The number one album today in 1965 was the soundtrack to “Roustabout”:
Today in 1968, the complete shipment of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s new album, “Two Virgins,” was confiscated by New Jersey authorities due to the album cover. A revised cover was used in record stores:
The number one album today in 1971 was fellow ex-Beatle George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass”:
I’m going to guess that not many readers will read this immediately upon posting.
Perhaps that was the problem for the Beatles in 1962, when they went to Decca Records for an audition, and Decca declined to sign them.
Before that, the number one single (for the second time) today in 1956:
Today in 1964, BBC-TV premiered “Top of the Pops”:
Since we are running out of 2015 (thank heavens), it’s time for the tradition that goes back three decades, That Was the Year That Was 2015, the title of which is borrowed from …
It’s too bad the British satire “That Was the Week That Was,” which starred David Frost and Roy Kinnear, doesn’t exist anymore. Much of 2015 would fit into the satire realm were it not for the fact that 2015 wasn’t fiction. (Remember, fiction has to make sense.)
There are still supporters of Barack Obama, despite the fact that (1) the economy is immensely overrated (look at the U6 unemployment rate and personal income growth), (2) the U.S. is now a joke to the rest of the world thanks to our foreign policy ineptitude, (3) we now have terrorists running around the U.S., and (4) Obama’s response is that global warming and our own guns are at fault. Obama is working hard to surpass, if that’s what you want to call it, Jimmy Carter as the worst president in this nation’s history.
Islamist terrorism has now become a bigger issue than the economy based on polls. And yet we have on one side Obama and his minions who claim it’s not a problem, countered by those who want to shred the Constitution (you know, that First Amendment thing about freedom of religion) to fight (or so they think) Islamists.
There are also, bizarrely, Americans who believe that the way to fix our problems since 2009 is to elect amoral liar Hillary Clinton, communist Bernie Sanders, or Donald Trump, who makes up his beliefs as he goes along. It makes you think maybe Winston Churchill was wrong when he said that democracy was only the second worst form of government in the world.
The person to fix all of this — or so people think when they vote for their favorite presidential candidate — will not be Gov. Scott Walker, whose campaign began and ended this year without a single presidential primary vote being cast. It was uncharacteristic in that one thing that has always stood out about Walker is his preparation. His campaign was not prepared for a national stage, and neither was the candidate. Again, Wisconsin is overrated in national politics.
The First Amendment guarantees freedom of expression (well, for now, anyway, unless the Move to Amend people get their way and shut down expression they don’t agree with); it does not guarantee freedom of expression without consequences, or polite freedom of expression. But the vitriol with which some people respond to things they disagree with continues to escalate, continuing to lead me to believe that we are about one step away from assassinations and murders over differences of political opinion. This should not be surprising given our zero-sum politics (as you know, one side wins, therefore the other side loses). We are, in fact, more divided than any period in our history since the Civil War, with no way to reunite us. I would suggest just ending the U.S. and carving up our part of the continent into, to quote former Secretary of the Interior James Watt, liberals and Americans, but that’s impossible to do.
Personally? I got to announce college basketball and three state basketball championship games, two of which ended in state championships. That is hard to top, to say the least. As those of you with whom I am Facebook Friends know that our kids set swim-team records and performed music and theater. As last year ended minus one cat (Mocha, R.I.P. at 14) but plus one dog (Max the Basenji/pit bull/something else) though the latter wasn’t planned, this year ended plus two cats, one of which emulates the previous household cat by running around in the middle of the night. And professionally, the area where I work continues to generate a remarkable amount of news for the newspaper editor, though whether that’s a good thing (bad news is job security for journalists) depends on your perspective.
As always, may your 2016 be better than your 2015. I’m pretty sure our nation’s and world’s 2016 will actually be worse.
James Taranto concludes 2015 on a note that will make you bang your head against a wall (again):
The post-9/11 cliché “the terrorists will have won” now has a successor: “what ISIS wants.” President Obama himself employed a variation of the new slogan in his speech after the San Bernardino attack: “We should not be drawn once more into a long and costly ground war in Iraq or Syria. That’s what groups like ISIL want.” (We guess ISIS wants Obama to call them ISIS and everyone else to call them ISIL.)
Then there was this much-discussed remark from inevitable presidential nominee Hillary Clinton during a little-watched Democratic debate 1½ weeks ago:
He is becoming ISIS’ best recruiter. They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists. So I want to explain why this is not in America’s interest to react with this kind of fear and respond to this sort of bigotry.
It’s not clear what she imagined Trump was saying in these videos, but it is clear she imagined the videos, as the Blaze reported on debate night. But Mrs. Clinton’s fabrication obscures the real, albeit rhetorical, question—to wit, who cares what ISIS wants, thinks or says?
To be fair to Mrs. Clinton, it’s possible she got confused and mistook Trump for another baby boomer politician who has appeared in an ISIS video. As the Daily Beast reported last month: “A new English-language video put out by ISIS calls Bill Clinton a ‘fornicator’ and George W. Bush a ‘liar.’ ”
Our purpose here is not to cast aspersions on President Clinton (or Bush), merely to underscore the silliness of Mrs. Clinton’s attack on Trump. If he were in an ISIS video, would that be to his discredit? Well, does knowing Mr. Clinton was in such a video change your opinion of him? Should it change anyone’s?
If anything, you’d think being cited in an ISIS video would be a point of pride. It is to Rick Santorum: “The only person that’s been listed in ISIS’ magazine as an enemy of ISIS is me,” BuzzFeed quotes Santorum as telling Breitbart radio.
Mrs. Clinton’s Trump tall tale also raises a question about her own view of ISIS. In a speech last month at the Council on Foreign Relations, she said: “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” If that is true, why would ISIS be so concerned about insults against “Islam and Muslims”? Trump has also insulted Seventh-day Adventists, but no one worries about what ISIS thinks of that.
Unlike Mrs. Clinton’s claim, Obama’s assertion that a ground war in the Middle East is what ISIS wants does have a grain of truth. In a March Atlantic article titled “What ISIS Really Wants,” Graeme Wood reported:
The Islamic State has attached great importance to the Syrian city of Dabiq, near Aleppo. It named its propaganda magazine after the town, and celebrated madly when (at great cost) it conquered Dabiq’s strategically unimportant plains. It is here, the Prophet [Muhammad] reportedly said, that the armies of Rome will set up their camp. The armies of Islam will meet them, and Dabiq will be Rome’s Waterloo or its Antietam. . . .
Who “Rome” is, now that the pope has no army, remains a matter of debate. But [Australian jihadist Musa] Cerantonio makes a case that Rome meant the Eastern Roman empire, which had its capital in what is now Istanbul. We should think of Rome as the Republic of Turkey—the same republic that ended the last self-identified caliphate, 90 years ago. Other Islamic State sources suggest that Rome might mean any infidel army, and the Americans will do nicely.
But Obama’s next words contradict Wood’s account: “They know they can’t defeat us on the battlefield,” the president said. According to Wood, they believe they can defeat us (or “Rome,” whoever that may be). Obama’s view would lead to the conclusion that in spoiling for a war, ISIS is making a grave strategic error. In that case, why not give ISIS what it wants—and, to paraphrase Mencken, give it to them good and hard?
Here’s Obama’s answer:
ISIL fighters were part of the insurgency that we faced in Iraq. But they also know that if we occupy foreign lands, they can maintain insurgencies for years, killing thousands of our troops, draining our resources, and using our presence to draw new recruits.
So Obama starts with what may well be a genuine insight about ISIS’ strategic aims. But rather than use it to inform a new American strategy, he retreats into his own ideological comfort zone.
It gets worse. As it turns out, his ruling out of “a long and costly ground war in Iraq and Syria” is less than categorical. This is from a (secondhand) New York Times report of an off-the-record presidential briefing to columnists two weeks ago:
Mr. Obama said that if he did send troops to Syria, as some Republicans have urged, he feared a slippery slope that would eventually require similar deployments to other terrorist strongholds like Libya and Yemen, effectively putting him in charge of governing much of the region. He told the columnists that he envisioned sending significant ground forces to the Middle East only in the case of a catastrophic terrorist attack that disrupted the normal functioning of the United States.
As the Washington Post reported, that Times story had originally included the following passage:
In his meeting with the columnists, Mr. Obama indicated that he did not see enough cable television to fully appreciate the anxiety after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, and made clear that he plans to step up his public arguments.
“Just as the quote was beginning to make the rounds, it disappeared entirely from the the [sic] Times piece, without a correction or any indication that the piece had been updated,” notes Mediaite’s Alex Griswold.
“There’s nothing unusual here,” the Times later said in a statement. “That paragraph, near the bottom of the story, was trimmed for space in the print paper by a copy editor in New York late last night. But it was in our story on the web all day and read by many thousands of readers. Web stories without length constraints are routinely edited for print.” (We’d received an email to the same effect from Peter Baker, one of the reporters on the story, after we noted the deletion on Twitter.)
But as Griswold noted in a follow-up, the revisions included an addition as well as the deletion, leaving the final product longer than the original. “When forced to make an edit to a piece for publication, they managed to remove the single-most interesting factoid in the piece?” asks rhetorically. “At the very least, someone showed remarkably poor editorial judgment.”
True, though we’d argue the former quoted passage is even more “interesting”—quite a euphemism!—than the latter. If the president is correct that America’s “sending significant ground forces to the Middle East” is what ISIS wants, then his stated willingness to do so only in the event of “a catastrophic terrorist attack” amounts to an invitation for such an attack.
Given the president’s—and his preferred successor’s—strategic incoherence and detachment from reality, it’s little wonder that a new CNN poll finds “Americans are more likely to say that terrorists are winning the war against the United States than they have been at any point since the September 11 attacks.” That may be just what ISIS wants.
Similar to Christmas, more happened on New Year’s Eve in rock history than one might think.
Today in 1961, the former Pendletones made their debut with their new name at the Long Beach Civic Auditorium in California: the Beach Boys:
Today in 1963, the Kinks made their live debut at the Lotus House Restaurant in London:
The number one single today in 1966:
Intellectual Takeout reports:
Recently, the Pew Research Center released a study on how Americans view the government. Not surprisingly, public trust of government is at an all-time low of only 19%.
But there’s also low confidence in the American people. The survey shows that since 2007 trust in the public’s wisdom and ability to make political decisions has rapidly declined. Today, only 34% have confidence in the public’s ability to make wise political decisions.
What is driving such a decline in confidence? Could it be that many Americans are recognizing:
- The mediocre academic performance of today’s students?
- The number of ill-prepared college graduates who are entering the workforce?
- The decline in behavior, manners, and other virtues which are necessary for a thriving society?
Are Americans right to have low confidence in the public’s ability to make wise political decisions? If so, are we more at risk of losing our representative government to a more despotic leader?
Politicians and candidates never go far by deriding people who could vote for them as fools. That doesn’t mean many voters aren’t, to put it as nicely as possible, making bad choices in the polling booth and elsewhere, as defined by Brendan O’Neill:
What we are faced with in the 21st century is the very serious situation where all the objective underpinnings of human identity have frayed or died. All those things individuals once defined themselves through – nation, church, work, family – have corroded in recent decades. We live in a post-national era where shamefacedness about our nations’ pasts is preferred over questionable national pride. A phoney cosmopolitanism that explicitly eschews ideas of national identity is now promoted by our elites. Churches in the West are in constant crisis, reeling from one scandal to another, and seemingly lacking the moral resources to withstand the tidal wave of relativism. In an era when few know (or are willing to say) what is right and wrong, churches have lost their purchase, and shedded worshippers.
Work has been thoroughly disorganised, too. Physically, the Western workplace has changed, with traditional male jobs increasingly giving way to a softer, feminised workplace where short-termism and job-sharing are the order of the day; and morally, too, the idea of work has transformed, and now tends to be seen less as a provider of comradeship and identity than merely a means to make ends meet. Trade-union membership is stagnating; industrial action has all but disappeared. Few would now say, ‘I’m a lathe operator at a factory’, as an expression of identity, of self, as they might have done in the past; rather, it would be merely a description of how they make money.
And the family has become hollowed out, too. Yes, we still live in families, and they provide us with great security and meaning, a sphere in which we can be ourselves, develop ourselves, nurture the future. But relentless external intervention into private life has undermined familial sovereignty, and risks reducing parenting from a lived part of our identity, a key part of who we are, to a skill we must get right. The declaration ‘I am a father’ is now more likely to elicit looks of concern, advice from the government, and some supernanny hectoring, rather than admiration for that once serious identity as provider for and socialiser of the next generation. To be a father now is to require guidance, not to be the architect of guidance.
The foundation stones on which identity was built for decades, the national flags, religious faith, workplace meaning or class feeling through which we constructed a sense of ourselves, through which we discovered or defined ourselves, are gone – or are at least shaky, insecure, withering. And in such circumstances, our sense of self can become weak; we cultivate new identities that feel unfounded, unanchored, changeable rather than convincing.
That the hollowing out of the old capitalist order and its institutions nurtures a crisis of identity has been noted by various thinkers of the postwar period. In the 1950s, the American sociologist David Riesman, observing major shifts in the education system and the workplace, noted the emergence of a new generation that seemed to lack, as he put it, ‘presence’. They seem to have, ‘not a polished personality’, but ‘an affable, casual, adaptable one’, he said. They were ‘present-oriented’ too, unlike their parents’ or grandparents’ generations, and those in ‘the earlier stages of industrialisation’, who were more ‘oriented toward the future, toward distant goals’.
These observations were taken further by the American thinker Christopher Lasch in the 1970s, most notably in his book The Culture of Narcissim. As a result of major quakes in the spheres of work, family and society, a new kind of individual was emerging, argued Lasch: one who ‘needed to establish an identity, not to submerge [his] identity in a larger cause’. Lasch’s observation of a new climate of narcissism in place of the old ideal of the strong-willed individual engaged in the world – John Stuart Mill’s individual with ‘strong susceptibilities that make the personal impulses vivid and powerful’ – was based on a recognition that the disarray of institutional life did not free the individual to discover his ‘real self’, as the hippies claimed it would, but rather gave rise to a new generation with a very weakened sense of self.
Lasch was struck by how the unravelling of social orders and norms gave rise to individuals whose sense of self was ‘weak, ungrounded, defensive, insecure’. He referred to the ‘weak self’, the ‘minimal self’. He noted that ‘apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free [us] to stand along or to glory in our individuality’. Instead, it ‘contributes to [our] insecurity’. It leads the individual to ‘depend on others to validate his self-esteem’, until he ‘cannot live without an admiring audience’. Where the strong individual of the past realised himself through engagement with the world around him, the new minimal individual merely wants to be consoled by the world, flattered by it. In Lasch’s words, ‘For the narcissist, the world is a mirror, whereas the rugged individual saw it as an empty wilderness to be shaped to his own design’. Julie Walsh, in her 2014 book Narcissism and Its Discontents, describes the Laschian distinction between the post-Enlightenment idea of the individual and the postwar weakened, narcissistic self as a difference in attitudes to, or more fundamentally relationships with, the external world: the former sees the world as ‘a wilderness to be shaped by the subject’s own design’; the latter seeks only ‘self-consolation’ from his surroundings. The former is a subject, using thought and conviction to engage and become; the latter is an object requiring moral massaging from others for his very survival.
This desire to treat the world as a mirror, as a thing that must validate our self-esteem, is far more pronounced today than it was in the 1970s. The cult of self-identification, the insistence that grammar, education and institutions reorganise themselves around what individuals feel themselves to be, takes to the extreme the reduction of public life to the level of mere validator for insecure individuals. Lasch’s work also helps us to see how phoney is the freedom claimed by those who ‘identify as’. They frequently insist that they’re liberating themselves from outdated structures and social expectations. They pose as harbingers of a new and daring way of life, overturning everything about the old order, from gender to language, family life to social attitudes. This is false for two reasons. First, because what they present as their self-willed rebellion against and undermining of the old social, moral and sexual order is in fact a long drawn-out process of capitalist and institutional decay that has called into question almost everything Western societies once took for granted. And it was authored not by them but by various profound historical events and developments. They are really prettifying social and moral crises, standing on the rubble of the West’s decayed sense of itself and declaring: ‘We did this.’ And secondly, the freedom promised by the new narrow self-cultivation of identity is shallow indeed; in fact, it is not freedom at all.
The new identitarians, or self-identifiers, might technically be liberated from old social pressures, gender norms and moral expectations – though it’s more accurate to say that those things fell apart rather than the identitarians having broken free of them – but they have become locked into new and even more insidious relationships of dependency. Their need for constant validation, for self-consolation, for an ‘admiring audience’, means that while they may be free of past, burdensome social expectations, they have become psychic slaves. They are dependent upon the recognition of others, especially officialdom. The frenetic subjectivity of their identity creation disguises the extent to which they lack any sense of genuine human subjectivity – as actors in and on and through the world – and instead have become objects of the therapeutic industry, maintained and even directed by the approval of institutions and experts. …
Where earlier celebrators of the individual emphasised our capacity for autonomy and for governing our own minds and sense of ourselves, today’s self-identifiers cannot exist without the blessing of new forms of therapeutic authority. Mill’s view of the strong individual was a creature who used ‘observation to see, reasoning and judgement to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision’. Contrast that with today’s self-indentifiers who claim words wound, that individuals are vulnerable, that, in the words of one, ‘our mental safety is threatened by those who question our right to exist’.
Another example that change and progress are not necessarily synonyms.
President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign was built on the claim that he was not just tough on terrorists, but also he was successful in fighting them. “President Obama has placed the killing of Osama bin Laden at the center of his reelection effort,” began one Washington Post story about the effort.
Vice President Joe Biden was sent out on the campaign trail to repeat the mantra daily: “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive!”
And it wasn’t just bin Laden. The campaign wanted to emphasize how successful Obama’s strategy was when it came to containing Islamist terrorism. Throughout the 2012 campaign, Obama described al Qaeda as being “on the path to defeat” or “decimated.” One media outlet counted 32 instances of him saying this even after the al Qaeda-linked attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.
At a campaign stop in Colorado, he said, “Four years ago, I promised to end the war in Iraq — and we did. I said we’d wind down the war in Afghanistan — and we are. And while a new tower rises above the New York skyline, al Qaeda is on the path to defeat, and Osama bin Laden is dead.”
A seven-minute video that made the case for re-electing Obama includes the now-even-more-outlandish promise that 32 million uninsured Americans would be covered under Obamacare by 2016, along with various other domestic claims. The foreign policy section touted an Obama speech where he said, “and now the war in Iraq is over,” and “for nearly nine years, our nation has been at war in Iraq. As your Commander-in-Chief and on behalf of a grateful nation, I’m finally proud to say these two words, ‘Welcome home.’” Graphics that read, “Iraq War Ended,” and “Libya Liberated” flashed across the screen.The media carried the message forward. Al Qaeda was on the run. When the GOP presidential nominee talked about Russia being a major geopolitical threat, Obama chided him: “
The media carried the message forward. Al Qaeda was on the run. When the GOP presidential nominee talked about Russia being a major geopolitical threat, Obama chided him: “The 1980s are calling, they want their foreign policy back.” Snap! Zing! The media loved it. They bought the claim that Benghazi was not an orchestrated, successful, Islamist terror attack so much as a very good reason to re-evaluate the First Amendment in the U.S. They bought the Sunday morning show talking points and carried the candidate to victory.
Cut to not even two weeks ago when 14 Americans were brutally killed in San Bernardino, California, and another 22 injured by Islamist terrorists Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik. This was the deadliest such terror attack on American soil since September 11, 2001.
There has been a smattering of in-depth media coverage in the aftermath, including local reporting by the Los Angeles Times, and some solid investigations into the federal bureaucracy’s inability to prevent these attacks byThe New York Times. But you’d be forgiven for darkly laughing at one wag’s observation from Twitter:
“How The Murder of 14 American Civilians on Our Own Soil Doesn’t Reflect Badly On Obama In Any Way Whatsoever” ~ every article today
Will Antonin (@Will_Antonin) December 7, 2015
Indeed! The media have seemed willing to go in any direction but there. Maybe the problem is people praying to God for mercy, some with actual jobs in the media suggested. Others went to their quasi-religious discussions of gun control. Many have stayed there. Still others have responded to Donald Trump’s every utterance with codependent yelps and squeals. Anywhere, anywhere, but a discussion of Obama’s handling of national security as it relates to Islamist terrorists. Can you even imagine such journalistic avoidance under the Bush administration? Particularly, seven long years into the Bush administration? …
Whenever he talked about Paris — an attack, which investigators suspect, saw some terrorists exploit refugee systems in Europe — Obama seemed more passionate about making fun of Republicans who worried about terrorists exploiting refugee systems. He kept making the point that women and children are nothing to fear. It’s of course true that most Islamist terrorists are male. But women can also commit acts of terrorism, as was the case in San Bernardino when Malik and her husband killed and injured so many innocent Americans. Obama quickly dropped the taunts about fearing women, but no media called him on it.
Another claim made repeatedly by the Obama administration was that people were stupid idiots to be worried about terrorists exploiting entry pathways to the country on account of how good our vetting is. When the Republicans in Congress worked on a bill to improve the process of vetting refugees from Syria, the White House issued yet another — yet another! — veto threat. The statement began:
The Administration’s highest priority is to ensure the safety and security of the American people. That is why refugees of all nationalities, including Syrians and Iraqis, considered for admission to the United States undergo the most rigorous and thorough security screening of anyone admitted into the United States…. The current screening process involves multiple Federal intelligence, security, and law enforcement agencies, including the National Counterterrorism Center, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Departments of Homeland Security (DHS), State, and Defense, all aimed at ensuring that those admitted do not pose a threat to our country.
And so on and so forth. Media coverage — which included numerous stories trying to guilt critics by making Biblically questionable comparisons with the Holy Family — strongly suggested that skeptics were evil. Either way, if poor, vulnerable refugees are vetted this much, surely we must be vetting regular immigrants even more, right? Bad news. One of the San Bernardino murderers came into the country on a fiancé visa. Her tough application included questions such as, and I’m not joking:
- “Are you a member or representative of a terrorist organization?”
- “Have you ever ordered, incited, committed, assisted or otherwise participated in genocide?”
- “Have you ever committed, ordered, incited, assisted or otherwise participated in torture?”
I mean, what answers do they think they’re going to get? The New York Times further reports that the murderer was openly calling for violence against the U.S., but we totally missed it because of how bad our vetting is:
WASHINGTON — Tashfeen Malik, who with her husband carried out the massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., passed three background checks by American immigration officials as she moved to the United States from Pakistan. None uncovered what Ms. Malik had made little effort to hide — that she talked openly on social media about her views on violent jihad. She said she supported it. And she said she wanted to be a part of it… Had the authorities found the posts years ago, they might have kept her out of the country. But immigration officials do not routinely review social media as part of their background checks, and there is a debate inside the Department of Homeland Security over whether it is even appropriate to do so.
ABC News also reported that a “Secret US Policy Blocks Agents From Looking at Social Media of Visa Applicants, Former Official Says.” Remember how much crap we gave President Bush for his “heckuva job, Brownie” comments in the aftermath of Katrina? Well, heckuva job everyone responsible for vetting new Americans. You couldn’t be doing better. A++ work.
But back to Obama. He issued a veto threat after claiming we couldn’t do any better at screening people. Turns out we’re asking them to volunteer information about how bad they are and respecting the “privacy” of their public comments calling for violent jihad. And yet, the media undoubtedly spent 200 times more time talking about whatever a certain floppy-haired presidential candidate muttered than this. Seriously, we saw the media make fun of Trump’s claim that he’d screen Muslim visitors by simply asking them whether they were Muslim. And rightly so, because that’s a plan that makes no sense. It’s also exactly what we were doing to screen out threats — asking people to tell us whether they were one — but the breathless and concerned coverage about the policies of an actual administration currently in power seems notably lacking. …
A Gallup poll just came out showing that American concern about terrorism has spiked:
Americans are more worried about terrorism than they have been in a long timehttps://t.co/A2XjpsHCm1 pic.twitter.com/p5zpj5nchK Aaron Blake (@AaronBlakeWP)December 15, 2015
A Wall Street Journal poll shows similar results:
Heightened fear of terrorism is rippling through the electorate, thrusting national-security issues to the center of the 2016 presidential campaign, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released on the eve of Republicans’ latest presidential debate.
Some 40% of those polled say national security and terrorism should be the government’s top priority, and more than 60% put it in the top two, up from just 39% eight months ago.
A whopping 70 percent say the country is “on the wrong track,” and 60 percent disapprove of Obama’s handling of ISIS.
Meanwhile, more than 50 intelligence analysts working out of the U.S. military’s Central Command “have formally complained that their reports on ISIS and al Qaeda’s branch in Syria were being inappropriately altered by senior officials, the Daily Beast reported.
The New York Times also reported that classified assessments about ISIS were significantly changed to “mask some of the American military’s failures in training Iraqi troops and beating back the Islamic State. The analysts say supervisors were particularly eager to paint a more optimistic picture of America’s role in the conflict than was warranted.”
And yet too many in the media sound downright Vox-y in their overall analysis of Obama’s foreign policy. This wasn’t even true when Matt Yglesias wrote it on November 16, but here’s how Vox Voxsplains Obama’s foreign policy:
Obama’s excellent record on national security
Consider, for example, the crowd-pleasing high points of Obama on national security. Unlike George W. Bush he really has “kept us safe” and avoided any terrorist attacks on the US homeland.Even more wrong now than it was November 16.
And yet The Atlantic‘s James Fallows writes this week:
Obama: Chessmaster, not Pawn
Many of the president’s supporters fear that he hasn’t really known what he is doing. Many of his critics worry that he is all-too-skillful at attaining his ends. There’s increasing evidence that the critics may be right.I think this may be the most obsequious subhead about Obama I’ve read yet: His supporters have a minor criticism that doesn’t dissuade them from supporting him! His critics think he’s a genius! The critics are right!
Even worse, this is the headline and subhead for an article claiming that Obama is totally awesome at foreign policy because of the mere existence of a climate deal; because of rapprochement with Cuba; and because of the Iran deal.
The media coverage of the cost of such wars has been eerily quiet, even though 75 percent of the soldiers killed in Afghanistan have been killed during Obama’s time in office.Now, let’s assume he included Cuba because he needed at least three examples. And let’s acknowledge that there are people, such as Fallows, who earnestly believe the Iran deal is not a disaster. The climate deal? Are you kidding? I know it got journalists excited, but there was no risk of not getting a deal, particularly when it demanded so very little of the signers.
In any case, it’s 2015. We’re at war in Afghanistan, war in Iraq, helped destabilize Libya and Syria, have seen the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, have no ability to vet visitors and entrants to the country or otherwise protect our borders, and have no coherent strategy for dealing with ISIS. We have a president who actually claims that climate deals are a good way to fight ISIS, and a press that treats this as a reasonable claim to make.
Must be nice to be a Democratic president.
The number one single today in 1967:
Today in 1970, Paul McCartney sued John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr to legally dissolve the Beatles.
The suit was settled exactly four years later.
Jonah Goldberg has found, he thinks, the perfect presidential candidate, though, uh, its eligibility may be in question:
I think it’s a safe bet that for most of us, the year-that-was was not the year we wanted it to be. …
But for most of us, 2015 was the year in which differences hardened. Republicans, not content with disliking Democrats more than ever before, now dislike each other with unprecedented fervor.
During the first Democratic debate, after rattling off a list of enemies she was proud to have made, Hillary Clinton said she was probably most proud of making Republicans her enemy. …
In a year-end interview with NPR, Barack Obama said that “not all” of his critics are motivated by anger over his status as the first African-American president.
And that’s true. There are precious few people I know who would look at the charnel house that is the Middle East and think, “That’s going swimmingly,” if Obama were of a different hue.
But in fairness to the president, one could be forgiven for thinking it was a good year for bigots. A drug-addled loser shot up a black church in hopes of starting a race war. The silver lining, for want of a better term, is that he didn’t get what he wanted. Instead, in what was inarguably the most miraculous and touching moment of this horrible year, he got forgiveness from the victims’ families.
But the disappointment of a punk who wanted a genocidal race war is not exactly an uplifting metric to declare it a good year. Nor is the news that in 2015, race relations have hit a 20-year low, according to a Time magazine survey.
For decades, we’ve been told the country needs an “honest conversation” about race. Today, honest conversation itself is racist.
The university, once considered a safe space for differences of opinion, must now be a safe space to avoid differences of opinion. At the University of Missouri, a communications professor asked for “muscle” to dispatch a journalist doing his job. At Yale, visitors who came to speak in favor of free speech were spit on — literally.
It’s not much better off campus. Unwilling to jump on the climate-change bandwagon? Well, that makes you not just wrong but evil. Don’t want to bake a cake for a gay wedding? Impolite society has no use for you.
My scorecard is a mess. Republicans who’ve spent years trying to protect freedom of religion cheer when Donald Trump wants Muslims monitored by the state and even barred from the country. Democrats who don’t blink at the prospect of forcing nuns to pay for birth control and who would toast marshmallows at a burning Chick-fil-A want the government to do everything it can to make Muslims feel honored and respected.
I could go on and — alas — on. But what’s the point? If you were alive in 2015, you saw it too. Which brings me to 2016 and my endorsement for president. Only one candidate can unite us all in a way George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama could not.
You’ve probably already guessed who I have in mind. But just in case you haven’t, it’s the Sweet Meteor O’Death, or, as he’s known on Twitter, @Smod2016.
I shouldn’t call SMOD a “he,” for as an inanimate hunk of ice and rock hurling towards our planet, SMOD has no sex. (In these gender-confused times, that in itself should be a selling point.) Hate the “1 percent”? SMOD will erase all income inequality. Under SMOD, America will have no industrial carbon emissions, and the Islamic State will be crushed. Hateful speech will be silenced, and no gay wedding cakes will be baked. SMOD has no super PAC and takes no money from unions. SMOD already has the only endorsement it requires: the cold impersonal law of gravity.
So if you want to end the messy bickering and negativity once and for all, SMOD is the candidate for you. Otherwise, expect more of the same in 2016 and beyond.
The Billboard Top 100 should have been renamed the Elvis Presley 10 and Everyone Else 90 today in 1956, because Presley had 10 of the top 100 singles.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 