- BitsBlog - https://bitsblog.com -

Nightly Ramble: LightHouse Edition

Welcome, one and all to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the sphere… The BitsBlog Nightly Ramble

This is the LightHouse Edition

ramble-lighthouse [1]

  • Mother’s day alert:  First of all, let’s take time out for this important message: You do know Mother’s day is this coming Sunday, right? Yeah. You’re welcome.
  • Fur Flying: Lots of fur flying from my Pajamas Media piece [2]posted earlier today, and that’s pretty much as I expected. I suspect I may have snarked the comment stream into silence, though, earlier today. We’ll see.
  • Better than you: But there’s more in the way of indirect linkage to the points I made in that bit than I ever imagined. Take for example Mark Steyn, who points up in a post at The Corner today [3]:

    My old editor, Charles Moore, has a piece in the London Telegraph on the 30th anniversary of Mrs Thatcher’s arrival in Downing Street [4]. Very pertinent, as Britain regresses to the basket-case Seventies. But this passage, I think, has relevance to the American elite’s view of the current Tea Parties. Charles quotes the leftie writer Hanif Kureishi’s condescending dismissal – “Thatcher, like the Queen, is basically vulgar” – and adds:

    Without having Hanif Kureishi’s exalted, exquisite, Nancy-Mitford-style sensitivity for class distinctions, I do see that the combination of Mrs Thatcher’s beliefs and her social origins (and perhaps also her sex) is toxic for people like him.
    People like Mrs Thatcher – state-educated, lower-middle-class, provincial, female – were not supposed to question the 1945 state-socialist settlement. To its architects, such people were of no account. They were neither poor enough to attract romantic sympathy, nor grand enough to be entitled to power. They were expected to know their place.

    There’s a lot of that in that CNN reporter’s coverage of the Tea Parties: You’ll be getting your $400 Obama “tax credit”. So what’s your beef? Why don’t you know your place?

    Similarly, we know that the Democrats don’t seem to have a grasp on middle America, either,  or it’s values, having rather focused on the ends of the spectrum, the very poor and the very rich.  Alas, that attitude of ‘superior’ seems to permeate the GOP as much as it has the Democrats of late. That, I see as part of the problem the GOP rank and file must face. The sad fact is that the most natural thing a political class can do is look down it’s nose at the people who elected them once they get into power.

  •  The Chruch of the bloody obvious: Right Wing News points up the obvious, but it does bear repeating: Alex Jones is a loon. [5]
  • An unlikely Friend: Andrew Lloyd Webber and the Tea Parties? Yep. [6]  Not directly, but read closely what he’s saying and tell me that the worries he expresses are not the cries we’re hearing from the tea party protests.
  • Summers and the Stimulus: Speaking of The Corner, here’s a bit [7]from Mark Hemingway, pointing out that Larry Summers didn’t think the Stimulus was a good idea. Funny how things change once yet get into power.  This thing also shows us that the time of  short national memory, where pols can depend on people not remembering their positions on issues of the day in years past, has gone. Time was when people didn’t have the computer age a lots of hungry bloggers digging for contrary positions in a person’s history. That era is gone. Time was, too, when  News people rather than digging for facts knew their place… as promoters of the left. That era is also gone, at least to a larger degree than liberals are comfortable with.
  •  One Flu over the HHS: You do know, I assume, that HHS is missing 19 key positions? [8]  Reason, of course is the disaster that the nomination process has been for this administration. One of their rules for being appointed apparently is you have to be a tax cheat. The other rule is you can’t get caught at it. The failure rate with those rules in place leaves us with the condition we’re in.  Not that I suppose political appointments would have any immediate impact on the spread of this  flu problem, really. But as I said yesterday, [9] I [10] have a great deal of difficulty imagining that were this kind of a lack to occur under the previous president, that the press wouldn’t be doing their wall to wall mode over the political implications of the foul-up, and blaming Bush for it. Of course the leftie blogs are already trying to blmae the right for the issue, anyway.
  •  100 days of Urkel:  I don’t put much stock in the 100 days, myself, being as it amounts to a holdover from the days of FDR, who Obama is desperate to cast himself as. I wouldn’t now, but for something I noted over the weekend, while doing a little research on the subject; I noted back in 2001 [11], at 100 days into Bush’s first term, that Bush’s numbers were higher at this point than were Clinton’s at the same point.  What struck me then,  was the overtly biased stack of questions being asked by the various pollsters, particularly ABC at the time. The apparent goal was to minimize the positive impact of Bush. The news orgs of the day made as little as possible of the approval ratings Bush turned a in at the time, of course.  Bring it to today, however, and we have a whole different effort being expended by the press.  There’s a lot of praise going on for Obama, where under Bush, there was silence. Interestingly, though, Obama’s polling numbers are quite similar indeed to Bush’s. Considering the tongue bath the polling questions about Obama represent, that’s an amazing stat, of itself. But more interesting yet is the degree to which enthusiasm is waning for The Chosen One [12].  As I told someone at Pajamas Media, this morning, check back in 3 years.
  •  But what has he done, really?  And that’s what all this comes down to. What are Obaa’s actual accomplishments, not what we FEEL about the whole thing since feelings tend to be manipulated by things other than fact.  I noticed the Fox News folks had a pundit put going this morning, discussing this very point.  Their answer to the question are remarkable: So far,according to the panel Obama has
    • Passed more spending than any other president in history. That bill, despite his assurences about Pork, was one written by the congress, not by him and thus loaded with so much pork as to double it’s size.
    • His popularity ratings are still high… an accomplishment which as I’ve said, is as much press manipulation of the facts… some would call it ‘brand management’ as it is his actual accomplishments.

    I submit that if this is a the best they can come up with, he’s got some serious problems, with even these strong points they’ve listed. Support based on feelings alone is paper thin by definition. As, I suspect, we are about to see, over the summer.

  • The Dullest tool in the drawer gets tossed:  Patterico passes along [13]word via McQ [14], that Ted Rall is looking for work. Of course given he got his wish with Oabam getting elected, we may all end up in his shoes, soon, but at least I won’t have profiting off Pat Tillman’s death on my list of accomplishments, along with Nick Berg’s beheading, on my resume.