Favorite poster from NR's "The Corner"

If the Shoe Fits [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

Michael Totten just got back from Iraq. So I asked him about the shoe this morning: "The Bush shoe incident made me laugh slightly. Only because of the U.S. was an Iraqi journalist allowed to throw that shoe. On some level, he knows that. Tellingly, Prime Minister Maliki stepped in the way to protect the president, * and many Iraqis in the room apologized for the offense."

Michael continued: "I have briefly met many Iraqi journalists in Baghdad. They seem like decent people, for the most part, and are not as shifty as many other civilians I encounter." ** He added: "In the Combined Press Information Center in Baghdad, where journalists are credentialed by the U.S. Army, is a poster showing the faces of all the journalists killed in Iraq last year. There are dozens of faces on that poster, and almost every single one of them is Iraqi. Iraqi journalists are very brave, much braver than I am, and I'd hate to see Americans get the wrong idea about these people from one lousy incident."

You can read his latest dispatch here. And for even more Totten, see the web briefing.

* this is not true

** shorter totten: "bloody wogs"

Hahaha shifty!

Funny you should mention that. I was in the Bahgdad market yesterday with my 14-year-old son who asked "What's up with Aswat Al-Iraq? What is that?" I replied, "It's a magazine for shifty civilians."

http://www.theonion.com/content/themes/onion/assets/columnists/teasdale_portrait.png

EWEWEWEWEWEWEW

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Jonah Goldbergis boning up on Chanukah as he prepares a presentation to his daughter's class on this exotic Hebrew celebration.13 hours ago

And They Call Themselves The "Reality Based Community" [Jonah Goldberg]

From the Weekly Standard:

Administrators of Team Sarah have uncovered evidence on a left-wing online thread that some Internet trolls sought to discredit the organization by posing as conservative racists on Team Sarah's forums.
Team Sarah, an online community supportive of Gov. Sarah Palin, claims over 60,000 members and is affiliated with the Susan B. Anthony List, a PAC that supports female, pro-life women for public office.
Apparently, about 90 left-wing participants on a thread at somethingawful.com pretended to be conservatives who loved Sarah Palin before writing racist or otherwise deranged rants against Barack Obama on the Team Sarah forums. Said one interloper on the somethingawful.com thread: "What I hope is that the fake posters eventually number the actual posters so it would be impossible to tell who is real and who is fake."

01/07 11:19 AM

lol the left considers somethingawful.com 'the reality based community'

Finally! I agree with a post!

Speaking of Age [Lisa Schiffren]

Looking at the pictures of yesterday's gathering of all the living presidents at the White House for lunch, I believe one is supposed to reflect on the virtues of our system. Peaceful transitions follow more or less honest elections, and past leaders show up to offer advice and support to the incoming president with a certain amount of comity. To be sure, that is nothing to sneeze at — or even to take for granted. However, for those, like me, who are old enough to recall each of those administrations, it was hard to muster even a passing sense of reverence. Three of the four had their merits, but, on balance they seem like a pretty disappointing lot. You have to wonder — what about our system throws up these unprepared, unseasoned men, (that would be 4 of the 5), fueled only by ambition, to lead the world? (Bush 41 was certainly prepared and seasoned, but disappointing nonetheless.) On the other hand, maybe no one really could have done so much better. Is that possible?

Re Babies 2006 [Andrew Stuttaford]

Maggie, the increase in the number of unmarried births may not be something to celebrate but nor, necessarily, is the increase in the fertility rate. There's a lot to be said for maintaining the sense (and reality) of space that is one of America's delights. The idea that a falling population (and the resulting change in a country's age distribution) is always a problem is one of the more pernicious of modern myths. Notably, it has played no small part in the disastrous decision by so many EU nations to encourage mass immigration, when what they should have been doing was encouraging increased economic productivity or, in other words, making the best possible use of the people they already had.

01/09 03:42 PM

not to break godwin's or anything, but, you know, 'liebensraum' dude

Jonah Goldberg is my hero

24 [Peter Kirsanow]

It's been nineteen months, but Jack's finally back.

I'd wager that nearly every conservative in America has fantasized about testifying to senators the way Jack did in the opening sequence of last night's episode.

Good to see the 24 time-displacement machine still up and running. Jack got from a senate hearing room to the FBI in about four minutes.

It begins.

A friend asked me yesterday what I thought of the speech — must not be a regular Corner reader! — and I said that I’d found it graceless and offensive, certainly in parts. He said, “You mean the parts about hope and virtue?” Funnily enough, that is not what I meant.

Wacky!

IIRC Nordlinger was surprised that people might hate Sarah Palin.

why is it that those of us who are conservative are pretty much confined to conservative outlets — outlets that have a forthright ideological label

"Should we stay signed with this label that knows its base or try and go mainstream?"

"Dude, c'mon, that would be selling out."

Fools complaining about inaugural speeches rebuking, overtly or covertly, the losing party must not have ever read an inaugural speech.

There is some crazyness going on with dissent over at NRO. Jonah today:

Is Dissent Still The Highest Form of Patriotism [Jonah Goldberg]
In Obama's America? One wonders what the Hollywoodies who vow to be servants of the president think now.

Of course it's still Patriotic to dissent. They must actually believe that all left-wingers were being disingenuous when they said dissent is patriotic - that they really were just participating in some kind of turf war and lying about it. This gives me a lot of insight into NRO people -- I don't think they actually have any idea what it means to honestly believe in dissent.

Rightwing authoritarian followers, it's part of their make-up. If not able to handle the idea of questioning Father EVER, then the massive projection that the other side is just as snivelling and infantile as you are, and thus don't actually care about anything so much as scoring bullshit points.

So yeah, your standard mix of cluelessness and projection.

Email from Jonah!

I'll wait and see to see to what degree you're speaking for yourself. Obama's rhetoric is certainly not nearly so open to dissent as you seem to think. Anyone who disagrees, after all, may well be childish, small minded and bigoted.

>> Yes, of course it's still very American and a high form of Patriotism. Please, either find real people or drop the strawmen.

>> Sincerely yours,
>>Mordy

Nice, Jonah just played the race card on a straw Obama's behalf

Sounds like Jonah was jealous he didn't get invited to the George Will dinner.

Is there a name for that? The reverse race card? The race trump card? This delusional argument that goes "Nobody's allowed to say anything bad about this person because this person is non-white / female / gay / a spotted owl / etc."

an asshole.

Alfred otm.

The Geraldine Ferraro's Credibility Memorial Race Card

I think complaining that you can't criticize someone without people thinking you have racial hangups is pretty much the flashing neon sign stating that you have racial hangups.

Poetic Etymology [Lisa Schiffren]

Was the Reverend Lowery's little race rhyme racist? I don't know. I personally found it more than a little jarring—because of where I had previously heard a version of same. During various water shortages in California in the 1970s signs appeared in public bathrooms with the conservationist suggestion: "If it's brown, flush it down. If it's yellow, let it mellow." Yes: yuck, gross, ick. Flushing toilets always seemed like a reasonable use of water to me. I understand that there is some cultural debate about this. Actually, the original jingle was a personal favorite of former California Governor Jerry Brown—an early 'conservationist.'

Having googled the phrase, I now understand that there is a longer history still involving the capacity of septic systems and/or common practice in rural areas during extended power outages. In any case, bringing up that jingle and the imagery inevitably associated with it seems like a pretty unnecessary addition to an inaugural benediction. And no, I probably shouldn't have written this post.

And no, I probably shouldn't have written this post.

OTM

Kirchick’s Distortion [Ed Whelan]

On David Frum’s new website, James Kirchick claims that at the National Review Institute’s post-election symposium “social conservatives Maggie Gallagher, Jeffrey Bell and Ed Whelan all encouraged conservatives to stress gay issues even more in the future, and most everyone in the audience nodded in agreement.” If my recollection is correct, that is hardly a fair representation of our comments. I’d bet that I made the obvious point that judicial imposition of same-sex marriage is an ongoing threat, and I’m sure that we cited the widespread popular support for traditional marriage and the need to continue to defend traditional marriage. But I don’t think that any of us believes that the best way to defend traditional marriage is to frame the matter as a “gay issue”, and I don’t recall any mention of any other “gay issue”. In other words, Kirchick’s comment would be accurate, I think, if he had written: “social conservatives Maggie Gallagher, Jeffrey Bell and Ed Whelan all encouraged conservatives to stress defense of traditional marriage even more in the future.” (If Kirchick or anyone else can quote comments that support his assertion, I’d be happy to correct the record.)

I’d prefer much less mention of gay issues in the public square.

01/22 11:51 AM

ourobouros.jpg

Between Frum's site and TheNextRight.com, there's going to be a slew of 'why are YOU guys attacking us?' complaints on the Corner to come.

this is the 2nd gis result for ed whelan, btw

http://flickr.com/photos/hades-central/76577041/

mildly nsfw

RE: Still #1 [Mark Hemingway]

When I pointed out that Reagan still bested Obama in the Nielsen ratings below, I immediately recieved several emails noting that the Nielsen figure isn't a good barometer for popularity as it doesn't include the 18 million webstreams that were open during the inauguration. Add the two together and Obama easily bests Reagan. (That's just one figure — the numbers of webstreams I've seen reported are all over the map.)

Aside from the fact that no one had the opportunity to watch Reagan's swearing in from their computer at work in 1981, you might look at their relative popularity in proportional terms. So 41.8 million people watched Reagan's swearing in to Obama's 37.8 million. But according to the 1980 census, the population of the U.S. was 226.5 million compared to over 300 million now. According to my back of the envelope math, even if you add in the webstreams Reagan still narrowly bests Obama in terms of percentage of the country that watched the inauguration. And that assumes that all of those webstreams came from within the United States. I would find it very hard to believe that a significant percentage of them weren't international, whereas Nielsen ratings only measure domestic televisions.

Yes, I realize that there are a million variables here. (Nielsen's statistical models, people that watched in classroom/institutional settings, etc.) Theoretically some statistician could eventually come up with some complex model that convincingly demonstrates that a larger percentage of Americans did in fact watch Obama's inauguration. But the take away here is simply that even though the media worked overtime this week to convince you all the hoopla means Obama's relative popularity is unprecedented — it's not.

I was going to point out their obsession with Reagan's ratings.

reagan still sucks fwiw

I was going to point out their obsession with Reagan's ratings.

Can't wait for the midseason break.

srlsy these guys.... "WELL MORE PEOPLE WATCHED REAGAN'S SO THERE!!!"

where's Derbyshire these days? We need him.

Obama could get wounded by a crazed Anne Hathaway devotee in a few weeks after his inauguration, say, and they would insist that Reagan's comparable ratings were better.

(I would also believe that Hilary would happily say "I'm in charge here" at that point.)

I assume Derbyshire threw up his hands at figuring out whether to despise those in power or those he found himself hanging out with.

Crying in a cupboard somewhere. xp

Given that many voters were born after Reagan's presidency ended, it's "to;dr lol" for the NRO again.

Ned, dare I recommend a "New Right" thread re: Frum and NextRight? I have a feeling a Corner thread on ILE will become as stagnant as NRO will become in the near future.

re: the March [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

I was struck by how prevalent the themes of "mercy" and "healing" were. In my experience of it (both the march itself and some surrounding events), the crowd was overwhelmingly concerned with saving lives, helping those who are hurting, and hoping that those on the other side of the debate might reconsider. Anger and despair were hard to find. Smiling faces were all around. I can't remember the last time I was wall-to-wall with people for a few hours and did not hear one foul word or see one inappropriate incident among young people (in fact: I even experienced both in the Catacombs in Rome last year!)

This is almost too Teasdale to be real.

Ned, dare I recommend a "New Right" thread re: Frum and NextRight?

Do it. I'm enjoying a temporary (and possibly extended) break from regularly trawling the usual sites so a tracking thread for the winners would be good.

i'd like that, too. a la douthat, salam et al, too? i enjoy reading those guys

what march is she talking about

For a second I thought Lopez was talking about the inauguration and I was all "Strangely generous of her." (Right to life march in DC the other day, omar.)