NRO's The Corner 2: Ghost Protocol

some khmer rouge slogans:

"You can arrest someone by mistake; never release him by mistake."
"Better to kill an innocent by mistake than spare an enemy by mistake."
"Better to arrest ten innocent people by mistake than free a single guilty party."

this chris christie bj would be insane even if the new jersey gov didn't just get busted for lying his fat ass off about the cancelled tunnel project

which post has this "ten guilty men" stuff in it?

But up close, when you see him pace across the floor, talking for 30 uninterrupted minutes about his achievements, you sense that this isn’t merely an expertly stage-managed politician, another governor with a large entourage, bravado, and a Patton-esque flag background. He is a cut above.

Whip-smart, articulate, and pleasantly pugnacious, Christie has the aura of a bona fide national sensation. The raucous applause he receives in Middlesex County is the same kind of reception that the governor receives in Orange County, the Rust Belt, and the Deep South. Republicans, from tea-party activists to national-committee grandees, can’t get enough. Team Romney, which has used Christie’s talents on the trail, surely notices. Yet at home, among his grizzled and outspoken constituents, the embrace of Christie is warmer and more intense than it is elsewhere. Speaking with the attendees, from members of the carpenters’ union and GOP state legislators to working-class parents, I don’t hear about Christie as just a future president, but as “the next Ronald Reagan.”

It’s pretty heady stuff.

welcome back, m@rk!

Whip-smart, articulate, and pleasantly pugnacious, Christie has the aura of a bona fide national sensation

the dullest sentence ever written. The grass outside my apartment browned as I read it. God, I hate adverbs.

which post has this "ten guilty men" stuff in it?

― goole, Friday, April 13, 2012 3:46 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's from the book description for goldberg's the tyranny of cliches

Christie has the aura of a bona fide national sensation

I want to break several personal rules about not being weightist because the substitution jokes are just too easy

well I gotta admit I read that sentence as "beef steak national sensation"

yeah i felt guilty (for a second) about typing "fat ass" but Christie's dishonesty about the transit project is breathtaking and infuriating. i.e. NJ would've shouldered 15% of the construction costs not 70% as he claimed. the NJ-NY commuters I know are so mad about this. Reading Paul Krugman this AM I actually wondered "NRO has been hyping this guy so hard how will they defend him" - nothing like a little sideshow to distract those grizzled NJ voters.

If Christie becomes the VP candidate he'll really leave his state in a mess.

Christie today is similar to the union-fighting rookie governor who took office in January 2010, but he’s visibly grown into the role.

the weight joeks are too easy but sheesh

"Moreover, I fear that Mark Steyn is right in saying that Derb’s departure will further narrow the already narrow limits of acceptable debate in American intellectual life."

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/296004/derb-and-discourse-john-osullivan

er, isn't the whole idea that open racism should not be an acceptable part of "debate in American intellectual life"? But this NRO commentator seems to think open racism ought to be intellectually acceptable? Get a brane, moran.

this comment about how norman mailer's killed more blacks than the klan is a jewel:

I say that the cultivation, by the Left, of a cultural theme that the only authentic black man is a hostile and aggressive one (this goes back to when all the radical-chic liberals were eating up Frantz Fanon and the original version of Malcolm X), has caused more black blood to be spilled than all the Klansmen who ever wore stupid hats. The grinning, shuffling Stepin Fetchit stereotype had to go, but replacing it with the image of the black man as heroic bada** did unspeakable evil. You see, bad men are lazy. (Vices tend to come in multi-packs.) Excuse a man in taking pleasure in hostility and aggressiveness, and he quickly stops limiting the focus of his aggression on the oppressor. It's much easier to victimize the guy next door. Which he does, to the number of several thousand dead every year.

heroic bada

the right was so much more enamored of the kinder, gentler black radical in those days. king, baldwin, they couldn't get enough of those guys!

Perhaps that commentator doesn't realize that black-on-black crime was so trivial in the eyes of the authorities before the 1960s that looking back now it has become all but invisible. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, etc.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/296135/i-personally-and-my-administration-s-position-legalization-not-answer-veronique-de-rug

comment from one Rocket_J_Squirrel is really something

Since when is ending the war on drugs a right-wing position? I'm so confused.

well it's a libertarian one and de rugy is one of their house libertarians

Bill Wilde
04/16/12 13:58

President Obama's hypocrisy on this issue is mind bending. Apparently he has no problem putting people in jail for doing something that he himself did on a regular basis for years. Cordially, Bill

as for Rocket_J_Squirrel's analogy: I have to park next to a group of kids who are always smoking Broncos and fixing their cars. Guess we should call for the abolition of kids, cigs, and cars for sullying the neighborhood.

We will be rid of our laws against drugs and prostitution when the American population is as culturally indifferent to drugs and prostitution as are the people of Amsterdam. But guess what? Outside of a few 50-year-olds wearing leather jackets, most Americans don't want anything to do with Amsterdam, which is why we have different laws.

viva las vegas

The Corner watches Mad Men!.

Pete may not commit suicide, just as America did not commit suicide in the traumatic period that began with the Sixties.

This is reminding me so much of all of the bad essays I've helped students with this week.

lol

I think someone just programmed a chat-bot that processes random input from news and pop-culture through a cascade of simple ideological filters--and named it NRO.

Read the comments!

[Approved commenter] kreminitly
04/20/12 10:44

He's going to commit suicide with a .22 ? The guy just can't do anything right.

Our friends are crowing over this Pew poll:

The Pew survey adds to a wave of surveys and studies showing that GOP-sympathizers are better informed, more intellectually consistent, more open-minded, more empathetic and more receptive to criticism than their fellow Americans who support the Democratic Party.

“Republicans fare substantially better than Democrats on several questions in the survey, as is typically the case in surveys about political knowledge,” said the study, which noted that Democrats outscored Republicans on five questions by an average of 4.6 percent.

The widest partisan gap in the survey came in at 30 points when only 46 percent of Democrats — but 76 percent of Republicans —- correctly described the GOP as “the party generally more supportive of reducing the size of federal government.”

The widest difference that favored Democrats was only 8 percent, when 59 percent of Republicans and 67 percent of Democrats recognized the liberal party as “more [supportive] of reducing the defense budget.”

The survey quizzed 1,000 people, including 239 Republicans and 334 Democrats.

However, Pew’s data suggests that the Democrats’ low average rating likely is a consequence of its bipolar political coalition, which combines well-credentialed post-graduate progressives who score well in quizzes with a much larger number of poorly educated supporters, who score badly.

For example, the survey reported that 90 percent of college grads recognized the GOP as the party most supportive of cutting the federal government. But that number fell to 54 percent of people with a high-school education or less.

In contrast, the Republican party coalition is more consistent, and has few poorly educated people and fewer post-graduates.

The widest partisan gap in the survey came in at 30 points when only 46 percent of Democrats — but 76 percent of Republicans —- correctly described the GOP as “the party generally more supportive of reducing the size of federal government.”

haha what kind of question (and answer!) is this

the GOP as the party most supportive of cutting the federal government.

like lol are they referring to Dubya here? Reagan? puhleeeze.

"most erroneously identified with"

why on earth would only 76 percent of republicans get that right??

"correctly"

i have yet to dig into this poll myself, but yes, the secret thread running through it is how clearly the wrong-answerers may be seeing the two parties

inability to identify party more associated with reducing defense spending just means you are smarter then the poll

As a college graduate I would answer the Pew survey in this way:

The Republican party's rhetoric is more consistently framed in terms of reducing the size of the federal government, but the actions of the Republicans at times when they have the power to control the size of the federal government are not consistent with that rhetoric. It would be far more accurate to characterize the Republicans as the party that wants to reduce the size of federal revenues.

the customers of Popeyes, White Castle, Dunkin’ Donuts and Chuck E Cheese were mostly Democratic, while the customers at Cracker Barrel, Chik-fil-A, Panera and Bob Evans were mostly Republican.

^^^My favorite part of this article. I'm surprised there was no talk around regions. What kind of lazy political analysis is this? I mean Dunkin' Donuts is basically the Northeast and Chick-fil-A is the South. Panera is mostly a suburban thing & White Castle is urban.

Further political analysis: Chick-fil-A rules. Cracker Barrel has good biscuits & gravy (for a chain). I wish I could move to a place that has both Dunkin' Donuts & Chick-fill-A (DC?). White Castle dominates this list. WTF Chuck E Cheese?

The same restaurants study showed that the customers at Cracker Barrel, Panera and Bob Evans were the most likely to vote in elections.

This is a very funny way of delivering old news.

my formatting is all goofy there

just got an email

Friends, readers, countrymen: You may have heard already (maybe too much) about my new book: “Peace, They Say: A History of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Most Famous and Controversial Prize in the World.”

The subject is a juicy one: It gives you an overview of the 20th century (and about a decade of the 21st). It introduces you to a vast cast of characters, all of them interesting, not a dullard in the bunch. I’m speaking of the laureates, mainly. They’re a diverse bunch, too: What do Mother Teresa and Yasser Arafat have in common? (Someone said, “Is it the unusual headwear?”)

Finally, when you explore the peace prize, you have to confront some of the biggest questions: concerning war and peace, freedom and tyranny, and all that jazz.

As I said, the subject is juicy, and I hope you would find the book so too. To order it from National Review, go here. Ask for a signature and an inscription, if you want. Or, order the book more traditionally (!) – from Amazon, here.

And lemme know what you think, by e-mailing me via my column.

Thanks much, and all best,
Jay (Nordlinger)

his prose is so creepy: that mix of slang ("lemme know") and coy locutions ("As I said, the subject is juicy, and I hope you would find the book so too").

and all that jazz!

gah juicy (x2!)

Jay (Nordlinger)

(Austerity (Ponies))

it's kinda like when you were in fifth grade and a classmate called you for the homework who you didn't really know very well and they said, "hey, it's Jay. [long pause] you know, Nordlinger, from school." "i know who u are, Jay."

or he made torturous parenthesis signs with his fingers

I got that Nordlinger spam, too -- I noticed that the book hasn't really been reviewed too much outside the usually spots (Examiner, some promotion on NRO, hard-hitting KLO q&a).

Mordy, have you emailed him before? I've called him out on some stuff but never got a response until he/NRO spammed me about that dumb book.

i don't think so. i tend to save my vitriolic emails for jonah. maybe if you email one of them they just add you to the collective PR email listings. it did come from no-reply @ nationalreview.com