BEST of the Web! Weekly Political roundup of great Political Commentary compiled by Blogger Jenny Hatch

June 23, 2012Jenny Marie Hatch Leave a comment

Roundup compiled by Blogger Jenny Hatch. Five of the best political stories on the web this past week!

Jenny Hatch
Natural Family Blog

1. Note to President Obama and Team – Not all Hispanics vote Democrat…

“At first I thought the recent announcement by President Barack Obama that the U.S. would try to open up a path to citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants landed with a thud. Actually, it was more like a feather. Because on the scale of weighty issues on immigration reform, this is fairly soft stuff. Why? Because it practically has bi-partisan support. I would say the issue has been out there so long that it is like a feather that lands and just as the Hispanic population embraces it, it floats off and eludes them once again.

I think it is really important that voters realize both parties are working on opening up opportunities for children who were brought here by their illegal immigrant parents. And that the Democrats don’t have a lock on recognizing the need for some kind of reform. After all, it was Ronald Reagan who touted an amnesty program to ease problems along the US/Mexico border. And Florida’s Republican Sen. Marco Rubio who proposed his own version of the Dream Act back in April. Rubio wants to create a system where these kids could earn work papers by taking college classes or through military service….”

…The timing of Obama’s announcement seems designed to court Hispanics in key states in these 2012 elections – Colorado, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico. But Obama should take note that Hispanics are the fastest growing segment in the social conservative bucket of the Republican Party. Within the next ten years, minorities will be the majority in this country and neither party will be able to take them for granted.To assume this latest political checkmate leads directly to votes for Obama may be naive. First, it has turned off some in the Latino community who wonder why more wasn’t done earlier in his first term as President. And second, as we’ve said, not all Hispanics vote Democrat.”

This post is part of a weekly conversation with our Moms Matter 2012 political bloggers. To see the original question and see what all the bloggers had to say, read What Do You Think of President Obama’s Immigration Decision?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Christine Luhnow is a writer, reporter, documentary producer, blogger and mother of two. She started ModerateMoms to give a voice to socially liberal, fiscally conservative women voters.

2. The best investigative journalist I know wonders…

Did Maraniss Commit Fraud to Protect Obama?

American Thinker: Jack Cashill

“I was sitting out at lunch the other day reading David Maraniss’s new book, Barack Obama: The Story, when I came across a passage that gave me pause. Maraniss excerpted the passage from an article, “Breaking the War Mentality,” that Obama had written in 1983 for a Columbia University publication called the Sundial. What caught my attention was that the passage in question read better than I remembered…

…After catching the word switch in the Sundial excerpt, I now have to question whether it was the young Obama who added the umlaut. I suppose the Sundial edit, like the umlaut, might have been made by an editing program and overlooked by Maraniss, but the duty to explain is now his. Otherwise, he stands accused of fraud.”

3. Is it really right for the President to Claim Executive Privilege when an American Citizen/Border Agent has been murdered?

The Left Can’t Defend Obama’s Privilege

Commentary Magazine: Alana Goodman

“Democrats and the political left hammered the Bush administration for using executive privilege, and are now faced with trying to justify President Obama’s much more questionable use of it. This isn’t as tricky for the Democratic politicians — they’re partisans, and it’s not exactly surprising they have a double-standard based on which party is in power. But left-wing pundits, columnists and bloggers (at least the ones who want to avoid being labeled as hacks) seem to be having a hard time justifying it…

…But this is really the only argument the left can make — that they dislike the use of executive privilege, but this “politically-motivated witch hunt” is one of those rare circumstances when it’s necessary. And that would be fine, if there wasn’t already plenty of evidence indicating that the DOJ has tried to mislead the Congress on this investigation. And if past investigations that the left has cheered on — i.e. the Plame affair — hadn’t clearly been blatantly politically motivated.

If this is the greatest defense from the left, then the Democrats are in trouble. No wonder Jon Stewart has already abandoned them on this.”

Jon Stewart hammers the administration on Fast and Furious

4. The parents of slain border patrol agent Brian Terry ask some great questions…

Rhymes With Right:

Don’t Ken And Josephine Terry Have “Absolute Moral Authority”?

One of the things that is true of the Left is that it is generally guilty of great selectivity when applying those things it claims are absolute.

I could note their selective absolutism on discrimination (except for affirmative action), the right to keep medical care between patient and doctor (but only for abortion — ObamaCare will bring government into every other medical decision), free speech (except for speech the Left dislikes) and freedom of religion (you WILL buy birth control for your employees and do gay marriages or lose your tax exemption!).

And apparently that selective application of absolute principles applies to the parents of public servants who are killed in the line of duty….

…And the news media? They have virtually ignored the Terrys — just like they ignored Brian Terry’s death and the connection to a law enforcement operation gone sour.

After all, supporting these parents of a slain law enforcement officer who just want the truth about their son’s death and proper punishment meted out to those who are responsible for it could reflect badly on an administration that so many in the press are invested in seeing succeed — unlike what we saw in 2005, when the media was more than willing to use a grief-stricken mother to tear down a president they opposed.

And we certainly haven’t heard the liberal media establishment arguing that Ken and Josephine Terry have “absolute moral authority” that needs to be deferred to by an administration that is arguably responsible for their son’s murder — because once again, that which the Left declares to be an absolute principle must fall by the wayside when it becomes inconvenient to the accomplishment of what they have decided is a higher goal (like reelecting Obama).”

5. And I saved the best for last.

Mark Steyn at National Review:

National Review: Mark Steyn

Obama’s Great American Novel

“Courtesy of David Maraniss’s new book, we now know that yet another key prop of Barack Obama’s identity is false: His Kenyan grandfather was not brutally tortured or even non-brutally detained by his British colonial masters. The composite gram’pa joins an ever-swelling cast of characters from Barack’s “memoir” who, to put it discreetly, differ somewhat in reality from their bit parts in the grand Obama narrative. The best friend at school portrayed in Obama’s autobiography as “a symbol of young blackness” was, in fact, half Japanese, and not a close friend. The white girlfriend he took to an off-Broadway play that prompted an angry post-show exchange about race never saw the play, dated Obama in an entirely different time zone, and had no such world-historically significant conversation with him. His Indonesian step-grandfather supposedly killed by Dutch soldiers during his people’s valiant struggle against colonialism met his actual demise when he “fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes.”

David Maraniss is no right-winger, and can’t understand why boorish non-literary types have seized on his book as evidence that the president of the United States is a Grade A phony. “It is a legitimate question about where the line is in memoir,” he told Soledad O’Brien on CNN. My Oxford dictionary defines “memoir” as “an historical account or biography written from personal knowledge.” And if Obama doesn’t have “personal knowledge” of his tortured grandfather, war-hero step-grandfather, and racially obsessed theater-buff girlfriend, who does? But in recent years, the Left has turned the fake memoir into one of the most prestigious literary genres: Oprah’s Book Club recommended James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, hailed by Bret Easton Ellis as a “heartbreaking memoir” of “poetic honesty,” but subsequently revealed to be heavy on the “poetic” and rather light on the “honesty.” The “heartbreaking memoir” of a drug-addled street punk who got tossed in the slammer after brawling with cops while high on crack with his narco-hooker girlfriend proved to be the work of some suburban Pat Boone type with a couple of parking tickets. (I exaggerate, but not as much as he did.)

Oprah was also smitten by The Education of Little Tree, the heartwarmingly honest memoir of a Cherokee childhood which turned out to be concocted by a former Klansman whose only previous notable literary work was George Wallace’s “Segregation Forever” speech. Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood is a heartbreakingly honest, poetically searing, searingly painful, painfully honest, etc. account of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s unimaginably horrific boyhood in the Jewish ghetto of Riga and the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. After his memoir won America’s respected National Jewish Book Award, Mr. Wilkomirski was inevitably discovered to have been born in Switzerland and spent the war in a prosperous neighborhood of Zurich being raised by a nice middle-class couple. He certainly had a deprived childhood, at least from the point of view of a literary agent pitching a memoir to a major publisher. But the “unimaginable” horror of his book turned out to be all too easily imagined. Fake memoirs have won the Nobel Peace Prize and are taught at Ivy League schools to the scions of middle-class families who take on six figure debts for the privilege (I, Rigoberta Menchú). They’re handed out by the Pentagon to senior officers embarking on a tour of Afghanistan (Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea) on the entirely reasonable grounds that a complete fantasy could hardly be less credible than current NATO strategy…

…In an inspired line of argument, Ben Smith of the website BuzzFeed suggests that the controversy over Dreams from My Father is the fault of conservatives who have “taken the self-portrait at face value.” We are so unlettered and hicky that we think a memoir is about stuff that actually happened rather than a literary jeu d’esprit playing with nuances of notions of assumptions of preconceptions of concoctions of invented baloney. And so we regard the first member of the Invented-American community to make it to the White House as a kinda weird development rather than an encouraging sign of how a new post-racial, post-gender, post-modern America is moving beyond the old straightjackets of black and white, male and female, gay and straight, real and hallucinatory.

The question now is whether the United States itself is merely the latest chapter of Obama’s fake memoir. You’ll notice that, in the examples listed above, the invention only goes one way. No Cherokee orphan, Holocaust survivor, or recovering drug addict pretends to be George Wallace’s speechwriter. Instead, the beneficiaries of boring middle-class Western life seek to appropriate the narratives and thereby enjoy the electric frisson of fashionable victim groups. And so it goes with public policy in the West at twilight.

Thus, Obama’s executive order on immigration exempting a million people from the laws of the United States is patently unconstitutional, but that’s not how an NPR listener looks at it: To him, Obama’s unilateral amnesty enriches stultifying white-bread America with a million plucky little Rigoberta Menchús and their heartbreaking stories. Eric Holder’s entire tenure as attorney general is a fake memoir all by itself, and his invocation of “executive privilege” in the Fast and Furious scandal is preposterous, but American liberals can’t hear: Insofar as they know anything about Fast and Furious, it’s something to do with the government tracking the guns of fellows like those Alabama “Segregation Forever” nuts, rather than a means by which hundreds of innocent Rigoberta Menchús south of the border were gunned down with weapons sold to their killers by liberal policymakers of the Obama administration. If that’s the alternative narrative, they’ll take the fake memoir.

Similarly, Obamacare is apparently all about the repressed patriarchal white male waging his “war on women.” The women are struggling 30-year-old Georgetown Law coeds whose starting salary after graduation is 140 grand a year, but let’s not get hung up on details. Dodd-Frank financial reform, also awaiting Supreme Court judgment, is another unconstitutional power grab, but its designated villains are mustache-twirling top-hatted bankers, so likewise who cares?

One can understand why the beneficiaries of the postwar West’s expansion of middle-class prosperity would rather pass themselves off as members of way cooler victim groups: It’s a great career move. It may even have potential beyond the page: See Sandra Fluke’s dazzling pre-Broadway tryout of Fake Memoir: The High School Musical, in which a 30-year-old Georgetown Law coed whose starting salary after graduation is 140 grand a year passes herself off as the Little Rigoberta Hussein Wilkomirski of the Rite-Aid pick-up line. But transforming an entire nation into a fake memoir is unlikely to prove half so lucrative. The heartwarming immigrants, the contraceptive-less coeds, the mustache-twirling bankers all provide cover for a far less appealing narrative: an expansion of centralized power hitherto unknown to this republic. In reality, Obama’s step-grandfather died falling off the chair while changing the drapes. In the fake-memoir version, Big Government’s on the chair, and it’s curtains for America.”

Tune in weekly for a Political Roundup of the best political commentary on the web!

Jenny Hatch

NRO: Mark Steyn Tattered Liberty, America in Decline

March 23, 2010Jenny Marie Hatch

“Is America set for decline? It’s been a grand run. The country’s been the leading economic power since it overtook Britain in the 1880s. That’s impressive. Nevertheless, over the course of that century and a quarter, Detroit went from the world’s industrial powerhouse to an urban wasteland, and the once-golden state of California atrophied into a land of government run by the government for the government. What happens when the policies that brought ruin to Detroit and sclerosis to California become the basis for the nation at large? Strictly on the numbers, the United States is in the express lane to Declinistan: unsustainable entitlements, the remorseless governmentalization of the economy and individual liberty, and a centralization of power that will cripple a nation of this size. Decline is the way to bet. But what will ensure it is if the American people accept decline as a price worth paying for European social democracy.”

...Now look beyond the Anglosphere. Why did decline prove so pleasant in Europe? Because it was cushioned by American power. The United States is such a perversely non-imperial power that it garrisons not ramshackle colonies but its wealthiest “allies,” from Germany to Japan. For most of its members, “the Free World” has been a free ride. And that, too, is unprecedented. Even the few NATO members that can still project meaningful force around the world have been able to arrange their affairs on the assumption of the American security umbrella: In the United Kingdom, between 1951 and 1997 the proportion of governmentexpenditure on defense fell from 24 percent to 7, while the proportion on health and welfare rose from 22 percent to 53. And that’s before New Labour came along to widen the gap further.

Those British numbers are a bald statement of reality: You can have Euro-sized entitlements or a global military, but not both. What’s easier to do if you’re a democratic government that’s made promises it can’t afford — cut back on nanny-state lollipops, or shrug off thankless military commitments for which the electorate has minimal appetite? A Continental might take the view that this is democracy’s safeguard against an old temptation. After all, declining powers frequently turned to war to arrest their own decline or another’s rise — see the Franco–Prussian, the Austro–Prussian, the Napoleonic Wars, and many others. But those were the days when traditional great-power rivalry was resolved on the battlefield. Today we have postmodern post-great-power rivalry, in which America envies the way the beneficiaries of its post-war largesse have been able to opt out of the great game entirely. In reality-TV terms, the Great Satan would like to vote itself off the battlefield. On its present course, as Dennis Prager put it, America “will be a large Sweden, and just as influential as the smaller one.”

And that’s the optimistic scenario — because the only reason Sweden can be Sweden and Germany Germany and France France is that America is America. Who will cushion America’s decline as America cushioned Europe’s?

Furthermore, is “a large Sweden” even possible? Insofar as it works at all, Big Government works best in small countries, with a sufficiently homogeneous population to have common interests. There’s a fascinating book by Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore called The Size of Nations, in which the authors note that, of the ten richest countries in the world, only four have populations above 1 million: America (300 million people), Switzerland (7 million), Norway (4 million), and Singapore (3 million). Small nations, they argue, are more cohesive and have less need for buying off ethnic and regional factions. America has been the exception that proves the rule because it’s a highly decentralized federation. But, as Messrs. Alesina and Spolaore put it, if America were as centrally governed as France, it would break up. That theory is now being tested by the Obamacare Democrats, and, as we see with the wretched Ben Nelson’s cornhusker kickback or the blank check given to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, when American-style Big Government starts “buying off ethnic and regional factions,” the sky’s the limit. To attempt to impose European-style centralized government on a third of a billion people from Maine to Hawaii is to invite failure on a scale unknown to history. Which is to say that, domestically, Washington’s retreat from la gloire will be of an entirely different order of business from Paris’s.

And overseas? If America becomes Europe in its domestic disposition and geopolitical decline, then who will be America? Of the many competing schools of declinism, perhaps the most gleeful are those that salivate over the rise of China. For years, Sinophiles have been penning orgasmic fantasies of a mid-century when China will bestride the world and America will be consigned to the trash heap of history. It will never happen: As I’ve been saying for years, China has profound structural problems. It will get old before it gets rich.

Russia? The demographic deformation of Czar Putin’s new empire is even more severe than Beijing’s. Russia is a global power only to the extent of the mischief it can make on its acceleration into a death spiral.

The new Caliphate? Even if every dime-store jihadist’s dreams came true, almost by definition an Islamic imperium would be in decline from Day One.

So there’s no plausible new kid on the block? Isn’t that good news? Not exactly. Much of the timing of American decline depends on Beijing, which will make the final determination on such matters as when the dollar ceases to be the world’s reserve currency. Given that they hold at least the schedule of our fate in their hands, it would be rather reassuring if they had the capability to assume America’s role as the global order-maker. But they don’t and they never will. The most likely future is not a world under a new order but a world with no order — in which pipsqueak states go nuclear while the planet’s wealthiest nations, from New Zealand to Norway, are unable to defend their borders and are forced to adjust to the post-American era as they can. Yet, in such a geopolitical scene, the United States will still be the most inviting target — first because it’s big, and second because, as Britain knows, the durbar moves on but imperial resentments linger long after imperial grandeur.

One sympathizes with Americans weary of global responsibilities that they, unlike the European empires, never sought. The United States now spends more on its military than the next 40 or so nations combined. Yet in two rinky-dink no-account semi-colonial policing campaigns, it doesn’t feel like that, does it? A lot of bucks, but not much of a bang. You can understand why the entire Left and an increasing chunk of the Right would rather vote for a quiet life. But that’s not an option. The first victims of American retreat will be the many corners of the world that have benefited from an unusually benign hegemon. But the consequences of retreat will come home, too. In a more dangerous world, American decline will be steeper, faster, and more devastating than Britain’s — and something far closer to Rome’s.

In the modern era, the two halves of “the West” form a mirror image. “The Old World” has thousand-year-old churches and medieval street plans and ancient hedgerows but has been distressingly susceptible to every insane political fad, from Communism to Fascism to European Union. “The New World” has a superficial novelty — you can have your macchiato tweeted directly to your iPod — but underneath the surface noise it has remained truer to old political ideas than “the Old World” ever has. Economic dynamism and political continuity seem far more central to America’s sense of itself than they are to most nations’. Which is why it’s easier to contemplate Spain or Germany as a backwater than America. In a fundamental sense, an America in eclipse would no longer be America.

But, as Charles Krauthammer said recently, “decline is a choice.” The Democrats are offering it to the American people, and a certain proportion of them seem minded to accept. Enough to make decline inevitable? To return to the young schoolboy on his uncle’s shoulders watching the Queen-Empress’s jubilee, in the words of Arnold Toynbee: “Civilizations die from suicide, not from murder.”

— This article first appeared in the January 25, 2010, issue of National Review as “Welcome to Rome.”

“

NRO: Mark Steyn – Harry Reid’s Negro Problem – And Ours

January 11, 2010Jenny Marie Hatch Leave a comment

GadsdenFlag1 This short blip from Mark over at the Corner pretty much sums things up for me. I find indentity politics absolutely revolting, and after a year of dems calling me racist for being involved in the teaparties, am about fed up with the hypocrisy of it all.

“…this comment by Matthew Yglesias (full disclosure: Mr Yglesias has no use for me) tiptoes ever so tentatively toward the heart of it:

“It’s good that Reid apologized, but at the same time you can’t really apologize for being the sort of person who’d be inclined to use the phrase “negro dialect” and it’s more the idea of Reid being that kind of person that’s creepy here than anything else.”

One understands the realities of power. You can talk about how light-skinned and clean the Negro is and that’s perfectly okay as long as you support the President’s policies or (as Mr Obama put it in his acceptance of Reid’s apology) “social justice”. But, if you go along to a town hall meeting and say you oppose the health care bill because you’re very concerned at what you hear about waiting times for MRIs in Canada, you’re obviously a knuckledragging racist who’s itching to string that uppity Negro from the nearest tree….

…even if you accept all that, you’re still left with what Mr Yglesias calls the “creepiness” – the fact that the Senate Majority Leader and to a lesser extent the Vice-President think in this way. To those of us who find identity politics repugnant, it would seem to confirm that an unhealthy obsession with “anti-racism” eventually becomes so condescending it’s indistinguishable from racism – or, at any rate, the micro-classifications of apartheid – to the point where bigtime Dem honchos are sitting around saying, “What we need here is a clean octoroon.” “Well, this high yaller from Chicago might do the trick.” I mean, in what sense are Harry Reid’s remarks any different from this?”