Quotulatiousness

October 9, 2012

Paul Wells on “AndrewSullivanammerung”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:47

In Maclean’s, Paul “Inkless” Wells has a look at Andrew Sullivan’s most recent panic attack over Barack Obama’s re-election chances and how his debate performance makes that task seem much harder now:

The extended North American/ Anglosphere Twittersphere is agog these days over the latest spectacle put on by Urblogger Andrew Sullivan, who edited The New Republic in the days when paper was king and who has spent the past decade blogging, in succession, for (a) himself (b) Time magazine (c) The Atlantic Monthly (d) Tina Brown. Since 2007 Sullivan has been perhaps Barack Obama’s leading gay British Republican supporter; he wrote a 2007 Atlantic cover story explaining why Obama was “necessary” to binding up the nation’s wounds and a 2012 Newsweek cover story asserting that Obama was about to become the most significant U.S. president since Reagan. (“The narrative writes itself. He will emerge as an iconic figure…”) About 6,000 times he has ended blog posts on Obama with the sentence-thing “Know Hope.”

But now comes Sully’s crisis of confidence.

He watched the same debate everyone else did last week; noticed, as many did, that the incumbent had a hard time of things, and then read yesterday’s surprising Pew Center poll, which essentially showed Obama’s support collapsing so rapidly he will soon owe Mitt Romney votes. [. . .]

It is, in fact, entirely possible that Obama blew the election with a single 90-minute display of I-didn’t-know-this-would-be-on-the-exam. Certainly if he does lose, all the post-mortem tick-tocks will begin in Denver on the night of Oct. 3.

Wells also linked to Ezra Levant’s most recent article at Sun News:

Now we know why Barack Obama uses a teleprompter everywhere, even taking it once to a photo-op in an elementary school.

Now we know why he hasn’t had a press conference in months, preferring to go on entertainment shows like The View (he told his fawning interviewers he is “eye candy”) and David Letterman’s show (first question: How much do you weigh?).

We know because of the shock of last week’s presidential debate with Mitt Romney. The 60 million Americans who watched that debate had been told a hundred times that Obama was the smartest president since Jefferson, the greatest orator since Churchill. And they had been told that Mitt Romney was a heartless gazillionaire.

What they saw was the opposite, for 90 excruciating minutes. When Obama didn’t have a cue card or a teleprompter, when he couldn’t simply skip questions he didn’t like, or talk out the clock, he was a disaster.

Update: Buzzfeed has eight animated GIFs that show Andrew Sullivan’s meltdown rather cleverly.

Politics and economics: election-style

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

At the Hit and Run blog, Tim Cavanaugh bewails economic illiteracy:

It’s “very hard to fine-tune an economy” using any tools. That seemed to be a clear lesson of the twentieth century workers’ paradises, and it is implicit when politicians claim (usually following up with a “but”) that the free market is the least-bad system for creating wealth. Spending and taxes can, however, have very destructive effects, and the best way for government to further an enterprise is by the alacrity with which it gets out of its way. As the Clinton-era example shows, you can have a boom even if you just slightly reduce the rate of spending growth. That’s not fine-tuning, it’s slightly easing the heavy hand of the state. The Post’s rhetorical question leaves out such options as “Did they screw it up?” or “Did they do too much?”

You get to this level of fantasy not by knowing too little economics but by knowing too much, by being persuaded that the same math you use when you shop around for bargains or balance your checkbook does not apply at the level of the macroeconomy. Unfortunately, Keynesian logic is like Videodrome: Once exposed to it you can never get rid of it, no matter how much trouble it causes. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman recently claimed that brisk sales of the iPhone 5 will spur economic growth, thus proving the broken-window theory of economics. In fact, it’s the opposite: People who buy the new phone think it will add value to their lives, not replace an equal amount of value that has been destroyed. As the Apple maps fiasco, the purple glare controversy, and this Jimmy Kimmel video suggest, they may be wrong about that. But that Krugman (who last year called for a hoax invasion by space aliens to spur spending) is down to such a transparently absurd argument suggests the time has never been riper to jettison both the new and old Keynesianism.

Just don’t look for either presidential candidate to do that. Right now the big question is whether Mitt Romney or Barack Obama will use his presidential job-creating powers to create more jobs. Mitt Romney is promising to create 12 million jobs, which strikes me as a strategic error. All Obama has to do is promise to create 13 million jobs and he’ll obviously be the better candidate, because that’s a lot more jobs.

October 8, 2012

Warren Ellis: A common thread between two political debates

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:31

An uncharacteristically serious column from Warren Ellis this week:

John Kerry, for our younger readers, was a politician who strongly resembled a reanimated Boris Karloff in a badger-pelt wig. He was a distant, charmless waffler who blew every political point he tried to score in the debates by either garbling the headline or shovelling on so much detail that people lost track of what he was trying to say. President Bush, in contrast, rolled up as the smiling ranch boss who weren’t too big to have a laugh an’ a joke with the hands, and whipped the shit out of his opponent on the floor.

The room was actually more excited by a Senator from Chicago who had a speech excerpt broadcast just as the polls closed. This was my first exposure to a dynamic orator called Barack Obama. More than one of the assembled group (which was mostly artists and sex workers, as I dimly recall) said that they’d rather Obama was running for President. John Kerry’s appeal centered largely on the fact that he wasn’t George W Bush. Which was nonsense in many respects. These were both American Patricians, who had even belonged to the same secret society at university. They were facing each other not because of any deep-seated critical political commitment, just a certain conviction that the world is run by people like them and so they were entitled to the Presidency.

[. . .]

By the end of his presidency, Bush was visibly tired, and said in an interview that he was really ready to not be President any more. He was one of the least popular Presidents in American history, the Tea Party (launched in part by his signature of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008) had begun to corrode the GOP, and he was eager to go away and live quietly.

The first of the 2012 Presidential debates aired a little under a week ago, as you read this. I was unpleasantly surprised by what I saw. The dynamic orator was gone. In his place was a distant, charmless waffler who blew every political point he tried to score by sounding either confused or incredibly boring. And he also looked tired. While the boss at the other lectern laughed and lied and outright told the debate moderator he was fired when the boss got to trade up to the White House… President Obama looked like a man who was really ready to not be President any more.

October 7, 2012

Libertarian propaganda appears even in video games like Minecraft!

Filed under: Gaming, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:54

Those evil Ayn Rand types are fitting their loathsome philosophy into everything! It’s even shown up in otherwise wholesome areas like video games:

I just realized that this has been nibbling at the back of my mind for some time: Minecraft may be a very subtle (and probably unintentional) piece of propaganda that could corrupt people into believing in Objectivist or libertarian/anarchocapitalist ideas. For those not familiar with political theory in this vein, one of the popular libertarian metaphors is that of resources as sand on a beach, and that there are so many grains of sand that no one should need to share, because they can just go out and get more sand.

Nowhere is this ideology more present than in Minecraft. You are a single individual, gendered male, who is placed randomly in a wilderness. You are able to fashion tools from only that which surrounds you. At first you can only build primitive tools and live in a shitty shack, but as you work more and more, you can eventually dwell in a castle. All you have to do is work hard and know what to do.

The metaphor gets even worse when we factor in monsters and villagers. Monsters are like socialist parasites — they come to attack you, and literally to parasite themselves off of you, but many of them — especially creepers — destroy your projects in trying to get at you. Think of Howard Roarke’s courtroom speech in The Fountainhead. The player in Minecraft is that quintessential builder-architect who discovered fire and was hated by others. Meanwhile, the villages — people living together in communities — can never aspire to the kinds of feats that the player can, and they exist only as resources to be exploited. There is no moral penalty for demolishing them or for stealing.

I’m not saying Notch intends this to be the reading of Minecraft, but it’s there and it unsettles me.

October 4, 2012

Here’s a reality TV show that should exist

Filed under: Humour, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:20

At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok has a pitch for a new reality TV show that deserves a chance:

I suggest a game show, So You Think You Can Be President? SYTYCBP would have at least three segments.

Coase it Out: Presidential candidates have 12 hours to get a bitterly divorcing couple to divide their assets in a mutually agreeable manner. (Bonus points are awarded if the candidate convinces the couple to stay together.)

Game Theory: Candidates compete in a game of Diplomacy. I would also include several ringers — say Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan and Salma Hayek. Why these three? Robin is cold, calculating and merciless — make a logical mistake and he will make you pay. Bryan is crafty and experienced. And Salma? I couldn’t refuse her anything but presidents should be made of stronger stuff so we need a test.

Spot the Fraud: Presidential candidates are provided with an economic scenario (mortgage defaults are up, hedge funds are crashing, liquidity is tight). Three experts propose plans. The candidate must choose one of the plans. After the candidate chooses, the true identities of the “experts” are revealed. One is a trucker, another a scuba diver instructor and the last a distinguished economist. Which did the candidate choose?

Entertaining? Check. Correlated with important skills for governing? Check. Can the voters tell who the winner is? Check.

September 27, 2012

Gary Johnson profile in Businessweek

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

He’s still struggling to get on the last three state ballots (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Oklahoma), but Gary Johnson does offer a very different vision than BaraMitt Obamney:

Gary Johnson was governor of New Mexico from 1995 to 2003. He made a name for himself by vetoing 750 bills that didn’t meet his standards for thrift. Before that, Johnson made a fortune in construction, starting as a solo Albuquerque handyman in 1974 and selling his 1,000-employee company, Big J Enterprises, for $10 million in 1999. Johnson likes to ski, hike, and cycle. He has completed 75 triathlons and climbed Mt. Everest while healing from a broken leg. Also, he is running for president.

While Representative Ron Paul (R-Tex.) carried the Libertarian flame all the way to the Republican convention this summer, it’s Johnson, not Paul, who’s on the ballot as the Libertarian candidate in 47 states — and making his case in courts to get on in the remaining three. (According to Richard Winger, editor of Ballot Access News, Pennsylvania is likely, Michigan a maybe, Oklahoma almost impossible.) “No other third party is going to come close to that,” Johnson says.

Johnson began the race as a Republican. His antiwar, pro-gay marriage, pro-marijuana legalization message could not get traction in a primary race led, at one time or another in the polls, by every other candidate — except Paul. “I thought it was going to be hard to marginalize two people talking about the same thing,” says Johnson. “I just got excluded.” (During a Fox News […] debate he did manage to get into, Johnson drew applause when he said, “My next-door neighbors’ two dogs have created more shovel-ready jobs than this current administration.”) So Johnson became a Libertarian. While the party has no one in national office, it’s good at getting on ballots. “They know how hard ballot access is, and they’ve got people who have been doing it for years,” says Micah Sifry, author of Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America.

September 26, 2012

Unthinking support of “the troops”

Filed under: Media, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:22

If you’ve read the blog for a while, you’ll know that I’m far from anti-military. I was in the Canadian militia (the army reserve) during my teenage years, and still have friends who are serving in the armed forces of Canada, Britain, and the US. Since 2001, Canadians in particular have re-evaluated their views of the military and are now much more likely to demonstrate their support for the army, the Royal Canadian Navy, and the Royal Canadian Air Force. Even so, Canadians are much more low-key in their demonstrations of respect and approval than Americans are.

Some of the more outspoken supporters actually give me the creeps … rather than showing their support for the soldiers, sailors, and airmen, they seem to be showing their support for militarism. That sort of thing enables and encourages military adventurism, armed intervention in other countries, and the militarization of civilian life (look at the military-style gear many police departments now operate, including drones for border surveillance and drug war operations). That’s a line I never want to see Canada cross.

At the Future of Freedom Foundation blog, Jacob Hornberger expresses some of the same concern:

One of the most fascinating phenomena of our time is the extreme reverence that the American people have been taught to have for the military. Wherever you go — airports, sports events, church — there is a god-like worship of the military.

“Let us all stand and express our sincerest thanks to our troops for the wonderful service they perform for our country,” declare the sports broadcasters.

“Let us pray for the troops, especially those in harm’s way,” church ministers exhort their parishioners.

“Let us give a big hand to our troops who are traveling with us today,” exclaim airline officials.

Every time I see this reverence for the military being expressed, I wonder if people ever give any thought to what exactly the troops are doing. No one seems to ask that question. It just doesn’t seem to matter. The assumption is that whatever the troops are doing, they are protecting our “rights and freedoms.” As one sports broadcaster I recently heard put it, “We wouldn’t be here playing this game if it weren’t for the troops.”

There is at least one big problem with this phenomenon, however: The troops are engaged in actions that are harmful to the American people, including most of the people who have a reverential attitude toward them.

September 25, 2012

It’s not just your imagination: libertarians really are weird

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Jonathan Haidt at the Righteous Mind summarizes a recent study published in PLoS ONE which looked at the psychology of libertarians (using conservatives and liberals as controls):

The findings largely confirm what libertarians have long said about themselves, but they also shed light on why some people and not others end up finding libertarian ideas appealing. Here are three of the major findings:

1) On moral values: Libertarians match liberals in placing a relatively low value on the moral foundations of loyalty, authority, and sanctity (e.g., they’re not so concerned about sexual issues and flag burning), but they join conservatives in scoring lower than liberals on the care and fairness foundations (where fairness is mostly equality, not proportionality; e.g., they don’t want a welfare state and heavy handed measures to enforce equality). This is why libertarians can’t be placed on the spectrum from left to right: they have a unique pattern that is in no sense just somewhere in the middle. They really do put liberty above all other values.

2) On reasoning and emotions: Libertarians have the most “masculine” style, liberals the most “feminine.” We used Simon Baron-Cohen’s measures of “empathizing” (on which women tend to score higher) and “systemizing”, which refers to “the drive to analyze the variables in a system, and to derive the underlying rules that govern the behavior of the system.” Men tend to score higher on this variable. Libertarians score the lowest of the three groups on empathizing, and highest of the three groups on systemizing. (Note that we did this and all other analyses for males and females separately.) On this and other measures, libertarians consistently come out as the most cerebral, most rational, and least emotional. On a very crude problem solving measure related to IQ, they score the highest. Libertarians, more than liberals or conservatives, have the capacity to reason their way to their ideology.

3) On relationships: Libertarians are the most individualistic; they report the weakest ties to other people. They score lowest of the three groups on many traits related to sociability, including extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. They have a morality that matches their sociability – one that emphasizes independence, rather than altruism or patriotism.

September 24, 2012

One thing the Occupy movement was absolutely right about: crony capitalism

Filed under: Business, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:29

In the Calgary Herald, Mike Milke says that the Occupy protest movement was spot-on in their criticism of crony capitalism:

With the recent first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, consider one beef from protesters that was legitimate: crony capitalism.

In general, Occupy Wall Street types could be described as a little too naive about the downside of more government power, and too critical of people who exchange goods and services in markets.

But insofar as any protester was annoyed with politicians who like to subsidize specific businesses — corporate welfare in other words, and which is an accurate example of abused capitalism — hand me a protest sign and give me a tent.

When taxpayer dollars are given or “loaned” (wink, wink, nod, nod) to specific businesses, such taxpayer-financed subsidies are not cheap.

According to the OECD, in 2008, at least $48 billion was proposed for automotive companies alone. Annually, global taxpayer subsidies to the energy industry clock in at more than $100 billion. And in Canada, between 1994 and 2007, governments spent $202 billion on all types of subsidies to multiple corporations in all sorts of industries.

Warren Ellis: the fun in politics is gone, gone, gone

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:29

In his weekly column at Vice, Warren Ellis finds it in his flinty heart to mourn the passing of fun in politics:

There has long been a notion abroad that positions of authority should be given to the best-qualified people who don’t want them, as the job of “ruler”, like “censor”, does not necessarily attract the best kind of human being. That would, of course, kill the inherent black comedy in politics-watching. The creatures who fight and kick and bite for the right to fuck with our lives tend to be grotesques, and serve as warnings. Warnings we never heed, of course, because we end up voting something in from that shallow pool of eels every time.

But, every now and then, there comes a period where that pool gets drained, and we find ourselves dealing with the dregs.

I actually find myself weirdly nostalgic for the authentic monsters of politics. Even the sly, hollow hustling of Tony Blair would be preferable to the callow bafflement of Nick Clegg, the unnaturally shiny forehead and beta-male posturing of David Cameron, and the… well, whatever Ed Miliband is. There’s Vince Cable, whom lots of people seem to like the idea of, but his presence, unfortunately, is that of Gravedigger #2 in one of the less successful Hammer Horror films.

Over the water, Mitt Romney doesn’t even have the facility to be slippery. He just staggers down the corridor of ideology like a cheap drunk, bumping into the walls. And President Obama isn’t even a tragic hero in the mode of Jimmy Carter, who struggled mightily (with himself, as much as anything else) and fell before the eerie charm of Ronald Reagan. I can admire the man’s intellect and general beliefs (or “values”, which is the season’s buzzword) while recognising that his main mode of operation is as a chilly functionary unwilling to take the big fights all the way.

September 22, 2012

The spectre of Ayn Rand is haunting America

Filed under: Books, Economics, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:45

Terence Corcoran on “the most dangerous woman in America”:

Weird, I thought. Why would a world-famous economist, followed by millions, advisor to UN officials and presidents, launch into a personal attack on a novelist who’s been dead more than 30 years by citing one of her novels and paraphrasing the words of one of her characters? How many people have even heard of Ayn Rand? And who the hell cares what one of her characters said in a novel published 60 years ago?

Lots of people, it appears. Ayn Rand may be long dead, but she seems to have been resurrected as the most dangerous woman in America. Judging by the barrage of attacks and references in the media, one can only conclude that Ayn Rand is a pervasive and increasingly powerful force in U.S. politics, possibly on the brink of toppling the prevailing orthodoxies of modern American liberalism.

Media references to Ayn Rand have skyrocketed over the last year, many of them elaborate putdowns. Her name is dropped like a hand grenade into articles and commentaries, as if readers will instantly recognize the menace. Her name has become an explosive device — like Karl Marx’s or Chairman Mao’s — apparently enough to rankle and send shivers down spines.

[. . .]

Rand’s supporters appear to be moving in on Washington’s Cato Institute, a libertarian bastion long headed by Ed Crane but now presided over by John Allison, the Ayn Rand Institute board member. Allison, a former banker from North Carolina, with funding from the billionaire Koch brothers, themselves characters out of Occupy/liberal nightmares, has said he aims to reshape Cato along Randian lines.

This is war. Rand condemned liberals and conservatives, but had even stronger views about libertarians. In a 2009 biography of Rand, author Jennifer Burns records that during Rand’s public speeches, she called libertarians “scum,” “intellectual cranks” and “plagiarists.”

It’s hard to tell today who has more to gain or lose from the seeming resurrection of Ayn Rand as an ideological enemy of the statists. She had no time for most other worldviews, right, left or libertarian. She would have fought the Cato Institute, she would have rejected the Tea Party movement, and she would have sought to demolish the Jeffrey Sachs of the world.

Mismeasuring inequality

Filed under: Economics, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:20

If you haven’t encountered a journalist or an activist going on about the Gini Coefficient, you certainly will soon, as it’s become a common tool to promote certain kinds of political or economic action. It is also useful for pushing certain agendas because while the numbers appear to show one thing clearly (the relative income inequality of a population), it hides nearly as much as it reveals:

The figures they use for a comparison are here. Looking at those you might think, well, if the US is at 0.475, Sweden is at 0.23 (yes, the number of 23.0 for Sweden is the same as 0.23 in this sense) then given that a lower number indicates less inequality then Sweden is a less unequal place than the US. You would of course be correct in your assumption: but not because of these numbers.

For the US number is before taxes and before benefits. The Swedish number is after all taxes and all benefits. So, the US number is what we call “market income”, or before all the things we do to shift money around from rich to poor and the Swedish number (in, fact, the numbers for all other countries) are after all the things we do to reduce inequality.

[. . .]

The US is reporting market inequality, before the effects of taxes and benefits, the Europeans are reporting the inequality after the effect of taxes and benefits.

[. . .]

Which brings us to the 300 million people in the US. Is it really fair to be comparing income inequality among 300 million people with inequality among the 9 million of Sweden? Quite possibly a more interesting comparison would be between the 300 million of the US and the 500 million of the European Union. Or the smaller number in the EU 15, thus leaving out the ex-communist states with their own special problems. Not that it matters all that much as the two numbers for the Gini are the same: 0.3*. Note again that this is post tax and post benefit. On this measure the US is at 0.38. So, yes, the US is indeed more unequal than Europe. But by a lot smaller margin than people generally recognise: or than by he numbers that are generally bandied about.

Which brings us to the second point. Even here the US number is (marginally) over-stated. For even in the post-tax and post-benefit numbers the US is still an outlier in the statistical methods used. In looking at inequality, poverty, in the US we include the cash that poor people are given to alleviate their poverty. But we do not include the things that people are given in kind: the Medicaid, SNAP, Section 8 and so on. It’s possible (I’m not sure I’m afraid) that we don’t include the EITC either. We certainly don’t in the poverty statistics but might in the inequality. All of the other countries do include the effects of such policies. Largely because they don’t offer benefits in kind they just give the poor more money and tell them to buy it themselves. This obviously turns up in figures of how much money the poor have.

“I can no longer shock [conservatives] when I tell them I’m gay – but I can shock gay people when I tell them I’m Conservative”

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:00

Of all the political changes you might have expected to see in Canada, having Stephen Harper’s Conservatives become pro-LGBT must be one of the least likely:

A mere seven years ago, the Tories were famously the opponents of same sex marriage. Now, the Harper Conservatives freely push gay rights abroad and even host an annual gathering of gay Tories. While they remain the favourite punching bag for Canadian LGBT activists, have the Harper Tories become unlikely warriors for gay rights?

“I can no longer shock people in the conservative movement when I tell them I’m gay – but I can shock gay people when I tell them I’m Conservative,” said Fred Litwin, and former vice-president of the Ottawa Centre Conservatives.

In June, Mr. Litwin was one of the organizers of the Fabulous Blue Tent Party, a gathering of approximately 800 gay Conservatives at Ottawa’s Westin Hotel that went until 3 a.m.

[. . .]

“It’s no secret that the Conservative Party hasn’t always been the biggest champion of gay rights, but public pressure, and quite frankly, society evolving has changed their views,” said Jamie Ellerton, an openly gay former staffer for Mr. Kenney.

“The Conservative Party, like the rest of society, has moved to be more supportive of gay rights in recent years, and I see that trend continuing,” he said.

[. . .]

After the 2011 suicide of gay Ottawa teen Jamie Hubley, Mr. Baird told the House that homophobia has no place in Canadian schools, and then appeared with other Tory MPs in a video for the “It Gets Better Project,” an online campaign looking to curb the disproportionately high suicide rates among LGBT youth.

In June, members of the Tory caucus even came to the rescue of a transgendered rights bill put forward by NDP MP Randall Garrison. Promising to protect transgender people under the Canadian Human Rights Act and make anti-transgender violence a hate crime, the bill passed second reading thanks to the support of 15 Conservative MPs, including Jim Flaherty and Lisa Raitt.

September 21, 2012

Gary Johnson polling at 6% in latest Reason-Rupe poll

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:37

The headline most media outlets would run includes just President Obama and Mitt Romney. If you allow more than two choices, however, Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson changes the numbers a fair bit:

A new national Reason-Rupe poll of likely voters finds President Barack Obama leading Republican Mitt Romney 48 percent to 43 percent in the presidential race. When undecided voters are asked which way they are leaning Obama’s lead over Romney grows to 52-45.

President Obama holds large advantages among women (53-37), African-Americans (92-2) and Hispanics (71-18). Fifty-two percent of likely voters view Obama favorably, while 45 view him unfavorably. In contrast, 49 percent of likely voters have an unfavorable view of Mitt Romney and 41 percent have a favorable view of him.

In a three-way presidential race, Obama drops to 49 percent among likely voters and Romney falls to 42 percent as the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson gets six percent of support. Johnson is already on the presidential ballot in 47 states.

September 16, 2012

Benghazi was a symptom of a deeper problem

Filed under: Africa, Bureaucracy, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

Mark Steyn almost forgets the humour in this week’s column:

So, on a highly symbolic date, mobs storm American diplomatic facilities and drag the corpse of a U.S. ambassador through the streets. Then the president flies to Vegas for a fundraiser. No, no, a novelist would say; that’s too pat, too neat in its symbolic contrast. Make it Cleveland, or Des Moines.

The president is surrounded by delirious fanbois and fangurls screaming “We love you,” too drunk on his celebrity to understand this is the first photo-op in the aftermath of a national humiliation. No, no, a filmmaker would say; too crass, too blunt. Make them sober, middle-aged midwesterners, shocked at first, but then quiet and respectful.

The president is too lazy and cocksure to have learned any prepared remarks or mastered the appropriate tone, notwithstanding that a government that spends more money than any government in the history of the planet has ever spent can surely provide him with both a speechwriting team and a quiet corner on his private wide-bodied jet to consider what might be fitting for the occasion. So instead he sloughs off the words, bloodless and unfelt: “And obviously our hearts are broken…” Yeah, it’s totally obvious.

And he’s even more drunk on his celebrity than the fanbois, so in his slapdashery he winds up comparing the sacrifice of a diplomat lynched by a pack of savages with the enthusiasm of his own campaign bobbysoxers. No, no, says the Broadway director; that’s too crude, too ham-fisted. How about the crowd is cheering and distracted, but he’s the president, he understands the gravity of the hour, and he’s the greatest orator of his generation, so he’s thought about what he’s going to say, and it takes a few moments but his words are so moving that they still the cheers of the fanbois, and at the end there’s complete silence and a few muffled sobs, and even in party-town they understand the sacrifice and loss of their compatriots on the other side of the world.

But no, that would be an utterly fantastical America. In the real America, the president is too busy to attend the security briefing on the morning after a national debacle, but he does have time to do Letterman and appear on a hip-hop radio show hosted by “The Pimp with a Limp.”

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