First, there's the correct and true perspective, gathered up by Instapundit.

He quotes, for example, even the somnambulatory progressive Washington Post noticing the obvious:

WASHINGTON POST: The Colorado recalls dealt a serious blow to gun-control advocates. Here’s why. “Something pretty remarkable happened in Colorado on Tuesday night. John Morse, the Democratic president of the state Senate, was recalled from office. So was Democratic state Sen. Angela Giron. Taken together, the losses arguably represent the biggest defeat for gun-control advocates since the push for expanded background checks failed in the U.S. Senate earlier this year. . . . It’s not every day that you see an incumbent recalled from office, let alone someone as high-profile as a state Senate president. The message the defeat of Morse and Giron sends to legislators all across the country is unmistakable: If you are thinking about pushing for new gun-control laws, you could face swift consequences.”

Instapundit adds:

Well, when you try to deny peopleÂ’s civil rights, there should be swift consequences.

There are more quotes and analysis there. I did not steal the whole thing.

Now, on the other hand, there is Debbie Wasserman-Schultz's perspective, which is, as you'd expect, bitterly partisan, stupid, false, childish, absurd, venomous, toxic, unsporting, uncitizenlike, crude, and risible.

“The recall elections in Colorado were defined by the vast array of obstacles that special interests threw in the way of voters for the purpose of reversing the will of the legislature and the people. This was voter suppression, pure and simple."

Well that's false, of course. Also false is her suggestion that the Mean NRA bought an election.

Reported contributions to Morse and Giron totaled about $3 million, dwarfing the amount raised by gun activists who petitioned for the recall, though some independent groups didnÂ’t have to report spending. Both the NRA and Bloomberg contributed more than $300,000 to the pro- and anti-recall campaigns.

We have people who draw a salary, and earn their paycheck, based upon their ability to say false things without giggling or blushing in shame.

We should have less such people, and we should create a system of incentives to reward truth-tellers and punish liars for hire.

Posted by: Ace at 02:17 PM | Comments (264)
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Ehh... he seems to have given one side a lot more credit than the other.

But she does make a good point about Obama's Favorite Trope. You know the one: Straw Men on one side, Straw Men on the other. And Obama, in the center, in the spotlight. Like a hero.

[A]lthough ObamaÂ’s contempt for the right is obvious, he also expresses a certain amount of contempt for the left. ItÂ’s just a somewhat more covertly-expressed contempt. Each are simplistic appeals: letÂ’s have those big guns for the bitter clingers of the right, and the little suffering children for the bleeding hearts of the left; the cold warlike aggressors versus the warm touchy-feelers. Meanwhile the great thinker, Obama, plots his brilliant course in Syria, playing four-dimensional chess with Putin.

Four dimensional? I'm assured by Ezra Klein there are at least six physical dimensions to his chess game, plus time.

Sorry I keep harping on this. I think this says a lot about Obama's temperament -- not first class, as it turns out -- and his much-vaunted power of persuasion.

This reminds me of a joke I did one time in like Real Life and stuff. A friend just gave me the greatest compliment I'd ever received, something very personal and flattering, to a group of people, and then I put my hand on his shoulder, and generously offered in return, "And my good friend here has a really nice truck."

Now I could get away with this because he was a close friend and also a ferociously funny one and understands the Rule of Funny: If it's funny, you have to say it. And he himself laughed the hardest at it. In fact, he was the only real audience for it. I didn't care if a bunch of strangers got it.

But Obama's not my friend and wasn't trying to be funny and make me laugh, as I made my friend laugh.

And he just told me I had a really nice truck. Tricked out with bombs n stuff.

Meanwhile, a Democratic strategist calls this bus accident one of the most humiliating episodes in presidential history.

A Democratic strategist who works closely with the White House, and who requested anonymity to avoid political retribution, told me, "This has been one of the most humiliating episodes in presidential history." ... As he faced an international and constitutional crisis, Obama and his team were in a familiar state: isolated, insular, and alone.

Thinking More... Neo-Neocon is on to something. I just realized the point of Obama's horrific formulation: Another implied self-brag.

See, the Left understands Freedom and Dignity.

The Right, crude-minded simians that they are, understands Military Might.

But only Obama, the Moral and Physical Hero, understands the beautiful union of the two.

In the personhood (?--personhood? Maybe not personhood, maybe something grander) of Barack Obama, we find the perfect synthesis of all virtue.

Why, he's almost Arthurian in his mind.

Skip to around 2:40 for Camelot's "Might For Right" epiphany.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:19 PM | Comments (234)
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The $40,000 for a matching pair type of new friends.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but Sydney Leathers, you need to take your big gigantic fake boobs and go away for a while.

This opens up another 500cc's of volume for bad tattooing. I imagine she'll get "GOLDEN" tattooed on Leftie and "PALACE" on Rightie.

The vine video in this Twitchy post depicts, I think, Sydney Leathers and her Triple D Posse literally chasing Weiner through a McDonald's, with the media of course in tow.

We've now reached the stage where someone becomes famous and A Celebrity for serving as a minor politician's virtual ejaculatory bullseye.

Although Weiner is undeniably douchey, sometimes I find myself liking him, like when he gives reporters the finger after leaving his event.

"Despite the scandal-driven media obsession over a mistake I made long ago which is now long behind me, I just wanted to get out my message of fighting for the Middle Class," said Anthony Weiner, masturbating into a woman's shoe.

Okay that's not really a quote. But it is the subtext.

Posted by: Ace at 12:31 PM | Comments (254)
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Via JeffB., it was pretty noticeable, it turns out.

After he had spent a few minutes stumbling through the war-is-peace argument, he turned to persuasion-by-insult:

"And so to my friends on the right, I ask you to reconcile your commitment to AmericaÂ’s military might with the failure to act when a cause is so plainly just.

"To my friends on the left, I ask you to reconcile your belief in freedom and dignity for all people with those images of children writhing in pain and going still on a cold hospital floor, for sometimes resolutions and statements of condemnation are simply not enough."

Maybe this convinced some left-wing Democrats, though you wouldnÂ’t know it from my Twitter feed. But only at the expense of backhanding Republicans. His argument was, in essence: Republicans, you may not care about the freedom and dignity of foreigners, or children writhing in pain and going still on a cold hospital floor. But you sure do love war and the military! WeÂ’re going to restore dignity, freedom and life to some foreigners by bombing them -- couldnÂ’t you overlook the fact that foreigners will benefit, as long as we get to blow some stuff up?

I donÂ’t think that argument is what he meant to make. ThatÂ’s why itÂ’s so breathtaking. Presumably our tin-eared president, and his blinkered speechwriting staff, didnÂ’t even hear him juxtaposing people who care about freedom, dignity and dead children, on the one hand, and bitter clingers who are committed to military might, on the other.

She also notes:

Keep that in mind as the revisionist history begins emerging from some quarters -- i.e., our patiently brilliant president once again demonstrates his mastery of n-dimensional policy chess.

Watching him blunder on easy, gimme moves makes me doubt he's playing 2-dimension chess, nevermind the n dimensional variations.

Posted by: Ace at 11:36 AM | Comments (268)
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Yeah I'm personally a little sick of the Corporate Caucus.

They signed a letter asking for more immigrants so that they could join the War for Global Talent or something. Byron York did some digging and found a fair number of them had laid off thousands of US workers.

In all, it's fair to say a large number of the corporate signers of the letter demanding more labor from abroad have actually laid off workers at home in recent years. Together, their actions have a significant effect on the economy. According to a recent Reuters report, U.S. employers announced 50,462 layoffs in August, up 34 percent from the previous month and up 57 percent from August 2012.

"It is difficult to understand how these companies can feel justified in demanding the importation of cheap labor with a straight face at a time when tens of millions of Americans are unemployed," writes the Center for Immigration Studies, which strongly opposes the Senate Gang of Eight bill and similar measures. "The companies claim the bill is an 'opportunity to level the playing field for U.S. employers' but it is more of an effort to level the wages of American citizens."

I understand why they do what they do and I don't deny they have the right to act in their own interests.

But I also sort of don't want to hear from them. And I don't know why they think I should be so terribly interested in advancing their interests.

A commenter writes, "But Natural GOP Constituency!"

Hah. But here's the funnier part: I misread that, I misinterpreted that. I thought he was saying, sarcastically, that the Corporate Caucus is a "natural GOP Constituency" [Serious You Guys is implied].

And it works that way too. Because the Corporate Caucus' embrace of Big Government is part of the machinery for "transforming" America.

There was a good line in the Star Trek movie. (Which I'd recommend because it was sooo colorful. No really. Great colors.)

"Is he [a shady stranger] helping us?"

"Actually, I think we're helping him."

End of the day, I'm not here to advance corporate interests. They are free to help advance mine, but they're not a "Natural GOP Constituency." They're a natural Democratic constituency.

Posted by: Ace at 10:54 AM | Comments (229)
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I don't know why someone would do this, but I guess they do.

The Ph.D. is a nice degree and all but the idea that it's So Impressive You Guys that one should gamble one's career on lying about having one is... flawed, let's say.

The Syria researcher whose Wall Street Journal op-piece was cited by Secretary of State John Kerry and Sen. John McCain during congressional hearings about the use of force has been fired from the Institute for the Study of War for lying about having a Ph.D., the group announced on Wednesday.

“The Institute for the Study of War has learned and confirmed that, contrary to her representations, Ms. Elizabeth O’Bagy does not in fact have a Ph.D. degree from Georgetown University,” the institute said in a statement. “ISW has accordingly terminated Ms. O’Bagy’s employment, effective immediately.”

OÂ’Bagy told POLITICOÂ’s Kate Brannen in an interview Monday that she had submitted and defended her dissertation and was waiting for Georgetown University to confer her degree.

Don't they just usually say "Ph.D. candidate" in these situations? And personally, I take "Ph.D. candidate" to mean "will probably have a Ph.D. in a year."

I guess she just wanted that credential so bad she couldn't wait for it.

As a little window into how Washington DC works, this Daily Caller story notes that the United States government pays the "task force" which employs Ms. O'Bagy to... lobby the United States government.

Think about this. A group which lobbies the US government for foreign policy action is actually funded by the US government itself. The US government is paying people to tell it what it probably already thinks.

And no one really raises an eyebrow about this, because in the Imperial Capital, of course every penny that drops into a till was raided from the coffers of the unfashionable people of the hinterlands.

The Syrian Emergency Task Force, the pro-rebel lobbying outfit that employs widely quoted intervention advocate Elizabeth OÂ’Bagy as its political director, receives funding from the U.S. Department of State and related government contractors.

I mean why not pay think tanks to lobby you to do what you already have decided to do? It's Free Money. Have a party. Go crazy with it.

Posted by: Ace at 10:06 AM | Comments (252)
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Sexton tipped me that this article was coming and it's as good as promised.

The article collates a lot of previous reportage to suggest that reporters really know more about the Syrian Weapons Pipleline, which starts in Tripoli and Benghazi, than they're letting on. It has long been suggested that that's why the CIA had so many personnel in Benghazi on September 11, 2012; this article pushes that suggestion closer to the category of simple fact.

This isn't a piece with a lot of partisan bite in it-- it's not really clear that we shouldn't have been doing this or we should have been doing even more of this or whatever other sort of political criticism one could immediately mount. But it does suggest reasons for the Administration's strange behavior in pushing out a cover-up storyline almost immediately.

For one thing, UN Resolution 1970, passed in 2011, expressly forbids the shipment of weapons into or out of Libya, and demands that any weapons possessed (by any UN country) be destroyed. Russia brought this matter up with the US earlier, so this was a source of potential embarrassment.

A month later, just three days after the 9/11 attack in Benghazi, the Times of London reported that a Libyan ship carrying 400 tons of weapons including "SAM-7 surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles" docked in Turkey. This was the largest known shipment of weapons to Syria at the time. The ship's captain, Omar Mousaeeb, was from Benghazi.

As CNN reported in August, there were 21 people, presumably CIA, at the Annex in Benghazi the night of the attack. It is possible that they missed the surface-to-air missiles being delivered to Syrian rebels. And it is possible that when the shipment arrived in Turkey the CIA agents working there again missed them (as they had the smaller shipment a month earlier).

An alternative explanation is that the CIA was, as the Times has reported, shopping for weapons to fill the pipeline. With the Russians continuing to sell attack helicopters to the Assad regime, surface-to-air missiles would represent a much needed game-changer on the ground.

When asked by CNN the State Department maintained its personnel were there to help the new Libyan government destroy dangerous weapons. However State pointedly refused to speak for "other agencies." In other words, take it up with the CIA. But the CIA did not respond to inquiries.

None of this lets the Obama Administration off the hook for Benghazi. Far from it. If it's true -- as it certainly seems to be -- that the US had a fairly important arms supply line running from Benghazi and Triopli to Syria (via Qatar, Jordan, and Turkey), it at least suggests the White House should have had more security in the area to protect its people.

The main thing I think this article advances is the Phony Scandal Cover-Up motive. That is, why are the media so determined to label Benghazi a "Phony Scandal"? Apart from their reflexive need to praise their Hero God, I mean.

I have long thought that, behind the scenes, the Administration was telling reporters, sotto voce, "Well, you know we had a major CIA operation going on in Benghazi. And those darned Partisan Republicans just want to expose it, Because They Hate America."

And then reporters, feeling all Trusted and Respected by their Boyfriend, dutifully run out to say, "Phony Scandal!"

Well, wrong. I have no objection to this sort of thing. I understand the CIA does some covert work every now and again. (It's Obama's Freedom & Dignity Loving "Friends on the Left" who actually have a difficult time accepting the proposition that a covert operations agency will sometimes agent some covert operations.)

But just because the CIA had a covert operation going on doesn't let the Administration off the hook for negligence in securing its own people.

And it doesn't give them license to lie to the public and claim this was about, for God's sake, a "spontaneous demonstration" spurred by an Unfavorable Movie Review.

The Administration didn't have to offer these politically helpful lines of spin (in an election season) to keep secret the Benghazi arms operation.

What I think happened was that they realized that the covert character of the Benghazi operation gave them a pretext to lie about the thing for domestic electioneering political purposes, because they could always claim later "We were just trying to protect an important US national security secret."

And I think that's the secret story of Benghazi. Under the cover of "protecting a US covert operation" (which practically everyone has known about for a year) they made up a fiction that would help them win an election.

And the media joined in with them.

The "Dark Star:" Mickey Kaus had an interesting metaphor for explaining odd news coverage. He suggested that sometimes one can feel the presence of a "Dark Star," visible only by the gravitational fields it exerts on visible matter. The star itself is dark and therefore invisible, but you can infer it exists by the strange and unexpected pathways other objects (stories) take when they come near the Dark Star.

I think this whole arms operation is the Benghazi Dark Star. I think it's better to just have it out in the open, because, look, it already is out in the open. There is literally no one in the world who cares to know about this who doesn't know about this.

The only people who are being kept in the dark are the American public. And I don't even care if they remain in the dark about this.

But what I do care about is the media's Phony Scandal You Guys treatment of the Administration's -- Obama's, Clinton's, and now Kerry's -- lapses and illegal cover-ups to protect a supposed Dark Star that everyone knows about.

Whatever the CIA was doing in Benghazi is simply not any kind of excuse for failing to take security threats seriously, or for failing to mount a rescue when men could still have been saved, or for perpetrating a ridiculous lie about a YouTube video on the public.

Posted by: Ace at 09:15 AM | Comments (224)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:45 AM | Comments (176)
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What is Izikhothane you ask? Fair question, I'd never heard of it until I read this story.

They burn money [literally], destroy expensive clothes [on purpose] and pour bottles of alcohol on the ground. The 'Izikhothane' live well beyond their means, spending more money than they and their parents can afford in order to be cool. This South African craze is as intriguing as it is shocking...

Simply put, the practitioners of Izikhothane seem to be an extreme form of anti-Kaboom kids. Thrift, or even mild restraint is not valued in this "culture". Ostentatious display of the destruction of wealth is. The more you have and can destroy, the greater your prestige.

This would be relatively harmless were it the trust fund babies of the super-wealthy doing it, perhaps even beneficial as a inefficient form of bottom up "economic stimulus" in that saner more pragmatic people are selling them the stuff they're trashing and making a living off it. But...its not the children of the super-wealthy who've embraced this lifestyle. The super-rich aren't even doing it.

...
The 'Izikhothane', known for their eccentric and wildly-coloured clothing, are typically aged between 12 and 25 and mainly come from the black middle class...

...“Young people tell me they’re prepared to do anything, including hitting their parents, to get money.”...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 05:20 AM | Comments (124)
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Ace rightly excoriated President Obama's caricature of the right as people who just want to bomb all the things, but let's pay a little visit to his appeal to the left in last night's speech.

And so to my friends on the right, I ask you to reconcile your commitment to America's military might with a failure to act when a cause is so plainly just.

To my friends on the left, I ask you to reconcile your belief in freedom and dignity for all people with those images of children writhing in pain and going still on a cold hospital floor, for sometimes resolutions and statements of condemnation are simply not enough. (emphasis added)

Really, Barack Obama. Really?

Because the Obama I know couldn't give two shits about children dying on cold hospital floors ... or in hospital utility rooms, anyway.

HANNITY: You tell the story -- a hard-wrenching story about a about a down syndrome baby you found.

STANEK: Yes.

HANNITY: . that was living, that had been abandoned in the soiled utility room at the hospital that you ended up cradling and rocking and holding for the 45 minutes that this baby lived.

Tell us that story.

STANEK: One night a nursing coworker was taking a little baby boy who had been aborted alive at -- between 21 and 22 weeks because he had down syndrome to our soiled utility room to die because his parents didn't want to hold him, and she didn't have time to hold him that night, and when she told me what she was doing, I couldn't bear the thought of this suffering child dying alone, and so I did cradle and rock him for the 45 minutes that he lived.

State Senator Barack Obama had the chance to act on this, but when the time came he voted "present" on Illinois' Born Alive Infant Protection Act.

Yet now, when he needs to tug at heartstrings to get his own ass out of the crack his mouth put him into, he's all For the Children. Give me a break.

Posted by: andy at 08:12 AM | Comments (217)
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