sisu

Obama is Al Sharpton with a better tailor

Tiger lily, tiger lily, burning bright. Framed by Starburst Lilies, Tiny on the front porch this afta soaks up the rays in the aftermath of a mild morning Nor'easter that gave us a good soaking.

A little birdie told us. Notes from the twittersphere. Race to the finish:

"If you are a racist, everything is about race, twitters ConNews.

Hucksters' hope:

Is "THE RACE INDUSTRY" TOO BIG TO FAIL? asks SissyWillis.

The clothes make the man?

"Obama is Al Sharpton with a better tailor," sez we.

Moral equivalence separates "us" from "them" both ways:

"BHO has conversation w/ Cambridge Police Sgt. and still comes in front of cameras and says that the Sgt. AND Prof. Gates 'OverReacted.' BULL!" twitters OwenS2.

Two warring tribes, a selection of our own tweets:

"Obama has nothing but contempt for the "little people."

"Thrilling the way law enforcement brotherhood standing behind Sgt. Crowley against the vicious racialist attack of members of the 'race industry.'"

"The left's "critique" of the right = psychological projection."

Conman Aversion Derangement Syndrome (CADS) comes to mind.

Update from our imail correspondent:

Just caught up with Sisu. Am delighted that Obama's "God Damn America" Reverend Wright slip is showing.

A girl can't be too careful.

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.

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.

"It costs when if you they"

 

Babbler-in-Chief Barack Obama in his own words (see below for details). Generate your own Barack Obama Poster here.

Captain Ed Morrissey launches a new series at Hot Air, "Obamateurism of the Day." In response to his invitation, we've sent along a link to our recent post "TOTUS talks back," with the following teaser, transcribed verbatim from a YouTube video of candidate Obama's disastrous "town hall event" on health care last September, when the teleprompter malfunctioned, leaving the "soaring rhetorician" and  "brilliant speaker" babbling incoherently:

It costs when if you they just gave you gave treatment early and they got some treatment … It would cost ab- It would cost about the same as what we would spend over the course of ten years it would cost us ... Hold on a second. I can't hear myself. But I'm glad you're fired up though. I'm glad. Heh, heh.

That's our president! Heh, heh.

This just in: "Thanks, Sissy!," Ed writes back:

I may use this on Tuesday or Wednesday. I'm already getting a backlog on this stuff!

Meanwhile, the mainstream media continues to look the other way. Heh, heh.

Update: "If you ever need proof that the media is giving him a free ride, you've got it," snorts a disgusted Tuck.

Update II: Professor Reynolds is not amused:

I think these kinds of features are silly, but there’s no reason why the silliness should be one-sided, I suppose.

Lighten up, sir! A little silliness judiciously applied is good for the soul.

Rush Limbaugh is channeling our blog

 

Repub of image and caption from our post "So much corruption, so little time" last fall: "But I think it's fair to say that the scandals that we've seen, both legal and illegal, under the current White House and Congress, are far worse than most of us could have imagined," Barack Obama told fellow Democrats with a straight face last winter at a gathering designed "to shine a spotlight on the Republican culture of corruption and highlight efforts to clean up Washington and get back to the people’s business." (Photo unattributed) As we blogged yesterday, "For them, political posturing is all."

"Hi, Doll. LOVE the latest post!" writes our imail correspondent:

She: I love how the SISU blog taps into all seven lively arts. I'm so proud of OUR SARAH!

We: Wicked. She's true blue (red, actually)!

She: Naturally, she makes herself grist for the Hypocritical Left. God love her fortitude. She is EXTREMELY powerful, in all the right ways, and that is why the left fears and reviles her. She is POWERFUL by sheer dint of her being true to herself. THAT's what they can't stand, since it is terra incognita for them

"Democratic state Rep. Les Gara says he is shocked the governor would turn away money. Mrs Palin says she is acting in Alaskans' best interests." according to the caption of this AP photo of the Divine Miss P in the [Singapore] Straits Times.

As we wrote yesterday, "Democrats can't conceive of someone's acting upon principle. For them, political posturing is all." Rush was onto something similar in yesterday's broadcast [via egopnews.com] when he was talking about the difference between Governor Palin's brave, true-blue acknowledgement of the "hopes and dreams and concerns" she has for her own Down Syndrome child vs. the pale purple prose of President Obama's lame "apology" for making fun of Special Olympics participants on Jay Leno's "Tonight Show" Thursday. [We're no talk-radio fan but have been paying special attention to what Rush has to say in the wake of Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's anti-Limbaugh jihad.] Here's Rush:

I want to contrast two people for you. Do you remember during the presidential campaign how the media, the Democrats and the left, savaged Sarah Palin? It's expected. It's who they are. She was effective. She threatened them. She brought life and energy to the moribund McCain campaign. She had to be destroyed. That's the left's modus operandi.  We expect that. However, we have some people on our side who also think that they are part of the best and the brightest. [Cf. our mid-September post "If the shoe fits."]

They're smarter than everybody else, part of the New York-Washington media axis. They were referring to Barack Obama as elegant … People on our side said, "It's great to have somebody as smart as we are running for president. It's great to have somebody as well spoken as we are. It's great to have an academic, somebody from Harvard Law, somebody from the University of Chicago Law School. It's great to have one of us, a fellow egghead running for office," and these same people [Cf. our post "A little people, a silly people" on the cravenness of Northeast Corridor Conservatives,] said of Sarah Palin, "How vulgar! … How uncouth. How so … middle class. That accent! Oh! D'oh! I just can't stand her accent. She had the baby?" People on our side were saying, "She had the baby with Down Syndrome? No. Look at that! She's whipping these middle-American Republicans into a frenzy! This is bad. This is not how we're going to become a majority party. Sarah Palin? Oh, she's so vulgar." So, here's Barack Obama last night on The Tonight Show.

"Confident one moment, and then uncertain. I was excited, but then I was scared. Everyone worries about what the future holds for their newborn child," Sarah Palin told viewers in her March 7 address to the 2009 special Olympics. "I was shocked to learn of the comment made by President Obama about Special Olympics,” she said yesterday, adding “This was a degrading remark about our world’s most precious and unique people, coming from the most powerful position in the world."

They're still not getting behind Palin, but Peggy Noonan and other leading lights of the Northeast Corridor Conservative community are starting to have their doubts about the current occupant of the Oval Office:

These are the two great issues, the economic crisis and our safety. In the face of them, what strikes one is the weightlessness of the Obama administration, the jumping from issue to issue and venue to venue from day to day.

Are Noonan & Company onto something, or are they unwitting dupes of a deliberate "crisis strategy" masterminded by the Soros-seeded Obama Machine, a Cloward-Piven plot that "seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse"? We wrote about Cloward-Piven in our post "So much disinformation, so little time" last fall. Now Steve Gilbert of Sweetness & Light provides a tutorial with Discover the Network links to source materials and some provocative postulations of his own. Could it happen here?

"We are not requesting funds intended to just grow government"

"To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak," Miklós Perényi and András Schiff play Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata, D. 821. How sweet it is.

We can't stand being lied to, and that's what the current Leader of the Free World has been doing to us from at least December of 2006, when his "soaring rhetoric" started to fool some of the people all of the time and let him get away with calling us a racist. Thomas Sowell pegged him early on as a fraud who "knows what con men have long known, that their job is not to convince skeptics but to enable the gullible to continue to believe what they want to believe," and our toes have been in permanent curl position ever since. President Obama's shock, shock at bonuses having been awarded executives who led bailout queen AIG down the beaten path during the last period of time are but the latest example of the big lie that is his modus operandi.

More music to soothe the savage breast from Nora the Piano Cat, brought to our attention by our nostalgic lifetime buddy NH illustrator extraordinaire M.L. Driscoll.

When it comes to soothing the savage breast, there's no one like Sarah Palin, who just said no to "stimulus" cash dangled before the state she leads:

The Alaska governor says she’s only going to take up to 69 percent of the $930 million her state could receive … Rather than focus on education, for which she could get $170 million, or other government operations, the governor’s looking at shovel-ready construction projects. "We are not requesting funds intended to just grow government," Palin said, adding that Alaskans shouldn’t want the feds to "engineer" their future for them. "To me it’s a bribe. It’s here, take these dollars. But you’ve got to grow your government."

On cue "Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse said Palin's decision 'appears to be nothing more than political posturing.'" But of course. Democrats can't conceive of someone's acting upon principle. For them, political posturing is all.

TOTUS talks back

In the early-morning light Tiny goes for the jugular of a bag of "Dr. Pussum's Fancy Feline Elixir."

You may have heard that President Obama's teleprompter — AKA TOTUS (Teleprompter of the United States) — now has its own blog:

So why am I going public now, when for the past two years I've let others do the talking? Well, this is a thankless job, and I sure don't want to take the fall for communications missteps. But more important, I expect you'll be seeing a lot more of me over the next few months and years. Barack and I don't go anywhere without each other; we even complete each other's sentences … well, more mine than his, but let's not split hairs.

Worth the price of admission: TOTUS links to a YouTube video of candidate Obama's disastrous "town hall event" on health care last September, when the teleprompter malfunctioned, leaving the "soaring rhetorician" and  "brilliant speaker" babbling incoherently.

We'd caught a clip of the event back then but never heard a word in the press about it, natch. You can imagine what hay the usual suspects would have made of such a faux pas had President Bush been the speaker. But no matter.

It's a must-hear. When we clicked on the link this evening and the babbling commenced, Tuck — busy at his own computer across the room — thought it was a parody. No kidding.

Update: Tired of "bloviating, grandstanding, bullying political hacks with little to no understanding of business"? Head on over to Modulator's Friday Ark #235 for the paws that refresh.

"Part of my leftism was a sales pitch"

"You were such a pinko commie pig that you were once recruited by the KGB, is that true?" early-morning provocateur Greg Gutfeld asked Roger L. Simon during Fox News's fast-moving NSFW gabfest Red Eye the other day. "That's true, and I was scared out of my pants," shot back the mystery writer, screenwriter and CEO of Pajamas Media. Check out Roger's look of astonishment when the host conflates him with "the other Roger Simon," introducing our man in Hollywood as an "award-winning journalist and columnist for Politico.com."  What ever happened to fact checking?

"I'm an intellectual to an extent, so I read things through, but I didn't think things through," Hollywood apostate Roger L. Simon tells City Journal Editor Brian C. Anderson re the self-described "fast and loose politics" of his youth:

Part of my leftism … was a sales pitch, not in the most crass sense, but in the sense that Hollywood is a very competitive place, as I'm sure everybody knows, and you have to distinguish yourself in some way, like the kid who raises his hand in school and says "Pick me, pick me." I was trying to be, if not the most left kid on the block, one of the more left kids on the block because I realized that the executive class there sort of envied that …

I went to China in 1979, which fits in with the previous question because when I went to China, very few had gone, and it gave me a tremendous panache. So although I realized when I was there that I was in this massive jail, and I was anxious to leave at the end for sure, when I came back I soft-pedaled that. I even soft-pedaled that in a novel I wrote, Peking Duck — which I believe is still an interesting book because it gives a sense of what it was like there at the time — but I soft-pedaled it because I knew in Hollywood it would be cool for me to have been to China … because very few people had gone at that point …

In Roger's salad days an aspiring screenwriter signaled membership in the tribe of cool by cultivating commie creds, just as today's A-list wannabes in Hollywood, academia and the mainstream media [Do they still have that? --ed] signal membership in the tribe by — in Karl Rove's razor-sharp words describing "Obama's Straw Men" in today's WSJ — "continually characterizing those who disagree with you in a fundamentally dishonest way." Our Gramsci-sodden cultural institutions' recent bout of BDS comes to mind, as we blogged recently:

"To trash Bush was to belong," writes Debra J. Saunders, putting her finger on the primal tribal imperative that underlies the relentless scapegoating of our 43rd president by his political adversaries gadding the corridors of power these last eight years, together with their allies in the media, here and abroad.

It looks like Roger and we ourselves are on the same page. Googling a suitable image for our blogpost, we stumbled upon this RLS quotation from a National Review Radio interview we'd missed a couple of weeks back:

During the Bush era, Bush-bashing was like discussing the weather. And the assumption was that you hated Bush. And if it was otherwise, you wouldn't necessarily lose the job, but your chances went down 80%.

Back to that City Journal interview for one more important insight. "You talk about how every Hollywood star has a kind of 'Mini-Me' inside," prompts Anderson, "the public face that espouses liberal platitudes; they live differently or think differently in their private lives":

Well, it's one of my theories, and I think it holds true, that because Hollywood is so ruthlessly competitive — I think people can guess that it is because lots of people wanna be stars, wanna be writers, fame and fortune is there — people have to fight like Hell to get their positions, and they don't always do nice things, and they become like that, they become callous, and they become tough. They feel bad about that a little bit because people don't like to be that way so they create this "Mini-Me," like the Austin Powers Mini-Me, [who] goes around saying "I'm the most progressive person in town. I'm for the people. I love you," and then they shut the gate on their estate in Bel Air and tell their assistant to go get the dry cleaning.

"Democrat 'compassion' was never about the have-nots — however defined — anyway. It's always been all about 'feeling good about themselves,'" we wrote back in September of 2007 in another RLS-related post, "Simon says OJ dunnit":

"In a riveting narrative [apparently no longer available online], Roger puts his finger on exactly what's wrong with the liberal project":

Aid given to people — no matter who they are — when it is not earned carries with it a level of insult and denigration. It comes from on high to down low and carries with it an implicit message of lowness.

"Reader RJH … sums it up nicely in the comments," we concluded:

That's a good read, and I have heard several variations on that theme from others. Not so much OJ specifically but people that had been lifelong liberals that changed their beliefs after taking a long hard honest look at what affirmative action and other Democrat causes had done to the black community. The black family structure was the strongest in the country. Today it has been decimated by Democrat "compassion." I doubt they could have done more damage if they had tried.

 

"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously said, explaining "What I mean by that, it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do." Translation: Take the money and run when people are preoccupied, and you can get away with spending it in ways they would never agree to were they paying attention.

Unfortunately, now that our "compassionate" betters have seized control of the reins of power, they have no intention of letting "a serious crisis go to waste":

Stimulus Bill Abolishes Welfare Reform and Adds New Welfare Spending.

Yes we CAN "posture and bicker and resort to the same failed ideas that got us into this mess in the first place."

 

Update: Speaking of doing "things that you think you could not do," look, Ma, we're featured in City Journal's "CJ in the News," sandwiched between The Australian's "Grammar falls victim to the cult of Obama" and The Weekly Standard's "Lessons of Katrina."

Update II: "Just about everything [comedian Jim] Carrey poked fun at is now conventional wisdom for the far left," writes Ed Driscoll, who links in "Gore Almighty," a chilling revelation of how "a whole host of hairshirt envirowacko shibboleths" transmogrified in the short span of 15 years into politically correct orthodoxy.

"Timeless wisdom versus hopenchangy socialism"

"So how do conservatives hold on to power when the population has been trained for two or three generations of Left-tinged rule to reflexively expect 'government to fix it' — whatever it may be?" wrote The Barrister at Maggie's Farm presciently back in October of 2006 in what we called, in our own post on the topic, "a tour de force essay that puts its finger on what ails us." (Unattributed image of Maggie and Ronnie, deep in conversation, on a brisk walk through the woods at [presumably] Camp David.)

"I never liked soaring rhetoric, and coupled with creeping (leaping?) socialism, I like it even less," we wrote in the comments of Texas Rainmaker's inspired imagining of what a Reagan/Obama debate would sound like:

Timeless wisdom versus hopenchangy socialism.

We imailed the link to Goomp, who writes back "Excellent and scary." Roger Kimball has a transcript of exerpts to whet your appetite. Be sure to treat yourself to the whole thing early and often, a cautionary tale that resonates and rouses our better angels. Our own personal favorite is this little holier-than-thou lecture/sermon of First Lady Michelle Obama's from February of 2008:

And Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism, that you put down your division, that you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone, that you push yourself to be better and that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

"GAK. I couldn't even listen to the whole thing," imails our sis:

She: Good God, Ronnie must be spinning in his grave at how short a time it's taken to come to this.

We: I know. The phoniness of Obama's "soaring rhetoric" is what gets me . . . vs. the calm, measured rhetoric of OUR RONNIE.

She: "Soaring rhetoric" interspersed with plenty of "uh, uh, uh"s.

As Vladimir Lenin would have said, "The lie that an insufferable blowhard is a "brilliant speaker" told often enough becomes the truth.

Update: Maggie's remembers.

"Irresolvable conflicts" with Obama's handling of the economic stimulus and 2010 census happen

"I've been doing watercolors in my 'too much down time' and will send along 'The two that came out right.' What you won't see are the nine wrist slashers," writes nostalgic lifetime buddy NH illustrator extraordinaire M.L. Driscoll, sending along this totally awesome painting of the Stevens Farm in winter.

"We are functioning from a different set of views on many critical items of policy," NH  Republican Sen. Judd Gregg said in a statement released by his Senate office this afternoon as he "abruptly withdrew his nomination as commerce secretary Thursday, citing 'irresolvable conflicts' with President Barack Obama's handling of the economic stimulus and 2010 census." Halleluijah! Unlike recent Democrat nomination withdrawals, Republican Gregg's withdrawal has nothing to do with questionable tax or lobbying issues but rather, refreshingly, philosophical principles:

Sen. Gregg, 61 years old, is a former New Hampshire governor who previously served in the House. He has been in the Senate since 1993 and currently serves as the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, where he is known as a crusader against big spending …

In citing the stimulus and census, he said, "Prior to accepting this post, we had discussed these and other potential differences, but unfortunately we did not adequately focus on these concerns. We are functioning from a different set of views on many critical items of policy."

 

Here's Mikey's second watercolor that "came out right," a portrait of his pussycat, Pumkin.

So glad he figured that out before allowing himself to go down the black hole that Dick Morris calls "Hillary’s incredible, shrinking role." We'd heard that anti-Israel under-the-bus campaign advisor Samantha Power had been rehabilitated under the radar to become NSC director of "multilateral affairs." She's the gal Obama tut-tutted over for popular consumption when she rightly called Hillary a "monster" during the primaries. How refreshing to have a Republican just say no. Quote from a news conference live on Fox, with Gregg gushing over how wunnerful President Obama is, BUT:

For me I just realized as these issues started to come at us and started to crystalize that it just isn't a good fit.

If the shoe doesn't fit … Ed Morrissey is as breathless as we are and has the goods:

Wow.  This is an embarrassment for Obama, and might imperil the stimulus package, if Gregg has any influence over the waverers. The decision to strip him of authority over the census looks like the last straw, however — as it should have been.

Update: Barack Obama will take another big hit to his transition, but the man who really deserves the obloquy this time is Rahm Emanuel. The census ploy was a transparent attempt to hijack the data for political purposes, and pulling that stunt after Gregg’s appointment made Gregg look like a political eunuch. It was classic overreach, and it’s classic Emanuel.

Now he’s embarrassed himself, made his boss look impotent, and managed at the same time to damage Obama’s most critical piece of domestic policy legislation. If Gregg hits the media circuit to criticize Porkulus, his credibility as an Obama appointee will create a lot of heat on other Republicans and even a few Democrats to stop the runaway train of this bill and force it back into debate.

How sweet it is. There may be some life left yet in this old democratic republic. First came Sarah Palin, then Michael Steele and now Judd Gregg back in the fold. "Wonder why I feel jittery and jumpy? I am like a school girl waiting for a dance." AEI scholar Steven F. Hayward has the last word:

President Barack Obama's honeymoon period seems to have ended quickly. That's because Mr. Obama doesn't grasp the essentials of presidential leadership. Rather than making a compelling case for his economic policies, he has resorted to curt rebuffs, such as telling House Republican whip Eric Cantor, "I won." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the same thing the same day: "We won the election; we wrote the [stimulus] bill." This is the trope of a party that has lost its ability to make an argument.

"Mr. Obama and his team would be well advised to put aside the imperious FDR model and study Ronald Reagan's first 200 days in office. The contrast is instructive," Hayward continues:

One of the main themes that emerges from the IAP report is that Reagan and his team didn't assume that a landslide victory meant they had a mandate to do whatever they wanted. To the contrary, the report's authors, Richard Wirthlin and David Gergen, wrote: "The election was not a bestowal of political power, but a stewardship opportunity for us to reconsider and restructure the political agenda for the next two decades. The public has sanctioned the search for a new public philosophy to govern America."

Establishing a new governing philosophy, in other words, would require sustained public argument — something for which Reagan had an abiding instinct. Even in private sessions with Democrats, Reagan relished vigorous arguments about the welfare state. This was much to the annoyance of then House Speaker Tip O'Neill, who just wanted to cut deals.

Cutting deals vs vigorous arguments. Obama vs. Judd. Let the debate begin.