2-02-09

John Hinderaker: Is Barack Obama an insensitive lout who serves $100 per pound steaks to his elite guests and turns up the heat in the White House high enough to grow orchids while a million of his countrymen are without power and dozens are freezing to death? If not, why not?

NRO: We won’t know the final results of the elections for weeks, but early reports are that Sunni and Shiite secular parties have fared relatively better than their religious counterparts. If this is the case, it will be a step toward empowering Iraqis locked out of the current power structure and making Iraqi politics more truly representative.

Victor Davis Hanson: Tom Daschle is a three-fer: a) he makes a mockery of a new administration pledge to free itself from lobbyists since he and his wife are, well, power lobbyists incarnate. b) he makes a mockery of past Democratic praise of taxes as patriotic given his own tax cheating and his own former invective about those who do what he did; c) he makes a mockery of the old Democratic populist creed.

More VDH: President Hamlet…It’s ‘to Be or Not to Be’ Time for Obama. The tragedy in all this—aside from the manifest hypocrisy of the first two weeks of the Obama administration—is that Obama is uniquely positioned to do things no other president could accomplish. He need not vote “present” or offer mere hope and change or continue to play Hamlet.

Micheal Yon: Israel is a free country that abides by the rule of law. By contrast, if a writer were to go to Gaza or Iran, for instance, and start writing bad words, he might wind up on the news, dead. Israel allows Christians and Arab Muslims to worship freely, while Hamas wants to see us all at the bottom of the sea. Hamas, supported by Iran, is clear about their goals: they want to wipe out Israel completely, utterly, with finality. But it’s not just Israel that Hamas wants to kill; they want to kill all Jews everywhere. Complete genocide.

Jules Crittenden: Why have 8 more kids…Because six wasn’t enough, even for a woman in bankruptcy living at home with mom and dad.

Filed under: Chip by Chip