7-8-2009

Joshua Muravchik: The most surprising thing about the first half-year of Barack Obama’s presidency, at least in the realm of foreign policy, has been its indifference to the issues of human rights and democracy…This strategy might be called peace through moral equivalence, and it finally makes fully intelligible Obama’s resistance to advocating human rights and democracy. For as long as those issues are highlighted, the cultural relativism that laced his Cairo speech and similar pronouncements in other places is revealed to be absurd.

James Taranto: When Palin says it, it’s stupid. When Biden says it, he gets graded on a curve: The problem is that other people are too stupid to understand the deep subtlety of Biden’s thinking.

Greyhawk: But while Biden ‘09 comfortably contradicts Biden ‘07, there is someone else who counters the newly triumphant Biden ‘09 and offers hope to those dismayed by his militant statements. That someone is none other than Joe Biden - who tells Americans that we’re “securing victory”.

Ed Morrissey: Reuters calls this a “pointed quip,” but unless Obama wanted to deliberately insult Russians, the only point is that Obama has still not figured out what diplomacy means.  At its most basic, it means refraining from insulting people. 

Matt Welch: there’s another interpretation of California’s rebellion, one with far sunnier implications for those of us who prefer our governments constrained. Faced with a political class that ignored bureaucratic inefficiency, that demanded higher taxes, that filled the newspapers with scare stories about people who will literally die as a result of budget cuts, the citizens of one of the bluest states in the nation collectively said we just don’t believe you anymore. If even California’s famous fruits and nuts can call the statists’ bluff, there may be hope for the rest of the country.

David Kehane: For the first time in history, the patrician class is deliberately selling its own country down the river just to prove a point: that, yes, we can! This country stinks and we won’t be happy until we’ve forced you to admit it…In other words, stop thinking of the Democratic Party as merely a political party, because it’s much more than that…think of the Democratic Party as what it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.

Filed under: Chip by Chip