Poor Little Rich Girl

If ever there was a picture of an angry, pinched, uber-liberal feminist, it's Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher the left-wing Nation magazine.  But for whatever reason, she never makes me angry in return.  On the contrary, her hypocrisy is so blatant that if I happen to listen to her opine on TV (rare) or read her column (rarer still) it always serves instead to make me giggle. 

That includes her latest salvo launched in the Washington Post against the country's conspiring cabal of rich people lead by Mitt Romney and the GOP, of course:  "Warfare Waged by the Upper Class" 

(What is it with Democrats and the "War against FILL IN THE BLANK" metaphor this year?)

The piece is altogether ridiculous, but one little gem of a phrase did catch my eye.  With a straight (but still pinched) face, she describes this first decade of the 21st Century as "an era of Gilded Age inequality."

Gilded Age inequality?  In a country where the "impoverished" have cell phones?

But again, it only made me snicker.

Take it for what it's worth, but according to Wikipedia at least, here's Katrina vanden Heuvel's early-life bio:

Vanden Heuvel was born in New York City, New York, the daughter of Jean Stein, an heiress, best-selling author, and editor of the literary journal Grand Street, and William vanden Heuvel, an attorney, former US ambassador, member of John F. Kennedy's administration, businessman, and author. She has one sister and two step-siblings. Her maternal grandparents were Music Corporation of America founder Jules C. Stein and Doris Babbette Jones (originally Jonas). Through her maternal grandmother, vanden Heuvel is a distant cousin of actor and comedian George Jessel. 

Vanden Heuvel graduated from the Trinity School in 1977.  Vanden Heuvel studied politics and history at Princeton University, writing her senior thesis on McCarthyism and serving as editor-in-chief of the Nassau Weekly.  She graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in 1981.

You know, just another working-class stiff like the rest of us.

Remember this the next time you hear or read Katrina vanden Heuvel (and many others like her) rage against the "Man" and maybe you'll laugh too.

The Least He Can Do

In a last-minute plea for the less than secure Catholic vote, Catholic Joe Biden appears in an Obama campaign ad laying a guilt trip on fellow communicants with among other lines this familiar one: "We call it Catholic social doctrine: what ever you do to the least of these you do for me.”

That's what ever you do Joe, not what ever you can force your neighbors to do and then take credit for yourself.

Told You So

Yesterday, save for FOX News Sunday, no other major network even mentioned Benghazi during their Sunday shows.

Also, I've now heard at least two reporters answer when pressed about why they were so apparently uninterested in Benghazi that if Romney himself wasn't bothered about it enough to raise it during the third debate, then it was not reasonable to expect that they should.

This is not only bias, it's corruption.

This is Driving Me Crazy

With a few, but still too few, exceptions, FOX News and non-FOX News media alike, along with politicians from both the Right and Left are slowly allowing Benghazi-gate to slip from the core immediate issue into a discussion about whether or not the Obama administration responsibly safeguarded the consulate.  A just assessment of that will take some time and to the extent that Democrats use that debate to charge that the issue has been politicized, they are correct to say so.  (Even though to say so is, cynically, part of their larger plan to obfuscate and/or change the subject.)

There will be plenty of time for the rest later, but at this point the central question is and must remain:  Why did the administration perpetrate initially and then perpetuate for weeks thereafter the falsehood that what happened in Libya was chiefly a consequence of a spasm of popular protest that turned violent over a purportedly anti-Islamic film?  Learn the answer to that question and the remaining questions will for the most part answer themselves.

Sick!

But not surprising.

You really must read this report of the substance of the condolences received from the President and the Vice President by the father of the former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods who was slain in the Benghazi attack last month.  However, that Obama is cold and aloof, and that Biden can be counted on to say something incredibly gauche is, sadly, not news.  

Actually, it was what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had to say to him that most grabbed my attention.  She said that she would "make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted."

Unbelievable.

Not only at that most private and personal moment did she still feel it necessary to repeat the lie, she repeated the lie that she, that they, that all of them, so have to believe.  That is, that what happened in Benghazi was ultimately our fault, America's fault.

Hell Hath No Fury

Please recall first that columnist and former Reagan and George H. W. Bush speechwriter Peggy Noonan enthusiastically endorsed Barack Obama for president in 2008.

Now read this, and note that "this" is just the latest in a growing string:  "When Americans Saw the Real Obama: Why the Denver debate changed everything"

I'm sorry Peggy, but the real Obama was there all along to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear,

I was already suspicious, but after that 2008 endorsement, I ceased trusting Peggy Noonan's judgment and, therefore, reading her column as well.

She is of a type, however, and therefore instructive.  A beltway bigot.  David Brooks is another.  More impressed with pedigree and style than substance.  Calling themselves conservative, but embarrassed by nothing so much as a conservative who really means it.

Oh well, they usually come around and I suppose we should welcome them when they do.

But I still won't trust her judgment.

Can the Center Hold?

The Left has for generations now waged a vigorous campaign against both the reality and even the idea of the modern nation-state, the political unit within which most of the world currently lives, the political unit that came formally into being in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War in Europe.

In this struggle, they've used every weapon at their disposal to include the promise of ever-greater physical and material security that would come with more universal forms of political identification and association.

The problem is that they over-promised.  Because those ever-more universal forms of political association have increasingly been unable to deliver the goods, they have also been increasingly discredited.

At the same time, in their determination to undermine the nation-state whatever the cost, they also foolishly took up weapons from time to time that actually served to undermine their own cause.  To wit, multiculturalism.  The success of politically correct multiculturalism has been more and more pressure toward balkanization, tribalization even.

Or, if you prefer, pressure for a return to the medieval political arrangements that immediately preceded the birth of the nation-state. Or so thinks Victor Davis Hanson and he's worth a read.