A friend sent me this picture which anticipates a post I have planned:

Remember how upset the left-wing blogosophere got when they “exposed” then-White House correspondent Jeff Gannon as a “shill” for a conservative website/news agency?  They were upset because this supposedly closeted gay man was excessively deferential when asking questions during White House press briefings.

They just didn’t like he like he tossed softballs at the president. As if no reporters were asking tough questions of the president and his team.

With the election of Barack Obama, it seems the press has become a corps of Jeff Gannons.  The president-elect’s news conferences have become “scripted” affairs:

As ferociously as we [the press] march like villagers with torches against Blagojevich, we have been, in the true spirit of the Bizarro universe, the polar opposite with the president-elect. Deferential, eager to please, prepared to keep a careful distance.

The Obama news conferences tell that story, making one yearn for the return of the always-irritating Sam Donaldson to awaken the slumbering press to the notion that decorum isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The press corps, most of us, don’t even bother raising our hands any more to ask questions because Obama always has before him a list of correspondents who’ve been advised they will be called upon that day.

We reporters have earned our own membership in the Bizarro universe.

Who are we, after all? The ones rapid-firing at Rod Blagojevich with tough questions until we drive him from the room? Or the Miss Manners crowd, silent until called upon, quietly accepting that only a handful of questions will be taken at a time?

Deferential, eager to please? Doesn’t that sound like the criticism left-wing bloggers leveled against Gannon’s tenure on the White House presss corps? And he was just one among many. Now, they all seem to be deferential and eager to please. And it’s primarily the conservative (& libertarian) bloggers who take notice.

I guess deference and eagerness to please are only a problem when addressing a Republican president.  They couldn’t tolerate just one reporter deferential to President Bush, yet remain largely silent as the entire press crops bows and scrapes to the incoming Democratic president.

Have you voted yet?  Have ya?  Hmmm?  Hmmm?!?

Well, we don’t seem to have much chance this year — which is fine since I did not want to do an all-out vote-getting blitz.

But, if you get a chance, feel free to vote for GayPatriot as Best LGBT blog.  You may vote once every 24 hours.

By the way, it is a great chance to check out the other nominated blogs in the category!  There are some new ones to the list this year.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

It seems that whenever you see some Democratic strategist discussing the fate of the GOP, he’ll report that Republican ideas have been discredited and that, if the party is to have any chance of success, it will have to come up with an agenda different from the small-government ideas of Ronald Reagan which defined the GOP in the past.

But, those who claim that the American people rejected Republican ideas in the past two election cycles miss one fundamental thing.  Voters didn’t reject Republican ideas, but rejected Republicans who had rejected them.

The Bush Administration have been anything but an era of conservative ascendancy in terms of domestic policy.  Yes, the more conservative party did control the executive branch for the last eight years and the legislative for the better part of the George W. Bush’s first six years in office, but, as we’ve noted repeatedly on this blog, his team put forward an entirely conservative economic agenda.

So, it’s odd that the president-elect thinks that turning to the government to address the economy represents a change from the last eight years.  Does he think we accumulated the gargantuan deficits that he acknowledges face us “for years to come” by holding the line of federal spending?

While Republicans, as Clint Eastwood said, are “supposed to be libertarians,” under George W. Bush, they haven’t been.  Maybe if they had, the American people wouldn’t have rejected them.  (H/t Althouse.)

Upon learning that Marlon Brando played Mark Antony in the 1953 film version of Shakespeare’s Julius Cæsar, a role which Charlton Heston played in the 1970 production (reprising his 1950 performance), a character which Richard Burton played in the celebrated (& controversial) 1963 film, Cleopatra, during the production of which he began his romance with Elizabeth Taylor, I wondered which other screen icon had played the unfortunate Roman politician and soldier.

And then I wondered if perhaps Mark Anthony had been more frequently represented on screen than Julius Cæsar, the man he once served.  Rex Harrison played that great Roman opposite Antony in the 1963 film.  Sir John Gielgud played him opposite Heston (in 1970) and Louis Calhern opposite Brando.  He has more recently been represented by Ciarán Hinds in the HBO series Rome.

Has any historical figure, I wondered, been more frequently represented on the silver screen?

Perhaps, it was England’s Elizabeth I.  In 1999, both Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench were nominated for playing the monarch, though in different films.  Screen legend Bette Davis also played the virgin queen (twice) as did Helen Mirren, a performance which earned her an Emmy and a Golden Globe.

Or maybe her rival Mary Queen of Scots has been more frequently represented on the silver screen.  Samantha Morton played the matriarch of the later English monarchs opposite Blanchett’s second turn as Elizabeth in the 2007 sequel to her 1998 film.  The great Katharine Hepburn played the exiled Scottish queen in John Ford‘s 1936 production, Mary of Scotland, Vanessa Redgrave played her in 1971′s Oscar-nominated Mary Queen of Scots, a film in which Glenda Jackson played Queen Elizabeth.

Or maybe perhaps, Elizabeth’s colorful father (Mary’s great uncle), Henry VIII, has been the most represented historical figure on screen.  Burton played him in 1969′s Anne of the Thousand Days.  Robert Shaw played him in A Man for All Seasons (where Redgrave has a brief cameo of Elizabeth’s mother Anne Boleyn).  The fetching Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays him most in the current TV series The Tudors.

Or maybe it’s someone else.  So, I wonder, which historical has been most frequently represented on the silver screen?

UPDATE:  Having written this post in haste, I spaced on a number of flicks I might otherwise have mentioned, most notably The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex where Davis first played the 16th century monarch.

UP-UPDATE:  The consensus of the commentary that Jesus has been most frequently portrayed.  So, let’s eliminate him from the mix and speculate what figure after him was most frequently represented in film?

Warning of dire consequences if we don’t take action to fix the troubled economy, President-elect Barack Obama said on Thursday that while 

we cannot depend on government alone to create jobs or long-term growth . . .,  at this particular moment, only government can provide the short-term boost necessary to lift us from a recession this deep and severe. Only government can break the vicious cycles that are crippling our economy . . .

Only government?

So, he favors a massage increase in federal spending, yet provides no evidence that such increases have ever solved economic crises.  In the two most recent economic crisis of similar (well, actually greater) magnitude than the current one, the two presidents ousting unpopular incumbents who presided over the downturn, enacted vastly different policies.  

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt continued his predecessor’s policies of government intervention in the economy, but accelerated the increase in domestic federal spending.  Unemployment remained high throughout the 1930s.  

Ronald Reagan, as best he could with a House of Representatives controlled by Democrats, reversed his predecessor’s big government policies, held the line on federal spending and deregulated the economy.  Once his policies started taking effect in 1983, the economy began to grow and unemployment to decline.  Inflation was held in check.

It seems that like his Democratic forebear, Obama seeks to continue and accelerate his soon-to-be predecessor’s policies.  During the Bush Administration, the rate of growth of domestic federal spending has outpaced inflation.  It increased at an even faster rate when the president-elect’s party gained control of Congress.

Mr. Obama’s commitment to an ever greater role for the government in our economy seems to contradict some of his campaign rhetoric favoring a more efficient federal government.  Not just that, there’s more hope than change in his spendthrift stimulus package.  Experience has shown us that such projects don’t achieve their intended goal.  

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[A]s the Financial Times notes, social networking site Facebook has become an important venue in the Arab world for protesting the Israeli campaign, as well as a potent fundraising tool for supporters of the Palestinian cause…

Of course, Israel has plenty of Facebook friends as well. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported today how Matt Freelander, a young Jewish Londoner, organized a pro-Israeli demonstration through Facebook; around 1,000 people showed up for the rally. Radio Netherlands notes another Facebook site that aims to round up a million supporters of Israel. (Wired)

It makes sense that this is happening. Islamic terrorists have for years now been using internet chatrooms, message boards and even YouTube for connections and propaganda purposes. It looks like Israel has learned from this and is now likewise engaging the enemy online in this current conflict through such efforts as the IDF’s new YouTube channel.

– John (Average Gay Joe)

Five of the pirates who hijacked a Saudi supertanker drowned with their share of a $3million ransom, a relative said Saturday, the day after the bundle of cash was apparently dropped by parachute onto the deck of the ship…

The drowned pirates’ boat overturned in rough seas, and family members were still looking for four missing bodies, said Daud Nure, another pirate who knew the men involved. (Associated Press)

Huh. Such delicious schadenfreude. Almost too easy, but I’ll go with the obvious with a spiritual twist I guess: “Live by the sword…”

– John (Average Gay Joe)

Buchanan Accuses Israel of ‘Blitzkrieg’.

It was the Nazis who developed and defined the idea of a “blitzkrieg.”  Pat Buchanan has apologized for the Nazis.  Is he thus comparing the Israelis favorably to those whom he believed nobly defended their fatherland against the diabolical Churchill?

Well, in my view, Pat Buchanan’s just another loony figure comparing Israel to the Nazis, even if he’s not as adverse to the latter as most who make the comparison.

UPDATE to revise my explanation:  Buchanan thinks the Nazis were justified in invading Poland with their “blitzkrieg.”  That suggests he believes a blitzkrieg to be a good thing.  Ergo, if he calls Israel’s operation a blitzkrieg, he thinks their operation is justified.

I guess that means he supports it.  That doesn’t make him any less of a crackpot.  And the Israeli operation is anything but a blitzkrieg.  But, then again, Buchanan does have a problem with world history.

We don’t have presidential opinion polling for 1920 or 1921 so we don’t know what Woodrow Wilson’s approval ratings were when he left office on March 4, 1921, but I would wager that if Gailup had been polling the American people back then, that Democrat would have then had approval ratings rivaling those of the currently outgoing incumbent.

One measure we do have is the result of the 1920 presidential election. The year, James Cox, the candidate of Wilson’s Democrats had the lowest popular vote percentage (34.5%) of any major party nominee in a race with no significant third party candidate. He even ran behind Herbert Hoover in 1932 and Jimmy Carter in 1980, incumbents running for reelection during the two worst economic crises of the last century.

Last fall, the candidate of George W. Bush’s party ran a full ten points ahead of Davis.

In 1916, Wilson won reelection with a popular vote margin nearly identical to that of Geroge W. Bush in 2004, though the Republican did win a majority of the popular vote.

While both men, Bush and Wilson, leave office largely out of favor with the American public, both espoused an idealistic foreign policy, centered around the notion of promoting democracy abroad. Compare Wilson’s Fourteen Points to Bush’s Second Inaugural Address. The essence of those points, “free trade, open agreements, democracy, and self-determination” is not much different than the broad outlines of Bush’s foreign policy goals.

History has held Wilson in higher regard than did the American people when he left office.  And I daresay, it will offer a similar opinion of George W. Bush.  Both led our nation to victory in foreign wars and may well have been undone, in part, by their idealism.  Neither will join the pantheon of the great, or even the “almost great” presidents, but neither will they be relegated to the list of presidential failures.

In an excellent post on those intellectuals who ape Jimmy Carter in favoring more Israeli concessions as a solution to the crisis in Gaza, Jonathan Tobin finds them blind to reality:

Matthew Yglesias . . . takes up the familiar theme that the outline of a peace settlement is well known (back to Taba) and that all it will take to get back there is “ruffling” some Israeli feathers and giving Israel some of the “tough love” that Jimmy Carter dished out.

Missing from this analysis is, as usual, any connection with the reality of the other side of the equation: the Palestinians who stand by Hamas and their terror campaign. This blind faith in the peace process is almost religious in nature. All objective facts that might disprove its thesis are ignored.

if we continue to follow the peace process these intellectuals so consistently and assiduously espouse, we’ll only see, to borrow one of their favorite expressions, an ever-increasing “cycle of violence.”

Emphasis added.

UPDATE:  In another post, Tobin continues his excellent critique of the blame-Israel-first crowd of intellectuals: “. . . long before 1967 and ever since, ‘Palestinian self-determination’ has been defined solely by the urge to extinguish Israel’s existence.“  Read the whole thing.

It doesn’t seem that the incoming Democratic president is making much of the opportunity the outgoing Republican president gave him to reshape the political landscape, with the Democrats becoming the party of fiscal discipline.

As the Washington Post‘s Chris Civilizza put this morning in the paper’s blog, Obama Bets Big on Big Government.  ”Only government,” the president-elect said, “can break the vicious cycles that are crippling our economy — where a lack of spending leads to lost jobs which leads to even less spending.”

Oh, really?

Where has he been these past eight years, the eight years he so sucessfully ran against in his presidential campaign?  Does he think the trillion dollar deficits which, he warns, will become “a reality for years to come” happened because the federal government didn’t spend enough?

It seems that Obama’s economic policy is not merely an extension of the policies of the Republican president he promised to change, but an attempt to dress up those policies as some kind of noble stimulative endeavor.

On domestic issues at least, instead of change from the last eight years, we’ll be getting more of the same.  Let’s call Obama’s stimulus what it is, Bush’s economic policies with a face more friendly to the MSM. And a larger price tag.

For the past few days, I have been contemplating a few posts offering a kind of retrospective on the Administration of George W. Bush.   The more I think about this project, the more I realize how complicated it is.  The incumbent is hardly the caricature his opponents paint, yet he has blundered badly on a number of issues, particularly on domestic issues in his second term.

On the issue which will (likely) most define his term, particularly in the years immediately after he leaves office, he exhibited characteristics which reveal his greatest weaknesses and greatest strengths.  He stubbornly adhered to a failing strategy from 2004 through the end of 2006, then against widespread opposition from the political class (and even the military brass), shifted course, showing incredibly resolve in adopting a new –and ultimately successful–strategy.

And while I commend the president from learning from his father’s mistake and refusing to raise taxes, that’s all he learned from his father’s domestic record.  He didn’t fully understand that Ronald Reagan’s Vice President betrayed his predecessor’s legacy not merely by increasing taxes, but also by not holding the line of domestic spending.

It seems George Bushes don’t value fiscal discipline; domestic spending increased at a rapid clip during each man’s tenure in the White House.

And with a Republican Congress under Tom DeLay committed more to preserving political power than to promoting conservative policies, the party departed from the fiscal principles which led the GOP to electoral success in the 1980s on the presidential level and in the 1990s on the legislative level.  Our political fortunes would surely have improved had the principled Bob Walker defeated the opportunistic Tom DeLay in the 1994 election for House Majority Whip.

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[T]he authorities of the Catholic Church do not defend the existence of Israel — which its enemies want to annihilate, and is ultimately at stake in the conflict — with the same explicit, powerful determination with which they raise their voices in defense of the “nonnegotiable” principles concerning human life.

This has been seen in recent days. The authorities of the Church, and Benedict XVI himself, have raised their voices in condemnation of “the massive violence that has broken out in the Gaza Strip in response to other violence” only after Israel began bombing the installations of the terrorist movement Hamas in that territory. Not before. Not when Hamas was tightening its brutal grip on Gaza, massacring the Muslims faithful to president Abu Mazen, humiliating the tiny Christian communities, and launching rockets every day against the Israelis in the surrounding area.

About Hamas and its vaunted “mission” of wiping the Jewish state from the face of the earth, about Hamas as an outpost for Iran’s expansionist aims in the Middle East, about Hamas as an ally of Hezbollah and Syria, the Vatican authorities have never raised the red alert. They have never shown that they see Hamas as a deadly danger to Israel and an obstacle to the birth of a Palestinian state, in addition to its being a nightmare for the Arab regimes in the area, from Egypt to Jordan to Saudi Arabia…

Good analysis by Sandro Magister of Chiesa. Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Vatican remark likening Gaza to a “big concentration camp” enrages Israelis.

UPDATE: Israel’s ambassador to the Vatican downplays tensions over Cardinal Martino’s remarks.

– John (Average Gay Joe)

In between researching for my dissertation and writing this blog, I try to take some time each day to read a book related to my latest intellectual interests.  Currently, fascinated by the similarities one period in classical history, the fall of the Roman Republic, and my favorite period in American history, the founding of our republic, I am alternating between books on each period.

What amazes me is the sheer level of talent present at both those periods.  Just as there was a greater concentration of some of the most gifted American leaders in the revolutionary period than at any other time in our history*, so was there a similar concentration of wise (but not always noble) Romans in the last years of their republic–and the first of their empire.

Of course, the contrast is that one nation saw its republic extinguished as it gained strength in the world while the other saw a republic born in circumstances adverse to the development of a new nation.

About the conspirators who assassinated Cæsar now nearly 2,053 years ago in his Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician, Anthony Everitt writes that they had “no plans for the aftermath of the assassination:”

The Dictator had maintained, if only in form, the constitutional proprieties and Brutus and his friends judged that, once he had been removed, nobody would seriously try to prevent the Republic from slipping back into gear.  Their assumption was that the constitution would simply and automatically resume its function.  The Senate would have little difficulty in taking over the reins of power.  This was not an unreasonable analysis and was confirmed in the event–for the time being.

History shows us how wrong that assumption was be. You need a strategy if you want to win.  You can’t expect things to happen on their own.

One of the reasons George Washington succeeded where Marcus Brutus (and his fellow conspirators) failed is that he had a strategy for managing American losses in the Revolutionary War. And now via Jennifer Rubin, we learn that, in its current war against Hamas terrorists, Israel seems to have learned from Brutus’s failure and Washington’s success:

This time, Israeli military commanders are leading from the front, not trying to direct the infantry from television screens. This time, the military has clear plans, in stages, drawn up with a year’s preparation. This time, there is no illusion about winning a war only from the air.

The Israeli military has clear plans. It has a strategy for victory. Something which Norm Coleman lacked in the Minnesota recount. And John McCain in the most recent presidential campaign.

——-

*When I have a moment, I wil track down Joseph Ellis’ remarks to that end.

In the past few days, I really grew to appreciate the value of good customer service.  I had to run a lot of little errands, buying necessities for my apartment, a DVD or two for my entertainment, oil for my car, books for my education and gifts for nieces and nephews celebrating their birthdays.

I was amazed at the number of stores I visited where I received excellent customer service.  The friendliness of my reception made those tedious tasks less trying.  It was in stark contrast to the chilly service I frequently receive at commercial establishments in the Hollywood area.

The greatest irony of this recent cycle of errands is that the one store where I normally get the best service was the only place this time where the staff seemed indifferent to my concerns.  Perhaps this was because the owner (and his wife) was absent from the toy store where I stop first when shopping for gifts for my nieces and nephews.  (I have patronized this shop for as long as I’ve been in LA and will definitely return.  The man who runs the place was born to run a toy store.)  The teenager working there Monday night was clueless about the newest Thomas engine which one of my three-year-old nephews just had to have.

Thanks to an amazingly friendly woman at the Toys ‘R Us on La Cienega, I was able to find just that engine which he will soon have. 

The customer service which most impressed me was that of the folks at Techrestore.com.

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Today, while hosting his soon-to-be successor and his living predecessors, President George W. Bush said on behalf of the former chief executives and himself said to the president-elect, “One message that I have, and I think we all share, is that we want you to succeed. . . .  Whether we’re Democrat or Republican, we care deeply about this country.”

That said, four years ago, how many leading Democrats said they wanted Bush to succeed in his second term and acted to effect that wish?

Welcome Instapundit Readers!!

The last time I remember reading something on the left-wing blog firedoglake, I found it so offensive I didn’t think I’d ever return to the website.  Well, just a few moments ago, while scanning Instapundit, I followed Glenn’s link JANE HAMSHER: I want to play poker with Harry Reid to a post there which pretty much reflected my views on how the corrupt Democratic Governor of Illinois rolled his party’s leader in the US Senate.

Of course, Jane Hamsher has a style entirely different from my own.  And, I gotta admit, despite her politics, she’s a lot of fun to read, well, at least, in this post.

With his party enjoying the largest Senate majority in over thirty years, you’d think Reid would be having a field day as Democratic leader.  But, Hamsher shows how the ham-handed Harry has had his hat handed to him by the appointee of a hapless governor disowned by his own party:  “A seventy-one year old dude who hasn’t held office for 14 years, appointed by a crook, takes the Senate Majority Leader to the cleaners.”

Read the whole thing.  It’s witty and on the money.

Today, in announcing his choice of Nancy Killefer as “Chief Performance Officer”, President-elect Barack Obama echoed Ronald Reagan in describing the type of change he intends to bring to Washington:

We committed to change the way our government in Washington does business so that we’re no longer squandering billions of tax dollars on programs that have outlived their usefulness or exist solely because of the power of a lobbyist or interest group. We can no longer afford to sustain the old ways when we know there are new and more efficient ways of getting the job done.

Even in good times, Washington can’t afford to continue these bad practices. In bad times, it’s absolutely imperative that Washington stop them and restore confidence that our government is on the side of taxpayers and everyday Americans.

The president-elect thus promises to do what the man he will replace in thirteen days has failed to do, root out wasteful government spending.  But, even as he proposes to eliminate wasteful programs, he warns of “trillion dollar deficits [becoming] a reality for years to come.”

With his multi-hundred billion dollar stimulus package, he will make real those deficits.  His policies are thus at odds with verbal commitment to fiscal discipline.  By contrast, the Gipper, whose type of change the president-elect favors (rhetorically at least) came to office during similarly difficult economic times and proposed cutting rather than increasing domestic outlays.

Holding the line on federal spending and cutting taxes, Ronald Reagan helped promote an economic expansion which lasted for approximately a quarter-century.

I am delighted the the president-elect recognizes the need to cut government waste, an issue near and dear to the hearts of the Republican rank and file, yet neglected by the great majority of our elected leaders for the past eight, if not ten, years.  And I’m heartened that Obama “will ban earmarks” from his stimulus package.

But, it’s that stimulus package which undermines Obama’s rhetorical commitment to curbing government waste.  Should he abandon that stimulus package or at the very least offer one with corresponding cuts in bloated federal programs thus acting on this promise to cut government waste, he could reshape the political landscape, making the Democrats the party of fiscal discipline.

Given the GOP’s failure to curtial — or even contain — domestic spending, the President-elect has an incredible opportunity, yet he faces a Democratic Congress which favors more and more federal intervention in the economy and is not likely to look favorably on the elimination of any government programs.

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Given the barbaric fascination Hamas has with such things as crucifixion and the lead-up to this conflict, this cry from a grieving Palestinian mother over the loss of her daughter is understandable.

h/t – The Jawa Report

Make no mistake: Hamas is responsible for the violence and loss of life in this conflict, not Israel. They have tortured and murdered hundreds of their own people, Israelis and others for years now. There is no agreement, no ceasefire, nothing that they haven’t violated in their quest for Israel’s destruction. Peace cannot be had with a group like Hamas. This Palestinian mother is right: Hamas must be exterminated.

– John (Average Gay Joe)