They say that dissatisfaction with the status-quo – everything from trite “anti-incumbency” to a genuine disgust with the power-mad “House Of Cards”-like ways of Washington (which Obama certainly didn’t invent, but which he’s moved front and center as the defining feature of his reign) will be the driving force in this fall’s election, and possibly 2016 as well.
To ensure that it is, I submit to you a few exhibits that show with crystalline clarity the contempt Obama’s Washington establishement feels for the electorate, whom they seem to believe couldn’t wipe and wash without their help:
The Master Of The Universe: bit here, about yet another vapid, vacuous Obama staffer “slipping up and telling the truth” about his, and the Administration’s, view of the unwashed masses; it’s Tommy Vietor, one of the Administration’s spokes-drones:
“Iraq is just a ploy to distract you from Bergdahl which distracted you from the VA scandal which distracted you from BENGHAZI. Idiots,”
Seething contempt for the bitter, gun-clinging Jeebus freaks who’d dare question their betters? The little prick is soaking in it!
Look at his picture at the link above; you can tell the little fop went to Georgetown, hasn’t had a job outside politics in his life, and doesn’t even look out the window when he’s flying to the west coast.
He’s not the poster-child for tearing down the establishment – but only because there are so many other options.
The Brahmins: Juan Williams indulged in another of the left’s parlour games, “Let’s Compare Degrees!”, on “America’s Newsroom” last week; I’ll add emphasis:
WILLIAMS: It comes in a week in which she said they were dead broke when they left the White House, and that set off conservative blogs, and now this one coming from Rush Limbaugh. I don’t know if he wants to test his Mensa score versus Hillary. I mean, you know, she’s a big-time college grad. But I think what he’s trying to do is he’s trying to deflate a balloon here in that what he said later in that monologue was that Hillary Clinton is supposed to be the brightest woman ever, the most competent woman, and therefore she can be president, and he wants to take down that whole structure right now.
Did you see what Hillary! accomplished during her term at State?
No?
Neither did anyone else.
Williams indulges the liberal conceit that believes the name on ones diploma confers, by itself, excellence. But most Americans know that the best thing, indeed the only good thing, that an “elite” education says about a person is that between the ages of 14 and 18 they lived a life that was perfectly calculated to win the attention of an admissions committee, knowing that four years of playing the paper chase would give them the one thing of value that attending an “elite” institution really confers; access to the alumni directory. And that’s the best thing it says about a person; in most cases – Hillary!’s among them – it means they were born into “Legacy” status (and if you read that and think “informal aristocracy”, you’re only wrong about the “informal” part).
For this good of this country, anyone with with an “elite” degree – or for that matter, anyone who’s been out of school more than three years who still talks about where they went to school – should be disqualified from public service. As should anyone who refers to “Mensa” score unironically.
Pay no attention to the utter lack of accomplishment, peasants.
“The job represented a long rise from the summer day in 2004 when Vietor, a Massachusetts native who had graduated from Kenyon College with a degree in philosophy, turned down an offer from the John Kerry presidential campaign to go work for a Illinois state senator making his first statewide run.”
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/24/news/la-pn-changing-of-the-young-guard-20130224
Apparently his first job after getting a BA philosophy from a liberal arts college was working for Obama as a van driver.
I have a theory that people who graduate BA from liberal arts colleges and do not go on to grad school are the dregs of liberal arts colleges. Not enough chops for a law degree or a hope for a future in academia.
I don’t know why a grown man would want to be known professionally by a diminutive form of his name. My birth name is written as its diminutive form on my birth certificate, and I am old enough that it’s too late to change it to its long form. If I had to start over again, I’d sign my name “Terence” or “Theodore” and only tell my non-professional friends to call me “Terry”.
I have a theory that people who graduate BA from liberal arts colleges and do not go on to grad school are the dregs of liberal arts colleges. Not enough chops for a law degree or a hope for a future in academia.
BA English from a school that was nominally “Liberal Arts” (although only half-heartedly so). Never had the faintest interest in grad school, academia or (until I was in the middle of the divorce process) law school.
Spent seven years in media (and/or working in bars), five as a tech writer, and sixteen as of this month in UX, a weird bastard child of psychology, engineering and business analysis.
I don’t feel like a dreg.
But then I never drove a van for Barack Obama, either.
Lots of those droogs work at the DoDE, I’d love to fire them all but they are protected by the only thing more evil and powerful than me. Public Sector Unions
I was thinking more of people with the CV’s of Vietor and Franken, Mitch. In the era that Franken graduated (BA poli-sci) it wasn’t unusual to do your BA, go off seeking your dreams for a year or two (entertainment in Franken’s case), and go back for a JD if the dream-chasing didn’t work out and circumstances allowed for it. According to LA Times article, Vietor was thinking of entertainment when he was between jobs with Obama.
Ah, gotcha.
According to Hannity (Ch. 1130AM), Obama released 12 more Al Quaeda prisoners today which Hannity claims is being intentionally camouflaged by the arrest of a known Bengazi participant.
Layers upon layers upon layers. Sure could make for an interesting game of 52 Card Pick-up. Maybe 104 card? I doubt if only one deck would suffice …
I have a theory that people who graduate BA from liberal arts colleges and do not go on to grad school are the dregs of liberal arts colleges. Not enough chops for a law degree or a hope for a future in academia.
BA in English from a liberal arts college in good standing. I worked for a downtown Chicago law firm for five years, in a variety of roles. The associates at the firm, who were generally the same age as I was at the time, were regularly working 12-13 hours a day to get their 8 billable hours. Many of them said I should go to law school and join their ranks. Not a chance. And the days when an English major could get through a PhD program and remain on the Right ended about the time I was born.
I enjoy getting my fresh allotment of souls twice a year when every law school student signs their souls away to me
Mark’s comment about whether an English major could get his PhD while retaining conservative sympathies illustrates brilliantly to me why we need to stop requiring them to be a professor. Barack Obama, with a J.D. to his name, is qualified to be a college professor, but Isaac Newton, with a mere BA, is not. And I’m pretty sure that Newton could do a much better job teaching first year physics than Barack Obama could teach a pre-law course.
OK, enough of that. It strikes me as well that, as much as I disagree with everything Obama does and how I’ll even go to question his motives (something I do not do lightly), he’s a genius at playing scandal against scandal. He knows (a) the media will cover for him and (b) unless a conservative is involved, they’ve got a two week attention span. At best.
Academia is an industry. I have worked for an academic institution — for physicists and astrophysicists — for most of life (in a non-academic technical role). What I have learned is:
-If you have to pay for your PhD, you shouldn’t get it.
-Once you leave the academy for industry, it is very difficult to get back in.
-Competition at that level is intense. You have a lot of very smart people competing for academic positions and for grant money to pursue research. The people at the top of their field are as much administrators as they are scientists, and they work very hard to pay for themselves and their departments by capturing grants from outside sources.
I suspect that the non-STEM fields are a bit different.
I suspect that the non-STEM fields are a bit different.
Yes, they are. But less so now that an increasing number of scientists are getting into scientism.
Bikebubba-
A mark of an oligarchy is its ability to choose its members. Affirmative action in higher ed should be looked at in this light. It was clubby in that way before AA and it will be like that when AA is just a memory.
The history of higher ed is different in each country. In the US we had the land grant colleges established in the mid-nineteenth century. These were supposed to educate the children of farmers and mechanics. I believe that the University of Minnesota started as a land grant college.
John Carey is a highly credentialed retired Oxford don who has written several books claiming that after WW I the academic class deliberately sought to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the European aristocracy. This is one Carey’s books:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Intellectuals-And-Masses-Intelligensia/dp/0897335074
True or not, it makes for fascinating reading. Many of the early 20th cent. academicians and artists we are supposed to admire (Virginia Woolf, D.H.Lawrence, etc.) made no secret of their contempt for the working class and especially for the middle class.
Carey is writing about Britain, but I think that there are parallels to the American intellectual class.
It’s worth noting that even engineering is getting politicized–a recent Tau Beta Pi journal I received had mostly want ads from the government, and both TBP and the ASQ have very consistent blindness towards the foibles of the government. Press reports from the government are reported rather uncritically, and my profession is suffering as a result.
For example, would it kill TBP or the ASQ to let people know that, since coal is fueling the Volt, it releases as much carbon as a one ton pickup? It’s not a tough calculation, but it’s disheartening to see how much ink is spilled with nary a critical thought.
Powhatan, good points–and I would agree that, whether it qualifies as a conspiracy or not, the academic class is using its subsidies to try to run the country (into the ground).
I’m frighteningly close to the point of regarding the loss of a contemporary Lavosier or two as an unfortunate but nonetheless necessary bit of collateral damage.
It’s a good thing our Iraq invasion paid for itself or I might be a little upset at this point. And we did eliminate Saddam’s WMDs. You can’t put a price on that sort of thing. Every time I have doubts as to the pretext or the efficacy of spending trillions there, I just look at the $0.99/gal tag on the gas pump at the local station, and everything is right as rain.
Science is a fragile thing. It is a practice — observe, hypothesize, experiment, repeat. It didn’t exist in its present form before Francis Bacon proposed it as a tentative way to learn about the natural world. Bacon did not consider natural philosophy a source of capital-T “Truth”. He proposed it as a way of learning things that might be useful to men.
Politics is far older and is built into human behavior in a way that science is not. Science has been used to influence public policy in terrible ways to reduce human freedom. Religious excuses for racism were always contested and were subject to argument. “Your destiny is determined by nature” is a scientific argument, not a religious argument.
So I guess you won’t be voting for Hillary, Emery.
Romney didn’t vote for the Iraq War. I suppose you’ll have to vote for Romney over Hillary if they are the 2016 candidates. Out of principle.
I would not be too surprised if Mr. Romney had another go at it.
Seriously, Emery, the reason that so many Dems voted for the Iraq War (a majority of Senate democrats, 80 Dems in the House) is because they bought Bush’s argument. It wasn’t so much about WMD as it was about rogue, terrorist-supporting regimes were incompatible with the Modern World we all love than it was about WMD (read HJR 114 from 2002, pls.). If we can’t enjoy things like open borders and free trade while there are terrorist supporting regimes who hate us, what do we do? Start World War 3? Nuke everybody? Close the borders and become isolationists?
None of the Iraq War haters I’ve read has ever answered this question: if we can’t make the nations of the Arab world peace loving, prosperous democracies, what do we do with them?
“It wasn’t so much about WMD as it was about rogue, terrorist-supporting regimes were incompatible with the Modern World…”
I would say this is just ignorant–and a recipe for staying in Iraq forever. The fact that a numerically superior (by far) Iraqi army collapsed while facing ISIS highlights the corrupt and inefficient nature of the current government. That basic fact will not be altered by any US intervention.
Petraeus and every other Army and Marine Corps Senior Officer and supporting politician who claimed the Iraq Army they had created and trained could support and protect their State, just as all their statistics showed — or were they lying then? And, every other military officer and politician who kept insisting their experience in Iraq wasn’t just a repeat of Vietnam — and we are witnessing the degree of accuracy of that assertion.
Military officers weren’t lying. The military’s experience in Iraq was an exact repeat of Vietnam. They won every battle.
Democrat politicians’ experience in Iraq was an exact repeat of Vietnam. They gave the country back to our enemies. They were lying then, and they’re lying now.
As for staying in Iraq forever, yes, that was Option A, the same option we used to convert Germany and Japan from enemies to allies. It takes three generations – you must wait for the old guard to die off, leaving only their grandchildren who have only ever known Pax Americana.
Option B was the Roman option: kill all the old guard now. We’re too nice to do that.
Option C was the Democrat option: kill some of the old guard, then give the country back to the survivors while we cut military spending to enjoy the Peace Dividend.
Joe, that was the most intelligently laid out smack down I’ve seen in these spaces. That’s the kind of wit and insight I come here for.
Well done.
Looks like Emery couldn’t answer my question. If these Arab countries spinoff terrorists who, on occasion, blow up American skyscrapers and hit our economy for a trillion dollar loss, what do we do? Live with it?
3,000 people died in the attacks on the twin towers. The number would have been much higher if the attacks had occurred later in the day, but the hijackers had to hit the buildings relatively early in the AM for reasons of logistics. They would have killed 30,000 if they could have. If they had had a nuke, the would have killed millions.
So what do we do about this?
Indifference is deadly in this case, the libertarian wing of the Republican party has to be careful to not sound so clueless.
Also trust me we have contingency plans that if a nuke goes off somewhere here in the US you don’t want to know our retaliation plans. That shit keeps me up at night.
Some years ago, maybe 2005, I heard a talking head (can’t remember which one) say that the reasons the “neocons” gained so much power post-9/11 is because they were the only people with a plan to deal with the problem of Islamic terrorism: democratize the ME, beginning with Iraq.
The neocon plan may have failed, but the initial problem remains: how does the modern world coexist with Islam? It has been almost 13 years since 9/11. Where are the Islamic reformers? If we don’t talk about the Global War on Terror anymore, it’s not because we are winning it.
Ans, speak of the devil, Insty has posted a montage of high level democrats — including Biden, Hillary, and Harry Reid — all confidently asserting, in 2002, that Sadam Hussein had WMD and that he must be stopped from using them at all costs.
http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/190439/
Since the latest turmoil in Iraq began a few weeks ago, I have heard countless democrat spinners try to lay the blame on everything tht happens in Iraq on GW Bush. Bush dragged us into Iraq, Bush invaded Iraq, etc.
Nonsense. Bush went to congress and asked for an authorization of force against Iraq. It had strong, bipartisan support. If you believe that the Democrats were against the war, that they are not responsible for anything in Iraq, you are believing a lie.
The Democrats are openly displaying their contempt for the people of the United States.
“how does the modern world coexist with Islam?”
PM… being serious for a moment it can’t actually, at least with Islam in its current form. Islam is approx. 13-1400 years old, look at where christianity was at that point in its history. Wars were fought between Catholics and Protestants for christs sakes (pun intended). Then about 1600 the reformation happened and one can only hope for a Islamic Reformation in the next 50-200 years. Before that though there will be lots of infighting (ie wars, and lots of dead Muslims) between the Sunnis and Shia and one can only hope they don’t end up with a nuke. Change must come from within, they need to enter the 21st century and just hope that the new generation will modernize and like the modern world
PM and Prince, the question was answered in a Townhall column on September 14, 2001:
http://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2001/09/14/this_is_war/page/full#!
I’ve heard people say that Islam needs a reformation, but I am not sure that they have thought through its implications. The immediate effect of the European Reformation was pan-European war and the rise of nationalism. The reformation was needed for Europe to become organized on the basis of nation-states, which eventually led to global war. The idea that the Christian reformation led to peace is mistaken.
Would it be too much to ask to put the “Iraq war was for Iraqi oil” meme to sleep? In the 12 years since, the ONLY people I have heard say “this is about oil” have been the people who were against it. If it were about the oil, where is all this Iraqi oil? Surely there would have been news reports of our takeover of the Iraqi oil infrastructure, and the many tanker loads of oil being shipped TO America to reduce our gas prices, in further attempts to demonize “Blood Oil From Iraq”.
PM, it could be argued then it happens backwards for Islam, nationalism (to a certain extent) and nation states have already been established in the Middle East, they don’t have the coordination to go to global war. This reminds me of a Golda Meir quote sort of related to this situation “There will never be peace between Israelis and Palestinians until the Palestinians learn to love their children more than they hate Israel/Jews”. There will never be peace between Islam and the rest of the world until they learn to love their children more than they hate the west.
The effect of the US invasion and the decisions made way back then are only now bearing fruit and, in my opinion, will be generational, not near–term, as most other fundamental shifts in the region have been. I suspect we won’t know and won’t have the foresight (no one will) to influence the future of Iraq for decades.
PM: I am a profound skeptic when it comes to the notion that the United States is effective at “shaping” outcomes in the Middle East.
The problem with your 09:23 comment, Emery Incognito, is that it is unfalsifiable. It would be equally true that if the U.S. had NOT acted to remove Sadam Hussein in 2003 its effect would have echoed down the generations. The failure to remove Sadam in 1992 led to the 2003 Iraq War. We are still living with the carve-up of the Ottomon Empire after WW I, for goodness sake.
George F. Kennan, responding to an earlier call for a US intervention on behalf of a falling government:
“I wonder how many of you realize what that really means. I can conceive of no more ghastly and fateful mistake, and nothing more calculated to confuse the issues in this world today than for us to go into another country and try to uphold by force of our own blood and treasures a regime which had clearly lost the confidence of its own people. Nothing could have pleased our enemies more.”
Memoirs, 1950-1963, pp. 59-60
PM: Do you really want America held responsible for whatever happens by all the world’s Sunnis? Do you honestly want your tax dollars paying for a war where the ROE aren’t set by your representatives?
PM: Do you really want America held responsible for whatever happens by all the world’s Sunnis?
9/11 occurred before the Iraq War. As I’ve written, they would have used a nuke if they had had one. They already hold us responsible for everything bad that happens to them.
Anyone can throw a quote out here and there. Kennan lost his post as ambassador to the USSR when he foolishly compared the Soviets to the Nazis. Just FYI, Kennan’s relative of the same name (George Kennan) wrote one of the finest early travel memoirs, Tent Life in Siberai, in the 1860s. Brrr! Reading a chapter will cool you off on a hot day!
Bush’s policy of the early 2000s was based on the idea that war was bad, but the status quo that led to 9/11 was worse. I have yet to hear this policy argued against. Is the status quo better than the loss of a few thousand troops? On 9/11 we lost 3,000 people in the twin towers. Remember that the Pentagon was also attacked. If not for the passengers of Flight 93, we might have lost the White House and the president, or the capitol building.
Best to wait. ISIS is overextended. They have no long term prospects, as the people they rule hate them. At some point they’ll collapse as quickly as they expanded. Continue to offer help to ‘moderate’ Syria rebels. Don’t offer help to Iraq unless a government more independent of Iran emerges.