It’s Wednesday, April 15th, Indentured Servitude Day 2015…but before we begin, courtesy of the WSJ, a timely snippet from…
A Letter to Günter Grass
Froman open letterto Günter Grass from British journalist Daniel Johnson in the New York Sun, Aug. 18, 2006, soon after the German writer—who died Monday at age 87—revealed that he had been a member of the Nazis’ Waffen-SS during World War II:
“…For nearly half a century you have been recognized by your country’s citizens as a moral arbiter, even (absurdly) as the conscience of Germany. In that capacity, you have sat in judgement on your fellow Germans, as indeed on America and just about everybody else.
Like your American counterpart Noam Chomsky, like countless writers and intellectuals of the left from Gabriel Garcia Marquez toHarold Pinter, you have worked hard to discredit the political and economic system to which you owed your success: capitalism. You did your best over many years to undermine the Atlantic alliance—the same alliance, incidentally, that liberated Europe from the tyranny of your countrymen.
During the Cold War, and now in the war against Islamist terror, you have frequently made use of your hard-won liberty to make common cause with its enemies. . . .
Now that we know how you began your career, with a thorough indoctrination in the Waffen SS, your lifelong loathing of the West takes on a new and sinister significance.“
A “lifelong loathing of the West”…making “common cause with” the enemies of liberty…working “hard to discredit the political and economic system to which you owed your success”; are we the only one wondering whether this letter was written to Gunther Grass, or…
…Barack Hussein Obama?!? Truth is, for the first time in her history…
And, to borrow a phrase from Sgt. Hulka’s favorite soldier, “That’s the fact, Jack”!
Now here’s The Gouge!
First up, it’s the Wake Up and Smell the Hypocrisy segment, courtesy today of yet another Dimocratic dissembler:
“Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick has joined Boston private-equity firmBain Capital LLCto lead a new unitthat will focus on investments aiming for financial returns as well as measurable social good. (Yeah…right; and Patrick, no doubt, will be working pro bono!)
Mr. Patrick, a Democrat and ally of President Barack Obama, left the Massachusetts statehouse in January after serving two four-year terms. In joining Bain, Mr. Patrick is taking a job at a firm co-founded by Mitt Romney, the unsuccessful Republican presidential nominee who preceded Mr. Patrick in the Massachusetts governor’s office…”
We don’t know which is the most hypocritical aspect of this melodrama: (a) that Patrick would join Bain after participating with his party in misrepresenting both Bain and Romney’s record there; (b) that Bain would hire him; or (c) that in its entire article, neither the Journal‘s editor nor reporter ever saw fit to mention…evenonce…the Left’s despicable and deliberately deceptive attacks on Bain and Romney. No hypocrisy to see here, folks…
…move along! Can a guy get any lower than callously and knowingly misrepresenting the circumstances of his wife’s death?!?
Okay, selling out one’s grandmother is right up there!
Then again, Mitt saw fit to call and congratulate Patrick on his new position; either politics DOES make strange bedfellows, or Romney’s ability to overlook not only Patrick’s hypocrisy, but his role in the character assassination of Romney’s wife is amazing. Let’s be honest: this just serves to prove Romney is a rudderless RINO undeserving of the opportunity Republicans offered him. And his attitudes, policies and lackluster campaign have given nothing to America beyond four more years ofHELL!!!
Next up, another bit of good news which further diminishes any chance of reining in Iran, which ties in nicely with The Obamao giving the world’s largest state-sponsor of Islamic terrorism The Bomb, courtesy of the WSJ:
“The Kremlin has formally lifted its own ban on the delivery of S-300 missiles to Iran, setting the legal groundwork for the possible Russian sale of a powerful air-defense system to Tehran.
The Kremlin posted a decree by President Vladimir Putin on its website Monday afternoon that formally removed the Russian ban. The move comes as world powers including the U.S. and Russia scramble to strike a final deal with Iran over the dismantlement of its nuclear program by a June 30 deadline…”
Since we’re on the subject of disasters of epic proportions, as Jim Geraghty notes at NRO‘s Morning Jolt…
Hillary’s Debut Was Terrible…But It Doesn’t Matter
Let’s get the bad news out of the way first.
If Hillary Clinton did nothing between now and Election Day . . . no interviews, no public appearances, refused to show up to any debates, taped no commercials or videos, and just sat in her house in Chappaqua for the next 20 months . . . she would still do pretty well. In fact, she might avoid some big mistakes! That’s the more extreme version of her (small-c) conservative, risk-averse, ball-control-offense strategy to come.
For perspective, in 2014, Republicans demolished Democrats in the House races. (This is a nice measurement because every district in America holds a House race, while only some states were holding Senate or gubernatorial races.) The Republicans won, 52 percent to 45 percent. So in a year where just about everything possible went wrong for Democrats, they finished with 45 percent. Mitt Romney’s 47 percent comment had a kernel of truth about the fairly high floor for a Democratic candidate.
What, you think a Hillary no-show campaign would get derailed by Martin O’Malley? Jim Webb? Lincoln Chafee, who insisted yesterday her foreign policy is too “Bush-like”? Come on. These guys aspire to “Seven Dwarf” status. At this point, they’re not even speed bumps. Absent-Hillary would probably still carry California, New York, Illinois, most of the West Coast, and New England. That’s about 183 electoral votes right there.
Credit the Democrats; they’ve built a political machine where the quality of the candidate isn’t really a factor. Their base is going to show up and vote, no matter what. The vast majority of the disappointed Hillary voters of 2008 turned out to vote for Barack Obama.
Thus, yesterday’s belly flop of a campaign announcement doesn’t really matter that much for her. She didn’t need a huge rally with thunderous applause. She didn’t need the dramatic live television coverage. A Tweet and video sufficed. (You know what was good about the video? Sure, it was a little heavy-handed, but it was about the voters, not her. “When families are strong, America is strong,” is not a bad tagline.)
Here’s the good news: Hillary Clinton is going to be a pretty bad candidate.The notion that she, with her $400,000 speeches to Goldman Sachs, is going to be the “champion” for “everyday Americans” (as opposed to part-time Americans?) against the people at the top is ludicrous. She won’t be able to hide from the press, and she tends to answer questions terribly, as we saw in her press conference about the e-mails.She is indeed a congenital liar, and a bad one. She’ll have at least one more big “sniper fire in the Balkans” style blowup in the next six months, count on it.
But by the end of the year, the Democratic base and the press — and perhaps I repeat myself — will have persuaded themselves that she is whatever the moment requires.They’ll convince themselves that she’s “lunch-pail Hillary” as a writer for The New Yorker insisted. If Russia and Ukraine are blowing up, they’ll convince themselves that Madam Reset Button will be the right choice to face down Putin. If the Middle East is blowing up, they’ll convince themselves that the architect of our intervention in Libya can secure our interests and bring peace to the region.
If there’s another VA- or Healthcare.gov-level failure of the federal government, they’ll convince themselves that Mrs. “What difference, at this point, does it make?” is the one to restore accountably. If it’s a cyber-attack, they’ll believe that the right choice to handle future threats like this is the woman who thinks Secret Service agents standing next to a server stop intrusions.
The good news is that she’s not going to be a good candidate. The bad news is it’s not clear she needs to be one in order to win.
Which is another way of saying, despite what the MSM would have you believe, this election is far from over, and Hillary’s coronation not remotely certain.
In a related item, the WSJ‘s Bret Stephens explains:
“Sometime in the 1990s I began to understand the Clinton way of lying, and why it was so successful. To you and me, the Clinton lies were statements demonstrably at variance with the truth, and therefore wrong and shameful. But to the initiated they were an invitation to an intoxicating secret knowledge.
What was this knowledge? That the lying was for the greater good, usually to fend off some form of Republican malevolence. What was so intoxicating? That the initiated were smart enough to see through it all.Why be scandalized when they could be amused? Why moralize when they could collude?
It always works. We are hardly a month past Hillary Clinton’s Server-gate press conference, in which she served up whoppers faster than a Burger King burger flipper—lies large and small, venial and potentially criminal, and all of them quickly found out. Emails to Bill, who never emails? The convenience of one device, despite having more than one device?
It doesn’t matter. Now Mrs. Clinton is running for president, and only a simpleton would fail to appreciate that the higher mendacity is a recommendation for the highest office. In the right hands, the thinking goes, lying can be a positive good—as political moisturizer and diplomatic lubricant.
What the Clintons pioneered—the brazen lie, coyly delivered and knowingly accepted—has become something more than the M.O. of one power couple. It has become the liberal way of lying…”
Fortunately, for both America and her eventual Republican opponent, Hillary’s a lousy liar. In fact, we’ve yet to discover anything at which she’s anygoodat all; has anyone?!?
We rest our case.
And in another blast from the Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty understandably wonders…
What CAN We Ask of ‘Able-Bodied Adults Without Minor Dependents’?
The New York Times suits up for another “heartless, cruel Republican governors slash food stamps” story, but once again when you read to the end of the story, the picture painted in those opening paragraphs doesn’t seem so dire.
Last year, the administration of Gov. Paul R. LePage, a Republican, decided to reimpose a three-month limit (out of every three-year period) on food stamps for a group often known as Abawds — able-bodied adults without minor dependents — unless they work 20 hours per week, take state job-training courses or volunteer for about six hours per week. Maine, like other states, makes some exceptions.
The number of Abawds receiving food stamps in Maine has dropped nearly 80 percent since the rule kicked in, to 2,530 from about 12,000. This time limit is an old one, written into the 1996 federal welfare law. But, during the recession, most states took advantage of a provision that allows them to waive it when unemployment is persistently high, which meant poor adults could stay on the program regardless of their work status.
Maine is one of eight states that qualified for waivers in 2015 but decided to use them only in parts of the state or not at all. And, as the economy improves, more states will cease to qualify for the waivers, even if they want them. The Agriculture Department estimates that 23 states will cease to qualify for statewide waivers in the 2016 fiscal year.
“It means life gets tougher for those childless adults who face barriers already getting back into work,” said Ed Bolen, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
See that last little bit at the bottom? Volunteer for about six hours a week.Six hours! That’s less than an hour a day! And remember, the people we’re talking about don’t have kids and don’t have jobs.
And remember, this is after the first three months on the program. So the state of Maine is saying, “If you sign up for food stamps, we will give them for you for three months with no requirements; after that, you have to work 20 hours per week, take state job-training courses, or volunteer for about six hours per week.”
How is that a draconian, unfair, or insufficiently sympathetic rule?
Given it’s enabled their prolonged grip on political power, it sure as hell was, and continues to be, to Liberals.
On the Lighter Side…
Then there’s this in the MSM Bias…WHAT Bias?!? segment:can you imagine even a single reporter abasing themselves like this…
Can you imagine even a single reporter abasing themselves like this to get a camera on Scott Walker?
Finally, speaking of the double standard in the Media’s coverage of Hillary, here’s an aspect of her first foray onto the campaign trail you won’t catch on the evening news:
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