In a Nation of Children, Where the Option Is Santa Claus or Hard Work, What Wins?

Rush Limbaugh (thanks to Valerie):

Mitt Romney and his family would have been the essence of exactly what this country needs. But what was Romney’s recipe? Romney’s recipe was the old standby: American route to success, hard work. That gets sneered at. I’m sorry. In a country of children where the option is Santa Claus or work, what wins? And say what you want, but Romney did offer a vision of traditional America.

In his way, he put forth a great vision of traditional America, and it was rejected. It was rejected in favor of a guy who thinks that those who are working aren’t doing enough to help those who aren’t. And that resonated. The Obama campaign was about small stuff. War on Women, binders, Big Bird, this kind of stuff. The Romney campaign was about big things, was about America.

(…) One of the greatest misunderstandings in this country, if you boil all this down, is what creates prosperity. The Romney campaign was essentially about that, and the Romney campaign was devoted to the traditional American view and history — vision, as well — of what creates prosperity. The old capitalism, the old arguments of hard work, stick-to-itiveness, self-reliance, charity, helping out in the community. All of these things that define the traditional institutions that made this country great, that’s what the Romney campaign was about.

It was rejected. That way, or that route to prosperity was sneered at. That route to prosperity was rejected. The people who voted for Obama don’t believe in it. They don’t think it’s possible. They think the game’s rigged. They think the deck is stacked against them. They think that the only way they’re gonna have a chance for anything is if somebody comes along and takes from somebody else and gives it to them. Santa Claus! And it’s hard to beat Santa Claus. Especially it’s hard to beat Santa Claus when the alternative is, « You be your own Santa Claus. » (…)

There is no rising to responsibility. There is no accepting responsibility. There’s just a demand that the gravy train continue, and we have an administration that’s promising an endless gravy train. All you have to do to stay on that gravy train is vote.

Charles Hurt adds that

The only way this gridlock is finally broken is when politicians grow up and decide to put away Big Bird and dancing horses and seriously address like adults the $16 trillion in debts they have racked up on our credit card.

Obama & Hollande

Plantu compares America's inauguration Bible with France's Gallois report on improving productivity and competition, which the French president similarly swears upon (but with less than mucho enthusiasm)


• François Hollande: Uh… I'll see what I can do!

The Mood

The mood (thanks to PK)…

RFI Debate Between 1 and 3 a.m. EST

I will be debating the U.S. elections on the English channel of Radio France International early Wednesday morning between 07h00 and 09h00 GMT Paris time (click on the News button inside the Listen to RFI box on the right margin).

Obama Leading, 59 to 41% …in Paris Bar (?!)

There is at least one place that Barack Obama is leading in the polls, you will be happy to know. In Paris, writes Les Inrocks' Alexandre Comte, where the Harry's New York Bar straw poll has been taken 19 times since 1924 and where the results have only been wrong three times.

Obama creuse donc l’écart avec un total de 214 voix contre 148 (soit 59% pour Obama, 41% pour Romney). L’effet Sandy ? En tout cas, pour le Harry’s, c’est quasiment joué d’avance, Obama sera réélu à la Présidence des Etats-Unis.

But then comes this:

« C’est vrai que depuis les deux guerres du Golfe et le 11 Septembre, moins d’Américains viennent en France », constate Alain Da Silva. « Et ceux qui viennent encore voyagent beaucoup, ils ont une ouverture d’esprit que d’autres n’ont pas, par exemple ceux qui restent chez eux et sont incapables de situer les capitales du monde. »

No Pasarán's W*2 provides the translation:

The caveat if BHO loses, according to Les Inrocks: only "enlightened" Americans travel these days. The other 'Murcans are "bitter clingers" who don't get out much. 

To which No Pasarán's Joe replies: The Europeans are

so simplistic and monomaniacal that they think all of society changes based on who's in office: it says more about their lack of depth than anything else.

Obama gave us 4 years of cronyism, secrecy, and deception

Barack Obama promised to clean up government and restore Americans' trust in their leaders. He broke this promise, and instead gave us four years of cronyism, secrecy and deception. 

Thus writes Tim Carney.

Obama's campaign rhetoric about honest government, his vow in 2008 to level the playing field and his pledge to right a rigged game lay at the heart of his appeal to the center. This talk of responsible government has continued throughout his tenure.

"We have to recognize that we face more than a deficit of dollars right now," Obama told Congress in his first State of the Union address. "We face a deficit of trust -- deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years."

A few seconds later, speaking on this very theme, the president blatantly lied to Congress and the country.

"We've excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs," he said.

But sitting in the front row of the House chamber were four former lobbyists whom Obama had appointed as Cabinet secretaries. His Internal Revenue Service general counsel had lobbied for the Swiss Bankers Association. His Treasury Department chief of staff was fresh off a gig as a Goldman Sachs lobbyist.

As Obama spoke those words, more than 40 ex-lobbyists held policymaking jobs in his administration.

The moment embodied Obama's greatest failures: his failure to play it straight with the American people, his failure to wrestle power from the lobbyists and his apparent failure to even try.

Obama -- through his special-interest dealings, his corporate welfare and crony capitalism, his deceptions, his lawbreaking expansion of executive power, his disregard for transparency and his broken promises -- has increased the deficit of trust that he inherited.

Obamacare, his signature initiative, was spawned in backroom deals with the very lobbyists he attacked on the campaign trail. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the largest single-industry lobby in the country, wrote large portions of the bill. The law is loaded with special favors and subsidies that benefit drugmakers at the expense of taxpayers and patients.

Obama's lawyers tried to keep this fling secret, stonewalling congressional investigators who wanted to see the White House's emails with the drug lobby.

Obama's stimulus was a pork-laden lobbyist feeding frenzy, and cronyism pervaded his green energy subsidies. A recently revealed email shows a top Energy Department political appointee warning, "Reid may be desperate. WH may want to help," referring to vulnerable Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who was seeking a subsidy for his home state. "Short term considerations may be more important than longer term considerations and what's a billion anyhow?"

Obama, newly public emails show, personally oversaw this politically motivated fast-track process that led to such failed investments as Solyndra. This was not good government. This was abuse of the public trust for political gain. And it is the norm under Obama.

Obama launched the United States into war in Libya with no legal authority to do so, and he tried to dodge the issue by calling it a "kinetic action."

His administration has clamped down on transparency, creating new justifications for rejecting Freedom of Information Act requests. Obama scrapped his "transparency czar" position in 2010, giving those duties to partisan lawyer Bob Bauer, who was openly hostile to transparency -- "disclosure is a mostly unquestioned virtue deserving to be questioned," Bauer once wrote.

Obama has led by misleading, and he is campaigning the same way. His economic attack on Mitt Romney centers on a flagrant misrepresentation of his own auto bailout and Romney's position. "We refused to let Detroit go bankrupt," Obama said in a radio address this year. But both GM and Chrysler went bankrupt. "You did not say that you would provide government help," Obama said to Romney in a debate, but Romney had called explicitly for federal loan guarantees.

Obama's culture war campaign consists mostly of claiming Romney would take away birth control -- because Romney opposes Obama's law outlawing co-pays on birth control and forcing employers to cover every penny of it.

On honesty, transparency and fairness, you can object that Bush was as bad. But that misses the point. Obama appealed to swing voters -- who don't share his extreme views on abortion or his expansive vision of the government's role -- by promising a new, fairer way of doing business.

He didn't deliver this. He lost our trust. He doesn't deserve it back.

Yes We Jerrycan

Plantu on America's elections while New York is still in waiting

• Yes We Jerrycan!

May the Best Manager Win

Speaking to a liberal Sunday, she finished our conversation with the words, "May the best man win."

I immediately corrected her: May the best manager win!

The traditional sentence is often used wrongly, implying — in retrospective (after the election or after the game or after the match) — that whoever it was who prevailed is, or turns out to be, ipso facto, the best of the two (or of the lot). This is what the sentence is taken to mean most of the time, and the truth is that is should be scrapped.

Should Barack Obama win tonight (and I am predicting that he will not do so), it will be thanks to news media that used double standards.

But who, of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, will be the best to manage, to guide, to lead the American republic?

You know the answer…

Ask not, Who will be the best man to win the presidential contest.

Ask instead: Who will be the best manager to lead the United States of America.


Update: Obama-Biden email: "According to our records
… you haven't given to this campaign yet."

Dear Leader knows who's paid and who hasn't…

The way to reconcile the similarities and the differences between Bush and Obama is to see both as guardians of the New Deal tradition

When Barack Obama won the White House in 2008, it seemed like the beginning of a new era 

writes Tim Stanley in a piece called Romney offers a real alternative to Obama, Bush and the whole New Deal sexy state circus.

The election of the first black president was historic in itself, but equally important was the discrediting and near annihilation of George W Bush’s Republican Party.

Remember Katrina? Remember Abu Ghraib? Remember Sarah Palin? We were told that these were the products of a bankrupt conservative philosophy that had morally and economically bankrupted America. It was time for a new age of ambitious liberalism.

The New Era narrative was a fraud. When Bush left office, unemployment was 7.8 per cent; today it is 7.9 per cent. Debt is up, food stamps are up, income is stagnant. Bush bailed out Wall Street and so did Obama – even Obama’s much vaunted “rescue” of the auto industry was actually kick started by Bush. If Bush suffocated civil liberties with the Patriot Act, Obama blew them to Kingdom Come with that awful kill list.

In many ways, the policies and performances of Obama and Bush are rather similar. There are some differences. First, Obama accelerated big government trends that he inherited from W – debt as a percentage of GDP is way, way up. Second, Obama was Bush’s cultural opposite. Compare the 2012 GOP and Democrat conventions. While the Republicans only talked unemployment, the Democrats had a 1960s level of obsession with sexual freedom – “Make Love, Not Jobs!” In the party’s platform, the language on abortion was changed from “safe, legal and rare” to just “safe and legal.” The distinction is significant: in the 21st century Democratic Party’s opinion, there is nothing inherently wrong or even troubling about abortion. This is Obama’s true gift to the liberal tradition: moral certainly on issues of grave moral complexity.

The way to reconcile the similarities and the differences between Bush and Obama is to see both as guardians of the New Deal tradition – with varying degress of enthusiasm and very different personalities. America still lives with mythic, traumatic and nostalgic memories of the 1930s, when Franklin D Roosevelt saved capitalism from the Great Depression. The old order had seen the presidency as a moral rather than legislative force, but from the 1930s onwards the federal government became a necessary – even benign – part of economy and society. There have been conservative rebellions (Reagan’s election in 1980) but never a true counter-revolution. If Bush was Roosevelt Lite, Obama was Roosevelt Max Strength. His 2008 electoral coalition was pure New Deal: the marginalised, the organised and the educated coming together to outnumber the reactionary and the red of neck. In office, Obama did what Democrats had often promised to do but never succeeded. Real healthcare reform, millions added to the welfare rolls and finally – finally! – someone prepared to take on the Catholic Church. Eleanor Roosevelt would be proud.

The problem was that the moment when the hardcore Roosevelt fans finally got the keys to the candy store was the exact moment when it had run out of candy. The money was gone and the economy exhausted. The New Deal order didn’t cause the recession, but it did limit America’s ability to recover from it. The creation of a warfare/welfare state consensus under both Republicans and Democrats lumbered the federal government with crippling levels of debt. Using the tax code to buy off segments of the population shrivelled income, while liberalism’s language of class war made it hard to build a consensus for reform. Talk of too many food stamps was racist. A conversation about the link between poverty and family structure was, obviously, sexist. Romney was accused of elitism for challenging a tax structure that cleaves America in two.

In 2012, Obama is the candidate of the warfare/welfare establishment that has dominated American politics for eighty years. Today, the real revolutionaries are the Tea Party, who have hijacked the Republican Party and turned it into an imperfect (and often reluctant) vehicle for a return to the fundamentals of Americanism: small, constitutional, limited government. To do this, they had to reject the politics of both Obama and Bush – and Mitt has slowly caught up. There was a significant moment in the second debate when a citizen asked Romney how he would distinguish himself from George W Bush. Romney said, “President Bush and I are different people, and these are different times.” He cited differences over aid to small business, balancing the budget, energy policy and relations with China. Remarkably, Obama then jumped in to defend Bush. “George Bush didn't propose turning Medicare into a voucher," the Prez said. "George Bush embraced comprehensive immigration reform … George Bush never suggested that we eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood.”

No he didn’t – and that underscores the fact that Romney offers an alternative not only to Obama but also to Bush. He offers an alternative to whole New Deal, big spending, debt hiking, contraception distributing, sexy state circus. And he’s only so radically different because the Tea Party made him that way. Romney went into the primaries branded a moderate and came out branded a conservative. He's a better, more important candidate for it.

The Romney/Ryan ticket seems to have grasped that America simply cannot continue the way it is going. In a globalised world, smaller government is more competitive and more competitive is more beautiful. It is also more concomitant with the American historical tradition. When a US president compels citizens to buy a consumer product – and gets away with it thanks to the Supreme Court – you know that something is amiss in the land of the free.

If Obama loses on Tuesday, then we’ll have to reassess what his four years meant. They were not a change in the direction that America was heading in, but rather a dramatic acceleration of the trends that came before. If Obama wins, then the race to the bottom continues. If he loses, then it’s possible that the New Deal relay is finally at an end. Romney/Ryan is a genuine alternative to everything that has come before.

Recent Posts

Dan Hodges and Tim Stanley debate: Barack Obama and the mendacity of hope

November 6th, 2012 8:00

Obama: the anti-Americans’ American sporting a combination of historically persecuted ethnicity and posh seminar tone

Barack Obama’s put-down of his rival, Mitt Romney, during the final US presidential television debate "was a piece of condescension, and it came not from a columnist but from the Commander-in-Chief" writes Charles Moore (thanks to Instapundit) in the Telegraph.

One reason, over the past four years, that Mr Obama has lost his heroic status is that people now see beyond the simple, wonderful fact that a black man can be elected president. Martin Luther King famously had a dream about the time when his own children would be judged not “by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”. In the case of President Obama, this time has come.

And it turns out that his character is not that of a man who has emerged from nowhere to challenge the powerful few on behalf of the wretched of the earth. It is that of a media-savvy professor of an Ivy League university – comfortable with irony, more than comfortable with the sound of his own voice, confident that he knows a great deal more than most of us. One of the striking features of the lives of such professors is their terms of employment. They have what is called “tenure”: no one can get them out.

Mr Obama went into the contest that ends on Tuesday believing that he, too, had tenure. The White House was his. The election, like those bogus selection processes for top public sector jobs when the winner has been pre-decided, was little more than a tiresome formality.

In the first debate, when Mr Romney attacked him and proposed himself as a man with interesting answers, Mr Obama looked shocked at the challenger’s effrontery. Ever since then, he has had to wake up and fight back. He has certainly performed much better. But he still speaks as if he thinks his main qualification for the job is that he has it already. In this time of immense economic difficulty, incumbency should have few rights. You have to listen very carefully to get any idea at all of what the president proposes to do with the four more years to which he feels so strongly entitled.

In Britain and, even more, in continental Europe, the people who bring their fellow citizens the news do not really see this. To them, Mr Obama’s combination of historically persecuted ethnicity and posh seminar tone is just perfect. It satisfies their mildly Left-wing consciences and fits in with their cultural assumptions. The chief of these is that the excesses of the West, especially of America, are the biggest problem in the world. Mr Obama comes as near to saying this as anyone trying to win American votes ever could. His “apology tour” to the Middle East early in his presidency remains, for the European elites, the best thing he has ever done. He is the anti-Americans’ American.

… whenever Mr Romney has made what the media call his “gaffes”, I have noticed that almost all of them contain kernels of truth. Whether he is talking about the 47 per cent (his figure) of Americans who are suppliants of the state or about the threat from Russia, he is raising real problems, very much the sort of questions that Mr Obama would rather not discuss.

The French are arguably the easiest Western nation to be brainwashed

The bottom line, indeed, is that almost everybody in France is convinced that Obama is good and Romney is bad

concludes Michel Gurfinkiel.

According to a GlobeScan/PIPA poll conducted in 21 countries and released on October 22, 72% of the French support Obama in the November 6 election, the highest figure in a largely pro-Obama survey. … it is true that Obama is popular in most countries, and immensely popular in France.

Sympathy for Obama is rooted in the deepest layers of the French collective psyche, right and left. He is supposed to stand for a tame, less dominant, less assertive America; and France, like many other former great powers — from Russia to China, from the Hispanic realms to the Islamic Umma — is driven by resentment against Anglo-Saxon dominance at large, and American great power in particular. That was, after all, Charles de Gaulle’s core political legacy (much more than the need to tame Germany) and the not-so-secret rationale for his Faustian alliance with both communism (Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese) and Islam. …

But collective psychology may not be enough by itself. Sympathy for Obama as the symbol of a declining America has to be constantly reactivated, even in France. And here we come to another point. The French are arguably the easiest Western nation to be brainwashed. Not that France is exactly a police state or one-party regime. It is just a statist state, where most media (including those which are supposed to be private or privatized) are under either the direct or indirect supervision of the state meritocracy (or “state nobility,” as the ultra-left philosopher Pierre Bourdieu used to call it), i.e., the nation’s ruling class, a Janus-like Leviathan with both a conservative-Gaullist face and a left-wing-Gaullist face.

Most journalists learn that in order to survive and succeed within such an environment, they must abide by the following unwritten cultural and political codes: political correctness, of course, at least up to a point; corporative loyalty; and, above all, quiet acquiescence to the state nobility’s dominance, agenda, and geopolitics. When, in addition, you have only state-run universities and research institutes, run by coteries, and almost no independent foundations, you are coming close to an Orwellian, all-pervasive control system.

Citizens, however, do no get the point. They think their media are in fact free and that their journalists are usually honest and courageous. Again, it has to do with age-old traditions and delusions.

… “France is an absolute monarchy limited by satirical songs.”

Lessons from the Old Regime were not lost to the really authoritarian rulers that dominated France later on, from Napoleon, the military dictator turned emperor, to the Gaullist-elected dynasty of “republican monarchs.” They understood that a measure of “song,” of apparent freedom, would make their rule palatable. Real freedom has to do with habeas corpus, property, and the Bill of Rights. Freedom, French style, is essentially sticking to 18th century novelists’ standards, from Marquis de Sade to Les Liaisons Dangereuses: the freedom not to go to church on Sunday and the freedom to cheat on one’s wife or husband. Enforce “French freedom” — church not being relevant anyore, only sex is at stake — and nobody will bother you about real freedom.

Now the French media and indeed the French political class know how to feed the naive French citizenry with unending love, romance, and hard sex stories. What really mattered in France when François Hollande, the socialist leader, was elected president last June was the ongoing fighting between his ex-companion and mother of his four children, Ségolène Royal, herself a presidential candidate in 2007, and his current companion, Valerie Trierweiler: a tale of jealousy, hatred, and near hysteria. That “Ladies’ War” (“Guerre des Dames”) sold better than anything narrowly political.

Worrying About Romney's Chances of Winning the Election, Le Monde Examines the Republican's Foreign Policy Views

Starting to worry about Barack Obama's chances for reelection, Le Monde's Service International section authors a huge double-spread article on in the weekend issue to examine what Mitt Romney's foreign policy views are and what his diplomatic policies promise to be should he be elected…

One of Obama's fundamental goals is to transform America from one nation under God to a totally secular nation

 A message from Phyllis Schlafly and George Neumayr, authors of No Higher Power:

One of Barack Obama's fundamental goals is to transform America from one nation under God to a totally secular nation where we are permitted to recognize no higher power than the federal government

They also support Todd Akin in Missouri…

Russell Banks: "If Romney wins, we will have to think about how our grand-kids will survive in an age of darkness"

Russell Banks is disappointed, the far-left writer tells Le Monde's Raphaëlle Rérolle in an interview in which he blames all on race and class and in which he fantasizes about globalization bringing about a "scourge of famine" on "the entire world" coupled with the "collapse of public service sectors", the "dramatic rise of homeless", and other like calamities.

If Romney wins, we will have to think about the manner in which our grand-children will survive in an age of darkness.

To no one's surprise, the author of Dreaming Up America and Invisible Stranger is obsessed with race. Indeed, during "the age of Reagan", we are informed,

the opposition between the two parties became one of a racial nature. In the American imagination, the Democrats are the party of colored people: Latinos, Asians, African-Americans… and liberal whites, like myself.

Conversely, the Republican party is a party of whites. […] In the United States, you always come back to the racial issue. 

(Hmm… Why is it that I am thinking that I should review Ann Coulter's Mugged very soon?!)

The above quotes were translated by moi back to English from the French newspaper:

Que va-t-il se passer si Romney gagne ?

La République se transformera en une ploutocratie. Le New Deal de Franklin Roosevelt sera définitivement enterré. Ce mouvement n'est pas nouveau : les ploutocrates y travaillent d'arrache-pied depuis des générations. S'ils arrivent à leurs fins, il n'y aura pas de retour en arrière, sauf s'il se produit une deuxième révolution. Mais, pour qu'il y ait une révolution, il faudrait qu'une ruine totale s'abatte sur le pays et, grâce à la mondialisation, sur le monde entier : famine, migrations forcées, 
augmentation dramatique du nombre de sans-abri, effondrement des services publics. Qui peut souhaiter cela ? Personne. Donc, il n'y aura pas de seconde Révolution américaine. Si Romney gagne, nous devrons réfléchir à la manière dont nos petits-enfants vont survivre dans un âge de ténèbres.

Comment percevez-vous le paysage politique américain ?

Ce qui est frappant, quand on regarde les derniers mois et même les dernières années, c'est de voir à quel point le spectre politique a glissé vers la droite. Les démocrates sont là où Reagan se trouvait il y a vingt ans. Il faut avoir mon âge pour se souvenir qu'aujourd'hui Nixon serait presque à l'extrême gauche, et qu'Eisenhower ne pourrait pas faire partie du Parti républicain. Je pense que le changement a commencé du temps de Reagan, quand l'opposition entre les deux partis est devenue d'ordre raciale. Dans l'imaginaire américain, les démocrates sont le parti des gens de couleur : Latinos, Asiatiques, Afro-Américains... et des Blancs libéraux, comme moi.

A l'inverse, le Parti républicain est un parti de Blancs. Or la ploutocratie américaine, qui est très effrayante, a réussi à faire naître des alliances dans lesquelles la race l'emporte sur la classe. C'est un événement historique : vous pouvez dresser des gens contre leurs intérêts si vous brandissez la question raciale. Des Blancs pauvres voteront pour les intérêts des Blancs riches, s'ils pensent que le parti adverse est associé aux Noirs. Aux Etats-Unis, on en revient toujours à la question raciale. Mais le moment est très intéressant, dans la mesure où les Blancs américains sont en train de devenir une minorité. Environ 45 %.

Le Monde Starting to Join the Obama Reelection Doubters

The World According to Romney, titles the front page of the weekend edition of Le Monde, as France's newspaper of reference starts fearing that Obama will not win reelection and thus starts examining what can be expected from Mitt's diplomacy viewpoints…

Meanwhile, France is still the only European country whose government has officially, and openly, taken the side of Obama…

LA FRANCE est le seul pays d'Europe à avoir officiellement, et ouvertement, exprime sa préférence dans la compétition électorale américaine. Le 24 octobre, le premier ministre Jean-Marc Ayrault contrevenait à bien des usages diplomatiques en déclarant que, s'il était citoyen américain, il voterait Obama, " sans hésiter ". La règle veut que l'on évite toute ingérence dans les débats électoraux d'une démocratie, a fortiori alliée.

… L'ironie est qu'en avril, à dix jours du premier tour de la présidentielle française, Barack Obama s'était livré à un exercice inédit de soutien envers le candidat... Sarkozy.

 
The French Fear a U.S. Administration Comprised of "a Few Boltons" 

… Mais qu'adviendrait-il si Mitt Romney passait ? La question ne met pas particulièrement à l'aise les responsables français, ayant déjà abattu leurs cartes pour M. Obama. L'une des grandes craintes serait de voir l'avènement d'une administration américaine peuplée de " quelques Bolton ", dit-on de source officielle à Paris. Une allusion a John Bolton, l'ancien membre de l'équipe George W. Bush qui aimait tant dire tout le mal qu'il pensait des Nations unies, enceinte clé du multilatéralisme, amplement valorisée par la diplomatie de M. Hollande. 

Update: Why Europeans Support Obama:

He wants to turn the United States into a version of Europe: big, meddlesome government, constantly higher levels of taxation, and intrusive regulation of almost everything

Media Flunky Update

From his childish and degrading propaganda perch, Chris Matthews insists that Rush Limbaugh reminds him of the 'Guy From Deliverance', or more accurately the oaf who forcibly sodomized the character in Ned Beatty’s role in the film, itself a hateful and prejudicial depiction of rural folk considered de rigeur of our cultural betters.

I suppose Matthews thinks of this as thoughtful political rhetoric, despite the fact that he reminds anyone with half a clue of Roger Herren’s character Rusty from Myra Breckenridge getting a pegging from Raquel Welch’s character, Myra:


Matthews, it seems has hit his creative limit, having used the one analogy he can remember fondly, just once too often:

Matthews previously smeared Ann Coulter's audience as straight out of Deliverance.

How he gets there, outside of obviously exhibiting a vivid interest in spelunking, mush as many other leftist seem to, remains unclear.

Perhaps from the position of their phony, self-constructed imaginings of others, they think this is supposed to shock conservatives. It doesn’t. It just makes them more familiar with what appears to be a stunning uniformity of thought on the part of the left. More to the point, the awkward allusions to obscenity, (this revealing of a persistent theme in their conversational culture,) serves only to shove away the few happy, normal, reasonable, and decent people that still support the left.

So my advice to Chris Matthews is simple at this point: don’t skimp on the Crisco back there, Pookie.

A Thought or two on Socialistic Crypto-Command Economics

A French commenter on Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s article noting how regrettable Hollande’s handling of the French economy describes the mistakes Socialists make over and over to a tee.

Canute thought he commanded the waves; French socialists think they can command the economy as if it were a performing seal. As usual, that theory is proving defective in practice.

True dat, but the crime is how they got there. Once the government spends 55% of GDP, and channels the use of yet more of it, it’s capacity to do the right things, once they learn what they are, are severely constrained. In other words, they overdid the lovin’, to the point where they are walking funny, and end up with a new form of ED which will remain uncurable for generations.

Hollande and his schoolteacher-turned-prime minister Ayrault have simply dusted off the playbook of 19th century economic theory that was such a disaster for Mitterrand and his schoolteacher-turned-prime minister Mauroy.

(It's the tragedy of French socialism that it is dominated by schoolteachers who've never read anyone further to the Right than Marx; also, of course, a tragedy for the nation.)

Why the allusions to personal violation? It’s brought to mind by the thought of one of France’s great Socialist scions taking his liberty with the ideas he and the left were espousing, despite the obvious harm it does to those it’s meant to help.

A Parisian pundit remarked the other day that the Parti socialiste spent 10 years in opposition jeering at conservative governments but hadn't given a moment's thought to what it would do when it regained power, other than look after its own.

This turns out to be true.

So he really is “M. Normale”. Normal for a Socialist in politics, that is, and not unlike Barack Obama’s attempts at a short-hand interventionist economic model as well, exemplified by a the doomed notion of being a Green Venture Capital organ. It eroded into the social failings of his branch of the International Socialist Guild: into cronyism.

Here the American left were hoping for a rock star, they got a featherbedding city councilman trying economic stunts that leftist academia have touted in its’ echo-chamber for decades. In France they sought someone normal to refashion the indulgent image of Socialism, and they got a pedantic and awkward city councilman trying economic stunts that leftist academia have touted in its’ echo-chamber for decades.

I suppose it takes teachers, living largely as they do in a simplified, closed-loop economic system themselves, with its’ “single-payer” simplification of everything, to try to apply this to the rest of society. The problem is that the private sector doesn’t have anyone else’s pocket to pick to make up the difference between income and payroll.

The outcome, surprising no-one, is failure.

Why Europeans Support O: big, meddlesome government, constantly higher levels of taxation, and intrusive regulation

I see from various polls that very nearly all of you support President Obama’s reelection

Michael Ledeen writes in his Letter to My European Friends (thanks to Instapundit's Sarah Hoyt). (See also Election Advice to the American People From France's Top Leaders.)

The numbers are remarkable, indeed incredible.  More than ninety percent of you would vote Obama (94% of Italians, for example, and the numbers for Great Britain, France, Spain, and Germany are even higher).  Other numbers show that nearly half of you think you should somehow be able to vote in our elections, since American policies have such an enormous effect on you.

All of which reinforces my belief—speaking as the grandson of Russian immigrants who arrived in Harlem and western Massachusetts early in the last century–that the American Revolution was a great thing, and that Americans were right to abandon authoritarian Europe for the possibility of creating a free country across the ocean.  Anyone who truly values liberty has to see that Obama is a threat.  He wants to turn the United States into a version of Europe:  big, meddlesome government, constantly higher levels of taxation, and intrusive regulation of almost everything, combined with a deliberate and systematic weakening of military power and a foreign policy that shrinks from decisive action against freedom’s enemies.

That’s you, sadly.  So it’s understandable that you’d favor Obama (although the numbers—reminiscent of plebiscites rather than normal elections—are ridiculous).  It’s yet another sign of the decadence of Europe.

… The Europe I loved, and still love, is increasingly a theme park.  It’s fun to visit, but it’s no longer a source of creative inspiration.  Europeans seem to me to have abdicated their liberties to their governments, provided that the governments provide them with an easy life, replete with free medical care, plenty of vacations, and no international obligations.  Surely you know that very few of your tax euros go towards your defense.  We have been paying that bill for decades, and our soldiers and military power have been protecting you.

So don’t be surprised—but you should be very concerned—that we are increasingly looking across the Pacific.  It’s no accident that the most brilliant and talented Americans are increasingly Asians, not Europeans.

We don’t want to follow your example.  And your landslide support of Obama—who has done terrible damage to America—confirms my pessimism about your future.

Indeed, just as these poll results were published, I noticed another headline, announcing record levels of European unemployment.  The two things go hand in hand.  Only the energies of a free people can sustain the creation of wealth, and the sort of state that you have created, both on a national and continental level, stifles those energies.  We, too, are having a difficult time, due in part to our own blunders, and in part because the Obama administration doesn’t seem to appreciate how exceptional America is.  You turn to your leaders to solve those problems.  Most of us—or so I hope—would prefer that the government get out of our way and let us find the best remedies by ourselves.

We have a chance to do that, especially if we thumb our noses at your bad advice, and send Obama to early retirement on the island of Oahu.

Monsieur Obama or Monsieur Romney? Election Advice to the American People From France's Top Leaders

The American people will be happy to know that they are receiving election advice from the top leaders of France.

First, it was the Minister of European Affairs who brought his support to Barack Obama. Bernard Cazenave said that he "wish[es] unreservedly" for the reelection of the current president of the United States.

The following day, the Prime Minister of France jumped into the fray: "If I were an American citizen, I would vote for Obama without hesitation" stated Jean-Marc Ayrault forthrightly.

Jean-Marc Ayrault choisirait Barack Obama s'il pouvait voter lors de l'élection présidentielle américaine du 6 novembre. "Si j'étais citoyen américain, je voterais sans hésiter Obama même si on attend des Etats-Unis, peut-être, sur un certain nombre de sujets, de l'audace", a déclaré le premier ministre français sur France Inter, en citant notamment la question du conflit israélo-palestinien.

But previously, in September, even the country's president had opined on the matter, although François Hollande had done so in the joking round-about style that is his trademark. "If a socialist were to support either of the two candidates [in an American election], that could cost him votes." Maybe, therefore, he added with a smile, "I ought to support Mitt Romney."

Maybe the facts of the case that Hollande spelled out (the support of a foreign socialist — or perhaps even of anybody — is rarely good in an American election) did not reach Jean-Marc Ayrault and Bernard Cazenave. Indeed, as Le Nouvel Observateur's Vincent Jauvert puts it, such a public positioning is "contrary to the interests of France", which will — obviously — not benefit the country if Romney wins and which will not do so either in the case of an Obama victory. It is nothing but a "a short-term strategy" of "surfing on France's pro-Obama wave.

Update: Why Europeans Support Obama:

He wants to turn the United States into a version of Europe: big, meddlesome government, constantly higher levels of taxation, and intrusive regulation of almost everything

Sorry, we’re no Longer Shocked

Artists whose interests received a boost with the €12 million renovation of a museum and art center are advancing an unintelligible protest against cuts to subsidies of their craft which no-one deems worth paying for of their own volition.



Behold, the vividness of their righteous anger!
The artful solution? Break into a privately owned property and complain about the local government’s policies, as though the house was the government’s to do with as the otherwise subsidized scions of culture wish.

“Now they don’t have enough money to do any interesting exhibitions,” Lag told EUobserver from New York, where he is pursuing a master’s degree in curatorial studies.

That curator’s appeal to state seizure came from the New York that it requires airfare to get to.

Once inside the abandoned building, Lag changed the locks on the door and began work on an art exhibition, he said, “to let the neighbours know what is happening, to make people in the world know what is happening in Spain.”

I’m not sure if the neighbors care, but I am sure that the scene in Alicante, Spain isn’t relevant enough for “the world,” pre-occupied with its’ own affairs to care either.

I’ll say it again: if “culture” is depending entirely on public funding (which a small elite, and not the public has a hand in delegating,) then that form of expression can be fairly assumed to already be dead beyond redemption, and waiting for some form of genuine and unmanaged innovation (which is tangible to someone,) to replace it.

Are uncreative artists creating universal hatred for great art?

Yes. The arts, at least the arts promoted by “arts establishment” are sterile, and the genuinely creative are paying the price for what Camille Paglia accurately calls the art mafia’s “delusional sense of entitlement” fed by the use of governmental powers to choose what’s funded.