On Cue

In the wake of its success, senior CBS news anchor Bob Schieffer denounced Donald Trump's campaign forcing President Obama to produce his birth certificate as, are you ready?, racist.  With friends like this in the media, does Obama really need a campaign manager for 2012.

By the way, did you notice how quickly the media went from derisory to indignant once Obama called a press conference and released a copy of the certificate?  If the "birthers" were worth mocking before, why not now?  Apparently, this latest episode really got to them, the media and the Obama White House, that is.

Certifiable

At long last, President Obama has released his birth certificate for public inspection.  (And, no doubt, the beginning of yet a whole new line of scepticism as well.)

Why now?  Why not three years ago when the controversy first erupted?

Some think it's a ploy, an attempt to make Donald Trump the hero of the "birthers" and thereby saddle the GOP with him as the Party's presumptive favorite.

I don't think they're that smart.  (Notice I didn't say "devious".)

How's this for a simpler explanation?:  There was a poll released just yesterday or the day before in which something like 38% of those asked were at least sympathetic to the "birther" challenge.  I suspect it occurred to the White House, as it occurred to me, that increasing numbers of people were puzzled by Obama's refusal to produce the actual certificate, even if they didn't share the "birther" suspicion that he wasn't actually native born.  That stubborn refusal was beginning to seem as weird as the "birthers'" demands.  With a weak economic recovery (if that), debt as far as the eye can see, anger over Obamacare, confusion over an inconsistent foreign policy, and a host of other non-accomplishments, "weird" was not a word the Obama Campaign needed attached to their candidate as things begin to heat up for the 2012 race.

Wish I'd Written That

In this "ode" to his good friend Christopher Hitchens, novelist Martin Amis describes him as a "rebel" rather than a mere "contrarian", a label one often finds attached to Hitchens.  In the course of making that distinction clear, Amis writes:

Most of us shakily preside over a chaos of vestigial prejudices and pieties, of semi-subliminal inhibitions, taboos and herd instincts, some of them ancient, some of them spryly contemporary (like moral relativism and the ardent xenophilia which, in Europe at least, always excludes Israelis).

I love that sentence and am extremely jealous of the facility with the English language that can produce it.

Anyway, read the entire piece.  That sentence is not the only part well written and it's interesting and insightful to boot.

Sign Her Up!

Check out this catch.

I'm humbled, and if you know me, that's saying something.

Stick a Fork in Him

He's done.  Obama, that is.

Or so thinks The American Spectator's Jeffrey Lord. 

Why?  Inflation.

Using the prices of grocery store items as a measure, Lord points out that a gallon of milk, for example, has climbed 28 cents in less than four months.  Why is this indicator different than the intricacies and extravagances of TARP, the stimulus package, buying GM, raising the debt limit, the threat of government shutdowns, etc.?  Because everyone, because everyone can see it, feel it, and understand it, whether they're politically aware or not.

While I'm eager to cheer, I'm afraid I'm not so sanguine.

Unemployment under FDR remained north of 15% for almost the whole of the 1930s and he was not only elected, but reelected, and then reelected again.  (And again as well, but that was during the War.)  If ever there was a chance for the GOP to make political hay, surely that was the decade.  But it didn't happen.

The truism, because it's true, is that you can't beat something with nothing and in politics the choice always depends on the alternative.  While The Sage would vote for almost any Republican alternative, including (pardon me while I cough) Donald Trump, I'm not sure a plurality of my fellow Americans feel the same way.
 
So, we'll have to wait...and pray.

Easter Reflection

This week, Holy Week, we Christians remember and celebrate the death and resurrection of the Lord, Jesus Christ.  Even now, after over two-hundred years of sustained secular attack, with a helping hand from liberal theology, in which the story has been either debunked altogether or reduced to mere metaphor, millions still stubbornly cling to and express their core belief that Jesus Chrtist is indeed Lord, that he, literally, "...was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary; suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead and buried; He descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead..."

We do this in spite of our uncountable sins and shaming hypocrisies.  How so?

Among the surest signs of genuine faith is an attendant confession that even that faith, most especially that faith, is itself a gift from God.  As the prophet Jonah cried from the dark, consuming belly of the beast, the beast that had swallowed him whole, "Salvation is of the Lord."

Happy Easter everyone!

The Vision Thing

It is comments like these at a fundraiser in San Fancisco that make me question not only the judgment, but also the patriotism, yes, the patriotism, of President Obama and the liberal elite of which he is almost perfectly representative:

"No matter who you are. No matter where you can came from. No matter what you look like. No matter whether your ancestors landed here on Ellis Island or came here on slave ships or came across the Rio Grande, we are all connected. We will rise and fall together. That's the vision of America I've got, that's the idea of the heart of America,...That's the idea at the heart of our campaign."

An America where we cannot make common-sense distinctions about who is and who is not a citizen, is no America at all.  And no America at all is, I'm increasingly convinced, what they are ultimately after.