sisu

"When they laugh at Sarah Palin, we feel them laughing at us"

"We're ordinary barbarians here. No one controls us. We're a horde," writes R.A. Mansour, co-editor of Conservatives 4 Palin, an unaffiliated group blog that speaks to our heart and mind as a member of the "pooh-poohed-by-the-anti-Palin-pooh-bahs" community. We love C4Ps banner (detail, above). Echoes of Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World."

"Sarah Palin is our voice. When they laugh at her, we feel them laughing at us. Someday we'll have the last laugh," writes R.A. Mansour of Conservatives4Palin:

The latest Rasmussen polling numbers were quite instructive. Palin's biggest group of supporters are young, unmarried, and not social conservative evangelicals. Her supporters do not view her as the social conservative candidate. Social conservatives prefer Huckabee as a candidate in 2012; however, they think just as highly of Sarah Palin as they do Huckabee. Sarah Palin's considerable base of supporters are attracted to her because she is the Beltway Outsider. She is the ordinary American who is fed up with the arrogant and incompetent Beltway elites who got us into the mess we're in and yet still show such disdain for the ordinary hardworking people who want nothing more than for their government to be "on their side and not in their way."

"Like virtually all political observers, I was at first surprised by Governor Palin's decision to hand the reins of Alaska governance over to Lieutenant Governor Parnell," admits Nebraska-based libertarianTim Lindell, another C4P co-editor whose perfect-pitch "Palin is now free to exercise her real power" in the Alaska Dispatch catches the commentariat mid flight,"wheeling and swooping" in self-protective unison:

On the national stage, it sent the entirety of the political and chattering classes hurtling into the air like a flock of geese flushed by a hunter, flapping wildly and honking their displeasure.

"More importantly, the news was burning up the venue in which Palin's core of supporters and advocates resides — the conservative blogs," continues Lindell:

And it was the subject of endless discussion in the places where her national constituency gather and live … at backyard Fourth of July barbeques, in the bleachers at Little League baseball games, at small-town fireworks displays, in the kitchens and around the dining tables of family gatherings over the holiday weekend. These are people who don't obsessively follow politics but are beginning to awaken with a deep sense of disgust for the condition of our national political discourse … and an equally deep sense of disgust for the politicians of both parties that have brought us here, and for the media that enabled them. To these folks, who often refer to Palin as "Our Sarah," each attack by the Beltway class simply slaps another layer of concrete on their support for her …

In our jaded and cynical times, we expect politicians to speak in the language of vagueness and spin, making it necessary to sift through endless verbal dross to find nuggets of truth. But Palin speaks plainly [same point made by Politico's Roger Simon in "The sins of Sarah Palin" the other day] and spoke clearly about her reasons in her Friday announcement, reasons both personal and political.

The WSJs John Fund has the story behind the story, great stuff:

People close to Sarah Palin say national political reporters and pundits have missed the real reasons for her surprising decision to resign as Alaska governor. The national media have dismissed or downplayed her real motives, which had little to do with any plans to run for president in 2012.

Contrary to most reports, her decision had been in the works for months, accelerating recently as it became clear that controversies and endless ethics investigations were threatening to overshadow her legislative agenda. "Attacks inside Alaska and largely invisible to the national media had paralyzed her administration," someone close to the governor told me. "She was fully aware she would be branded a 'quitter.' She did not want to disappoint her constituents, but she was no longer able to do the job she had been elected to do. Essentially, the taxpayers were paying for Sarah to go to work every day and defend herself."

This situation developed because Alaska's transparency laws allow anyone to file Freedom of Information Act requests. While normally useful, in the hands of political opponents FOIA requests can become a means to bog down a target in a bureaucratic quagmire, thanks to the need to comb through records and respond by a strict timetable. Similarly, ethics investigations are easily triggered and can drag on for months even if the initial complaint is flimsy.

Meanwhile, stuck in their anti-Palin Pauline-Kael bubbles, national political reporters continue to miss the point. One example that caught our eye: Reporting on the Iowa GOPs invitation for Palin to headline their annual Reagan Day Dinner, CBS led with "Despite announcing her resignation, Sarah Palin is still a sought-after asset in the Republican Party." As we wrote years ago re "out-of-touch elites who have fallen for their own rhetoric" regarding GWs persistent popularity in the wake of iraq and the 9/11 hearings, "Because of, not in spite of, stupid!"

Update: Marketing and branding expert John Tantillo agrees:

She made a choice that came out of the deepest part of herself (her core brand) — no wonder the political class was left scratching its collective head. They hadn't taken her claims of loving her family seriously. But the wives and mothers who make up Palin's supporters got it …

She's a woman who means what she says and does what she believes.

It's her "core brand," stupid!

Pooh-poohed by the anti-Palin pooh-bahs

"Twitter's constantly updating record of up-to-the-minute reaction has in some instances threatened to usurp media coverage of breaking news [and] helped many celebrities, athletes and politicians bypass the media to get their message directly to their audience," says an AP report that ironically demonstrates its own usurpation by clinging to the false premise that "Those direct, near-instantaneous dispatches are far less reliable than old-fashioned journalism." (Twitter bird logo above)

Northeast Corridor Conservatives still don't get it. Sarah Palin's unorthodox behavior continues to drive them and their fellow travelers on the left side of the aisle to distraction, even as she consults — so Gretchen Carlson of Fox & Friends reported the other day — with the likes of Dick Cheney, Fred Thompson, Charlie Crist and other GOP bigwigs behind the scenes and communicates directly with us fans through Twitter. Roger Simon of Politico explains the disconnect in his playfully ironic hit piece "The sins of Sarah Palin":

Sarah Palin is a sinner. She has violated several commandments and thoroughly deserves the savage beating that she is now getting from political mandarins and media elites …

Thou shalt not surprise the media … When you do what the media have predicted, you are “savvy.” You are a “skilled” and “adept” politician. If you surprise the media, however, you are “out of control” and “bizarre” and even “egotistical” …

Thou shalt not upset the pooh-bahs … Doesn’t she know that the highest form of political communication today is to exactly regurgitate a speech written for you by a speechwriter who has crafted, vetted and polled every phrase, line and word?

But listen to Palin. Listen to how “rambling” and “disjointed” she is. Once upon a time in American politics, this was known as being “plain-spoken,” but that time has gone. An entire industry of political consultants has grown up to make sure politicians are never plain-spoken. Sarah Palin does not get this. Which is to say she is not very bright …

Thou shalt pander to the few, not speak to the many … It is only a “certain element” of the party that finds her energizing, fresh, tough and willing to stand up to the mandarins and the media. Clearly, Palin must “grow” beyond that base to win over ... whom?

"When Twitter experiences an outage, users see the 'fail whale' error message created by Australian artist and designer Yiying Lu," says Wikipedia, "a whimsical illustration of red birds [They look orange to us. – ed] using nets to hoist a whale from the ocean. The message reads: 'Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.'" The image itself has developed a huge and enthusiastic following and has its own online store, as breathlessly described in " How An Unknown Artist's Work Became a Social Media Brand Thanks To the Power of Community." Not to mention the power of unfettered capitalism!

Speaking as a member of that "certain element" reflexively pooh-poohed by the pooh-bahs, we have found 1. Sarah Palin to be refreshingly energizing and authentic from that day last August when she emerged onto the national stage "while pampered liberals slept," as we wrote back then, and 2. Barack Obama to be tediously dispiriting and disingenuous from that day in December of 2006 when he feigned shock, shock at all the attention he was getting after his Oprah endorsement and gratuitously implied that persons like us who do not share his political views are racists. We can report now from anecdotal observation that elitist memes of the moribund MSM and their allies in government and academia, desperately trying to keep the dead weight of the Barackian leviathon (see Fail Whale image above) afloat, are losing the ear of the plain-spoken community at an accelerating rate. We used to be able to tolerate the occasional fuddy-duddy on a Fox News panel, but now, even fave opinionator Charles Krauthammer is making our remote finger twitchy.

Rainy-day strategy

What to do when it's pouring outside and you don't like to get your paws wet?

Curl up into a silky fluffball and powernap until the sun comes out.

Update: Should it continue to rain for forty days and forty nights, head over to Modulator's Friday Ark #250, now boarding.

Every heart beats true for the red, white and blue

Blue skies and gentle west winds with occasional gusts graced our Sunday Family Fourth Festivities at Goomp's Camelot-by-the-Sea down east. Old Glory, above, was in her glory.

Matthew and Susan pose in a proud and loving mother-and-son embrace with the Brahmanesque York Reading Room and Atlantic Ocean falling away behind. Click here for higher-resolution image.

Suzi's Red, White and Blue Strawberry/Blueberry Shortcake hit our sweet spot. All agreed Pillsbury's Shortcake beats those dry, tasteless homemade ones of our new-bride days when you had to prove your culinary worth by making everything from scratch.

Working off our just desserts, Sue, Ellen, Matt, Tuck, Ben and ourselves tripped the light fantastic in a rousing rendition of the Cliff-Walk Two-Step across the York River down by York Harbor Beach, with the Hahbah in the background.

Mother ponders what to do next as son checks camera settings.

Earlier on the opposite side of the river at Goomp's, a groaning board of Fourth-of-July faves was downed with relish: Grilled Chicken Sate with Peanut Sauce, rib eyes, Kayem [Chelsea's own!] dogs — both pork and beef — on grilled buns, corn on the cob, Eddie's Beans [Thanks, Ellen!], Sissy's Superb Potato Salad and Corny Cornbread Mini Muffins. Did we forget anything? Oh, yes: The champagne flowed!

'Wish the day would linger longer … They left us laughing and begging for more. A wonderful time was had by all. Click here for higher-resolution image.

As we made our way back to the car, Matthew discovered a "sport," or botanical "reversion," growing out of one of the Dwarf Alberta Spruces (Picea Glauca 'Alberta') that dot the landscape. The sport's the strapping youngster sprouting from the refined parent plant, above. Wikipedia explains:

A sport is a part of a plant … that shows morphological differences from the rest of the plant.

Sports with desirable characteristics are often propagated vegetatively to form new cultivars. Such selections are often prone to "reversion," meaning that part or all of the plant reverts to its original form.

Googling, we came upon this fascinating snippet of plant-explorer lore — worthy of a blogpost of its own, tied in with the contentious "green" debate —  from the University of Arkansas Extension Service:

Dwarf Alberta Spruce was discovered in 1904 in the Northern Rockies near Lake Laggan, Alberta as two Arnold Arboretum botanists awaited the arrival of their train to take them back to Boston. Today, they would meet with serious government red tape and social castigation, but at the time they spotted the stunted seedling and recognized it as something new and different. Without a second thought, they dug it up and took it home with them.

Back in Boston, the dwarf spruce was found to be easy to propagate and was released to the nursery trade a few years later. [You see them everywhere, from carefully cultivated formal estates and suburban lawns to planted in large terra cotta pots outside luxury apartment buildings and perfunctorily "landscaped" curbs of gas stations along the interstate.]

The most famous of the pair was Alfred Rehder, who became known to thousands of students for his Manual of Cultivated Trees and Shrubs. In the1940 edition, Rehder was the first to use a plant hardiness zone map based on minimum winter temperatures. His first hardiness map had only seven zones but served as the precursor to the 12-zone USDA map we use today.

Heading south back to Chelsea on I-95 Monday morning, we found ourselves playing a bit part in the big traffic story of the day, a smash-up involving three cars and a tanker truck in the northbound lane. Police cars, ambulances, fire engines, a dump truck full of sand and a hazmat vehicle rushed to the scene, and a helicopter hovered overhead. The highway was closed for hours as emergency workers tried to stem the flow of oil into the nearby Merrimack River. We escaped with a relatively modest 45-minute delay and a creepy feeling at the horror of it all, compounded by the fact that just as the traffic was starting to slow down, we had been reading the chapter in Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism where Lucianne's elder son makes the argument that Woodrow Wilson was "the twentieth century's first fascist dictator."

Update: More pics and info re crash and clean-up from local Daily News.

Other than that, a perfect weekend.

Sarah Palin "speaks from the heart"

Were you there at the revolution? We were as rumors of Sarah Palin's imminent retirement from her Alaska governership lit up the twittersphere this afternoon. As twitterati jockied for first place, we found ourselves at one point retweeted by Michelle Malkin herself. Highlights, latest to earliest:

Vapid NE Corridor fuddy-duddy prattle. Did SarahPalin take Krauthammer's advice to spend next 3 yrs boning up?

Saw Mitch Daniels at a conference broadcast on CNN . . . Wicked impressive.

Now you're talkin': RT @oxfordgirl: Western media appear to think if a revolution takes more than a week it is over. #iranelection

Palin speech is totally in the eye of the beholder. I took it on its own terms and liked what I heard.

I totally disagree with the totally awesome Nat Review ed @RichLowry who says Palin speech didn't make any sense on its own terms.

RT @goparchitect: "Sarah Palin" now #1 trending topic on twitter. Thank you, Sarah, for kicking Michael Jackson off the cables.

Sarah get your gun: RT @goparchitect: Palin quotes Gen. MacArthur “We are not retreating; we are advancing in another direction.”

Wall St Journal crossword clue: Stock exchange? Ans: Moos. Too cute!

Carl Cameron: She's done it again. To some, it's the end of her career. To others, it's the start of her presidential campaign.

Sarah get your gun: RT @scrappleface: @AKGovSarahPalin quits to spend more Time with Couric, Gibson.

Like Barack Obama, Sarah Palin can be a blank canvas upon which huddled masses yearning to breathe free — or in Obama's case, huddled masses yearning to be on the dole — project their inchoate longings. The difference is that while Obama speaks from the latest polls, Palin — in Fox Brit ex pat Stuart Varney's words — "speaks from the heart":

And maybe that's what Americans want.

The Shining City Upon a Hill is often taken for granted by those born under its light, and sometimes it takes an outsider like Varney to remind us that freedom isn't free. We loved this tweet from s_a_harris:

SarahPalin we're behind you all the way. $$, volunteer, whatever. Help us take this country back!

Tuck thinks it sounds funny. Is there a Palin scandal out there too big to weather the spotlight? Could be, but our preference is to take her at her word. Our favorite soundbite from her speech this afternoon:

A good captain knows when to pass the ball so the team can win!

It sounds like one for Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.

Newsbites and viewsbites and the power of crowd-sourced journalism

Like Tiny twisting and shifting her ears in all directions for environmental clues, we spent much of the day hanging around what Jordan Raynor calls the "Citizen-Powered News Bureau," turning our mind's ear to manageable portions of the 24/7 rush of 140-or-fewer-character newsbites and viewsbites from citizen journalists we're following on Twitter. Like a teaser headine, a well-written tweet invites us to follow the writer's Tiny URL links to larger worlds beyond. Writes Raynor: "News consumers are trusting crowd-sourced journalism to provide them with the news they want because they believe in the idea of a truly free-market journalism system where trusted news sources rise to the top naturally."

"You cannot sustain a campaign of platitudes and clichés over a year and a half if you're running for the presidency," Charles Krauthammer told Megyn Kelly — first woman ever to sub as host of Fox News's flagship "Special Report with Brit Baier" — last night. We cringed at the condescension towards Sarah Palin as we grumbled to the television that oh, yes you can sustain a campaign of platitudes and clichés, indefinitely, if your name is Barack Obama and big media is in the tank for you. Most annoying of all, our beloved Krauthammer agreed with liberal co-panelist Mara Liasson:

Now, as to Palin, I agree entirely with what Mara said. She is — she has star power without any doubt. She has an extremely devoted following. But she is not a serious candidate for the presidency.

She had to go home and study and spend a lot of time on issues in which she was not adept last year, and she hasn't. She has to stop speaking in clichés and platitudes. It won't work.

And how, pray tell, do Charles and Mara know what Sarah has or hasn't been doing beyond official duties since November? You can bet they don't follow AKGovSarahzPalin on Twitter, a great way to keep up with her schedule and priorities [Can't be sure whether she or a staffer does the actual twittering, but like Palin herself, her tweets have an authentic ring about them.] If Krauthammer and Liasson know something, let's have the details. We'd heard rumors just after the election that among other things the Alaska Governor was being mentored on foreign relations and government waste by Republican heavyweight Fred Thompson. As for those Northeast Corridor Republican fuddy-duddies who look down their noses at the hayseed caricature relentlessly spun by a biased, elitist media, we offer this insight from the executive producer of "Saturday Night Live," as quoted by Daniel Henninger during the last weeks of the fall campaign:

Lorne Michaels lives on the forward wave of American life. This week he gave his view of Sarah Palin to EW.com: "I think Palin will continue to be underestimated for a while. I watched the way she connected with people, and she's powerful. Her politics aren't my politics. But you can see that she's a very powerful, very disciplined, incredibly gracious woman. This was her first time out and she's had a huge impact. People connect to her."

But not Charles Krauthammer and fellow members of the fuddy-duddy community. As we wrote in our very first Palin post "It's a girl?" late August last year, "Charles Krauthammer on Fox is saying McCain should pick someone 'safe' like Fred Thompson [Ironic, huh? –ed]. We LOVE Fred, of course, and our sis will remind us that we have a heart too soon made glad, but the Governor of Alaska gets our girls-just-wanna-have-fun juices flowing. Sarah, get your gun!" We're reminded of something Dr. Krauthammer said just the other day about President Obama's poor judgment in siding with the would-be dictator of Honduras:

Look, a rule of thumb here is whenever you find yourself on the side of Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and the Castro twins, you ought to re-examine your assumptions.

To you, sir, we would add our own rule of thumb:

Whenever you find yourself on the side of Mara Liasson, you ought to re-examine your assumptions.

And look. Please try to avoid using that toe-curling Liassonism, "Look," at the start of every declarative sentence.

Update: Look, all animals, all the time at Modulator's Friday Ark #250.

The mountain comes to Mohammed

It takes three tugboats to guide the chemical/oil tanker "Mount Rainier," sailing under the flag of Cyprus early morning, into the Chelsea Creek.

We love the layered, foreshortened image above — taken from our front steps — where the turning tanker seems to be squeezed into the tight space — actually a watery expanse of about 1/4 mile — between the McArdle Bridge that runs from Chelsea to East Boston in the foreground and a secondary span of the Mystic River Bridge between Chelsea and Charlestown in the background.

The working waterfront never sleeps.

Twitter: It's not just about Iran and Michael Jackson anymore

 

Michael Jackson's untimely death may have temporarily stolen the spotlight from the crackdown on Iranian protesters in social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, not to mention the cables, and even the major networks, but unlike whiny nanny-staters who keen for handouts, the Iranian freedom fighters picked themselves up and got back in the race. Example: A montage of photographs from the past few weeks of protests in Iran set to the music of MJ's "Beat It." Above, Jacko in his heyday singing PYT (Pretty Young Thing).

"Ask and ye shall receive. Thank you from the bottom of my heart (and pocket book!)," we just direct twittered Michelle Malkin. Unlike the congressional aide we talked to about an hour ago, she's been live twittering the cap-and-trade debate this afternoon and has all the answers. See below for details, but first, re that congressional aid, we spoke earlier with Steven Carlson, energy aide to our Taxachusetts Congressman, Michael E. Capuano. Told him we'd read on Twitter that Cap-and-Trade vote count was 210-210, with 14 undecided. He said he couldn't confirm as his office was not in touch with actual vote. Hmmm. Not following Twitter, then? Couldn't confirm whether Capuano had voted yet or was among the undecided. Double hmmm.

He asked whether we objected to the bill because it didn't go far enough or went too far. Not far enough? Hadn't thought of that but told him we believe 1. Bill is based upon junk science as more and more scientists are coming out to acknowledge the fact and 2. It amounts to the largest tax hike in the nation's history. He duly noted our thoughts and said he would pass them along to his boss. The silent majority, now mobilized at the individual level, becomes the smart mob?

A few tasty tidbits from Michelle Malkin's live tweeting of the final excruciating hours and minutes this afternoon:

YES! Rep. Barton refers to EPA-suppressed Carlin report (my column here if u missed it) …

Barton rocks: Cites Spain's greenjobs boondoggle. Costs 2.2 jobs for every greenjob. "Not a revolutn I want 2 b part of."

Barton closing statement: Facts data inconvenient truths. Waxman closing statement: HOPE! CHANGE! SAVE THE PLANET!

Ed Markey invoking "moral imperative" again. Global warming cult at work.

Sausage history in the making!

This just in re the 14 undecideds, straight from the horse's mouth in a direct tweet from the Divine Miss M herself:

@michellemalkin: Arcuri, Boccieri, Brown (FL), Carney, Dicks, Donnelly, Al Green, Kind, Kirk, Kirkpatrick, Petri, Space, Teague, Tonko

Talk about SOURCES! 'Don't see our guy, Capuano on the list. No doubt he voted early in favor of the highest tax hike in the history of the universe, but his aide didn't want to talk about it.

A little Gingbird told us "just say no" to energy tax increase

Darwin's Starlings on Otmoor, a few miles East of Oxford: "Individuals, but moving in a single entity. And the reason for this behavior? Well, thousands of eyes looking for predators on the roost site. Nothing could escape their gaze, no raptor could surprise this soaring mass of bird flesh … The birds are also maneuvering for position, social position."Totally awesome must-watch video here. More on how flocks of birds "wheel and swoop in unison," not unlike twitterers and other social network denizens, here.

"Everyone should call their [sic] congressman this morning and demand a no vote on the unread energy tax increase. The vote is very close," twittered Newt to his 527,564 followers this morning. We'd been meaning to but hadn't gotten around to it. That little Gingbird in our ear did the trick. First we retwittered Mr. Gingrich's message for the benefit of our own exclusive flock of 288 followers, then googled up our Massachusetts 8th District Rep, Michael E. Capuano's DC phone number and gave him — and his energy specialist, Steve Carlson — a call. The woman who answered the phone couldn't have been lovelier. Fat (=well paid) and happy in her job or not too many calls? The Anchoress had a similar experience — "MOST POLITE cong. staff I've ever dealt with" — and is telling her 1182 followers she's "thinking fewer calls coming in." Lori Byrd makes it even easier for her 565 followers with her tweet:

Follow this link, put in ur zip-code, call your Rep, and say "vote no on H.R. 2454", the Cap&Trade leg.

If all of our followers and their followers retweet and make the call, we've got a smart mob self-organizing to pursue a shared goal. Meanwhile, Al Gore twitters his 1,090,925 followers with urgency:

The most important environmental vote of this generation.

Isn't everything he ever thinks, says or does "the most important" in its category? From his website:

According to news reports, the full House of Representatives will vote on the global warming and energy bill on Friday. Make no mistake, this is the most important environmental vote of this generation. If passed this legislation will put us on the road to actually solving the climate crisis, in addition to building a green economy.

Call your Representative: 877-9-REPOWER (877-9-737-6937) and make sure they vote yes.

Mr. Gore is forever saying the debate is over, but the twitterers on this side of the debate have got news for him. As Emily Zanotti twitters:

Watching these Cap & Trade/global warming debates makes one thing very clear: it ain't only the creationists who willingly ignore science.

And as The Anchoress tweets in return:

Boondoggle begets boondoggle. Global Warming a flim-flam begets this flim-flam legislation. Too much power 4 1 party.

And too many words in congressional bills that go unread by power hoarders who vote as they're told, and damn the [unintended?] consequences! Insult to injury from twitterer DarkKnight3565:

Rep. Waxman adds a 300 page amendment to cap-and-trade amendment morning of its signing. Congress now completely broken.

Pass it on.

Update: OneFineJay retweets us with apt comment:

RT @SissyWillis Update: Cap-and-Trade Vote Count: 210-210, 14 Undecided Vote out 210 congressmen in 2010!

We tried calling our rep, Michael Capuano for second time this afta:

@OneFineJay You go, boy!!! Good news?: Got thru easily to my Blue-state MA congressman Capuano this a.m. Now busy signal.

Give 'em hell!

"And his miracles, and his acts, which he did in the midst of Egypt"

"There is no nuance, no logical approach, no deft explanation that covers near silence and inadequate, tepid condemnation of the meekest sort," Steve Schippert captioned this unspeakable image (Unscreened version — sickening — here) of a young victim of "Iran's Tiananmen Square." For the American president "to decline any mention of possible repercussions on the regime for these acts 'because we don't know how this is going to turn out' is moral cowardice of the highest order."

"He's behaving as though he's the leader of a small, neutral nation instead of Leader of the Free World," Nile Gardiner of Heritage Foundation told Martha MacCallum of Fox News as "Prez condemns violence in Iran but takes 'Wait and See' approach" bannered across the bottom of the screen yesterday.

One picture, 1000 words. Book covers by designer Henry Sen Yee (Photos by Jon Shireman)

"It is the moral equivalence game from the Cold War all over again," writes Lorne Gunter in Canada's National Post, recalling the electrifying effect of President Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech on Soviet dissidents like Natan Sharansky:

Speaking to the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983, president Reagan urged delegates against taking a moral equivalence stance on nuclear proliferation. When voting later in their convention on whether to support a freeze in the nuclear arms race, it would be too easy, Mr. Reagan said, to "label both sides equally at fault." That would "ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire."

Poo-poohed by "the usual suspects — academics, European leaders, special-interest cause pleaders, foreign policy experts, journalists and other assorted appeasers" — Reagan's declaration "before the entire world," in Sharansky's words, that the Soviet Union was "a totalitarian regime" had "made it impossible," explains Gunter, "for other world leaders, and Soviet leaders themselves, to maintain the facade that Russia and its satellites were as righteous as the West":

"It was one of the most important, freedom-affirming declarations," according to Mr. Sharansky, "and we all instantly knew it. For us, that was the moment that really marked … the end of Lenin's 'Great October Bolshevik Revolution' and the beginning of a new revolution, a freedom revolution" …

"A president's strong words would be for the Natan Sharanskys of Iran, not the mad mullahs who run the country," Gunter chides the current president's "Weeny diplomacy," Fausta's delicious formulation.

John Shireman's crumpled-paper evocation of violence (above right) called to mind this crumpled wax-paper-on-pie-dough image from our October 2007 post "There are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion," where we quoted John Tierney: "The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly … It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn’t it his job to express the scientific consensus? But that was the problem. Dr. Koop was expressing the consensus … He was caught in what social scientists call a cascade" of sheeplike belief formation that causes flat-earthers to crowd the cultural ether in every era.

"And his miracles, and his acts, which he did in the midst of Egypt unto Pharaoh the king of Egypt, and unto all his land …"

                    — Deuteronomy 11: (King James Version)

"Last week on Meet the Press, Chuck Todd reported that administration officials were 'frustrated that they're not getting credit for what's going on in Iran … they think that Cairo speech did help supporters of Mousavi sort of see light at the end of the tunnel in their country,'" writes Mary Katharine Ham, pulling back the curtain on the sausage-making process as the dithering diplomat who is President of the United States — with a 24/7 assist from Mythmaker-in-Chief Rahm Emanuel — gets away once more with having it both ways:

Today, speaking to a group of Washington reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel reinforced that argument by declaring that Obama's speech in Cairo "will go down as one of the most significant foreign policy speeches."

"It was equal to what Kennedy's speech was, what Reagan's speech was," he said. "I think he did 20 years worth of work … for advancing America's interests … We are no longer the issue in that region of the world."

Once more with[out] feeling, in the President's own words:

I have made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is not at all interfering in Iran’s affairs. But we must also bear witness to the courage and dignity of the Iranian people, and to a remarkable opening within Iranian society. And we deplore violence against innocent civilians anywhere that it takes place.

We knew Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was a friend of ours. President Obama, you are no Ronald Reagan.

This just in: President Ahmandinejad is accusing Obama of interfering in Iran and demanding an apology for saying he is "appalled and outraged" by the recent violence there.

Update: Maggie's links with a question: "When did the US renounce 'Leadership of the Free world'?"

Who can explain its mystery?

Tiny by palmlight seeing things we don't outside on the terrace early morning.

"I LOVE your analysis of the Tiny/Earl Grey romance and am sure you are right about the 'dashing white boots,'" we emailed friend Carol Ward, a lifelong seeker of feline wisdom and truth:

I was enthralled by your pics of Tiny and Earl. I am fascinated to know what it is between the two of them that makes them not get all territorial with each other.  (Would that Snowball and Tigger, the neighbor's other, outside, cat get along like that, even for a minute.) It seems apparent that Earl is dating "up," while I can only guess that Tiny's head has been turned by the dashing white boots.

No wonder Earl Grey is smitten. What a sweatheart, above popping her head up from the lawn, grown tall through 40 days and 40 nights of intermittent rain.

'Reminds us of "Not just another pretty face," our photographic essay of love among the maples, wherein we contrasted the "pistillate [female] flowers' exquisite refinement" with the "unkempt, seedy appearance" of their staminate [male] suitors and asked the eternal question "What does she SEE in him?"

Update: More lovely faces now boarding Modulator's Friday Ark #249.

Obama: Freedom of speech? Who needs it?

"'Freedom from Fear' (left) and 'Freedom from Want' are two of Norman Rockwell's 'The Four Freedoms' series inspired by FDR's rousing wartime State of the Union address in 1941," we captioned these images from a 2004 post. "Reproduced in four consecutive issues of The Saturday Evening Post in 1943, the original paintings by America's favorite illustrator toured the United States, raising over $130 million for the war effort. (Norman Rockwell Museum photos)"

"Who would have thunk it? George Bush turns out to be [Actually always was. –ed] the truer proponent of freedom," twitters Fred Thompson. Joshua Muravchik explains:

The most surprising thing about the first half-year of Barack Obama’s presidency, at least in the realm of foreign policy, has been its indifference to the issues of human rights and democracy. No administration has ever made these its primary, much less its exclusive, goals overseas. But ever since Jimmy Carter spoke about human rights in his 1977 inaugural address and created a new infrastructure to give bureaucratic meaning to his words, the advancement of human rights has been one of the consistent objectives of America’s diplomats and an occasional one of its soldiers.

This tradition has been ruptured by the Obama administration. The new president signaled his intent on the eve of his inauguration, when he told editors of the Washington Post that democracy was less important than “freedom from want and freedom from fear."

"'Freedom of Speech' left and 'Freedom to Worship' complete the series," we wrote in 2004. "We remember having reproductions of the illustrations hanging on the walls of our grade-school classrooms in the fifties and thinking even then they seemed quaintly old-fashioned. In today's world, again at war with those who would stomp on our freedoms, we see them with fresh eyes. Because Rockwell's subject matter was usually on the corny side, serious art critics tended to look down upon the artist's accomplishment, but beyond the anecdotal component — much loved by the average American — his compositional and painterly skills were quite remarkable.

Contrast Obama's anemic assertion last January that democracy is less important than "freedom from want and freedom from fear" — not to mention his tepid response to earth-shaking events in Iran and his ongoing "sledging strategy of intimidation" designed to discredit domestic dissent, from Fox News and talk radio on down to us bloggers and anti-statist tea partiers — with Franklin Delano Roosevelt's rousing State of the Union January 6, 1941:

In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called "new order" of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

As we twittered in response to Fred Thompson's observation above, "How telling Obama left out 2 of FDRs 4 freedoms: freedom of speech & freedom of worship!"

For thy love is better than catnip*

Tiny and her dashing gentleman caller Earl Grey out together clowdering cheek to cheek on the front stoop in the early morning light.

First time we've ever seen our sweet tiny girl so taken with another member of her species, and the feeling is obviously mutual.

Fight or flight? Camera shy and people shy, Earl eyed us with suspicion when he realized a paparazza was in dogged pursuit.

*Blog title is taken — with liberties — from Song of Solomon 1:2 (King James Version): "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine."

Sec Def Gates: "I don't have a clue what it's about"

Late afternoon on the front porch Tiny assumes the sphinx pose that is her birth right.

“This department, I think, is way behind our curve in this and that’s an area where I think we have a lot of room for improvement," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters yesterday in a discussion of the ways new social networking services like Twitter and Facebook have been facilitating transmission of fast-breaking news within and outside of Iran:

And where economic strife combines with modern technology, as it has in Iran, he added, “It makes the control of communications by a government extremely difficult …

"And if you can’t text, then you Twitter. And my guess is in some of these countries that the leadership is kind of like me: I don’t have a clue what it’s about,” Gates said, chuckling.

All eyes and ears, she is ever on the alert for Donald Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns."

Ouch. His predecessor Donald Rumsfeld's words come to mind:

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

Intellectually incurious talking heads snickered at the time, but our own beloved Rummie's words resonate, and the irony of Secretary Gates's words is doublefold:

1. Even as Gates properly acknowledges that Twitter makes it hard for authoritarian governments to jackboot free cyberspeech, he ignores his boss's "sledging strategy of intimidation" designed to discredit domestic dissent, from Fox News and talk radio on down to us bloggers and anti-statist tea partiers.

2 Chuckling over not having a clue about how the younger generation is keeping in touch is dangerously pathetic.

Fortunately, as BayNewser reports [via The Anchoress], over at the State Department there's a "27-year-old whiz kid whose job is to advise the State Department on how to use social media to promote U.S. interests in the Middle East":

And imagine our further surprise when we learned this young gentleman wasn't one of Barack Obama's social media geniuses, but instead was a Condi Rice pick hired specifically to advise the State Department on young people in the Middle East and how to "counter-radicalize" them.

According to the New York Times, it was Jared Cohen, a member of the Policy Planning Staff, who contacted Twitter on Monday, inquiring about their plan to perform maintenance in what would be the middle of the day, Iran time. Following that contact, Twitter decided to postpone their maintenance so that it would take place in the middle of the night Iran-time, even though that meant it would be the middle of the day U.S. time.

Somewhere we read that Twitter says their decision to defer maintenance was independent of government intervention, and we know that Twitter users bombarded the site with thousands of requests asking that they delay the maintenance downtime. But whether or not a call from the State Department was the determining factor, it's encouraging to know that a Gen Xer like Cohen is on the case:

"Iranian young people are one of the most pro-American populations in the Middle East,” Cohen told the New Yorker. “They just don’t know who to gravitate around, so young people gravitate around each other.”

More's the pity that the Leader of the Free World's "Choice is not to choose on Iran."

The price of liberty

Tiny bays at the moon in the midday sun …

"Sooner or later, a society of sheep must create a government of wolves."

                 — Bertrand de Jouvenal

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

                — Edmund Burke

… and goes eyeball-to-eyeball with a Lilac trunk.

"We've always said — whether anyone was listening or not — that the forces of darkness (apologies to wolves, who have their own imperatives, which we totally respect but would always defend our own against) are forever waiting just outside the campfire of civilization to move in for the kill."

                — Sissy Willis

Update: The forces of light now boarding Modulator's Friday Ark #248.

"The 21st-century equivalent of the Berlin wall is a cyberbarrier"

Cast your vote for Google to change their logo for one day in solidarity with the people of Iran yearning to breathe free.

How come Twitter's still getting through while other social networking services have been stifled by Iranian authorities? We'd been meaning to google that but didn't have to. Instead, the answer came to us by way of Iranian twitterer Elzone from Tehran: "Times' Kristof: How Iranian protesters are evading the gov't Twitter shutdown," a classic tale of the American Dream come true. "It is these Chinese supporters of Falun Gong who are the best hope for Iranians trying to reach blocked sites," explains Nicholas Kristof:

The protesters’ arsenal, such as those tweets on Twitter.com, depends on the Internet or other communications channels. So the Iranian government is blocking certain Web sites and evicting foreign reporters or keeping them away from the action.

The push to remove witnesses may be the prelude to a Tehran Tiananmen. Yet a secret Internet lifeline remains, and it’s a tribute to the crazy, globalized world we live in. [Or maybe, Mr. Kristof, it's a tribute to the golden door of opportunity the US opened to freedom-seekers fleeing tryranny. – ed] The lifeline was designed by Chinese computer engineers in America to evade Communist Party censorship of a repressed Chinese spiritual group, the Falun Gong … usage of the consortium’s software has tripled in the last week. It set a record on Wednesday of more than 200 million hits from Iran, representing more than 400,000 people …

Here's how it works:

Mr. Zhou, the son of a Chinese army general, said that he and his colleagues began to develop such software after the 1999 Chinese government crackdown on Falun Gong (which the authorities denounce as a cult). One result was a free software called Freegate, small enough to carry on a flash drive. It takes a surfer to an overseas server that changes I.P. addresses every second or so, too quickly for a government to block it, and then from there to a banned site.

Freegate amounts to a dissident’s cyberkit. E-mails sent with it can be encrypted. And after a session is complete, a press of a button eliminates any sign that it was used on that computer …

Responding to the growing use of Freegate in Iran, the consortium introduced a Farsi-language version last July — and usage there skyrocketed.

"Noticed green avatars all around in support of #IranElection? See who started this great idea," twitters Mr Tweet himself, answering another question that's been on our mind, even as we've gone from pink to green (Our own avatar, before and after, above).

"If President Obama wants to support democratic movements on a shoestring, he should support an 'Internet freedom initiative' pending in Congress," Kristof gently chides the President who "chose not to choose on Iran":

This would include $50 million in the appropriations bill for these censorship-evasion technologies. The 21st-century equivalent of the Berlin wall is a cyberbarrier, and we can help puncture it.

As tayastorm twittered from Tehran this morning, "fight back government's propaganda in twitter! if we lost here we have no other place."

Note: Check out all the latest Iran tweets here. This just in as we write: BBC confirm reformists detained, former Vice-President Abtahi, Mustafa Tajzadeh and Saeed Hajjarian. Our own twitter contributions here.

Update: Luis Gil (elzote), the Iranian who alerted us about the Kristof article, is now following us on Twitter! As Elisson twittered a month back, "How recursive is that?"

An Army of Twitterers

"Sometimes I write a post and think, This is going to get huge traffic. Then I post it and watch in disbelief as people collectively shrug their shoulders and ignore it," writes Michael Hyatt in "The Sovereignty of Readers." Image is from his post "Some Twitterers Worth Following,"

"Do you think he could be blander?' scoffs Ann Althouse regarding the maddeningly bloodless language the Leader of the Free World used today to express "deep concerns" about Iran's hotly disputed election:

What I will repeat … is that when I see violence directed at peaceful protesters, when I see peaceful dissent being suppressed, wherever that takes place, it is of concern to me, and it's of concern to the American people. That is not how governments should interact with their people. And my hope is that the Iranian people will make the right steps in order for them to be able to express their voices, to express their aspirations."

Some swoon at the President's "soaring rhetoric," but "When it comes down to words, our man [McCain] gets to the point three times faster than his opponent," we blogged back in the heat of the fall campaign:

Obama: "I am a person who believes [fill in the blank]" = 6 words

McCain: "I believe [fill in the blank]" = 2 words

"Must be that 'nuance' thing the Democrat elites are forever patting themselves on the back about," we'd chaffed at the time, noting "We ourselves have always been of the brevity-is-the-soul-of-wit school of intelligence assessment." As we wrote in Althouse's comments this afternoon:

Muscular prose reflects muscular thinking (Churchill, Reagan, GW). Flabby prose reflects flabby thinking (Chamberlain, Carter, Obama). Never use one metaphorically-charged noun or active verb when a string of colorless nouns and passive verbs will do.

We're with Frank J of IMHO, who twitters "If you wanted someone to speak forcefully on Iran, you should have elected a president with testicles." But like the White House itself with regard to Iran, "We have to deal with the American president that we have rather than the American president that we wish we had." Speaking of presidents we kind of wish we had, ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper engaged John McCain in an "impromptu twitterview" (140 or fewer characters per tweet) on the Iranian Tea Party this morning:

Tapper: what would u say were u president? how much of a concern wd it be that "the west" supporting protestors cd be demonized? Thx

McCain: we heard that during the Cold War when the left didn't want us criticizing the Soviet Union b/c we could have been "demonized" …

Tapper: So if President Obama called u and asked your advice what would u tell him?

McCain: speak up for these young Iranians who deserve a free and fair election.

While the American President that we do have "chose not to choose on Iran," as Jonah Goldberg put it, the folks at Twitter chose to "put themselves on the side of free expression, to let the battleground of ideas have it out," in the words of Research Director at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society Rob Fari, as Forbes reports:

But when the site's 90-minute maintenance window was announced Monday afternoon — in the midst of the service's use in organizing thousands of Iranian dissidents protesting alleged fraud in the national election — the result was a flood of thousands of requests to the site asking that Twitter delay the maintenance downtime …

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in a blog post on the site that Twitter had worked out a deal with its network provider, NTT America, to delay the maintenance.

Now we are being told that the State Department put in a word on the side of the angels [good on you, Mr. President, if that's so]. From Reuters:

Confirmation that the U.S. government had contacted Twitter came as the Obama administration sought to avoid suggestions it was meddling in Iran's internal affairs as the Islamic Republic battled to control deadly street protests over the election result.

Meddling while not meddling. Vintage Obama. More from the Washington Times:

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly declined to discuss the department's specific actions regarding Iran, but he said that officials were in touch with Twitter "all weekend." He also said that regular contacts between Foggy Bottom and the site on various issues had taken place long before the Iranian election.

Mary Katharine at the Standard weighs in on the relative weight of Government interference vs the Army of Davids Twitterers and the wisdom of crowds:

Well, if that ain't the cheapest, most effective government intervention I've seen all year …

The #nomaintenance campaign among Twitter's own users likely had something to do with the postponement, as well, especially given than Twitter users, in aggregate, likely pinpointed the problem and communicated it to Twitter's higher-ups much faster and more effectively than the State Department could have.

The bottom line, from that Forbes article:

"The buzzy startup's employees had likely recognized that supporting the dissidents in this case was also a savvy business decision, argues Rafal Rohozinski, a founder of the Infowar Monitor research group.

Unlike other Internet firms like Google, Microsoft  and Yahoo!, which have all been forced to choose in important cases between the interests of their users and those of the authoritarians who limit the rights of those users, Twitter's role as a protest tool fits snugly with its business motives, he contends.

"They're proving that 140 characters can build an instant mass market" he says. "I'm sure that raises their value as a company."

The Invisible Hand. Was there ever a more colorful metaphor for the self-regulating nature of the marketplace?

Update: "Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul,' The Anchoress quotes Emily Dickinson in one of her blockbuster linkathons (including us), "Twittering Liberty … and Hope," calling her readers to "Pray for the people of Iran; pray for good to triumph. Pray for their safety, their fortitude, their energy, their 'thing with feathers,' which is hope."

Update II: "The first female President," The News Junkie at Maggie's quips with a link.

Update III: And the winner is …

"The forty-fifth Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) Award goes to Sissy Willis of SISU," writes Morgan Freeberg of House of Eratosthenes [via Brutally Honest] re our "Muscular prose reflects muscular thinking (Churchill, Reagan, GW)" paragraph, above.

The man obviously has taste.

"At home chillin' with the wife"

"If you wanna find out about Republicans just like us, you just tune in to MSNBC," quips AlfonZo Rachel (right) in PJTVs blockbuster "Everyday Normal Republicans," now showing at a YouTube near you.

"At home chillin' with the wife! Hope your weekend is goin' good!," twitters AlfonZo Rachel, the chocolate-cookie half (above photo) of PJTVs to-die-for "Everyday Normal Republicans!" the best thing since sliced Oreos (no inside, no outside). We were thrilled to learn that he is "following" us on twitter [Ed note: We are using lower case t for twitter now that it's become the generic "kleenex" of social networking sites].

"I almost forgot. All black Republicans are traitors to their own race," cracks Steven Crowder, who plays the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Robert Culp character to Zo's Bill Cosby in this thoroughly modern iteration of the colorblind Sixties TV comedy hit "I Spy."

Even as the moribund David Letterman brand of politically correct humorless humor exits stage left in a cloud of ignominy, a sweet and savory new brand of wordplayful, colorblind comedy takes center stage. Our friends on the left side of the aisle won't know what hit them.

"It's hard as a progressive actor to get into this conservatively warped character, but I thought that came across as pretty genuine," deadpans Crowder in a masterful coda that impales the heart of the liberal project.

"I have a TERRIBLE crush on Zo," twitters The Anchoress this morning, noting with gusto:

Crowder looks a lot like my son buster!

They ARE a couple of cuties! "Sarah, Mary Katharine and now Carrie," we blogged a month back, delighting in the bevy of fresh distaff faces springing forth from the right side of the aisle:

Talk about beauty in unexpected places, not to mention the cojones* to go where no man has gone before. The ladies are leaving the Democrats' lame "Party of No" in the dust.

Welcome to the theater of operations, gentlemen.

Con-Man Aversion Derangement Syndrome (CADS) epidemic spreads

"Savoring the revealing contrast between Drake's seafaring 'reach for the stars' vision and Michelle Obama's landlocked 'audacity of whining,'" we wrote last May in "Because we sailed too close to the shore," a post about the Obamas' soft bigotry of low expectations, illustrated by this image of the heart of a grapefruit revealed by the early morning light.

"It's mute or bricks, and TV replacement costs are high," ribtwitters Michael Hazenstab, a fellow Con-Man Aversion Derangement Syndrome (CADS) sufferer who shares our uncontrollable impulse to click on the mute button whenever the Leader of the Free World appears on TV. President Obama's "soaring rhetoric" may cause acolytes to feel a "thrill" going up their legs, but it leaves CADS victims heaving. We stumbled into a previously unknown "community" of persons living with CADS in the comments to Dan Riehl's post "You couldn't say this," where he observes:

Bill Maher is sick of seeing Obama on TV. So are conservatives. But if a Right-side pundit suggested Obama giving a WH tour was akin to the television show "Cribs," they'd be fired for being a racist.

Victor Davis Hanson is on the same wavelength with his must-read "Just Make Stuff Up":

The problem in the next four years will be not just that the president of the United States serially does not tell the truth. Instead, the real crisis in our brave new relativist world will be that those who demonstrate that he is untruthful will themselves be accused of lying.

Enter, stage right, the CADS samizdat communicating sub rosa in the Riehl World View comments. Commenter JAL speaks for us all:

Amazing. I, too, thought I was the only one who hit mute or changed the news on the radio when I saw or heard President Obama come on.

Think some Tea Party signs to the effect of "Mute the President" might spread the word?

Careful what you commit to print, though. Big Guy may be watching.

Killing me softly with soft lies

The blogosphere, twittersphere and Fox News are all over David Letterman's gratuitous trashing of Sarah Palin, but frankly, my dear, we don't give a damn. Same old same old (see below). Above, the "Heart of the Republican Party" (in the provocative words of Chris Cillizza of the WaPo's "The Fix") strides across the stage at that big-tent Senate-House fundraiser the other night,

"Distorting history is not truth-telling, but the telling of soft lies," writes Charles Krauthammer on a must-read [psycho]analysis the "disturbing ambivalence toward [his] own country" demonstrated by President Obama's recent international "Moral Equivalency Tour":

Obama undoubtedly thinks he is demonstrating historical magnanimity with all these moral equivalencies and self-flagellating apologetics. On the contrary. He's showing cheap condescension, an unseemly hunger for applause and a willingness to distort history for political effect.

Krauthammer's thoughts recalled our own post of four years back on the dangers of tellig half truths, "I certainly can fudge what I say," illustrated with one of Chris Muir's insightful Day-by-Day cartoons, which we now republish for comparison and contrast:

"I can certainly fudge what I say"

"A man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth. But a man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it," says Claude Raines' Mr. Dryden in "Lawrence of Arabia" (screenplay by Robert Bolt, 1962), foreshadowing by two generations the sorry place to which the postmodern project has led many of our nation's Bush-bashing intellectual elites today.  Take Sy Hersh, investigativoid journalist extraordinaire formerly of the New York Times and most recently of The New Yorker. Chris Muir's cartoon, above, says it all. As Chris Suellentrop wrote in New York Metro yesterday:

There are two Hershes, really. Seymour M. is the byline. He navigates readers through the byzantine world of America’s overlapping national-security bureaucracies, and his stories form what Hersh has taken to calling an “alternative history” of the Bush administration since September 11, 2001.

Then there’s Sy. He’s the public speaker, the pundit. On the podium, Sy is willing to tell a story that’s not quite right, in order to convey a Larger Truth. “Sometimes I change events, dates, and places in a certain way to protect people,” Hersh told me. “I can’t fudge what I write. But I can certainly fudge what I say.”

Bill Clinton's "It depends upon what your definition of is is" comes to mind, of course, not to mention Dan "False but Accurate" Rather's characterization of Bubba:

I think at the core he's an honest person . . . I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.

Then the Boschian horrors of the entire postmodern project, from Rousseau on down, come spilling out. If you've got the time, check out Mark Brittingham's heroic "The Cold War is Not Over: Europe and the Post-Modern Left [from the comments at One Hand Clapping]:

Thus, the Post-Modern [sic] project enjoys both the energy of moral outrage and a philosophical cover for its errors that prevents anyone from undercutting the outrage.  Attempts to point out its philosophical shortcomings are nearly useless because the expressions of this philosophy are maddeningly jargonesque and impenetrable.  In this, Post-Modern Leftism is enormously attractive to any party having a gripe against the modern world.  Every failed state, every ethnic hustler, every ideological movement, every intellectual poseur, and every tyrannical thug has a stake in feeding and propagating this modern variant of Rousseau's Hydra.  Its energetic rise in modern Europe will prove to be one of the great ideological challenges of the 21st century.

We happened to read some of Rousseau in the original French in our undergraduate days, and even then, we knew "the noble savage" never existed except in the utopia-addled minds of reality-challenged intellectuals.

"That's the definition of blogging! :-) And twitter!"

Tiny gazes out from the front porch into the surrounding greenery this morning, seeing/hearing things — birds, perhaps? — we don't.

"That's the definition of blogging! :-) And twitter!" twittered The Anchoress in a eureka moment yesterday, responding to our own teaser tweet citing Schoepenhauer on informational and reputational "cascades":

There are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion.

Another elusive supper-campaigning action shot captured by our camera last evening.

Like a bird flying overhead, in a eureka moment of his own, Elisson twittered down upon our head a message of his own:

Opinions are like assholes: Everybody has one, and everybody else's stinks.

"One thing leads to another," as we wrote a couple of weeks back in one of our ongoing series attempting to explain the attraction of this "free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each others' updates, known as tweets."

Update: No need to explain the attraction of the denizens of Modulator's Friday Ark #247, now boarding.

GOP is back. A little bird told me.

"Whoever the party leaders selected for last night's [GOP Senate-House fundraiser] keynote could legitimately claim a modicum of heir transparency," observes the WaPo's Dana Milbank. "Hence the intrigue over the two would-be keynote speakers, Gingrich and Palin, each with an eye on a 2012 presidential run." See below for details. Above, Newt keynotes as GOPs "intellectual center" (Tucker Carlson's words) while Sarah the "It Girl" flashes a bit of political ankle. (C-Span screen grab, left, Getty Images, right)

"Like broken clock, TIME got it right. McCain's tweet at GOP funder was moment of truth: GOP = back!" we twittered in response to a Howard Kurtz twitter query this morning. More about the unanticipated effect McCain's tweet had on us, but first, Kurtz's query:

Is Twitter just a fun hangout, or do you buy the Time-cover argument that it's changing the way we communicate and get information?

We're with Ed Morrissey, who twittered back "Both." Take that McCain tweet referenced above. It was fun, informationally enriching AND had an energizing psychological effect that traveled instantaneously over the internet from the Washington Convention Center straight into our own heart and mind:

Great to see Sarah and Todd at the dinner tonight — nice reunion!

We just happened to have been on our Tweet Deck and caught it live. We missed the dinner speeches at the time but caught some of Newt Gingrich's keynote in wee-hour C-Span reruns. Good, substantive stuff that's music to the ears of anti-statists like us. Will try to catch up today. We heard emcee Jon Voight was a smash, "taking a bite out of the Obama administration," as Fox & Friends hostess Gretchen Carlson described his crowd pleasing welcome. There'd been a frenzied buzz amongst the commentariat about whether Palin would or would not show, would or would not speak:

Palin was invited to be the keynote speaker at the dinner. What happened next, however, is a matter of hot dispute. Party officials say she accepted and reneged. Palin loyalists say she was merely mulling the offer. Either way, the party moved on and invited Gingrich to be the substitute keynoter.

In recent days, Palin was reinvited to the event, but that invitation was rescinded over concerns that the darling of the conservative base would steal the spotlight from Gingrich…

Finally, a compromise of sorts was reached: Palin would attend the event and be given a seat of honor, but would not have a speaking role.

Instead, she would be speaking to a much bigger audience, having taped an interview with Fox News's Sean Hannity (viewership in excess of 3 million). It was scheduled to air at 9 p.m. — exactly the moment Gingrich was scheduled to begin his keynote address.

'Sounds like her handlers know how to put a little flash of ankle to good use. Press reactions this morning were all over the place, from the WaPo's Dana Banks's intoxicated "Keynoter or Not, Palin Steals Spotlight at GOP Fundraiser" to CQ Politics's soberer "Gingrich Trumps Palin at GOP Gala." Take your pick. There's room for both Sarah's gung ho charisma and Gingrich's equally gung ho gravitas in this big Republican tent. As Newt told Fox & Friends this morning, "I'm an inclusionist, not an exclusionist. I think it's more fun to be a majority." Besides, Sarah's a quick study and was heard seamlessly incorporating Newtonian ideas and phraseology — duly credited — into a speech she gave last week. Enter, stage left, a Palinophobe looking for dirt:

Newt Gingrich takes no issue with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for using his words in a speech she gave last week. In fact, he'd be happy if more Republicans espoused his ideas, a spokesman for the former House speaker said Monday.

Blogger Geoffrey Dunn, who is writing a book about Palin, accused the former Republican vice presidential candidate [in a Huffington Post piece] of lifting phrases and ideas at length from an article co-written by Gingrich in 2005.

Gingrich spokesman Rick Tyler said the accusation was comical. "If she used Newt's ideas in a speech and gave him credit for them, there certainly is zero issue," Tyler said.

As we twittered Jake Tapper in response to a tweet of his quoting that Gingrich spokesman:

Lefties fear charismatic Sarah, armed with Newt's words she agrees with & credits, will be unbeatable!

But woman does not live by Twitter alone. Video of the GOP Senate-House Dinner, start to finish, now available at C-Span:

Fmr. House Speaker Newt Gingrich stressed getting back to “first principles” as he addressed the 2009 Republican Senate-House Dinner. Criticizing Pres. Obama’s “utopian idealism,” Mr. Gingrich said the GOP now faces opportunities to regain the White House and Congress.

This just in on Fox from commentator Tucker Carlson, who acknowledges the excitement Sarah brings to any gathering but notes: "Newt Is emerging, I think as the intellectual center of the GOP. People are looking to him for ideas, and I think he's running for president."

Update: Maggie's links.

Roger L. Simon to write VDH screenplay?

"The key was that the initial planting of the vineyard involved a delicate balance," wrote Victor Davis Hanson in The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization. "The farmer had to be careful not to opt for either extreme, and instead to be aware that conditions adverse to full production ironically prove hospitable. So the growing practice of viticulture in the early polis —much more so than livestock raising or grain growing — must have reordered Greek values and contributed to the peculiar Greek notion of harmony and moderation … Hard work, not natural bounty was to be lionized."

"Should be required reading for all Pauline-Kael-bubble residents, from President Obama on up or down. Somebody should make a movie of it. Get Roger L. Simon on the phone at once!!! This could be box-office gold," we wrote (only half in jest) in the comments of Victor Davis Hanson's "Obama Versus the Way of the Universe," an eye-opening "farmer's tale" of the military historian's own mugging by reality at age 26, when — in a reversal of the "How 'Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm?" narrative — the gentleman farmer realized that trying to make nice to a neighbor willing to take advantage of a young man's naiveté was a loser's game. A few snippets to whet your appetite, and then be sure to read the whole thing:

I wish the President well, but he is butting up against human nature. And that is a fight one cannot win…

Only someone who has not been in the real world, but only marketed rhetoric without consequences (e.g., if Obama had a bad day organizing, or legislating, was he fired?) could believe such things.

In short, Obama reminds me a little of myself — at 26. I had left the farm for 9 years to get a BA in classics, PhD in classical philology, and live in Athens for two years of archaeological study — all on scholarships … I had forgotten much of the culture of the farm where I spent years 1-18.

Then after the requisite degrees I left academia, and returned to farm 180 acres with my brother and cousin — and sadly was quickly disabused of the world of the faculty lounge.

Then follows the coming-of-age drama of internalizing the tragic view of human nature and a word of warning to the starry-eyed Utopianists currently at the wheel of the ship of state:

Obama will come to his senses with his ‘Bush did it’, reset button, moral equivalency, soaring hope and change, with these apologies to Europeans, his Arab world Sermons on the Mount to Al Arabiya, in Turkey, in Cairo, etc., his touchy-feely videos to Iran, his “we are all victims of racism” sops to Ortega, Chavez, and Morales. It is only a matter of when, under what conditions, how high the price we must pay, and whether we lose the farm before he gains wisdom about the tragic universe in which we live.

A sojourn at an elite university, you see, can sometimes become a very dangerous thing indeed.

"This is one of your finest articles to date as it deftly sums up the incredible hubris of 'The One' and illustrates that credible deterrence — not good intentions and empty blather — indeed keeps one's 'neighbors' honest and leads to a tolerable existence," writes Scott in the first of dozens and dozens (128 as of this writing) of insightful comments to VDHs post. We'll quote a couple for you to savor and then urge you — and especially President Obama & Company! — to read 'em all:

Thrasymachus: The question is not will Obama come to his senses (he won’t) but will enough Americans come to their senses, and soon enough, to save our collective patrimony. Jimmy Carter never got it and never will.

Ron Kean: I’ve learned that those who raise their voice usually expect the same from you or see the obsequiousness as a license to continue rude domination.

Allison Aller: From when I first started reading your blog, it was your experience in agriculture that gave you baseline credibility to me. All your classical study was very important icing on the cake (and it sure enabled you to write well!) … but it is the dealing with the world as God made it — in nature and in human nature — that brings wisdom and perspective.

Great dramatic potential. What do you say, Roger L? Maybe self-avowed "no longer brain dead liberal" playwright David Mamet would be interested.

Update: Maggie's links.

"I just had the crankiness serenaded out of me. THX! :)"

"A rush of dopamine at our first Instalanche (above), followed by dopamine's falling at our first really nasty comment," we wrote back in March of 2004. We've noticed a similar if muted feeling of well being in the aftermath of Twitter responses (see below).

"SissyWillis!!! You made my week with that Jerry Orbach link," twitters tweeter nest mate OneFineJay, a fellow we remember from our early blogging days who had more or less dropped off our radar screen:

I just had the crankiness serenaded out of me. THX! :)

So many unexpected rushes of dopamine-induced pleasure out there for the tweeting. They call Twitter a mini-blogging platform, and the kind of rush of which we speak does suggest a mini-Instalanche kind of afterglow. In this case a Twitter meme called "#followfriday" that we'd resisted 'cause a list of links to someone else's faves without context or teasers is a yawner. But today we found ourselves being followfridayed in spades by some of our favorite twitterers so decided to tweet back in kind. One thing led to another. Then "Try to Remember" from "The Fantasticks," with its refrain of "follow, follow, follow, follow, follow, follow, follow" came to mind and lent us a playful theme to enliven our own followfriday tweets. For our non-twittering readers, apologies. Trying to explain what Twitter means to a blogger like us is an ongoing project. It's definitely in the eye of the beholder. Watch this space.

We were never "just" a Christian nation, fergossake

When it's time for the next meal, Tiny goes for the proboscis.

"If you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world," misdirected Magician-in-Chief Barack Obama on the eve of his latest Mea-Culpa-Middle-East Tour. Satirist-in-Chief ScrappleFace puts the President's fatuousness in perspective:

After announcing that the United States is “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world,“ with an Islamic population soon to overtake number 50 (Mauritania), President Barack Obama today boasted that the U.S. is also the second largest Jewish nation on earth, “and moving up fast.”

"Only Israel has more Jews than us," said President Obama, "and we're catching up. Like our productive American Muslims, our Jews are working hard to make us number one in the world."

"It [Touro] is not only the oldest Synagogue in America but also one of the oldest symbols of liberty. No better tradition exists than the history of Touro Synagogue's great contribution to the goals of freedom and justice for all," said President John F. Kennedy on September 15, 1963.

Presidential wannabe Obama tendentiously asserted in June of 2006:

Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation — at least, not just. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, and a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers (Have you noticed his pronunciation of plurals such as nonbelievers as nonbelieverss as opposed to nonbeliverz? It grates on our earss).

"We were never 'just' a Christian nation, fergossake," we wrote in the comments at Ann Althouse's post on the subject:

I'm thinking of the Touro Synagogue — "not only the oldest Synagogue in America," as JFK said, "but also one of the oldest symbols of liberty" — in Newport, RI, for starters. Obama gets away with it because they no longer teach the history of this Shining City Upon a Hill in our public schools, let alone our elite institutions of higher education.

Santayana continues to roll over in his grave as President Obama quixotically tilts at straw men.

Update: "According to the American Veterinary Medical Association, there are 81,721,000 pet cats in the United States, an average of 2.2 per cat-owning household (37,460,000). Does that mean that we are a nation of cat worshipers?" asks Connecticut Yankee rhetorically in the comments. As Gayle Miller responds, "With cats, being worshipped is a given to their minds!" A king can look at a cat?

Update II: Lots more objects of national worship at Modulator's Friday Ark #246.