure anti-Islamic YouTube movie, despite the fact that the Libyan government itself is saying that the aforementioned murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens and members of his staff was part of a “precalculated, preplanned attack” by a terrorist group.  After all, not only is the latter explanation the more believable one (disorganized rioters rarely bring rocket-propelled grenade launchers to spontaneous demonstrations); it’s frankly the less insulting one, given that the administration is essentially taking the position that it’s reasonable to expect Muslims to bring rocket-propelled grenade launchers to spontaneous demonstrations.  And yet there Ambassador Rice is there, busily embarrassing herself all over the television – and with the pitying disapproval of her peers, too.

What’s going on?

Sheer pragmatism.  A clumsy lie beats admitting to eight years of hypocrisy, you see. Continue reading Ambassador Susan Rice’s grim, vaguely bigoted, Libyan point-defense.

#rsrh ‘…A dying superpower’s blundering response.’

This Mark Steyn post starts brutal, and doesn’t particularly feel the need to stop:

So, on a highly symbolic date, mobs storm American diplomatic facilities and drag the corpse of a U.S. ambassador through the streets. Then the president flies to Vegas for a fundraiser. No, no, a novelist would say; that’s too pat, too neat in its symbolic contrast. Make it Cleveland, or Des Moines.

Normally this is where I’d say ‘read the whole thing,’ but this time I suggest that you get your blood sugar up first.  As it is, you’re going to have enough trouble keeping your temper in check over what kind of natsec dark place this administration has taken us to this past week.

Moe Lane

PS: Please understand this, and do not pretend to not understand: the only people who want the Right to sit out this election are the people who want Barack Obama to be reelected.  I don’t care what their reasons are for that, and I would appreciate it if you did not care, either.  Mitt Romney for President.

#rsrh African-American voters and the Democrats’ false Hegelian choice of 2012.

I understand the issue: on the one hand, Barack Obama is now in favor of same-sex marriage (for the record, so am I, and have been considerably more honest about it than he ever was).  On the other hand, African-American church-goers have been told for some time that Mormonism is a cult (it is the official opinion of MoeLane.com that Mormonism is not*).  What to do, what to do?

:shrug: If you’re an African-American voter?  Stay home.  That’s not partisan hackery, either: more accurately, partisan hackery is lining up nicely with the uncomfortable truth that politicians will never take a group seriously if they know that they can also utterly take it for granted.  So it doesn’t really matter whether I am being self-serving, here (I totally am) – I’m also being right. Continue reading #rsrh African-American voters and the Democrats’ false Hegelian choice of 2012.

#rsrh Can’t wait to hear how the Chicago bomb thing was a stupid video/Mitt Romney’s fault.

Because God forbid that we assume that any of this could be due to a failure of leadership:

Undercover FBI agents arrested an 18-year-old American man who tried to detonate what he believed was a car bomb outside a downtown Chicago bar, federal prosecutors said today. Adel Daoud, a US citizen from the Chicago suburb of Hillside, was arrested last night in an undercover operation in which agents pretending to be extremists provided him with a phony car bomb. But the device was inert and the public was never at risk, officials said.

Or, more accurately, a failure to induce the proper bed-wetting terror that should accompany any thought of setting off an explosive on US soil.  Because if you’re thinking that this sort of story seems to have gotten more and more common since 20[0*]9… well.  Yes, it has.

Moe Lane

[*Nag, nag, nag.]

#rsrh Another quick reminder on turnout models.

  • We will not know which polling firm had the best turnout model until after the election.
  • Based on previous history, having a good turnout model in previous election cycles does not necessarily mean that you will have a good turnout model in this one.
  • A poll is not accurate simply because it agrees with you; in fact, a poll is often not accurate even when it agrees with the end result.
  • Every criticism about the assumptions made in a particular turnout model will itself be based on assumptions.

And everybody in the business will agree to the above, with the private caveat Except for my favorite polling firm, of course.

Moe Lane

PS: What? No, there’s been no new polling, particularly. But this has to be brought up sometime.

SM Stirling, check with your attorney?

…I mean, I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen this “Revolution" thing before - only it was called Dies the Fire and was the start of a fairly involved, fairly well-known book series.  One hopes that NBC isn’t simply planning to file off the serial numbers and pass off Mr. Stirling’s work as their own…

#rsrh I’ll say it in public, sure: I wish John McCain had won.

And you can assume that I know that he would have infuriated me and other conservatives on a regular basis; that we would have had a knock-down, drag-out internal fight over the fallout from Citizens United; that the Republican party probably would not have cleaned up so thoroughly in the last election cycle; and that right now we’d have to listen to nigh-infinite waves of shuffling Obama zombies telling us that we would have avoided 6% unemployment, $2.60/gallon gas, and $11 trillion debt* if only we hadn’t been such racists.

Yeah, sorry: I still wish John McCain had won, and I’ll say so in public until the cows come home.  I got kids.

Moe Lane

*All three numbers for that alternate were estimated (read: “eyeballed”) under the assumption that McCain would have done pretty much nothing at all, which would frankly have been a better option than the counter-productive imbecility that has been the hallmark of the Obama administration.