NRO's The Corner: Obamacare ‘like a house on fire’ with more flammable parts yet to come

classic headline and byline:

How We Can Make Putin Pay, and Why We Must
By Elliott Abrams
March 3, 2014 2:44 PM

Putin pays $50 at least

During investigation of the Iran-Contra Affair, Lawrence Walsh, the Independent Counsel tasked with investigating the case, prepared multiple felony counts against Abrams but never indicted him.[24] Instead, Abrams cooperated with Walsh and entered into a plea agreement wherein he pled guilty to two misdemeanors of withholding information from Congress.[25] He was sentenced to a $50 fine, probation for two years, and 100 hours of community service.

I constantly see Right Wing relatives comparing her to Marie Antoinette and seem to think that the Obamas are living like monarchy while the rest of the US starves which is a little odd to me because nothing they do seems flashy and I think they take fewer vacations than other families in the White House.

They hate success.

Anyway, last week, I felt a surge of bitterness. Why? I am disliking the current occupant of the White House more than ever. And, on seeing this house, I winced. And then I caught myself: "Come on, Jay. It's still the White House. Presidents come and go. This is a great and glorious country, with a constitution, separation of powers, regular elections . . . Don't have an ‘our planes' attitude." Like others, I suppose, I have to remind myself of this from time to time. I think I'll need ever more frequent reminders in coming years.

it's just... sometimes it's so hard to be a jingoistic fuckhead, you know?

well, yeah

It's so extra funny when these types complain about unemployed people being lazy and liberals not wanting to work and stuff. This guy's job is basically transcribing a toddler-age hissy fit into a string of multisyllabic words.

Mr. Farrow and the Obama Syndrome
By Victor Davis Hanson
March 4, 2014 1:08 PM
Comments18
Print Text

Young, charismatic, good-looking, hip, and glib are all superficial traits that supposedly cerebral liberal elites have a bad habit of believing trump experience, knowledge, humility, and what the Greeks called pathei mathos, learning through requisite pain. Once someone is acclaimed as a liberal prodigy by elites, stamped with the right Ivy League brand and aristocratic contacts that resonate through networking and cocktail parties along the Boston to D.C. corridor, all normal cross-examination seems to end.

He is anointed a genius—and then usually Nemesis strikes, in the fashion that the once just-about-to-be-appointed New York senator Caroline Kennedy could not find a polling place or finish a sentence without a “you know” (142 times in an interview), or Barack Obama became Phaethon, his crashing chariot our presidency, and his collision scorching those below him. Harvard Law can teach one everything one needs to know except how to pronounce corpsmen, establish a deadline, red line, or step-over line, and why not to be post-election flexible with Vladimir Putin who really was America’s chief conventional worry all along.

In which elite prep school did Victor Hanson learn his annoying habit of ill-advised classical allusions?

george w, otoh, was pathei mathos incarnate

xp from lewis lapham, no doubt

I dropped by VDH's wiki page and (surprise!) I find that he has a PhD from Stanford from which post he berates elitism, and a fellowship at the Hoover Institute from which vantage he berates networking in the Boston to D.C. corridor. No exclusive prep school, though. His Stanford doctorate was in classics, so the urge to flash his credentials is vestigial.

Victor Davis Hanson imagines himself a very tall poppy indeed

wow, such humility

Vladimir Putin who really was America’s chief conventional worry all along.

this feels like a pretty serious case of retconning

what galling prose

One wonders why "conventional" worries merit a special category of worry, or why he suddenly wants to elevate that category ahead of nuclear worries or terrorist worries, which right-wingers seem to rate far higher than Russian tanks whenever it is more convenient to their aims.

Vladimir Putin Dr. Doom who really was America’s chief conventional worry all along.

Vladimir Putin who really was America’s chief conventional worry all along.

hey did i just blink or did VDH admit to being wrong about foreign policy for the past 20 years

oh i see he threw "conventional" in there, very clever, doctor

conventional like non-nuclear? conventional like non-terror? conventional like non-?

Conventional like "white."

Rick Perry, intellectual.

Perry’s roof-raising speech Friday, which was festooned with ten-dollar words and an emphasis on state governance as a mechanism for crowd-sourcing solutions, broke through in part because it came in a new package: Perry the collected-but-not-cool thinking man, wearing a muted tie, a bespectacled elder statesman whose long tenure as chief executive of the Lone Star state bestowed wisdom on him while showering prosperity on Texans.

"You can’t see Perry’s sensible shoes, but he’s working a subdued, knees-together posture, modestly leaning in to his interlocutor, fully committed to the pursuit of better solutions."

Very disappointed I was not the first to write such insightful prose.

Showering prosperity - MAKE IT RAIN!

so, he put on glasses?

in which Jonah explains how his daughter isn't bossy

jonah makes a stylistic breakthrough. four pages! subheadings! i think he may have discovered dfw.

So why all the throat clearing about a point anyone this side of Joe Biden can grasp? Well, first of all, if you haven’t learned by now, the G-File is a lot like riding a bike to Gary, Ind.; the best part is the journey, not the destination.

[W]hen George W. Bush was proposing to create private accounts for social security, liberals reacted like he wanted to put a Hooters in the Vatican. (That analogy only works if you assume liberals have a sense of piety with regard to the Vatican — or disdain for Hooters. If you can’t get your head around that, substitute “liberals reacted as if he wanted Lena Dunham to stop doing nude scenes and do something worthwhile with her life.”)

disraeligears • 2 hours ago

I was watching The Book of Daniel last night, and in it they made a great point of the fact that though Darius did not want to throw Daniel into the lion's den, his advisors, after doing a a laborious search, could find no law which would allow Darius to abrogate his own law. So, with much regret, Daniel had to go into the lion's den, but Obama, having much greater power than the autocrat Darius, can simply make the law whatever suits him at the moment.

disraeligears

I can see the congratulatory pat he gives his thigh as he composed the last sentence

Fans of “The Adventures of Letterman” — not the once-funny late-night-talk-show host, but the cartoon from The Electric Company (narrated by Joan Rivers!) – might remember that the superhero used letters to thwart any threat. The villainous (oddly turban-wearing) Spell Binder would use his wand to change the “L” in “light” into an “N” for “night,” causing the world to be plunged into darkness, or he’d change “pear” to “bear,” making things awkward for a young lady who intended to eat a pear. Letterman — who was faster than a rolling “O” — would swoop in to save the day. (Just watch the videos I linked to, it will explain everything.) Post-modernists are a bit like Spell Binder. They hang quotation marks on any capital T Truth and the weight pulls that top bar in the capital letter “T” down until it becomes a smaller, lowercase letter; making “the Truth” into simply “a ‘truth.’”

oddly turban-wearing

This makes a Bryn Mawr seminar (unless they prefer to call them “ovulars” now) on post-modern themes in the sermons of Thulsa Doom seem like a really productive use of time.

this convo has gone into weird places but can we all at least agree that obamacare is a job-killing tax-and-spend armaggedon that's ruined the country irreversibly and we are forever doomed i feel like this is now beyond question

Well, we all know how the 'job creator' class likes the whine the most when things are going their way.

likes to whine the most

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/373579/foolish-anti-vax-cause-rich-lowry

here entirely and solely for the comments

The problem of reemerging diseases is a problem of illegal
imagration. In third world hell holes they don’t have mandatory vacation protocols for Jenny McCarthy to rail against.
Vaccinated fence jumpers number in the many millions. Anti Vaxers grumble but take the shots or their kids can't go to school.

They come here with the blessing of Marco Rubio and spread
formally dead diseases.

Whooping cough, measles, polio are all making a resurgence
but don’t blame Jenny McCarthy blame Juanita Martinez

I propose we make illegal imagration against the law.

mandatory vacation protocols

Altalena Vekis • 4 hours ago

And is it just COINCIDENCE that while Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln, Lincoln had a secretary named Vaccine?

lord help me i lol'd

formally dead diseases

Les maladies revenantes!

Spring is upon us at last, and with it is the new spring issue of National Affairs. Among the offerings:

-Jim Manzi on how to revive American innovation
-Ron Haskins on whether government can encourage marriage
-Judah Bellin on reforming student loans
-Gabriel Schoenfeld on the trouble with shield laws
-Ilan Wurman on originalism and the founders
-Diana Schaub on the Gettysburg Address

-Ron Haskins on whether government can encourage marriage

After which he examines whether government can contain communism.

‘Seems an Awful Waste’
By Jay Nordlinger
March 25, 2014 8:36 AM

When I saw the headline “Aborted babies incinerated to heat UK hospitals” (story here), I thought of Sweeney Todd. Reason is, I saw this Sondheim musical recently, and reviewed it here. Sweeney Todd can put you in a macabre frame of mind.

Remember, Mrs. Lovett is a maker of meat pies. Her friend Sweeney has just killed someone — and will kill many more. They are talking about how to dispose of the first victim’s corpse. And Mrs. Lovett gets an idea.

“Well, you know me, sometimes bright ideas just pop right into my head, and I keep thinking . . . Seems a downright shame . . .” Sweeney wonders, “Shame?” Mrs. Lovett continues, “ Seems an awful waste . . . Such a nice plump frame Wot’s-his-name has . . . Had . . . Has . . . Nor it can’t be traced. Business needs a lift — debts to be erased — think of it as thrift. As a gift. If you get my drift . . .”

Sweeney doesn’t. Mrs. Lovett continues, “Seems an awful waste. I mean, with the price of meat what it is, when you get it, if you get it.” Sweeney says, “Ah!” Mrs. Lovett answers, “Good, you got it.”

“Mrs. Lovett, what a charming notion,” says Sweeney, “eminently practical and yet appropriate as always. . . . How delectable! Also undetectable.”

A question: If an unborn child is just a “meaningless blob of protoplasm” (the phrase I grew up with), what’s the rumpus about using this blob for a little fuel? Why the squeamishness?

Either it’s a baby or it’s meaningless matter. Decide, please. (The cries I always heard were, “It’s not that simple!” Then you grew up, thought, and realized, “Yeah, it kind of is, actually.”)