Poor Hillary Clinton—literally. In her telling at least, she and Bill were penniless paupers when they left the White House in 2001. “We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt,” she sobbed in an interview with Diane Sawyer ABC News last night. “We had no money when we got there and we struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea’s education. You know, it was not easy.”

No, I’m sure it wasn’t easy to line up all those five- and six-figure speaking engagements, the book deals and, of course, Bill’s post-presidential pension and benefits. By the end of 2001, the Clintons had raked in around $15 million. Their net worth today is in the neighborhood of $200 million. Since resigning as Secretary of State in 2013, Hillary alone has earned some $5 million in speaking fees. Oh, the humanity!

Bill Clinton was famous for his finely tuned political instincts: “I feel your pain” has passed into history along with “We have nothing to fear but fear itself and “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” But masterful politicians are born, not made, and despite decades of watching her husband harp on America’s heartstrings, Hillary Clinton can’t whistle the tune. All thumbs, two left feet, blind in one eye and can’t see out of the other—the mind gropes for a metaphor to describe the clumsiness of her political technique. Yet there are scores and hundreds of Friends of Hil who insist that she’s the most brilliant, accomplished person of any gender in the Land of E Pluribus Unum. I suppose if they go on repeating this mantra day in day out, the Friends of Hil may finally convince themselves that it’s true…

Posted by tmg110 at 7:59 AM EDT

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Even for the pratfall-and gaffe-prone Obama Administration, the lies, confusion and incompetence surrounding the prisoner swap that returned Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl to US custody was breathtaking.

It was obvious from Obama’s demeanor during his Rose Garden appearance with Bergdahl’s parents that he expected praise for closing the deal that brought home an American soldier captured in Afghanistan in exchange for five high-level Taliban leaders imprisoned at Gitmo. But the President surely knew that Bergdahl was no hero, having very likely deserted his post and given himself up to the Taliban after growing disillusioned with the Army and America. Surely he knew that Bergdahl may even have collaborated with the enemy. Surely he knew that Bergdahl father was a Taliban sympathizer. And knowing all that, he must have realized that the dog-and-pony show in the Rose Garden was, essentially, a cover-up—and a poorly engineered one at that.

That Bergdahl’s actions were, to put it at the lowest, questionable is not some new revelation. From the day of his disappearance stories that he deserted to the Taliban have been circulating. The Army tried to silence these whispers by ordering the soldiers who served with Bergdahl to keep their mouths shut, even making them sign non-disclosure agreements. But now that he’s back in US hands, they’re speaking out. And to a man, they say that Bowe Bergdahl is a deserter who must be held accountable for his actions.

So why was Susan Rice (of Benghazi infamy) permitted to go on a Sunday talk show and declare that Bergdahl had served with “honor and distinction”? Of all the people who could have been tapped to defend the Administration’s, she was the worst possible choice. Then there was Propaganda Barbie—State Department spokesperson Marie Harf—saying essentially that the soldiers who served with Bergdahl don’t know what they’re talking about.

But if Bergdahl was a deserter, how can his exchange for five of the most senior and bloody-minded Taliban leaders in US hands possibly be justified? Congress—many Democrats included—are angry about the Administration’s high-handed actions, which appear to have violated a law requiring prior notification to Congress before Gitmo detainees are released. Veterans and serving soldiers of all ranks are furious with the President and his people. In short, the prisoner swap that brought Bergdahl home is a policy and public-relations disaster for the Obama Administration.

And this debacle can be pinned on Barack Obama personally: the product of his arrogance, disdain for the press and contempt for the American people. Certainly he believed that his fellow Democrats would carry his water one more time. Undoubtedly he believed that the servile mainstream media would run interference for him as they have so often before. Clearly he believed that the optics—triumphant Rose Garden announcement, beaming parents, hometown euphoria—would beguile the credulous American people and smother the unlovely truth. Wrong on all counts, Mr. President.

Well, at least Bergdahl knocked the VA scandal off the front page…kind of like treating cancer by shooting yourself in the head…

Posted by tmg110 at 10:04 AM EDT

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Here's the very model of a hanging curve ball: Maureen Dowd: “I became convinced that I had died.”

Ms. Dowd, the New York Times pundette who in her salad days was accounted a clever little girl, descended into bitterness and inanity during the George W. Bush years, when it seems she had trouble finding a boyfriend. Others in similar circumstances have turned for solace to substance abuse, but it seems that she’s out of luck there as well. The sad result of Maureen’s experiment with marijuana in the form of a pot-laced candy bar is related in this NYT column:

I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy.

I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall!

Posted by tmg110 at 8:50 AM EDT

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This article in the Atlantic is one of the unintentionally funniest things I’ve read I’ve read in quite some time. “There's No Such Thing as a Slut,” Olga Khazan breathless informs us as she plunges into a surpassingly puerile account of “slut-shaming” in a college dorm—as documented, natch, by a couple of sociology professors. We learn “that women practiced ‘slut-shaming,’ or denigrating the other women for their loose sexual mores. But they conflated their accusations of ‘sluttiness’ with other, unrelated personality traits, like meanness or unattractiveness. It seems there was no better way to smear a dorm-mate than to suggest she was sexually impure.” Now my takeaway from this factoid is that young women in college, who after all have just graduated from high school, often persist in high school-like behavior. Well, duh! But apparently it’s news to sociology and Ms. Khazan.

The article is fleshed out with much hand-wringing over the sad fact that upper-class girls from well-to-do families tend to look down on their classmates of more humble background. We are told that there are in-groups and out-groups— there is tale carrying and backbiting and snark and gossip in female college dorms—imagine!

I suspect Ms. Khazan realizes that the “slut-shaming” hypothesis is open to ridicule on the grounds of silliness and triviality. Ah, but she has us there—slut-shaming kills!

Perhaps no recent example of slut-shaming is as horrifying as the shooting in Santa Barbara last week. Before killing seven people in his rampage, Elliot Rodger vowed to “slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up blonde slut”—all while complaining that those very same “sluts” refused to sleep with him.

To [Professor of Sociology Elizabeth] Armstrong, the shooting highlighted that “slut” is simply a misogynistic catch-all, a verbal utility knife that young people use to control women and create hierarchies. There may be no real sluts, in other words, but there are real and devastating consequences to slut-shaming.

On the other hand, it may be that the Santa Barbara massacre was caused by the meltdown of an individual with a serious mental illness, and that “slut-shaming” had nothing whatever to do with it. I’m just saying.

Posted by tmg110 at 10:11 AM EDT

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The climate-change mob will try anything to sell its increasingly unpopular product, including this: Climate Change Doomed the Ancients

Writing in the New York Times, Eric H. Cline, a professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University, argues that for lack of green energy mandates or cap-and-trade regulations, the flourishing civilizations of the Late Bronze Age collapsed, leading to a long Dark Age. But wait…those ancient peoples burned no coal, oil or natural gas, drove no SUVs, flew no airliners, screwed in no light bulbs…

Oh, all right, Professor Cline isn’t actually criticizing the Hittite Empire for neglecting the development of electric cars. But he is arguing, however, that climate change could doom us just as it doomed the ancients. There’s just one problem: Cline is engaging in pure speculation.

Now it may well be true a changing climate had something to do with the Late Bronze age collapse. But as Cline himself eventually admits, “We still do not know the specific details of the collapse at the end of the Late Bronze Age or how the cascade of events came to change society so drastically.” Very true. So how can he then go on to say that “[I]t is clear that climate change was one of the primary drivers, or stressors, leading to the societal breakdown”? Beats me.

Nor am I quite convinced that “We live in a world that has more similarities to that of the Late Bronze Age than one might suspect…” It’s always possible, indeed, to draw parallels between present-day societies and ancient ones, for example the ever-popular equation of contemporary America with ancient Rome. But on close examination such comparisons usually turn out to be more plausible than solid; the US Senate and the Roman Senate are not really that much alike. And whatever similarities the modern world may have to the world of the Late Bronze Age, they’re trumped by one big difference: The ancients didn’t have science, but we do.

There are plenty of radical Greenshirts who would, if they could, dismantle industrial civilization and return humanity to some blessed state of nature—you know, like the Late Bronze Age. But if Professor Cline is right, wouldn’t that be futile in the long run…?

Posted by tmg110 at 8:57 AM EDT

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Remember Valerie Plame? Sure you do, because when she was outed as a CIA agent, supposedly by the Bush Administration in retaliation for her husband’s activities, Democrats had a meltdown. They and their media chorus touted it as the worst scandal since…since…well, since Watergate. Though no White House conspiracy to out Plame proved to exist, the Dems and the Left generally were not shy about using the word “treason.”

At the time she was publically identified as a CIA officer, Plame’s days as a field agent were over and she was working at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Thus, though her status remained classified, the leak did not really put her life in danger. Indeed, she became a minor celebrity and went on to co-author a series of spy novels.

But that was then and this is now:

The White House accidentally identified the CIA’s top official in Afghanistan on Sunday, sending his name to reporters traveling with President Barack Obama on a short Memorial Day weekend visit to the U.S.-run Bagram Air Base outside Kabul.

The name appeared on a list of officials briefing Obama on security conditions in the South Asian country in advance of a second round of presidential elections there scheduled in about three weeks.

The identity of the top CIA officer in Afghanistan was “accidentally” disclosed? Really? Are we to take the White House’s word for that? Is not a thorough investigation of this lamentable incident warranted? Oh, but wait, we’re not talking now of Cowboy Bush and Darth Vader Cheney but of He of the Perfect Trouser Creases, President Barack H. Obama and his clown car of an administration, from whom gross incompetence is only to be expected…

Posted by tmg110 at 7:56 AM EDT

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As you may know, Democrats including the comical Nancy Pelosi have taken to blaming George W. Bush for the scandalous state of affairs at the Veterans Administration. But do the facts bear out these accusations? Let’s look at the record, as laid out in this March 2013 article in the Daily Beast. Some highlights:

Under President Bush, the average wait time for veterans filing disability claims fell by a third—this despite the fact that 320,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars entered the system between 2004 and 2009. When Obama became president, there were about 11,000 veterans who’d been waiting more than a year for their benefits. By December 2012, though, there were 245,000 and the problem has worsened since then.

The numbers show that the Bush Administration did address the problems of the VA and brought about some improvement—though I hasten to add that 11,000 vets having to wait more than a year for their claims to be processed is not acceptable. But the numbers also show that despite his rhetoric as a candidate and as president, Obama has allowed an unacceptable situation to become catastrophic.

If this were the first or even the second year of his presidency, the President could not be really be held responsible for the sorry state of the VA. It’s certainly true as many Obama apologists say that the VA has long been dysfunctional. But this is his fifth year in office and the blame-Bush mantra simply doesn’t cut it. Obama and his Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Eric K. Shinseki, have failed in their responsibility to America’s veterans. They talked a good game; now they insist that they’re “madder than hell.” Well, isn’t that reassuring?

It’s just too bad that this further proof of Barack Obama’s light-minded incompetence had to come at the expense of America’s veterans. But if you voted for Obama, I hope you won’t be too quick to revile him. Have a look in the mirror first.

Posted by tmg110 at 9:56 AM EDT

Updated: Tuesday, 27 May 2014 12:02 PM EDT

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I'm pleased to announce that my short story, "But I Will Sit With You," has been accepted for publication by the online magazine, eFiction. Publication date: 1 June 2014. A subscription to eFiction is $1.99 per month with a 14-day free trial. Who knows? Maybe I based one of my characters on you…

Posted by tmg110 at 7:55 AM EDT

Updated: Tuesday, 27 May 2014 7:57 AM EDT

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The continuing unpopularity of Obamacare has lefties, progressives and liberals in a tizzy. After assuring one another for months and years that the President’s signature initiative would become wildly popular after it began showering benefits on the American people, they see that roughly 50% of the country still loathes it. How could this be? The answer comes in one word: racism.

That’s what the Washington Post’s Paul Waldman claims, and he has the proof: “[T]here is a growing body of evidence that people’s implicit or explicit ideas about race affect how they look at the Affordable Care Act.” Let me quote from the abstracts of studies done by political scientists and psychologists over the last few years…”

And quote them he does, as if such actually proves anything. Let’s look at one of the quotes that Waldman provides: 

This study investigates the relationship between individual-level support for the 2010 Affordable Care Act and nativism, the perception that a traditional American culture and way of life needs to be protected against foreign influence. The results of an analysis of a 2011 public opinion survey demonstrate that nativism was an independent and significant predictor of opposition to health care reform and that this effect held for both Republicans as well as Democrats, although the relationship is stronger for Republicans.

That such a thing as nativism, so defined, actually exists in America today as a broad-scale social attitude is, to put it mildly, a dubious proposition. First, just what is “a traditional American culture and way of life”? I have no doubt that some people who oppose gay marriage also dislike Obamacare. But also there are many supporters of gay marriage who dislike Obamacare, particularly among the young. And is it really the case that a conservative who opposes Obamacare on the ground that it represents a dangerous extension of state power is guilty of the heinous sin of “nativism”? In short, this study’s entry argument is bunk. It lumps together a wide range of beliefs—political, economic, religious, moral, practical—under a pejorative term, “nativism,” and concludes that opposition to Obamacare is therefore nativist/racist.

Or how about this one? 

This study argues that President Obama’s strong association with an issue like health care should polarize public opinion by racial attitudes and race. Consistent with that hypothesis, racial attitudes had a significantly larger impact on health care opinions in fall 2009 than they had in cross-sectional surveys from the past two decades and in panel data collected before Obama became the face of the policy. Moreover, the experiments embedded in one of those reinterview surveys found health care policies were significantly more racialized when attributed to President Obama than they were when these same proposals were framed as President Clinton’s 1993 reform efforts.

Or it could be that the people surveyed just relate more easily to the affable Clinton than to the standoffish Obama—though polling has consistently shown that Obama is liked personally. Anyhow, when Bill Clinton and his lovely wife were actually trying to enact health care reform in 1993, they faced the much same sort of opposition that Obama has faced. And while it’s no doubt true that opposition to Obamacare has intensified with the passage of time, that’s because unlike Hillarycare, it has actually been enacted.

Probably there are some few actual racists who hate Obamacare because they hate the black man in the Oval Office, but such people are fringe loonies whose attitudes cannot possibly explain why Obamacare is so widely disliked. And the explanation is simple, requiring no studies of “nativism” or “racism”: The claims made by the President and his cabal on behalf of the Affordable Care Act have proved to be false—indeed, they’ve proved to be lies. And of course, the program’s actual implementation has been disastrous, leaving people with an uneasy conviction that the worst is yet to come.

In short, the proof of racism-based opposition to Obamacare that Waldman presents is really nothing more than pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo, more revealing of the truly weird alternate reality inhabited by progressives than of any real-world phenomenon.

Posted by tmg110 at 11:11 AM EDT

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That ever-reliable Obama apologist, Ezra Klein, knows why his hero’s presidency has been such an embarrassing flop. It’s not that Obama oversold himself as a candidate. It’s not that he was unprepared for the burdens of the office or that ideas are just wrong. Nor was it the overweening hubris of a narcissistic jerk. No, the problem with the President is the presidency: Gosh darn it, but the office simply doesn’t endow its occupant with the power to get things done! That’s the thesis ofKlein's “The Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency, explained.”

The Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency, first proposed by Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan, is “the belief that the president can achieve any political or policy objective if only he tries hard enough or uses the right tactics.” In other words, it’s a straw man analysis. No informed and thoughtful person actually believes that the power of the presidency is “functionally all-powerful,” as Nyhan puts it. I doubt in fact that anyone really believes this. But the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency serves a useful purpose for the Obama claque—of which Ezra Klein is a card-carrying member.

Leaning heavily on Professor Nyhan’s notion, Klein argues that the power deficit of the presidency has negated all the brilliance and wonderfulness of Barack H. Obama. One wonders why he didn’t see this coming back 2007-08, when he and so many others in the mainstream media were swooning for Barry. One also wonders if Klein realizes just how unflatteringly his analysis reflects on He of the Perfect Trouser Creases. For if the history of the top job tells us anything, it’s that the presidency is what you make of it. Exceptional men (Lincoln, FDR, Reagan) succeed; decent, average men (George H.W. Bush) can do all right; but the flaws of some men (Nixon, Clinton, Obama) are so magnified in office that they fail in whole or in part.

Time and fate, of course, happen to them all. That overgrown adolescent Bill Clinton, fortunate that he did not serve in interesting times, was spared the worst consequences of his antics. George W. Bush, a resolute man of good common sense, was not so lucky and his presidency was turbulent. Ronald Reagan, facing a similar time of troubles, demonstrated the sure touch of a leader.

Klein waves away such fine distinctions, arguing that Obama simply couldn’t help but fail:

Presidents consistently overpromise and underdeliver. What they need to say to get elected far outpaces what they can actually do in office. President Obama is a perfect example. His 2008 campaign didn't just promise health-care reform, a stimulus bill, and financial regulation. It also promised a cap-and-trade bill to limit carbon emissions, comprehensive immigration reform, gun control, and much more. His presidency, he said, would be change American could believe in. But it's clear now that much of the change he promised isn't going to happen—in large part because he doesn't have the power to make it happen.

There’s a kernel of truth in what he says, of course. Every candidate makes some promises that, as things turn out, he can’t fulfill. But does this explain away the near-total failure, foreign and domestic, of Barack Obama’s presidency? Even the promises he did keep—health-care reform, a stimulus bill, and financial regulation—have flopped in execution. And does the power deficit of the presidency really explain Obama’s failure to grapple with the problems of the Veterans Administration health-care system, problems of which he was made aware as long ago as 2008?

It appears to me on the contrary, that Obama’s problems are the product of his personal deficiencies: (1) he’s simply wrong on a wide range of issues, from environmental policy to Mideast diplomacy, (2) he has too much vanity and self-regard to profit from experience and (3) he’s simply too lazy to do the work. But Ezra Klein can’t see this—probably because he doesn’t want to see it.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:30 AM EDT

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