He's talking up people getting "bamboozled" again, cribbing dialog from the movie (but not apparently the life of) Malcolm X. (Neo-Neocon sets me straight; I always assumed the speech was drawn from reality.)

Good post, read it, I'll wait.

Here's my question. We conservatives are forever being accused of using "racial code words" and "blowing racist dog whistles," right?

Why is Obama allowed to reference by deliberate choice of key words a fictitious speech which is entirely -- en. tire. ly. -- about a conspiracy by evil white people to harm and keep down blacks?

Is this not a racial code word? No dog whistle here?

Here's the fictitious Malcolm X speech he keeps name-checking.

IÂ’m gonna tell you like it really is. Every election year these politicians are sent up here to pacify us! TheyÂ’re sent here and setup here by the White Man!

This is what they do!

They send drugs in Harlem down here to pacify us!

They send alcohol down here to pacify us!

They send prostitution down here to pacify us!

Why you canÂ’t even get drugs in Harlem without the White ManÂ’s permission!

You canÂ’t get prostitution in Harlem without the White ManÂ’s permission!

You canÂ’t get gambling in Harlem without the White ManÂ’s permission!

Every time you break the seal on that liquor bottle, thatÂ’s a Government seal youÂ’re breaking!

Oh, I say and I say it again, ya been had!

Ya been took!

Ya been hoodwinked!

Bamboozled!

Led astray!

Run amok!

This is what He [the White Man] doesÂ…

How many times does this motherfucker get to drop the words "hoodwinked" and "bamboozled" before someone in the MFM notice he's making a very nasty subterranean racial appeal based on resentment, suspicion, conspiracy theory, and ultimately hatred?

Post-racial? Really?

Really.

By the Way: That's the only really good piece of writing I can recall Spike Lee ever doing. I love that bamboozled/led astray/run amok thing, especially because the last one don't even make no sense. That's what makes it great.

But -- aesthetic appreciation aside -- this is an explicitly rabble-rousing race-warring whitey-hating speech.

Why does Obama's mind keep going here?

The word "bamboozled" was all but gone from the English language (including among blacks, don't give me that crap) until Spike Lee revived it in this nice piece of writing.

That is the real etymology of the word as far as current usage -- as far as current conscienceness of the word, it began with this speech in Malcolm X. It had been a dead obscurity before that.

So why's Obama so smitten with the word? I'm always told how goddamned smart and educated he his; why does his mind keep running back to a bit of discarded street slang whenever he wants to talk about the whiter party at election time?

Posted by: Ace at 11:39 AM | Comments (205)
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From JEM in the comments.

So let's establish a long-winded metaphor here. You're a girl, let's say your name is America, and you were in a long-term relationship with a guy - let's call him W - who started off okay, even caught a purse-snatcher and beat the snot out of him.

Then he started going off the rails a little, he let go of the purse-snatcher to chase a guy that he thought might mug him. He went out to drink with Ted Kennedy a couple too many times. Just generally got kind of irritating, stopped listening to you, and you realized that you were really annoyed by his big ears. When he put your money in a bank that was going broke you got really mad.

So next time you decided to have a fling with a guy who was as unlike the last guy as possible. Entirely reasonable.

Except that six weeks into the new relationship you realized he'd named his genital wart and liked to talk to it. He spoke authoritatively about everything, but couldn't actually do anything without calling all the buddies he'd known at Harvard. He'd spent weeks telling you about how different he was than the last guy, but then you noticed he went to all the same restaurants as W. He had a lot of brilliant friends but every time you were near them they were trying to pick your pocket. And then he started lecturing you about all your bad habits.

By now you're thinking homosexuality might be a really good idea.

Other articles: Obama's Summer of No Love from Politico, and Jay Cost on What Went Wrong With Obama, which I'm gonna subtitle myself The God Who Failed.

Or: It's the Geography, Stupid.

Here's Cost:

Was there an alternative approach the President could have taken? I think so. Such a tactic would have acknowledged the sizeable McCain bloc. McCain won 22 states, making his coalition a politically potent minority. Obama should have governed in light of this. I don't mean in hock to it. He didn't have to make Sarah Palin his domestic policy advisor, but he should have ignored the hagiographers who were quick to declare him the next FDR. These flatterers always manifest themselves anytime a new Democrat comes to the White House, and they are of very little help for Democratic Presidents who actually want to be great.

What he should have done instead was disarm his opponents. If he had built initial policy proposals from the middle, he could have wooed the moderate flank of the Republican party, marginalized the conservatives, and alleviated the concerns of those gettable voters in the South and the Midwest. This is precisely what Bill Clinton did between 1995 and 2000, and it is what the President's promises of "post-partisanship" suggested.

Our system of government can only produce policy when geographically broad coalitions favor it. The Senate, more than any other institution, forces such breadth. Obama created breadth the wrong way. He watered down initially liberal legislation to prompt just enough moderate Democrats to sign on. Instead, he should have built policy from the center, then worked to pick up enough votes on either side. The left would have been disappointed, but the right would have been marginalized and, most importantly, Independent voters - who have abandoned the President in droves - might still be on board.

A revolutionary idea in our polarized political climate, I know. Still: ask your average swing voter what he or she thinks of such an approach, and watch them nod in agreement.

Posted by: Ace at 11:06 AM | Comments (120)
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Astonishing.

As noted, the Democrats may see trouble this fall because of the direction of these real economic indicators. Voters now give the Republicans a 49 to 36 percent advantage on handling the economy, the worst for Democrats in all of our polling.

For the first time in our tracking, a majority of 54 percent believes that President ObamaÂ’s economic policies have done nothing to relieve the recession and run up a record deficit; just 39 percent that believe his administrationÂ’s efforts averted a worse crisis. This is not consistent with the administrationÂ’s argument about economic success.

When asked about the vote in November, 52 percent plan to vote Republican to protest the direction of the economy – 11 points more than voting Democratic to not jeopardize the recovery.

Faughan's got the big-ass colorful charts at his site. On the economy... Oh my. Oh my. Here's one, but they're all good. In other findings, Dems are at -13 and -18 on who would handle the economy and deficit better; and more people think Dems are on the side of Wall Street than typical voters.

Click, click. You have to see it. It's brightly gory. It's like an installment of Saw produced by Pixar.

He also notes at post's end something commenters have pointed out: That when people are now polled on who they voted for (past tense) in 2008, fewer people than 52% admit they voted for Obama. It's something like 47%.

That's not good -- when people would rather lie to complete stranger about who they voted for than confess to having voted for you.

Posted by: Ace at 10:34 AM | Comments (88)
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Oh perfect. Now it's an official MI-6 License to Kill, too.

"Everyone's got a breaking point," the mother of his girlfriend avers. Indeed.

I'm feeling a bit of a breaking point myself.

Relatives say Thornton, 34, finally cracked after suffering racial harassment in a company where he said he was singled out for being black in a predominantly white work force.

Also singled out for being a thief, but I guess that was racist.

"Everybody's got a breaking point," said Joanne Hannah, the mother of Thornton's longtime girlfriend.

After shooting his co-workers, Thornton hid as police moved in. He called his mother, who tried for 10 minutes to talk him out of killing himself, his uncle Will Holliday told reporters.

"He said, 'I killed the five racists that was there that was bothering me,'" Holliday said. "He said, 'The cops are going to come in so I am going to take care of myself.'"

Authorities said they found him dead.

Thornton had said he found a picture of a noose and a racial epithet written on a bathroom wall, said Hannah, of Enfield, whose daughter Kristi had dated Thornton for the past eight years. Her daughter told her that Thornton's supervisors said they would talk to his co-workers.

Brett Hollander, whose family owns the distributor, denied any racial bias. And a union official said Thornton had not filed a complaint of racism with the union or any government agency.

By the way:

Was he a Tea Partier? I understand Tea Partiers have grievances and may become violent at any moment, but the media usually isn't so understanding about that.

So I guess probably not a Tea Partier, then.

So The Eight Dead Are Now Accused of Racism By A Mentally Unstable Murderer, And We're Gonna Push That Idea, Huh? Commenters are noting this -- thanks to the media, eight families will bury their dead with the last public word uttered of them "Racist."

Because there's no way a crazy freak of a thief and murderer would make up a sob-story about racism on a suicide call to his family to explain his vicious action.

Posted by: Ace at 10:17 AM | Comments (154)
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A one-day pattern-spiller... I hate the weird ones.

A Maryland man is accused of squirting semen from a bottle onto shoppers at two Gaithersburg stores, and police are looking for other potential victims.

Michael Wayne Edwards Jr., 28, has been charged with spraying the fluid on a shopper at a Giant Food store in Gaithersburg on July 15. Police said he got the liquid on a woman and then snapped a photo of what he had done with his cell phone.

Edwards has also been charged in a similar incident at a Michaels craft store, also in Gaithersburg.

Police said they are looking for at least two more victims. Anyone who noticed a liquid on their clothes but wrote it off as benign is urged to call 301-258-6400. Edwards is free on bond.

He'll be back.

Let's see what you've got here...
you've got alcohol, fireworks, condoms...
and a spray bottle filled with your own
genetic material. Let me ask you something--
what were you planning
on doing with these things?

More uncouth news, utterly beneath the exalted dignity of David Klinghoffer, at The Other McCain.

Posted by: Ace at 09:34 AM | Comments (148)
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Similar to how the quote got changed, what is really meant is "The only good conservative is a dead conservative."

I'm on my last nerve with the bleating intellectual pansies who are tearing down the movement because they find it too coarse and rude for their exquisite tastes at the moment. The latest example of a pretend-conservative-ripping-down-real-conservatives was by David Klinghoffer.

I won't direct you to his insipid whine (which one suspects was in fact written to garner those cocktail party invites, to be, as Tunku Varadarajan called a "Polite Company Conservative").

Instead, let Jonah Goldberg explain the fundamental dishonesty with this perpetual whine.

The latest example comes from my old National Review colleague David Klinghoffer in this paper. "Once, the iconic figures on the political right were urbane visionaries and builders of institutions — like William F. Buckley Jr., Irving Kristol and Father Richard John Neuhaus, all dead now," Klinghoffer lamented. "Today, far more representative is potty-mouthed Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart."

As someone who knew Buckley and Kristol (and was a brief acquaintance of Neuhaus), I think David's got it wrong. For starters, no one confuses Breitbart for Buckley — first and foremost, Breitbart himself — and the only people making that comparison are those wishing to indict contemporary conservatism for one reason or another.

Let's start with the left, which certainly has different motives than Klinghoffer's. The urge to lament how far today's conservatives have fallen from the "golden age" of Buckley & Co. is a now-familiar gambit. You see, this is what critics on the left always say: "If only today's conservatives were as decent or intellectual or patriotic as those of yesteryear."

The best conservatives are always dead; the worst are always alive and influential. When Buckley and Kristol, not to mention Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, were alive, they were hated and vilified by the same sorts of people who now claim to miss the old gang. The gold standard of the dead is always a cudgel, used to beat back the living.

Just so!

When Reagan was president, he was compared unfavorably to Eisenhower.

When Bush was president, he was compared unfavorably to Reagan.

Know this: When a Republican takes office in 2013, he will be compared unfavorably to Bush, who will be held out as a "conservative who at least had some heart and some sense of compassion" and the current Republican President will be, as each Republican President is called in turn, the worst President in all of history.

How slow liberals are to inform us years after the fact, years after it may have had some political usefulness, how very fond they were of all of our now-safely-dead-and-buried leaders!

What do you think could account for the fact they never speak up in a timely fashion about their respect and admiration for our leaders when they are vital and influential?

Perhaps they're just so thoughtful they take decades to properly compose their thoughts?

Instapundit has an interesting take:

Buckley was charming because he had to be. He got a lot of attention because it was a time when liberalism was at its zenith, and so was its control of the media. Liberals were secure enough to let guys like Buckley on, but only guys like Buckley, whose IÂ’m-a-member-of-the-club aristocratic credentials made him seem safe. And only so long as he was sufficiently nonthreatening.

And how they loved him too, for not actually running for any offices! (Okay, he did, famously and disastrously, run for NY mayor at one point.)

Does anyone think that William F. Buckley, arch-conservative Senator from the state of Connecticut, would be so beloved by the left and the Polite Company Conservatives?

And one more observation. Were the Conservatives of Yesteryear so well-mannered and erudite? Did they avoid all the uncouth and boorish agitation of Breitbart and the Tea Party?

Zoom in on this editorial cartoon from 1934.

Why, they accuse FDR of planning a dictatorship! Why, that's racist, I've been reliably informed oh so many times of late.

Posted by: Ace at 09:13 AM | Comments (101)
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JounoList was a place to hash out their arguments and claims behind closed doors before pushing them out to the public.

Mattie Boy is just lost without it.

First he mocks...

Then he gets put some information...

Then comes his grudging admission.

Bring back JournoList! We liked you guys better when you are only mostly retarded!

Thanks to ThomasJ.

Posted by: Ace at 08:56 AM | Comments (47)
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This is a truly great read, a conversation that's interesting not just because it's loaded with insight and perspective, but because it's an actual conversation, transcribed as it happened, and an enjoyably erudite one at that.

There's a lot of good stuff here (it's quite long) but I'll focus on the brief bit about Obama and the press, because, I guess, not every conservative cares so much about the ins and outs of Israeli politics or what Zionism actually is but we all care about Obama and the press.

And Europeans and their arrogance.

That said -- this isn't the best section of the interview at all. Other sections are better, such as the parts on Zionism, or whether the Palestinians have an actual identity as a people, or on the anger Israelis feel at the nonstop Nazi slurs. But this is the "grabby" part.

Read the whole thing, as they say, but if you can't, here's some interesting stuff.

MJT: So whatÂ’s it like to read about Israel in the foreign press?

Benjamin Kerstein: Surreal.

MJT: How so?

Benjamin Kerstein: It rarely bears any resemblance to the country I live in, mainly because it either deals only with the conflict or because the news is produced by people who live in the English-speaking Jerusalem bubble.

MJT: Tell me about the English-speaking Jerusalem bubble.

Benjamin Kerstein: ThereÂ’s a large population of English speakers in Jerusalem. The people who speak English tend to gather around each other, especially if theyÂ’re in the higher reaches of government or the media. They tend to hang out with other English-speaking people. They go to the places where such people congregate, they read English-language newspapers, and they watch English-language television. They have very little contact with the rest of Israel, which is predominantly Hebrew-speaking....

What they portray as Israeli is a corner of a corner of a corner of this country.

More excerpts below. more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:23 AM | Comments (45)
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D'oh!

From Michael Tanner, at The Corner:

According to preliminary results, just under 668,000 Missourians voted in favor of Proposition C. Only 578,000 Republicans voted in their party’s primaries. Another 40,000 voters appear to have cast votes on Proposition C without voting in either the Republican or Democratic primaries. So, even if you assume that every single Republican voted for the initiative and every person who didn’t vote in a primary voted for it, at least 40,000 Democrats — more than one in every eight Democratic primary voters — voted against the centerpiece of President Obama’s health-care plan. And these aren’t just any registered Democrats; these are the party activists, the Democratic base.

Thanks to Tami for that.

Posted by: Ace at 08:02 AM | Comments (132)
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The theory is that a millionaire in NYC doesn't really have as much money as a millionaire in Oklahoma, because the guy in NYC has so much less disposable income because costs are so much higher.

Well, two problems with this theory: One, It is an income tax, not a disposable income tax, and two, anyone who lives in NYC will brag on all the benefits of the dense urban environment they've chosen -- they get benefits out of the massive costs, they'll say.

Exactly. They've chosen a very costly city over a less costly city (or an even less costly rural area).

The government has not business subsidizing their lifestyle choices by reducing tax rates on Manhattanites (and Los Angelenos) only.

But that's what Jerry Nadler wants to do. He wants to make this country expressly one of a spoils system in which elections decide which party's members are punished and which are rewarded.

One irony of the tax increase that arrives on January 1 is that the it will hit residents of high-income, Democratic-leaning states like California, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York the hardest. This is a problem for pro-tax Democrats.

Enter New York Representative Jerrold Nadler, who wants to exempt his own six-figure constituents from the tax hike he supports. Mr. Nadler's bill would "require the IRS to adjust tax brackets proportionally in regions where the average cost of living is higher than the national average."

In other words, the various tax brackets would apply to residents in certain regions at higher income levels versus other parts of the country. A family with an income of $50,000 or even $1 million in Manhattan would pay less federal income tax than a family with the same earnings in Omaha. The bill is called the Tax Equity Act, but a more accurate title would be the Blue State Tax Preference Act.

Unbelievable.

This is third-rail stuff, dangerous stuff -- expressly setting a spoils system where there are expressly different Classes of citizenship and the Second Class shall be compelled to pay a subsidy to the ultrarich in the First Class.

And, since we're playing with fire here anyway --

Can we work it the other way? Can we start compelling Blue Staters to pay higher taxes than everyone else, too? After all, they're always voting for the higher-tax party; shouldn't they carry the bulk of that load themselves?

Since they want it so damn much?

Thanks to Ben.

Hey... If I buy a six bedroom house instead of a three bedroom house, should I get directly subsidized by the government for my high-flying lifestyle choices?

Why not? In that case I've done what tony urbanites have done -- I've chosen a more costly lifestyle that necessary. Shouldn't my taxes be cut so that I am immunized against the costs of my choices, too?

From the Comments:

So basically these guys are admitting that New Yorkers can't make it there. I guess they aren't as special as they thought they were. Perhaps they can make it somewhere else.

Posted by: PR

Posted by: Ace at 07:05 AM | Comments (233)
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