Mark Steyn and Some Other Stuff

Today's lead item of interest is, without question, Mark Steyn's take on President Obama's take on Tuesday's election result. A few excerpts follow.

On Obama's blaming the result on people's frustrations over what's happened the past eight years.

Got it. People are so angry and frustrated at George W. Bush that they’re voting for Republicans. In Massachusetts.
...Presumably, the president isn’t stupid enough actually to believe what he said. But it’s dispiriting to discover he’s stupid enough to think we’re stupid enough to believe it.

On Obama's last minute attempt to prop up Martha Coakley's candidacy.

The Barack Obama who showed up last Sunday to help out Martha Coakley was a sad and diminished figure from the colossus of a year ago. He had nothing to say, but he said it anyway.
...The most striking aspect of his performance was how unhappy he looked, as if he doesn’t enjoy the job. You can understand why. He ran as something he’s not, and never has been: a post-partisan, centrist, transformative healer. That’d be a difficult trick to pull off even for somebody with any prior executive experience, someone who’d actually run something, like a state, or even a town, or even a commercial fishing operation, like that poor chillbilly boob Sarah Palin.

On Howard Fineman's (Newsweek) remark that Scott Brown's pickup truck is a racist symbol.

Ah, yes. Scott Brown has over 200,000 miles on his odometer. Man, he’s racked up a lot of coded racism on that rig. But that’s easy to do in notorious cross-burning KKK swamps like suburban Massachusetts.

Steyn's advice to aspiring writers.

Don’t just write there, do something. Learn how to shingle a roof, or tap-dance, or raise sled dogs. Because if you don’t do anything, you wind up like Obama and Fineman — men for whom words are props and codes and metaphors but no longer expressive of anything real.

There's much more.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MThlOTBiN2QwNDgzNTk0MDBkZjNhYzM2MWQyODUyOWY=

Going from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Bob Herbert, the uber-left columnist for the NY Times (one among many) writes of his disgust with the Democrats for wasting a year on an unworkable health care plan instead of dealing with our (as he puts it) "economic emergency".

While the nation was suffering through the worst economy since the Depression, the Democrats wasted a year squabbling like unruly toddlers over health insurance legislation. No one in his or her right mind could have believed that a workable, efficient, cost-effective system could come out of the monstrously ugly plan that finally emerged from the Senate after long months of shady alliances, disgraceful back-room deals, outlandish payoffs and abject capitulation to the insurance companies and giant pharmaceutical outfits.

Liberals like Herbert support socialized health care for this country. A large majority of Americans don't. How did he think the Democrats were going to square that circle without patching together an "ugly plan" with "backroom deals", "outlandish payoffs" and "abject capitulation" to large health care interests?
And, by the way, the Democrats did address the economic situation. They did precisely what's prescribed in the left's economic fix-it manual. Mortgage the future. Pass the bill to our children and their children. Their ill-conceived $787 billion "stimulus" package was enacted only a month after Obama took office and it was supposed to keep the unemployment rate below 8%. Herbert supported the bill, though he now thinks it was far too small. This despite it's being the costliest piece of legislation ever enacted.
Of course Herbert is still dismissive of the GOP.

The Republican Party has abandoned any serious approach to the nation’s biggest problems, economic or otherwise. It may be resurgent, but it’s not a serious party.

The people of Massachusetts (Massachusetts! - sorry, I have to keep doing that) have chosen to disagree. They think that Republican Scott Brown's tax-cutting message is a serious approach to solving the unemployment problem. It's the Democrats' close-minded insistence in repeatedly throwing boxcar loads of money at wasteful projects and special interest groups that warrants ridicule.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/opinion/23herbert.html?ref=opinion

Another NY Times columnist who's pushing for more "stimulus" is Paul Krugman. Stephen Spruiell (NRO) dug up this quote by Krugman offering a solution for the 2002 recession.

To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

I'm sure we're all glad that advice was followed.

For some good advice read the editorial (link below) which appeared in the Lorain County Morning Journal. The small local paper lectured Obama while he was busy touring Ohio and feigning concern for its unemployed and underemployed masses. Pompous, elitist lefties at the prestigious Times should take note.

The president will show Lorain County he understands its needs by correcting his first-year mistakes. Lorain County doesn't need more government and more taxes. It needs government to get out of the way and clear a path for business to prosper and new jobs to grow.

http://www.morningjournal.com/articles/2010/01/22/opinion/mj2189636.txt

It's a bad sign for the Obama administration that even the Washington Post now believes that its handling of the Christmas bomber case was botched. This is a sharp reversal of their initial position.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/22/AR2010012204349.html

A new Rasmussen poll says that 61% of Americans want Congress to stop pushing for Obamacare, while 30% disagree. My advice to Obama and Democrats in Congress - Ignore the poll. Go for it!

More polling from Rasmussen. Obama's approval rating is now at a new low: 44%. This includes 24% who strongly approve (who are those people?). By contrast, 55% disapprove, 43% strongly. Obama's approval index - the difference between strongly approve and strongly disapprove - is also at a new low, -19. Bush didn't get down to Obama's level until well into his second term.

An AP news story yesterday -

An Israeli search team pulled a severely dehydrated 21-year-old man from the rubble of his bedroom a staggering 10 days after an earthquake leveled much of the Haitian capital.

That's right. An Israeli rescue team. Tiny Israel has one of the largest international aid teams in Haiti despite its location a third of the way around the world from the disaster site. This is the same nation maligned by much of the world (read - U.N.) for its "human rights violations". How about a U.N. resolution commending Israel's humanitarian efforts? Let those paragons of moral virtue, who lead the way for Israel's censure - Libya, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran - now join with the rest of the world in singing it's praises.
What was it that Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner said the other day about pigs flying?