Favorite poster from NR's "The Corner"

More on Specter's Switch [Robert Alt]

I, too, was disappointed to see that Arlen Specter took a very public step to announce his allegiance to the Democratic party. For those who forget, this happened on October 23, 1987, the day that he voted against Robert H. Bork.

lol "bork"

i went to NRO for some specter-related schadenfreude and stumbled on a coherent and ethical post about waterboarding by jim manzi. i feel let down.

how long til he's blacklisted from nro?

how long til he's suggest banned from nro

Life's a Beach [Mark Steyn]

Alex Massie of the British Spectator (where I spent many happy years) thinks I misinterpreted President Obama's remarks in Strasbourg:

We cannot pretend somehow that because Barack Hussein Obama got elected as president, suddenly everything is going to be okay.

As Mr. Massie sees it, this is not arrogance but the opposite:

But itsn't it obvious that, on this occasion at least, Obama is being traduced in much the same manner as poor old King Canute has been done in by a wilfull misunderstanding of his actions. When Canute ordered the incoming tide to recede he was not expecting it do actually stop and retreat whence it came, rather he was demonstrating to his courtiers the limitations of Kingly power.-

That would be a more plausible interpretation if the Canute de nos jours hadn't already declared that his mere nomination (never mind election, never mind inauguration) marked "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow."

Consider the sentence immediately before the "everything's okay" line:

I think that it is important for Europe to understand that even though I’m now president and George Bush is no longer president, al-Qaeda is still a threat.

I'd say this is false self-deprecation — taking every opportunity to deny your spectacularity in order to promote it. (See Kathryn's post immediately below.)

04/29 12:09 PMShare

probably tl;dr but nicely demonstrates why i voted for steyn.

Yeah, wtf that Manzi post. Has he been tossed from the mast of the NRO cruise ship?

You guys beat me to the punch re the Manzi post. Mindboggling.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/black-white-divide-in-obama-popularity-43923897.html

Hey did you guys hear that Obama's only really popular cuz polls are incorrectly counting black people as like actual people?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/29/AR2009042903132_2.html

The Supreme Court has an idea about fixing that for 2012...

lol Nordlinger:

Back in the early 1990s, I said this about Charles Krauthammer as columnist: “The thing is, you can hold up a Krauthammer column and say, ‘Here it is. This is it. This is what I believe, in a nutshell. This is the case I would make, had I the ability.’” A Krauthammer column gave you something to wave. A document to nail to a door, so to speak. A friend or acquaintance would say to you, “What do you believe about this issue, and why?” And you could hand him a Krauthammer column, saying, “Here.”

In fact, that is the highest value of any columnist, don’t you think? He crystallizes your own thought. (Then again, he could make you reexamine.)

All of this came to mind when I read Krauthammer’s column published today, on torture: here. It makes you say, “Yep — that’s it.” At least it makes me say that. I also thought of George W. Bush. He said, on at least one occasion, “You never get credit for what didn’t happen” — e.g., further terror attacks on your country.

One more word about Krauthammer: WFB once wrote a column in praise of him. In the Washington Post — I’m going from memory here — it was titled “Washington’s Dr. K.” At the time, Dwight Gooden was a very famous baseball pitcher, and he was known as “Dr. K” (“K” standing for strikeout). I’m glad that, after all these years, Washington’s Dr. K. is still prescribing. And I’m glad he is no longer writing speeches for Mondale — that is, that he is no longer philosophically and politically suited for such a position.

I fear this was my immediate mental image:

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y219/lordbotox/bear_shining_costume.jpg

usually i laugh at kraut-hammer's column but this morning's really bummed me out. the kind of reductive logic could be used to justify, say euthanasia. this guy is a Nazi.

and while I strive to rise above school yard taunts on TV he always looks like he has a big stick up his ass.

Blame the wheelchair (he's got muscular dystrophy, I think).

OOPS. sorry, charlie. mocking someone's disability is worse than anything he writes. is my face red, etc.

lol

Don't feel that bad. I'm pretty sure he'd look like he had a stick up his ass MS or not.

That column is pretty weak. Calling Pelosi out is good. But the rest of the argument is based on false dichotomies, straw-men, etc.

And yeah, he totally leaves it 'uncapped' as to "if torture is effective to what extreme can we take it?"

(he's got muscular dystrophy, I think).

He's paralyzed as the result of a car accident. I had no idea until I saw him on a Frontline show about stem cell research.

Nordlinger is great:

I must admit, I sort of checked out of this debate, years ago, when a terror detainee complained that an American female interrogator had brushed her breasts against him. This is American torture? It was very hard to listen to this stuff when I was knee-deep, or neck-deep, in testimony from Chinese, Cuban, and Middle Eastern prison cells. As my new hero Boutrous Boutrous-Ghali says, “Come on, man.

'that one ridiculous assertion allowed me to feel ok about ignoring everything else that was going on'

He goes from torture to breasts to Boutrous Boutrous Ghali in the same paragraph!

"As I brushed Boutrous Boutrous-Ghali's breasts with my tortured hands..."

"...I was neck deep into them"

http://www.washingtonlife.com/issues/october-2006/pop-politics/images/pop_politics05.jpg

WHERE THE TITTIES AT?

Geez, I'm not sure "false dichotomies" even covers the weird logic of this:

Could we not, as the president repeatedly asserted in his Wednesday news conference, have obtained the information by less morally poisonous means? Perhaps if we'd spoken softly and sincerely to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, we could equally have obtained "high-value information."

It's so weird: the first sentence totally acknowledges the problem of false dichotomies, and asks what the other options are -- then the second sentence just presents the same false dichotomy its predecessor was effectively questioning!

In my experience — and I’m just generalizing here — the better the person, the more positive he is about George W. Bush. Certainly the less snarky and narrow. Most of the people I admire most, admire the 43rd president. (Please note that I said “most of the people,” not “all of the people.”) This is particularly true of those who know something about tyranny, and the need to resist it: e.g., the Dalai Lama.

http://www.thenewcommunity.org/Messages/images/MissingthePoint450.jpg

An extremely troubling threesome:

Want Solutions? He's Got the Right Solutions [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

Andy McCarthy reviews Mark Levin's blockbuster.

05/01 02:24 PM

But it could easily come from my hometown of Ann Arbor, Mich., where a great many thought — “thought” — like this. It reminds me of what I rebelled against, following the injunction of the bumper sticker to “question authority.”

So Nordlinger has an Alex P. Keaton complex, that explains a lot.

In my experience — and I’m just generalizing here — the better the person, the more positive he is about George W. Bush. Certainly the less snarky and narrow. Most of the people I admire most, admire the 43rd president. (Please note that I said “most of the people,” not “all of the people.”) This is particularly true of those who know something about tyranny, and the need to resist it: e.g., the Dalai Lama.

LOL

http://daisyfae.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/youre-totally-shitting-me.jpg

Sotomayor, Consolation Prize [Mark Krikorian]

Sorry for the radio silence — I'm in charming Fort Collins, Colo., where I'll be speaking tonight (I'm hoping for protesters!).

I'm sure Mark H. is right about Sotomayor's being dumb and obnoxious, just as Derb is right about her being female and Hispanic is all the matters. But I'd add that the Hispanic part is the main attraction for this administration. Since there isn't going to be an amnesty this year (or next), and since the Raza crowd actually thinks (mistakenly) that Obama owes his victory to them, the White House has to throw them something or they'll start to get really peeved. So an Hispanic Supreme Court justice is an almost mandatory consolation prize for the amnesty folks.

He's hoping for protestors!

Also: Greenwald did a characteristically superb job today of fisking NRO and The New Republic for relying on stock objections to Sotomayor.

yeah that was killer. i'd say "racism" in place of "stock objections" tho

Or sexism.

yeah absolutely.

why is it so hard to be white

lol this woman:

I See London . . . [Lisa Schiffren]
In sharing the following I am forced to admit that I still get a hard copy of the New York Times delivered each morning. The editors seem determined to end that lifetime practice of mine by tanking what remains of their credibility.

This is the main, above the fold, four-column color picture the editors saw fit to run this morning. And the thinking was . . . ? "That Afghanistan war sure is a hoot. Look at this weenie soldier fighting off the Taliban in his pink boxers! ha ha ha . . . " Or maybe it is just a picture of a guy with a cute butt, who just happens to be in hills of Kunar province — you know, borrowing from the "cheesecake" tradition of British tabloids. And why is the soldier's name provided?

For the record, the other front page picture is a somber, dignified portrait of Rosie O'Donnell's brother, a gay N.Y. State Assemblyman, who is focused on passing legislation to legalize gay marriage in New York. Clear enough what we should take seriously.

Did we cover the bit where one of their writers freaked out over her daughter living in a co-ed co-op, and the daughter had to go to the NYT blog of all places to defend herself in the comments?

I don't remember that!

Here we are:

Crazy story. A young woman at Stanford who had the misfortune to be the daughter of someone who writes for the National Review lived in a co-ed room in a co-op she had chosen to live in. Predictably, the mother freaked and wrote about it in NRO, because what better way to communicate with your children than by humiliating them in front of thousands of strangers? As you would expect, the article was filled with inaccuracies. The parents also stopped paying for the daughter’s tuition (so the daughter took out a loan in order to graduate).

and the quoted bit from the daughter's post:

7. This conflict has very little to do with Stanford and gender-neutral housing. Is has everything to do with my parents having a hard time adjusting to the fact that I’m out of the house (I’m the oldest), I’m 3000 miles away, and especially that I’m a liberal agnostic while they are conservative Catholics. The NR really should have looked into this situation a little bit before publishing that article.

I can’t believe I’m having to write this in the NYT blog. This is ridiculous.

ha i read shit like that and i get like karen hill's mother in goodfellas, "what kind of PEOPLE are these!!?"

I love my parents, but thank god that they don't have a forum to air whatever crazy thought has popped into their head about me. I don't blame her parents as much as I blame NR for letting them write the thing.

Oh I blame her parents. Why should the National Review give a shit if one of their writers has a dysfunctional relationship with her daughter if it results in page hits?

GOLD, even conceding that I can totally see why a parent would be freaked by this. Get a brain, Morin.

This would rank low on my list of things to be freaked out about when my kids are attending college.