Last April, I wondered how Thomas Friedman gained the reputation as “one of the most, if not the most, thoughtful columnists in America.”  He never seem to offer anything more than the “conventional [liberal] wisdom with just a little bit of a twist.”  Given his appeal, his columns do aoffer a window into the liberal mindset.

On Monday, James Taranto joined some of his fellow conservative bloggers in quoting the New York Times columnist:

THE Associated Press reported last week that Fidel Castro, the former president of Cuba, wrote an opinion piece on a Cuban Web site, following a Republican Party presidential candidates’ debate in Florida, in which he argued that the “selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is — and I mean this seriously — the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been.”

When Marxists are complaining that your party’s candidates are disconnected from today’s global realities, it’s generally not a good sign. But they’re not alone.

So, Tom, you’re telling me that Marxists who silence dissent in their regimes are particularly attuned to global realities?  And, um, Marxists tend not to have the highest opinion of American conservatives.

Maybe that explains why American liberals have long been so enamored with Mr. Castro. Et tu, Thomas?

Can you imagine the reaction if a Republican candidate had penned the fundraising missive that Julianna Smoot, Deputy Campaign Manager Obama for America wrote. According to Bookworm who has “signed up” for Obama campaign e-mails in order “to see what the opposition is doing“:

Everyone’s got that special conservative in their life.

Maybe it’s your dad, who forwards you every chain email about the President’s birth certificate, or your neighbor, who just put up a Mitt Romney sign.

Dealing with these folks can be … frustrating.

This holiday season, we’re giving you a chance to have a little bit of fun at their expense. Let a Republican in your life know they inspired you to make a donation to the Obama campaign — chip in $3 or more today.

When you give to the campaign, simply enter your Republican friend’s email address and they’ll get a note letting them know that they motivated you to donate — which will surely make their day.

“Sure enough,” writes James Taranto who linked the above,

BarackObama.com has a special Web form for donors who wish to have “fun at the expense of a Republican.” Let’s say you’re a Republican and your 20-something daughter is an Obamabot. (Have you had a DNA test?) She makes a $10 donation to the president’s campaign, which sends her an email tweaking you–and your name and email address are now on a list of dissenters against the most powerful man in the world.

In his roundup, Jim Geraghty quotes Nice Deb who suggests this tack could sow divisiveness:

It’s not cute, and it’s not funny. Family members will fight and friendships will be lost over this. What person in their right mind would do something like this to someone they like? Wouldn’t it have to be someone they don’t like? So the Obama camp is purposefully egging on their followers’ basest instincts to hurt people during the holidays? (more…)

Bryan Preston looks at film critic Frank Rich’s column in New York magazine, quipping that it “should get him ridiculed and fired; no one who is so irresponsible with the hard facts of life has any place in the commentariat.” “The title,” Preston observes, “gives Rich’s game away. It’s ‘What Killed JFK?’ not ‘Who Killed JFK?’ as it should be.”*

Yeah, better to blame a right-wing bogeyman than look at the actual facts of the case and the background of the shooter. No wonder all too many on the left buy into the conspiracy theories. Lee Harvey Oswald was not a villain taken from liberal central casting. He, Preston reminds us, “was not a mainstream Dallas man. He would not have been a Tea Partier. Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist.”

So, liberals had to find someone else to blame:

They blamed Dallas for Kennedy’s death then, and [liberal talking heads] blame Sarah Palin and conservatives for the senseless shooting in Tucson this year. The facts of the story change, but the smear stays the same. Frank Rich blames “hate” for both, but the only hate on display is his own. It blinds him to the fact that Oswald was a man very much of the left, and that the Tucson shooter had no discernible ideology at all. But men of the left such as Rich prefer to assign collective guilt on their political enemies. Without pushing that collective guilt on others, their own lives have no meaning. They cannot convince themselves of their own superiority without an inferior other to hate. And collective guilt is a useful tool to intimidate.

Interesting how so many on the left so eager to accuse conservatives of harbor such (often intense) hatred themselves for conservatives. And their hatred is not based on things conservatives have done, but on things certain liberals like Mr. Rich (and those who blamed conservatives for the Tucson shooting) project onto them, as if conservatives in general must necessarily be guilty for the actions of one lone individual (often not even a conservative, see, e.g., the Tucson shooter or Lee Harvey Oswald).

Preston’s column really merits your time and further thought.

* (more…)

President Obama thinks the bad actions of a few individuals in Penn State’s football program is some kind of national crisis requiring the “entire country to do some soul-searching“:

President Obama called for the nation to do some “soul searching” in the wake of a scandal at Penn State University that led to the firing of longtime coach Joe Paterno after it was revealed one of his assistants allegedly sexually abused eight boys and the team did little to stop it.

“Obviously what happened was heartbreaking, especially for the victims, the young people who got affected by these alleged assaults,” he told Westwood One Radio in a Friday night interview, making his first public comments on the scandal.

“And I think it’s a good time for the entire country to do some soul-searching — not just Penn State. People care about sports, it’s important to us, but our No. 1 priority has to be protecting our kids. And every institution has to examine how they operate, and every individual has to take responsibility for making sure that our kids are protected.”

One assistant coach behaved very, very badly and should be locked up for the rest of his life. And those who knew and did not report this matter to authorities also deserve censure (at minimum) and perhaps punishment (depending on the laws in the Keystone State).

But, why must all Americans engage in soul-searching for a handful of individual bad actors?  Is it this liberal mentality makes social problems of individual crimes?

This is a very revealing comment about the president’s mentality.  He would have been better served to respond as did Pennsylvania’s junior senator.  By all accounts, Joe Paterno was a first rate coach who handled this situation in a, well, less than professional manner.

Because this matter has received such prominence, perhaps it is appropriate for the president to comment, but to fault those at fault and express the disgust most Americans feel at the charges, but we’re not the bad actors here.  And we don’t need engage in soul-searching for misdeeds we haven’t committed.

“We can,” Stacy McCain contends with examples abundant, “no longer tolerate media assertions that this is a non-violent movement.”  Media cluck-clucking and left-wing blogging notwithstanding, he’s not talking about the Tea Party.  In this case, he’s referencing violence instigated by the “Occupy” movement outside the “Defending the American Dream Summit” hosted by Americans for Prosperity where a 78-year woman was knocked down cement stairs.

And it’s not just in Washington, D.C. where the various Occupy movements — and their various members acting individually — have engaged in violence — just as many in the chattering classes, in highest dudgeon, warned us about the Tea Party.

Well, those in the chattering classes did exult in the rise of the left-wing movement, seeing it as the left-wing Tea Party!  Does seem like the Occupy movement has become just like the Tea Party of the left-wing narrative.

UPDATE: Calling this “The Worst Media Double Standard in Recent History“, Ed Driscoll writes:

In 2009 and 2010, the media trashed the Tea Party, using the crazied, hyperbolic language possible — and yet were envious of their success at the polls last November, and wanted a Tea Party of their own. Hence, Occupy Wall Street. Richard Fernandez asks a great question at the Belmont Club. Did the MSM’s intensely negative reporting cause them (directly or indirectly) to amp up the craziness at OWS to waaaay past 11 on Nigel Tufnel’s Marshall stack, or is that simply what happens when a mass of people with an ill-defined cause co-habituate in an urban Burning Man festival for months on end?

But regarding the MSM’s coverage, since so much of what passes for “liberalism” boils down to “It’s Different When We Do It,” the amount of double-standards in the MSM is bottomless.

Read the whole thing.

Yesterday, I started Thomas Sowell’s Economic Facts and Fallacies, underlining many passages, including this one:

. . . the zero-sum fallacy had kept millions of very poor people needlessly mired in poverty for generations before such notions were abandoned.  That is an enormously high price to pay for an unsubstantiated assumption.  Fallacies can have huge impacts.

Emphasis added.  In the margin, I wrote, “Obama’s ‘stimulus’: was there evidence it would work — where have similar programs tried & succeeded?”  Yes, we read economists explaining how the president’s plan was supposed to work, but they derived their explanations from Keynesian theory and not marketplace experience.  They reached their conclusions on unsubstantiated assumptions.  And we’re paying an enormously high price for that.

It does seem that Democrats and left-of-center pundits, not to mention intellectuals, make their cases on faith, er, theory rather than experience.  A few hours after reading Sowell, I caught something  on Instapundit which helped confirm that hypothesis:

JIM TYNEN: “Here’s what interests me: why do the journalists and professors so fervently believe in things they cannot possibly verify on their own? . . . Journalists who are not scientists, or professors who are not climate scientists, identify with the Knowledge Class.”

Tynen adds that “journalists and others on the low rungs of the Knowledge class defend the dogma. And of course this also goes for the dogma of Keynes, and multiculturalism, and much else.”  Emphasis added.

Last Thursday, a blogger at Ace of Spades quoted White House flack Josh Earnest’s contention that the president’s American Jobs Act is “the only plan before Congress that independent analysts confirm would create jobs right away“. And just who are those independent analysts, Josh? And did they show how the president’s plan was similar to other government programs which led to job creation or did they base their conclusions on economic theory?

It seems sometimes that so much of liberal theory is just that, theory, based not on how the world works, but on how some very smart people believe it works.

Ed Driscoll sums it up:

Regarding [Kate] Zernike [New York Times]‘s story on OWS, I love this notion of conservatives “trying to define the Occupy protesters before the protesters define themselves.” How does a movement not define itself before it starts? The Tea Partiers were very specific: stop spending, stop the bailouts, and once ObamaCare began to metastasize, stop that as well. Protests in the 1960s were highly specific as well: more civil rights for black Americans, let South Vietnam get clobbered by the North end the Vietnam War. How is it that Occupy Wall Street couldn’t articulate a similarly straightforward message?

Emphasis added.  Read the whole thing. (Via Michelle Malkin‘s Buzzworthy.)

————

*Er, maybe I should add a “yet to be” where he asterisk now is.

RELATED:  Interesting coverage of Occupy DC:

While they work out of their office by day and go home in the evenings, the rest of their time is spent at the square, protesting with dozens of others.

It is not clear what the Occupy DC movement is protesting — a declaration of grievances is being developed, though some organized a recent flash mob outside a reception for Walmart in protest of corporate greed.

Emphasis added.  Dozens of protesters?!??  Dozens?

One of the defining things about Barack Obama the presidential candidate was how much enthusiasm he generated among his followers. They didn’t just believe he would be a good president; they were convinced he would be a great one on par with Lincoln. Some swooned in his presence; there were even reports of people fainting when he appeared before them at campaign events.

People traveled many miles and volunteered long hours on behalf of his campaign. They became rhapsodic when describing his qualities (often imagined) and delineating his potential. Now, it seems this passion has cooled.

When talking with liberal friends (and family members), many of whom were gung-ho for the Illinois Democrat in 2008, I hear mostly disappointment. One septuagenarian one-time Hollywood heartthrob called him a “failure.” A mother on the cusp of middle-age wishes he would refrain from seeking reelection to allow a more competent Democrat to take his place. A man a few years younger than she says that while he has concerns about the Medicare reforms in Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, grants that at least the Wisconsin Republican has a plan for deficit reduction while Obama does not.

They’re not the only ones.  Yesterday, Glenn Reynolds linked this piece from Richard Cohen, “Barack Obama has lost the Hamptons”:

Over the Labor Day weekend, I went to a number of events in the Hamptons. At all of them, Obama was discussed. At none of them — that’s none — was he defended. That was remarkable. After all, sitting around various lunch and dinner tables were mostly Democrats. Not only that, some of them had been vociferous Obama supporters, giving time and money to his election effort. They were all disillusioned. Let me call the roll. I am talking about are writers and editors, lawyers and shrinks, Wall Street tycoons and freelance photographers, hedge funders and academics, run-of-the-mill Democrats and Democratic activists. They were all politically sophisticated, and just a year ago some of them were still vociferous Obama supporters. No more.

Even the press, Glenn quipped this morning, “has become noticeably less deferential of late.“

If I were not traveling, I would likely write a lengthier piece on this topic, but did a kind of double-take when I read the first paragraph in this Wall Street Journal editorial:

Among the core assumptions of modern liberalism is that future regulations have no more effect on the economy than future taxes, as if expectations don’t matter and businesses don’t prepare now for their costs tomorrow. President Obama’s letter to John Boehner yesterday is a classic of the genre.

Emphasis added.  When talking about the economy with liberal friends and acquaintances, I have often noticed how oblivious these interlocutors are to the cost regulations impose on businesses, particularly small ones.

Since the regulations serve a genuine societal interest (as defined by them), entrepreneurs would be eager to comply.  And any burdens created by government rules would be all but inconsequential.  Some liberals seem incapable of comprehending the costs of compliance.

UPDATE:  Sonicfrog looks into one recent example of federal regulation run amok:

. . . lets look at something very close to my heart….. Guitars! The recent raid by the Feds on Gibson Guitars is kind of mind boggling! It’s not due to smuggling cocaine in guitar bodies or anything like that… It’s about WOOD!!!!

Read the whole thing.  According to WSJ.com’s Political Diary (available by subscription), Gibson Guitars tend to conservative causes while rival Martin “leans Democratic.”  Latter uses “same sources of wood”, but wasn’t raided.  Wonder if we’ll see any coverage of these facts in the MSM.

Much hubbub over Vice President Biden’s latest foot-in-mouth buffoonery, this time delivered on the soil of our landlord. (When, btw, can we all agree he makes a bigger fool of himself and more often than Dan Quayle ever could have even tried to?)

If you haven’t seen his despicable (and, no I can’t think of a more appropriate way to describe his words) comments, hold your nose and press play:

Of course the most disgusting and blatantly offensive thing he says is that he “fully understand[s]” and is “not second-guessing” the brutal and vile and perverted One Child Policy and its ancillary of forced abortions and sterilizations in that Communist (and, by government dictate, godless) nation.

But as with his boss, look beyond his characteristically poorly chosen extemporaneous words and you’ll see a philosophy that drives him and the rest of the Left:

It isn’t that, as a practicing Roman Catholic, the Vice President finds abortion to be an abomination. It isn’t that he sees forced sterilizations and abortions to be an egregious trampling of civil rights. It isn’t that such policies and disrespect for innocent human life leads to a coarsening of society and therefore an overall degradation of its moral quality. Nah, in the face of those factors, Mr. Biden is not “second-guessing”.

The criticism of the policy Biden musters—and hopes, from which “maybe we can learn together”—is that they’re “in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people: Not sustainable.”

When faced with the evil of China’s One Child Policy, to people like Biden, the greatest flaw is that it won’t sustain a welfare state as he’d like to see it.

So much for rendering unto Caesar.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

In a post on Saturday, Victor Davis Hanson echoes something our reader Leah said two-and-one-half years ago when she quipped that “Obama worship is the flip side of Bush hatred“.  That sage scholar and pundit observes that soon after Barack Obama launched his bid for the White House, those who spent half-a-decade hating George W. Bush soon became enamored with Barack H. Obama:

Then the mad hatred turned to the mad worship. Do we remember the great campaign of 2008? The madness now metamorphosized, as an obscure, heretofore unremarkable rookie senator became the Great Savior who would deliver us from Bush. Newsweek declared him a god; almost nightly we heard of leg tingles and speeches comparable to the Gettysburg Address. To doubt was racist, to really doubt was un-American. But now there was no shrieking, shrill Hillary Clinton to scream that such dissent was not really un-American.

Via Instapundit.  Read the whole thing.

Bush-hatred, Obama adoration, two sides of the same coin.

Commenting to my New York gay marriage post which I only hacked out in a few minutes, having learned the news while noshing on some yogurt after returning from a date, Jim Treacher offers another wonderful window in the liberal worldview:

It’s always funny when a lefty assumes he knows your opinion and condemns you for it. Because YOU’RE the prejudiced bigot.

It’s always fun noting the prejudices of the left, rushing to conclusions about our posts, based upon assumptions about our opinions, assumptions often at odds with the very content of the posts to which they attach them.  Some just must assume that so political am I that on a Friday evening, instead of socializing with friends or going to the movies, I will assiduously follow the news, able to write up a thoughtful and incisive blog post the moment big news breaks.

Sorry, fellows, politics isn’t all there is to my life.  I don’t sit at the computer waiting for news to break or constantly checking for updates on my Smartphone.

Do find it amusing that our first commenter must needed to comment critically, just minutes after I posted while I was getting ready for bed.

ADDENDUM:  Sometimes our critics refuse to appreciate that we have passions not related to political blogging and, unlike some web-sites or news outlets, don’t have staff who monitoring the news 24/7 and able to blog on a matter at a moment’s notice.  I was bone-tired last night when I learned the news and realized I needed to blog on the topic (even though I was beginning to fade).  I had planned to spend today reading (as is my wont on Saturdays when I don’t go to shul) before heading out to an afternoon barbecue, but because of the events in New York, will be devoting a (far) greater part of the day to blogging than I had initially planned. (more…)

On Monday, realizing that nearly 500 e-mails had accumulated in my blog and personal e-mail accounts, I started wading through them, going through nearly 200 e-mails.  I did catch a few personal ones I missed, but most (fortunately!) were just links to (or summaries of) news and opinion pieces which I mostly skimmed over.

A number caught my eye, including this one from the globe-trotting Jamie Kirchick:

The subtitle struck me even more than the title, “The political legacy of opposition to apartheid has devolved into hostility toward the West — and sympathy for anyone else engaged in ‘anti-imperial struggle’”. It’s almost as if that statement defines many facets of American liberalism — and other left-wing ideologies — particularly since the Civil Rights movement.

All too many on the left saw segregation not as an ugly stain on a noble experiment, but instead as a defining aspect of America. In opposing that heinous system, many became hostile toward the United States and, by extension, the West. Their animosity is often furthered by the way the legacy of the Civil Rights’ movement is taught on college campi. Western civilization, our teachers tell us, is fundamentally hostile to “the other.”

No wonder some left-wing outfits show support for the ostensible representatives of other oppressed groups, even when those representatives are themselves hostile to those supposedly represented by the groups themselves. Witness Codepink. Or “Queers for Palestine.”

All too few (alas!) recognize that Dr. King drew on the very best of the Western tradition in crafting his (successful) movement to end segregation, frequently citing, in his speeches, our country’s founding documents and national hymns and regularly referencing Scripture and lessons drawn from his education in Christian theology.

Reading Glenn’s report of efforts to stop the Gaza Flotilla, I started wondering if those do-gooders eager to help those suffering under the Islamicist tyranny in Gaza had organized such aquatic caravans to provide relief to those suffering under similar regimes in Syria, Iran and Libya or in such impoverished places like Somalia.

Via HotAir.com

Representative Anthony D. Weiner has told friends that he plans to resign his seat after coming under growing pressure from his Democratic colleagues to leave the House, said a person told of Mr. Weiner’s plans.

Mr. Weiner, a Democrat, came to the conclusion that he could no longer serve after having long discussions with his wife,  Huma Abedin, when she returned home on Tuesday after traveling abroad with her boss, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Our long national nightmare is over.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Commenting on his exchange with Ali Velshi on CNN’s American Morning where that latter dismissed as a talking point his observation that “barring a sudden drop in the unemployment rate between now and November 2012, the unemployment rate for every month of Obama’s presidency will be higher than it was for every month of Bush’s two terms”, Jim Geraghty makes a great point which I may find echoed in the Gipper’s new book:

I suppose either you find the comparison of the economic performance under Bush and under Obama relevant, or you don’t. It seems that the pro-Obama argument relies on the notion that the Great Recession just happened, and there just wasn’t much Obama could do about it over a four-year period. (Of course, if there was nothing that could be done to really mitigate it, that more or less undermines the central argument of liberalism that sufficient government spending can create economic growth.)

Emphasis added.  Interesting how he put the meat in the parenthetical.

“Some of TV’s top executives from the past four decades may have gotten more than they bargained for,” Paul Bond writes in the Hollywood Reporter, “when they agreed to be interviewed for a politically charged book that was released Tuesday, because video of their controversial remarks will soon be hitting the Internet”:

The book makes the case that TV industry executives, writers and producers use their clout to advance a liberal political agenda. The author bases his thesis on, among other things, 39 taped interviews that he’ll roll out piecemeal during the next three weeks.

The Hollywood Reporter obtained several of the not-yet-released clips, embedded below. Each contains a snippet of an interview, usually some historical footage of the TV shows the interviewee was responsible for and, naturally, a plea to purchase the book, “Primetime Propaganda” by Ben Shapiro and published by Broad Side, an imprint of HarperCollins.

Shapiro, according to Bond, provides “anecdotes of bias against conservatives” including one involving Dwight Schultz, “best known for his roles as Murdock in The A-Team and Barclay in Star Trek: The Next Generation”:

The late Bruce Paltrow knew that Schultz was a fan of President Ronald Reagan. When Schultz showed up to audition for St. Elsewhere, a show Paltrow produced, to read for the part of Fiscus, Paltrow told him: “There’s not going to be a Reagan asshole on this show!” The part went to Howie Mandel.

“Most nepotism in Hollywood isn’t familial, it’s ideological,” Shapiro writes in the book. “Friends hire friends. And those friends just happen to share their politics.”

Interesting.  I have heard anecdotes about people going to Democratic fundraisers, not so much to support the various candidates, but to make connections with some of the town’s movers and shakers.  The clips which Bond has embedded confirm what many conservatives have long suspected, in this town, sometimes your politics are more important than your talent.

When hearing a number of liberal friends this week talking about “social justice,” it seemed they were trying to dress up their liberal political agenda in religious terms.  They talked about the need to help the less fortunate, but seem convinced that only state programs could provide the necessary assistance.

Thinking about such things, I recalled that Dr. Helen had posted on the topic when reading F.A. Hayek’s book Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 2: The Mirage of Social Justice.  Said blogmistress. . .

. . . never felt comfortable around academics who throw out the word “social justice” because it always seems restrictive and self-serving. Once I hear a group of social “scientists” employing the term, it generally means that are looking for reasons to favor some groups (almost always Democratic constituents), while excluding others.

So, she sees the left-wing ideal of social justice as a particular form of statism, asking whether “the current form of ‘social justice’ with its emphasis on government force for some special interest groups but not for others really justice?”  She has a different notion of social justice.  Just read the whole thing to find out what it is.

Ever since someone gave me Tom Friedman’s book From Beirut to Jerusalem in the early 1990s, I’ve been trying to figure out the journalist’s appeal. To be sure, he can write well and offers some interesting anecdotes from his “decade of reporting in the strife-ridden Middle East.”  But then, so do a lot of journalists writing about the regions they’ve covered.

Perhaps, it’s because the Mideast is such a hot spot that caused his book to stand out.  But, just because he writes well about aninteresting region doesn’t mean he’s a particularly gifted pundit.  I never really got his reputation as being one of the most, if not the most, thoughtful columnists in America.

Whenever I read his column, even when I do manage to finish it, I rarely find that he offers an original  – or even interesting — insight.  He tends to repeat the conventional wisdom with just a little bit of a twist.  It’s almost as if people believe him to be an insightful and original pundit because they’ve heard that he’s an insightful and interesting pundit.

Calling Friedman “one of the most overrated people in the world“, John Hinderaker cites Rob Long’s post on Ricochet reminding us of a 1999 column where the supposedly sage columnist warned of the coming demise of amazon.com.

And then there’s his infatuation with the People’s Republic of China.

To be sure, he’s not the first columnist to get something wrong.  Look, maybe I’m missing something, but it just seems Tom Friedman is not so much a penetrating and thoughtful analyst of world affairs as he is perceived to be just such a pundit.

RELATED: Hold the accolades on China’s ‘green leap forward’

How liberals argue:

Via Powerline.