11-16-2009

Send Better Kabuki!: I am not getting a kabuki vibe here.  I see it more as “Brokeback Mission” actually - I picture Obama looking mournfully at Karzai and saying “I just can’t quit you”, after which Obama drunk-dials McChrystal at 3 AM and asks him how they can get back to the feeling they had last spring when their strategy was new and the world was full of promise.

More Great Headlines for Obamacare: Report: Bill would reduce senior care AND CMS: House health bill will hike costs $289B…Reduce care and increase costs…what’s not to like about this?

America’s First Pacific President?: …the incumbent is hardly the first chief executive to have lived in another Pacific Rim country. William Howard Taft was governor-general of the Philippines. Dwight Eisenhower had military postings in the Philippines and the Panama Canal Zone. Herbert Hoover worked as a mining engineer in Australia and China; he even learned to speak Mandarin. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Bush 41 all served in the Pacific during the Second World War. What they did as adults was perhaps more consequential than what Obama did as a child.

John Hinderaker: One seriously hesitates to draw the conclusion that Barack Obama is a fool, no matter how strongly the evidence may point in that direction. But what are we to make of a man who is ignorant of history; who is ignorant of economics; who despises his own country; and who appears to believe that awareness of his own wonderfulness is enough to guide him? To put it charitably, he has a great deal to learn, and not much time to learn it.

Paul Mirengoff: Bill Clinton is in Jerusalem trying to clean up behind President Obama and Hillary, whose strident anti-settlement policy has blown up in their face.
Nazism and Islamofascism In his new book, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, Jeffrey Herf describes in painstaking detail Nazi Germany’s effort to win the sympathy of Muslims in the Middle East…They didn’t invent Muslim anti-Semitism, but they focused it and exploited it, and their rhetoric echoes today.

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