Friday p.m. various & sundry

Maybe it's because I've been busy and away from the news, but even sine Steyn (how long, Mark, how long?) NRO has outdone itself today. A sample:

John Derbyshire on how to fix our schools: Race to Nowhere

Here is my prescription for a reform of the nation’s education system. First, destroy all the schools. Cart away the rubble for landfill and sow the ground with salt. Abolish the federal Department of Education and all state equivalents. End all education funding from public sources.

If the inhabitants of any district then wish their kids to be educated in schools, let them raise the necessary funds themselves.

An anti-government-school radical after my own heart.


Krauthammer on the bankruptcy and malignancy of the Left: The Last Refuge of the Liberal

Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the “bitter” people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging “to guns or religion or” — this part is less remembered — “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

That’s a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking. [. . .]

Now we know why the country has become “ungovernable,” last year’s excuse for the Democrats’ failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?

RTR. Dr. K nails it as usual. The Left has no honor.


Jonah Goldberg on Obama's sea of troubles: Dorsal Fins Surround White House

Convinced that his popularity was eternal, Obama responded by saying, yes, but there’s a “big difference” between 1994 and 2010, and that big difference is, “you’ve got me.”

The funny thing is, Obama might have been right. Because things might be much worse for Democrats in 2010 than they were in 1994 — and the big difference might well be Barack Obama. [. . .]

Moreover, Obama has lost his connection with the American people. He’s aloof without inspiring confidence. On issue after issue — terrorism, immigration, the oil spill, the environment, and the Ground Zero mosque — he seems determined to craft his responses in a way that will annoy the most people possible.

RTR.


On the Corner, Andy McCarthy keeps his eye on the ball:

It’s a sleepy Friday in late August, the president is on another vacation, Congress is out of town, no one is paying much attention. What better time for the Obama administration to pull the plug, once again, on military commissions? This time, it has halted the case of top al-Qaeda operative Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was to be prosecuted by a military court for the Cole bombing. The Washington Post report is here, and Jen Rubin has thoughts at Contentions.

Also from J-Ru, how hubris precludes self-correction:

I was wrong – I underestimated how badly Obama would harm his own party and how quickly the American people would turn on him. But in answer to your query, I am not holding my breath; the clique that scoffed at the notion that Ronald Reagan (or Margaret Thatcher or John Paul II) could win the Cold War and that has bowed before the false idol of Keynesianism should not be expected to reflect on its misjudgments. Unlike the Bourbons (who managed to remember everything), the left learns nothing and remembers nothing. It is why it is so drearily predictable and so often surprised.

Just think where we might be now if Obama, Pelosi, and Reid hadn't so utterly lost their heads, and instead of trying to force their entire statist agenda down our throats, they had plotted out a more subtle, slower paced power grab? The electorate would be dozing instead of reaching for their pitchforks.


Does Charlie Crist have to work at being a consummate weasel or is it just a gift? From The Hill via the Corner:

Crist told a local TV station Friday that he would have voted in favor of President Obama's healthcare proposal were he in the Senate. That was a reversal of his previous position against the healthcare law.

"I would have voted for it," Crist said in the interview. "But I think it can be done better, I really do."

But now, Crist says he "misspoke" in that interview. His campaign sent out a statement Friday afternoon clarifying Crist's position on the healthcare law.

"If I misspoke, I want to be abundantly clear: the health care bill was too big, too expensive, and expanded the role of government far too much," Crist said in a statement. "Had I been in the United States Senate at the time, I would have voted against the bill because of unacceptable provisions like the cuts to the Medicare Advantage program."

The campaigns of both Rubio and Meek are having an absolute field day with Crist's flip-flop.

And there are people who plan to vote for this man. Oy.

*Updated to add Victor Davis Hanson's piece, The Sources of American Anger:

In addition, Obama and his crew see America in isolation, without comparison to the wretchedness that exists in so much of the world outside our borders. So a logical disconnect is never quite explained. If America is so xenophobic and culpable, why would millions of Mexicans or Middle Eastern Muslims wish to immigrate here — and what exactly is America doing to attract them that their own countries are not? If Michelle Obama felt that she could not be proud of America before Barack Obama’s accession, was it the free-market system that both provoked her ire and created the capital for her to jet to Marbella?

In other words, with the race/class/gender critique of the Obamians comes very little appreciation of the bounty, freedom, and affluence that they so eagerly embrace. Surely someone in the past — perhaps even white males — must have been doing something right for America to evolve into a place that our present-day critics apparently enjoy.

Also adding Andy McCarthy's Why They Can't Condemn Hamas. Feisal Rauf is as slippery as an eel:

During a WABC radio interview, Aaron Klein three times pressed Rauf to admit that Hamas is a terrorist organization. Rauf bobbed and weaved in classic Islamist style. “I’m not a politician,” he replied, as if only politicians trouble themselves over whether terrorists are terrorists. “I try to avoid the issues. The issue of terrorism is a very complex question.” Avoid the issues? You don’t say!

But it is not a complex question, no more complex than “Does Derek Jeter play for the Yankees?” It is a straightforward question that Islamists complicate with clever casuistry, carefully designed to ring all the right chimes for our opinion elites and their media pitchmen.

RTR.


Thanks to MichelleMalkin.com for the Buzzworthy link.

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