• Hillary Clinton,  Mark Steyn,  Michael Ramirez

    Hillary Clinton Lip-Synced More than Beyoncé

     

    Read all of Mark Steyn’s excellent post on Hillary Clinton and Benghazi.

    A couple of days later, it fell to the 45th president-in-waiting to encapsulate the ethos of the age in one deft sound bite: What difference does it make? Hillary Clinton’s instantly famous riposte at the Benghazi hearings is such a perfect distillation that it surely deserves to be the national motto of the United States. They should put it on Paul Krugman’s trillion-dollar coin, and in the presidential oath: “Do you solemnly swear to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States?” “Sure. What difference, at this point, does it make?” Well, it’s the difference between cool and reality – and, as Hillary’s confident reply appeared to suggest, and the delirious media reception of it confirmed, reality comes a poor second in the Obama era. The presumption of conservatives has always been that, one day, cold, dull reality would pierce the klieg-light sheen of Obama’s glamour. Indeed, that was the premise of Mitt Romney’s reductive presidential campaign. But, just as Beyoncé will always be way cooler than some no-name operatic soprano or a male voice choir, so Obama will always be cooler than a bunch of squaresville yawneroos boring on about jobs and debt and entitlement reform. Hillary’s cocksure sneer to Sen. Johnson of Wisconsin made it explicit. At a basic level, the “difference” is the difference between truth and falsity, but the subtext took it a stage further: no matter what actually happened that night in Benghazi, you poor sad loser Republicans will never succeed in imposing that reality and its consequences on this administration.

  • Media

    Earth to Karl Rove and Sheldon Adelson: Do This

    Screencap of The Frisky website

     

    The Frisky

    Why not?

    Mitt Romney and the GOP lost, but it wasn’t for lack of money. They spent a lot; they just didn’t get enough bang for the buck.

    Billionaire Sheldon Adelson alone donated $150 million. But Romney lost anyway, especially among unmarried women.

    Which is why I think that rich people wanting to support the Republican Party might want to direct their money somewhere besides TV ads that copy, poorly, what Lee Atwater did decades ago.

    My suggestion: Buy some women’s magazines. No, really. Or at least some women’s Web sites.

    One of the groups with whom Romney did worst was female “low-information voters.” Those are women who don’t really follow politics, and vote based on a vague sense of who’s mean and who’s nice, who’s cool and who’s uncool.

    Since, by definition, they don’t pay much attention to political news, they get this sense from what they do read. And for many, that’s traditional women’s magazines — Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, the Ladies Home Journal, etc. — and the newer women’s sites like YourTango, The Frisky, Yahoo! Shine, and the like.

    Then, how about buying a spot on Comedy Central to combat Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert?

    Buy a spot on Showtime to ridicule Bill Maher. There is plenty of material and talent.

    Winning the culture/political war, one television show, one website at a time…..

  • Mark Steyn,  Pinboard Links,  The Sunday Flap

    The Sunday Flap: October 30, 2011

    These are my links and comments for  Sunday, October 30th:

  • Darrel Issa,  Day By Day,  New York Times

    Day By Day August 23, 2011 – These Are The Times

    Day By Day by Chris Muir

    The American public have lost faith in the “Lamestream” media because of the crap that goes on at the New York Times. Look at the Rep. Darrel Issa story.

    New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau opened his Monday front page story on the overlap between Rep. Darrell Issa’s business and governmental work with a compelling scene:

    “Here on the third floor of a gleaming office building overlooking a golf course in the rugged foothills north of San Diego, Darrell Issa, the entrepreneur, oversees the hub of a growing financial empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”

    But here’s the problem: Lichtblau, a Pulitzer Prize winner, says he never saw that exact view of Shadowridge Country Club — though he did visit the third floor of the building. And Issa’s office says the course cannot be seen from anywhere in the building.

    That’s only a minor point in a story that Issa, the chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee, is saying is riddled with inaccuracies. In the days since the story ran, Issa has been on a crusade against the story, which put Issa’s business and political life under a tough spotlight.

    Issa claims that The Times asserted a building he bought went up in value, when it did not and the story said Issa went easy on Toyota during congressional inquiries because a company he founded was a supplier to them, when in fact Issa says his Directed Electronics corporation does not have a relationship with Toyota. Issa’s camp also says the Times’ assertion that his charitable foundation reaped a windfall from a financial holding is false, as he actually lost money on the investment.

    The credibility of the New York Times is like the rest of the MSM.

    Take it with a grain of salt – trust but verify.

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    The Day By Day Archive

  • Day By Day,  Mark Steyn

    Day By Day August 7, 2011 – In Vino Veritas

    Day By Day by Chris Muir

    Chris, the problem is most Americans are tired of all of the BS and have withdrawn from the political process. Most voters mire than likely could not pass an American Civics test.

    And, look what has happened. America is disappearing as we know it.

    Tomorrow Mark Steyn’s new book will be available, After America: Get Ready for Armageddon.

    Buy the book, laugh and get ready for the future, if Americans don’t take back their country from the LEFT.

    By the way, I am still in Las Vegas on vacation, won my first small poker tournament, ran about 12 miles today and will blog when I have the time.

    I have friends arriving in Las Vegas tomorrow afternoon and the Epic Poker League Main Event starts Tuesday AM. So, regular blogging won’t occur until next week.

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  • American Debt Linit,  American Economy,  Barack Obama,  Mark Steyn

    Mark Steyn: Planless Dems

    Mark Steyn

    In this post, Mark Steyn talks about the austerity budgets in Europe and what may be coming very soon to the United States, if the Congress and President Obama do not get serious about government spending.

    It seems reasonable to conclude from the planlessness and budgetlessness of the Obama/Reid Democrats that their only plan is to carry on spending without limit. Otherwise, someone somewhere would surely have written something down on a piece of paper by now. But no, apparently the Department of Writing Down Plans is the only federal expense the president is willing to cut. You begin to see why the Europeans are a little miffed. They’re passing austerity budgets so austere they’ve spawned an instant anti-austerity movement rioting in the street — and yet they’re still getting downgraded by the ratings agencies. In Washington, by contrast, the ruling party of the Brokest Nation in History has no spending plan other than to plan to spend even more — and nobody’s downgrading them.

    Well, don’t worry. It’s coming. The domestic media coverage of this story has been almost laughably fraudulent: To the court eunuchs, a failure to raise the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion would signal to the world that American government was embarrassingly dysfunctional. In reality, raising the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion without any spending cuts would confirm to the world that American government is terminally dysfunctional.

    In the debt-ridden treasuries of Europe, they’re talking “austerity.” In the debt-ridden treasury of Washington, they’re talking about more spending (Kathleen Sebelius is touting new women’s health programs to be made available “without cost.”) At the risk (in Samuel Johnson’s words) of settling the precedence between a louse and a flea, I think Europe’s political discourse is marginally less deranged than ours. The president is said to be “the adult in the room” because he is reported to be in favor of raising the age of Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67.

    By the year 2036.

    If something is not done soon, the financial markets will react for the Congress and the President.

    It won’t be pretty and all the POLS will be able to do will be to try to blame the other side.

    Why can’t they simply pass a short term compromise and have the great debate in 2012?

    Or, does President Obama relish a financial crisis for re-election demagoguery?

  • American Debt Linit,  Mark Steyn

    Mark Steyn: No Bargaining with Barack Obluffer

    Mark Steyn

    Another masterful piece from Mark Steyn.

    There is something surreal and unnerving about the so-called “debt ceiling” negotiations staggering on in Washington. In the real world, negotiations on an increase in one’s debt limit are conducted between the borrower and the lender. Only in Washington is a debt increase negotiated between two groups of borrowers.

    Actually, it’s more accurate to call them two groups of spenders. On the one side are Obama and the Democrats, who in a negotiation supposedly intended to reduce American indebtedness are (surprise!) proposing massive increasing in spending (an extra $33 billion for Pell Grants, for example). The Democrat position is: You guys always complain that we spend spend spend like there’s (what’s the phrase again?) no tomorrow, so be grateful that we’re now proposing to spend spend spend spend like there’s no this evening.

    On the other side are the Republicans, who are the closest anybody gets to representing, albeit somewhat tentatively and less than fullthroatedly, the actual borrowers – that’s to say, you and your children and grandchildren. But in essence the spenders are negotiating among themselves how much debt they’re going to burden you with. It’s like you and your missus announcing you’ve set your new credit limit at $1.3 million, and then telling the bank to send demands for repayment to Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s kindergartner next door.

    Nothing good is going to come from these ludicrously protracted negotiations over laughably meaningless accounting sleights-of-hand scheduled to kick in circa 2020. All the charade does is confirm to prudent analysts around the world that the depraved ruling class of the United States cannot self-correct, and, indeed, has no desire to.

    Read all of the piece.

    The charade had better self-correct or we will be no more.

    The time is NOW.