Thursday's Web

The Day’s top Political News:

Washington Post sells access, $25,000+

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few" — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels it’s a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff."

Corruption of journalism by liberals at the Post, reaches a new low.  “Honest Journalism” has been turned into an oxymoron.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/24441.html

Racial discrimination no longer a real issue

The implicit message, delivered by the Supreme Court majority in two of the most important decisions of the term that ended this week, is that racial discrimination is no longer as big a problem as we once thought.

Neither the voting rights case out of Texas nor the affirmative action hiring case out of New Haven, Conn., said that explicitly. But the link between the two is the assumption or assertion that this society has largely healed itself and does not need the race-conscious remedies that the previous generation of politicians thought necessary.

Liberal assertions that opposition to Obama and his administration is race-based is absurd.  No intelligent analysis would provide such a conclusion.  Obama’s problem is left wing extremism.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/07/02/the_issue_thats_not_going_away_97273.html

Fox News Breaks Records on Cable News 

 The Fox News Channel is having its best year ever and aired all 10 of the top-rated cable news shows in the second quarter of 2009.

Fox showed a 33 percent rise in total viewers last quarter compared to the second quarter of 2008, and a 54 percent increase in younger viewers for its primetime weekday shows.

The biggest gainer on Fox was Glenn Beck. "Beck, who takes aim at the administration repeatedly, is proving an even bigger draw since coming over from HLN: His 5 p.m. slot is up 110 percent from last year," Calderone disclosed

(NOTE: Given its image of being conservative, the Fox success may represent really bad news for Team Obama.  Fox victory – overwhelming as it is – shows a growing opposition to Obama and liberals.)

Opinion:
‘tending to things:

(NOTE: I was in meetings yesterday in Birmingham, so my 19 year old son had to take the chair of this web site…including writing the Opinion Piece.  He made me proud.  Very proud indeed.)

Notably, Tho (yes that’s his real nickname – don’t ask for clarification) had been working hard sending video we shot at tea party demonstrations here that confronted Congressman Allen Boyd,  a Blue Dog who voted FOR Obama’s Cap and Trade tax increase, to Newt Gingrich and his operations in the tea parties.

Speaking of the Panama City tea party Tuesday, if you check back, you will see I was not optimistic about how successful that spontaneous demonstration would be.  After all, the Cap and Trade tax scam had been passed by the House only last Friday.

Clearly Congressman Boyd was shocked too.  About 300 angry voters – HIS voters – met him at a local college when he arrived for a speech.  The angry sentiment – from a crowd far larger than had been expected – forced the Congressman to have to sneak out of a back door in order to leave.

My prediction was wrong.  I am both reassured and relieved.  This show of continuing anger at how things are currently going on in Washington demonstrates just how deep the anger runs.  Newt tells me a similarly surprising demonstration was witnessed on Long Island a few days earlier.  This is good news – America is awakening.  Hopefully, this show of anger can result in a movement to change things, beginning with next year’s elections.

We achieve that positive change in one and only one way: by defeating Democrats and replacing them with Republicans.  That’s the strategy that is needed.  This means the tea party movement must be focused – focused on the strategy I just cited.

Unless that focus is achieved and liberal Democrats are taken on and taken out, America will continue its current plummeting into the depths.

Tuesday was a good day for America.

Let’s not let the moment pass.

Buddy

The Day’s top Blogs:

1.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YTMzMmE3ZjE3YTkzZGJjN2VmZWFlMzUwNzViNWFkNmY=

Obama and the ‘Noble Lie’
Our philosopher-king prevaricates on behalf of us all.

Victor Davis Hanson

For much of the Bush administration, the media splashed stories of neoconservative conspiracies and cabals. Exposés about mostly Jewish liberals-turned-conservatives charged that they were adherents of the philosopher Leo Strauss and embraced the Platonic notion of the “noble lie.”

In his Republic, Plato outlined an elaborate, ranked utopia, a good city (“Kallipolis”) run by a sort of benign natural selection. The philosopher-kings sat atop hierarchies in which occupations were assigned for the citizenry. To justify arbitrary selections, the rulers would make up “noble lies” about divine edicts, making clear that the occupations chosen for lesser folk were god-given.

Once the inferiors understood that there were divine sanctions behind their lot in life, they would feel happier. And society at large would benefit by each worker’s having the proper aptitude for his occupation. The larger point Plato was making was simply that sometimes an all-knowing elite must hedge on the truth to convince the ignorant public what is good for it.
 
Other Greek authors likewise were willing to give an educated elite wide latitude. Many aristocrats, such as the historian Thucydides, felt that religion was a sort of superstition of the ignorant masses. But he tolerated it as something deserving support by rational leaders, inasmuch as it provided a valuable bridle on the dangerous appetites of the mob. Some of our own Founding Fathers were deists — rationalists who may have believed in a creator, but believed even more that adherence to religious ritual among the more ignorant and potentially dangerous classes was critical for a good society.

The Left charged that President Bush was surrounded by wannabe Guardians who, via the work of Leo Strauss, bought into Plato’s argument. Therefore, according to their critics, they played fast and loose with the truth (Saddam’s ties with al-Qaeda, WMD in Iraq, etc.) in order to scare clueless Americans into accepting the invasion of Iraq and waging a war on terror. These “noble lies” were deemed necessary, since the authoritarian threats from the Middle East after 9/11 were, in fact, real, and the public otherwise would never have appreciated the mortal danger to our country.

No accuser, however, was ever able to demonstrate a pattern of sustained, premeditated prevarication on the part of neoconservatives. How, after all, had Platonic Straussians taken over the government from WASP or African-American realists like Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, and Rumsfeld? In most cases, “neo-con” ended up simply as an acceptable anti-Semitic slur to describe Jewish intellectuals who supposedly put Israel’s national security on a par with, or above, our own.

(NOTE: Liberals such as those who support Obama have no grasp or understanding of patriotic sentiments or feelings.   They are getting a message they also may not grasp in the tea party protest movement – angry voters are venting their fury against the liberal extremists of the Obama administration.)

The irony is that during the Obama administration’s first six months, we have seen ample evidence of noble lies.

The first category is the historically inaccurate statement designed to bolster the spirits of the Islamic world. This type of lie offers proof of Obama’s noble intentions and conduces to the greater good. Obama, of course, seems to know little history. And to the degree he is interested in the past, history becomes largely a melodramatic, rather than tragic, story, in which we are to distinguish victims and oppressors based on modern moral standards, and allot sympathy and blame accordingly.

That said, I still cannot quite believe Obama thinks that chattel slavery in America was ended without violence. Or that Islam was responsible for unprecedented breakthroughs in advanced math, sophisticated medicine, and printing, let alone that it served as a catalyst for the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

Instead, Obama seems to believe that fudging on facts is not fudging, but simply offers a competing narrative that gains validity by its good intentions. Most Americans, Obama further believes, are either too dense or too uneducated to discern his misinformation. But they will at some future date appreciate the global good will that results from his feel-good mytho-history.

No one in the Arab street is going to object when Obama assures us all that Islamic felonies — religious intolerance, gender apartheid, coercive government — are equivalent to American religious and gender misdemeanors. Hitler made up stories about World War I and German minorities in Eastern Europe for murderous racist reasons. His ignoble lies are in no way similar to present-day noble lies that are offered for exactly the opposite goal of promoting religious tolerance and global brotherhood.

A second type of noble lie is more personal. Obama as a Platonic philosopher-king advocates all sorts of exalted aims that he himself will probably never fulfill. That he is hypocritical matters little, given the fact that his bromides are unquestionably for the public good. Obama apparently speaks no foreign language, yet he deplores the lack of foreign-language fluency on the part of less sophisticated Americans. He is unable to quit smoking entirely, but emphasizes the role of preventive medicine and healthy lifestyles in his radical health-care reform initiatives.

He wisely calls for racial transcendence and an end to racial identities — even as he excuses Judge Sotomayor’s clearly racialist belief that race and gender inherently make one a better or worse judge. Obama, the healer, jumpstarted his own political career through religiously listening to and subsidizing the racist hate-speech offered by the charlatan Reverend Wright.

Obama deplores Wall Street greed and CEOs who take junkets to the Super Bowl and Las Vegas, even as he serves $100-a-pound beef, flies in his favorite pizza maker from St. Louis, and goes on a lavish “date” with Michelle to New York. Philosopher-kings accept certain protocols for themselves, others for the less sophisticated — knowing that if most people tighten their belts in time of recession such parsimony is good for the country, but it is irrelevant to the occasional indulgences by an all-knowing elite.

We saw earlier examples of such elite personal exemptions with an array of Obama’s appointees. The most brazen called for higher taxes while, as gifted technocrats, they obviously felt that such taxation did not, and should not, apply to their own exalted 1040s.

The third sort of noble lie is the deliberately incomplete truth. Obama sincerely believes that “stimuli” and vast new budget-breaking programs are critical for the welfare of hoi polloi, but he also knows that the mob is suspicious of record-breaking deficits. So he signs the record-breaking deficits into law, while promising to be a deficit hawk — by cutting one half of one percent of the federal budget. In his Platonic mind, the mindless public is both pacified and shepherded in the right direction.

Obama knows that our country needs to be protected from radical Islam by renditions, tribunals, wiretaps, intercepts, Predator assassinations, and persistence in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he also knows the public feels bad when some (like an earlier Obama himself) demagogue the issue, alleging a war against constitutional rights.

So he offers the noble lie of denouncing these Bush protocols that his antiwar base abhors — even as he maintains or expands them. He is certain that the average Joe cannot quite figure out what is going on, and would never suspect that a charismatic, postracial Guardian would ever deceive the people.

Obama plants soft questions at news conferences, lies about earlier promises of posting pending legislation on government websites for public perusal, feigns populist unease with his radical government expansion, fires public auditors who uncover liberal transgressions, and in general adopts a hardball politics that the Left claimed was innate to George W. Bush. These again are lies that are noble, in that they facilitate progressive politics that help the people — and they are presumably indiscernible by a fawning media and an unaware electorate.

So why does President Obama so often get history wrong, so often call for utopian schemes he would hardly adopt for himself, and so often distort by misinformation and incomplete disclosure?

Partly the culprit is administrative inexperience, partly historical ignorance. But mostly the disconnect comes because Barack Obama believes he is a philosopher-king, whose exalted ends more than justify his mendacious means.

In other words, Obama is our first truly postmodern president. And the Guardians who form his elite circle — in the very manner that they once falsely accused neo-cons of doing — deliberately, but “nobly,” distort the truth on behalf of us all.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution..
 
 2.

Defense Bills Defy Obama’s First Veto Threat
Josh Rogin, CQ Staff

In a challenge to White House efforts to reshape military spending, and in defiance of President Obama’s first veto threat, both the House and the Senate have advanced bills that include money for a key program the administration is trying to end.

The Senate’s version of the 2011 defense bill, which the Armed Services Committee unanimously approved last week, would permit the government to spend up to $1.75 billion for seven F-22 fighter planes, extending the production line into next year.
 
The administration wants no more than 187 of the aircraft. On June 24, Obama threatened to veto the House version of the defense bill (HR 2467) over a provision that would add $369 million for the advance procurement of parts for 12 of the planes.

The Senate committee’s chairman and ranking member, Carl Levin , D-Mich., and John McCain , R-Ariz., both voted against the F-22 funding. They were defeated in a 13-11 committee vote, exemplifying the widespread bipartisan resistance in Congress to some of Obama’s plans for the military.

Levin and McCain said that the fight over the F-22 was far from over and predicted that amendments would be offered during floor consideration.
“We will fight that more on the floor,” McCain said of the additional money for the F-22.

(NOTE: It most be noted the F-22 Raptor is not “just another aircraft” – it is also not at all redundant to the F-35.  Both are outstanding aircraft and as a former USAF pilot, I should know.  The F-22 --- the plane so despised by the White House, is the best fighter in the world – so good it can give us air superiority way into the future.  Cancelling the F-22 is irresponsible.)

Levin defended his committee’s bill as “at least 90 percent supportive” of the budget initiatives put forth by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates in April. The Senate’s measure would agree with Gates’ plan to terminate many troubled defense programs, including large portions of the Army’s Future Combat System, the VH-71 presidential helicopter and several components of ballistic missile defense.
“I don’t think anybody’s looking for a battle here with the White House at all,” Levin said. But, he added, “obviously, we’re not in lockstep.”

Senate floor action is expected next month.

Additional Disputes

Several military funding disputes between Congress and the White House will be debated as the defense authorization bill makes its way toward Obama’s desk.

One concerns the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. After learning that the House added $603 million to support development of an alternative F-35 engine and restricted the remaining funding for the new fighter to pressure the Pentagon to go along, the White House threatened to veto any Defense authorization bill that would “seriously disrupt” the program.

The Senate committee voted 12-10 to add $438.9 million for the alternative-engine program and also added money for 18 F-18 planes for the Navy, rejecting the administration’s plan to procure only nine.
James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, the committee’s second-ranking Republican, said he would support several amendments related to missile defense when the bill reaches the floor, including language to increase funding for two planned missile-defense sites in Eastern Europe.

The committee’s bill did not change existing restrictions, imposed by Congress, that barred construction of the sites. It did support the president’s plan to reduce total missile defense funding by about $1.2 billion from last year’s level.

The committee’s bill would also give a 3.4 percent pay raise to the military, equal to the House’s bill and more than the 2.9 percent increase req

The Senate’s defense authorization bill includes a provision to alter the rules of evidence for the forthcoming trials of detainees held at the U.S. facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

“President Obama has stated that he believes some detainees should be tried by military commissions,” Levin said. “But in order for that to happen, to survive legal challenge, those commissions and their procedures have got to be changed to be consistent with American principles of justice.”

Referring to guidelines spelled out in the Supreme Court’s 2006 decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Levin said his language would modify several provisions of the law — for example, coerced testimony would be inadmissible in court if the language is enacted. The bill would also modify the admissibility of hearsay testimony, the use of classified evidence, detainees’ access to exculpatory evidence and jurisdiction over detainees, Levin said.

Levin, McCain, and Lindsey Graham , R-S.C., a former military lawyer, are working with the White House on the military commissions process, McCain said. He added that many detainee issues are not addressed in the bill. As an example, the bill contains no provisions to deal with the transfer of prisoners from Guantánamo Bay to the United States.

3.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124649175841883047.html

A Family's Valor, a Nation's Freedom
Why would a 61-year-old civilian surgeon volunteer for Iraq?

KARL ROVE

At a dinner last week in California, I was reminded of the debt we owe to those who have, for 233 years, sustained our freedom and independence. One remarkable family in particular exemplifies the best in the American spirit of courage and sacrifice.

Sitting at my table was a friend, Christine Krissoff, wife of Dr. Bill Krissoff and mother of Nathan and Austin Krissoff. One of her sons, Marine First Lt. Nathan Krissoff, was killed in Al Anbar Province in December 2006. A Williams College grad, athlete and musician, he'd left for Iraq on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He was 25.

I met his parents and brother in Nevada in August 2007 while accompanying President George W. Bush to Reno, Nev. The president was there to address the American Legion before meeting with local families who'd lost a loved one in Iraq or Afghanistan. Mr. Bush has met with about 550 families in private visits like this. At those meetings, he would have a senior staff member close by in case there was something that needed to be followed up on, such as getting a flag to a family member.

We entered a small room in the back of the convention center to find the Krissoffs waiting -- the father in a black suit with his arms crossed and the mother in a plain dark outfit. Their dress contrasted with their son Austin's Marine dress uniform. Like his older brother, Austin had volunteered for service after college. He was to be deployed to Iraq in March 2008.

During my White House years, I saw few people with the quiet power, intelligence and poise of Chris Krissoff. She talked about her sons, the pain of her loss, her concern for her youngest when he went into harm's way, and the stakes in the War on Terror. The entire time, her husband was quiet.

When stories had been told, tears wept, and grief expressed, Mr. Bush asked if he could do anything. At that, Bill Krissoff spoke.

"Yes," he said. "I'm a pretty good orthopedic surgeon. When my younger son is deployed to Iraq next March, I would like to be working as a Navy medical officer, but they won't let me because I am 61 years old. Will you give me an age waiver, Mr. President?" Mr. Bush pointed to me. Dr. Krissoff and I exchanged business cards and he promised to fax me his application.

I checked him out on the way back to Washington. His reputation was that of an outstanding trauma and sports medicine surgeon. He was also a marathon runner and a really fine person.

Two days later, I placed Bill's application on the president's desk before he met with Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. I made sure Gen. Pace had the file when he left. He promised to get back soon with an answer. I told him that he would have to get back to someone else: The next day was my last day at the White House. One of the last things I did before turning in my badge was to write Bill Krissoff to wish him well.

A day later, I was in West Texas for the start of dove season. While waiting for the next flight of birds, I realized I hadn't written Mrs. Krissoff. So I sat down that night at the Gage Hotel in Marathon and did. She had already lost her oldest son. Her younger son was preparing to deploy to Iraq.

Meanwhile, her husband wanted to give up their comfortable life, career and friends so he could honor their sons by joining the military at age 61. And she had given her full, heartfelt support.
A few weeks later, I received a note saying Bill had received his waiver and a chance to pass basic training. A few months later, I was invited to the commissioning ceremony for Lt. Commander William Krissoff, United States Navy Medical Reserve.

(NOTE: It is the shame of our time that so many in our country, especially among our young people, will understand this story and the willingness of this family to offer themselves for service.  That so few will understand and appreciate this story, is an indictment of our public school system and the extremist labor union – the NEA – that has corrupted it.  Values mean nothing to these liberals – and the NEA shamelessly serves – not as a legitimate professional organization – but as the nation’s largest union and an organic arm of the Democrat political party.  NEA influence in matters of educational policy and decision making must be ended.  Until it is, our public education will continue spiraling downward, and far too many wont understand why the Krissoffs do what they do.  For NEA and liberals – patriotism is not something they grasp or understsand.)

ill emailed me this April about his duties as a combat surgeon in Iraq. He sent photos of himself with Austin, who is now on his second tour there. This is how father, mother and brother are honoring the sacrifice of Nathan. While sharing this story with the audience last week, I found myself unable to look at Christine until I finished and the crowd rose to applaud her.

Watching the smoke rise from the Battle of Bunker Hill, Abigail Adams wrote her husband John, who was away at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. While she and others lived "in continual Expectation of Hostility," Abigail wrote, "like good Nehemiah, having made our prayer with God, and set the people with their Swords, their Spears, and their bows, we will say unto them, Be not affraid of them."

Christine Krissoff's husband and sons, wrapped in prayers and armed with swords and scalpels, have served our nation with valor. So has she. So long as our nation produces families like the Krissoffs, America will remain not only the greatest nation on earth, but also the most noble in history.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal.
 

 
 
 

Comments

[Harry Becker]

Buddy

Tell Tho 'NICE JOB!

Harry