"I'm Taking Control of the Room . . . "

Remember that video link about Obama voters' lack of knowledge of the candidates and the issues? Well here are some of Obama's more knowledgeable supporters. The lesson: even when they're smart they're stupid.

Some Enchanted Evening in a Small California Town

I went to high school about 200 miles from here. I graduated in 1966 which is about four years after the action of this movie took place.

THE VIOLET

Buried in foliage green,
The sweetest flowers are seldom seen,
Hidden far from human sight,
They live their simple, perfumed life.
Rarely seen, even by the prying sunbeam
They bud alone, in solitude they fade unseen.

by Arthur Ohnimus, chief clerk of the California State Assembly 1923-1963

Liberalism = Genius?

If there is a dreadfully overused word in the giddy countdown to the Obama inauguration, it is “smart.” Not just “smart,” but also its stronger cousins like “Brilliant” and “Genius.” These words have been offered shamelessly for nearly every person assigned a role by President-Elect Obama. They are assembling an “all-star cabinet.” This was not an honor for those having attended all the right schools, but a tribute to people who have all the “right” ideas. Liberals are smart because they’re liberals. Conservative beliefs are honed from having been dropped on your head as an infant.
Last week, Newsweek almost comedically compared Obama to Lincoln, hailing the strength of his “humility.” How could anyone stay humble with all these hyper-flattering cover stories about whether you’re Lincoln or you’re Franklin Roosevelt? Nobody asked: But what if he turns out to be another ineffective Jimmy Carter? Then again, not to worry. Just as Time turned Obama into FDR on its cover, they comically projected Carter as Gary Cooper in “High Noon” in the hostage-crisis spring of 1980.
Back in June of 2001, Newsweek headlined an article on an upcoming Bush foreign policy trip with these words: “See George. See George Learn Foreign Policy.” He was painted like a president who couldn’t prove he was smarter than a fifth-grader on TV. Newsweek did attempt a historical comparison. European pols heard Bush advocating missile defense, and one participant joked, “He was like Reagan....without the charisma.” Newsweek concluded school wasn’t working yet for Bush: “Still a student in a most demanding and unforgiving school, he needs all the teachers he can get.”
That dismissive attitude toward Republican politicians will long outlive the Bush presidency, just as it outlasted Reagan’s. Nine days after the election, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham denounced Sarah Palin in the snobbiest of tones on NBC’s “Today” as someone who should “be going into a kind of policy Berlitz course, which one would think would be a relatively sound thing to do.” Plugging Meacham’s biography of Andrew Jackson, NBC’s Matt Lauer added the colorful tale that Jackson threatened to kill his own vice president, so Meacham caustically added, “I don’t know if Senator McCain has thought that along the way.”
Meanwhile, Newsweek’s writers are exploring the inspiring depths of humility of their blessed Barack: “Obama has unusual detachment for a politician. He observes himself as a kind of figure out of literature.” Does that sound humble? Or does it sound astoundingly arrogant? Reagan living in his own movies put him in Fantasy Land, but Obama seeing himself as the Embodiment of Hope on the library shelf is somehow grounded. The Obama-crazed media are hallucinating.
On ABC’s “Good Morning America,” co-host Robin Roberts couldn’t stop gushing about the Obama cabinet picks: “Some would say it’s a team of rivals, a la President Lincoln, or is a better comparison a team of geniuses as FDR did?” George Stephanopoulos unsurprisingly agreed: “We have not seen this kind of combination of star power and brain power and political muscle this early in a cabinet in our lifetimes.”
Smelling salts all around, please.
If this proposed incoming Obama administration wasn’t so stuffed with Clintonites, starting with Hillary, that line might have sounded insulting to Bill Clinton. Sixteen years ago, all these same tributes were being offered to Bill Clinton’s superior intelligence, Bill Clinton’s grace under pressure, and a superior incoming Clinton staff. Even Stephanopoulos was ogled back then over the charisma of his “power whisper.”
But looking back, how well did Bill Clinton display a foreign policy genius that made the world a less violent place? Are the mass murders in Rwanda or the massacre in Srebrenica something that every Clinton fan in the media has wiped clean from their brains? Have they all forgotten the Americans killed at the Khobar Towers, or aboard the U.S.S. Cole, our lost diplomats at the embassies of Kenya and Tanzania? Did the overflowing international compassion of Clinton melt the hearts of al-Qaeda into retirement? Why, then, does every media liberal assume that History will open her arms and beckon Obama forward as an early entry into the Pantheon of Presidential Greatness?
Conservatives and Republicans have a very important role to play now in holding this alleged Team of Geniuses accountable. This disgraceful “news” media won’t, period. They will line up to serve Obama only slightly less explicitly than Chris Matthews, who typically blurted out that his new job as a television host was to insure President Obama’s success. We say “blurted out” because Matthews tends to...blurt. But give him credit for one thing: the courage to admit the attitude of servitude that his colleagues so piously deny.

by L. Brent Bozell III

More Proof of America's Monumental Kindness and Sensitivity

'Gays Too Precious To Risk In Combat,' Says General

DON'T JUDGE YOUR INSIDES BY SOMEONE ELSE'S OUTSIDES



Don't ever do that or you will be sorry.

'40s Pinup Girl Act With Christina Aguilera

NBC News Cornoring the Market on Objectivity and Nonpartisanship

NBC news Senior Vice President Mark Whitaker has recently said, "I think it goes beyond the Middle East, and I think it's a bigger phenomenon which is the leader of the biggest democracy in the world is now a person of color and that is going to give him what political scientists would call a legitimacy in the street around the world that I don't think an American leader has had, ever perhaps." He had to leave the interview early because he had to return to the office and attend to the shrine of St. Barack. He is said to be a rainmaker at raising funds for the DNC from NBC staffers.

Are You Trying to Tell Me that the Whole Universe Doesn't Worship Obama?

MSNBC anchor Alix Witt is surprised that the terrorists were not stopped by the election of Obama. I have this from newsbusters that she said, "You know, John, and it’s interesting because there are many who had such an optimstic and hopeful opinion of things, and you certainly can’t expect things to change [snaps fingers] on a dime overnight, but there are many who suggested that with the outgoing Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration there would be something of a lull in terrorism attacks. There had been such a global outpouring of affection, respect, hope, with the new administration coming in, that precisely these kinds of attacks, it was thought — at least hoped — would be dampered down. But in this case it looks like Barack Obama is getting a preview of things to come."
The lesson is that, even though MSNBC is your one stop shop for Obama worship, if you want to find out about world affairs or terrorism you're better off almost anywhere else.

The New U. N. Ambassador

"On July 21, she said Obama "bows to nobody in his understanding of this world."
This, of course is not a statement about what or if Obama knows anything. It is just a statement about the circumstances under which the dude bows. I guess you could call it choreography.

Al Gore Is A Big Fat Liar

He seems like a reasonable well informed bloke. But I've gotten too accustomed to threats and lots of dire predictions in my science. And I quickly tire of his measured and thoughtful, 'on the one hand this and on the other hand that' approach. Good old Al Gore doesn't fool around with over thinking these issues: he just comes right out and says his position is settled science and everyone else is lying to us. I like not having to think too much or do any research. I especially respect the way Al Gore never wasted time or money on scientific degrees. No, you've got to respect someone who doesn't waste time on argument or discussion. Al Gore isn't afraid to apply a little muscle to science. Like the guy says people are afraid to lose their jobs if they publicly disagree with Gore. Now there's a guy who is willing to break a few heads just so I don't have to think too much. Maybe someday Al Gore will share the scientific secret that allows him to fly private jets and and drive around in fleets of SUVs without harming the environment. He must have some secret technology because if he engaged in that dangerous behavior while saying what he says in public it would make him just another money grubbing hypocrite.

In Memory of W. B. Yeats

I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

     You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
    The parish of rich women, physical decay,
    Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
    Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
    For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
    In the valley of its making where executives
    Would never want to tamper, flows on south
    From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
    Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
    A way of happening, a mouth.

III

          Earth, receive an honoured guest:
         William Yeats is laid to rest.
         Let the Irish vessel lie
         Emptied of its poetry.

         In the nightmare of the dark
         All the dogs of Europe bark,
         And the living nations wait,
         Each sequestered in its hate;

         Intellectual disgrace
         Stares from every human face,
         And the seas of pity lie
         Locked and frozen in each eye.

         Follow, poet, follow right
         To the bottom of the night,
         With your unconstraining voice
         Still persuade us to rejoice;

         With the farming of a verse
         Make a vineyard of the curse,
         Sing of human unsuccess
         In a rapture of distress;

         In the deserts of the heart
         Let the healing fountain start,
         In the prison of his days
         Teach the free man how to praise.

W. H. Auden

I Don't Think We Can Blame Obama for Everything Bad That Happens

Doubleplusundead is blaming Barack Obama for the release of Britney Spear's latest album. "Britney Spears is releasing a new album. Surely the four horsemen are saddling the horses."
I think, even in jest, one can go too far. Besides Obama will have enough to answer for. Not that he's the kind of person who is given to explaining or justifying himself.