Krauthammer on Obama ...4:48 pm
Charles Krauthammer has some spot-on observations about the Barack Obama that has been relentlessly emerging, in a column entitled The Audacity of Vanity.
Americans are beginning to notice Obama’s elevated opinion of himself. There’s nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?
Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted “present” nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.
It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history — “generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment” — when, among other wonders, “the rise of the oceans began to slow.” As Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, “Moses made the waters recede, but he had help.” Obama apparently works alone.
[...]
He lectures us that instead of worrying about immigrants learning English, “you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish” — a language Obama does not speak. He further admonishes us on how “embarrassing” it is that Europeans are multilingual but “we go over to Europe, and all we can say is ‘merci beaucoup.’ ” Obama speaks no French.
His fluent English does, however, feature many such admonitions, instructions and improvements. His wife assures us that President Obama will be a stern taskmaster: “Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism . . . that you come out of your isolation. . . . Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”
For the first few months of the campaign, the question about Obama was: Who is he? The question now is: Who does he think he is?
Indeed.
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Wednesday, July 16, 2008
It’s time for some campaignin’ ...10:11 am
It’s obligatory, of-course, to link to the new Jib Jab comic internet video thingie, poking fun at the U.S. presidential candidates. It is obligatory because they use Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ as their song parody. It’s pretty funny. I’m starting to wonder what people did for laughs in elections before the Jib Jab guys.
Now, when you watch the video at their site, you are offered an opportunity to “be in the video;” that is, to put a picture of yourself into it. I don’t enjoy looking at myself, but it occurred to me that there’s one guy who really just had to be in it — you know, the guy who doesn’t command his children to stay far away from Republican conventions (see previous post). And, since he wrote the song and all. Click below to watch that version. He doesn’t show up until right near the end. (Others may well be able to upload alternate pictures and make it come out better than little ol’ me.)
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Tuesday, July 15, 2008
A good tagline ...1:01 pm
[Jakob Dylan responds through publicist: It wasn't Dad. -- scroll down for update]
…
There’s a story from Minnesota about Jakob Dylan and the Wallflowers deciding not to take a gig playing for the Minnesota Agri-Growth Council on September 2nd in Minneapolis. The gig takes place while the Republican National Convention would be in town, and it is apparently looked on by some as an “afterparty” for the conventioneers. Not big news that a band declines a gig, you would think, but when the name “Dylan” is involved things are different — especially when you can add the name “Bob.”
The Pioneer Press reports this way:
Has singer Bob Dylan staged the first protest of the 2008 Republican National Convention by persuading his son Jakob Dylan not to perform here in September?
That’s the talk in the Twin Cities, although neither Dylan was available to comment Monday.
[...]
Representatives had agreed on a performance fee, although no contracts had been signed, said Daryn McBeth, executive director of the agribusiness trade group. Then, the deal fell through.
“The lead singer of the band, his dad is Bob Dylan, and I’m told he (Bob) weighed in and encouraged them not to do it because of the political nature of what’s going on in town that week,” McBeth said.
McBeth tried to relay the nonpartisan nature of AgNite, noting it was a celebration of America’s food industry. GOP conventioneers are definitely welcome, he said, but Democrats and independents are, too. No matter.
“The deal was dead at that point,” McBeth said. “I don’t know how Bob got wind of it, or if his son and the band communicated it to him. But (the gig died after) the concern about politics, and maybe Bob Dylan’s feeling about the state of Minnesota and his son’s band playing in his home area.”
So, Mr. McBeth says that he was told that Jakob’s father “weighed in and encouraged them not do do it,” but we don’t know who told him this, or, for that matter, who told the person who told him. It’s called hearsay in court. It’s called gossip in other places. When have we ever heard before that Bob Dylan tells his son and his band, the Wallflowers, what they should do or when and where they should play? That’s right: never. And what about this further insinuation, to the effect that maybe it’s related to “Bob Dylan’s feeling about the state of Minnesota and his son’s band playing in his home area.” What the heck does that mean? Dylan hates Minnesota and doesn’t want his son playing there? He’s played there himself many times and is understood to keep his own farm somewhere in the state!
What’s more believable is that Mr. McBeth is being taken for a ride by someone who claims to know a whole lot of things about Bob Dylan, and Jakob Dylan, that they just don’t know. It would hardly be the first time someone wanted to portray themselves as being “in the know.” And for the reporter, it makes a good story, so why shouldn’t he give it credence? Just look: it got a rise out of me.
…
Update 3:36pm: Not so, surprise, surprise. Again from the Pioneer Press (thanks to Kim for the tip):
Publicists for singer Jakob Dylan said Tuesday there’s no truth in earlier reports, carried in Tuesday’s Pioneer Press, that singer Bob Dylan was in any way involved in a decision by the Wallflowers not to perform at an agriculture function during the Republican National Convention.
[...]
The initial Pioneer Press story quoted McBeth as saying, “The lead singer of the band, his dad is Bob Dylan, and I’m told he (Bob) weighed in and encouraged them not to do it because of the political nature of what’s going on in town that week.”
The Dylan camp called that version “fabricated.” They said the Wallflowers were approached to perform at the event, and turned it down. They said Bob Dylan had no involvement whatsoever.
…
Update 5:00pm: From Fox News, who reported the earlier story and are following up on the correction to it:
The Dylan representative said she’s awaiting a retraction from the newspaper. The author of the article, Tom Webb, told FOXNews.com that a denial by Jakob Dylan’s publicists was added to the story but the reporting of the allegation was accurate.
The Pioneer Press later reported that McBeth acknowledged not having details of the deal-making process with Dylan’s representatives.
“I didn’t have first-hand knowledge of the various bands or the negotiations or pursuits to confirm various entertainers. …. We had some soft ‘asks’ out there, before we’d make a formal contractual offer. And for a while, while we were pursuing Wallflowers, I was optimistic that we’d get them booked. And later, I was told they wouldn’t work out. The details of why they didn’t work out are unknown on a first-hand basis to me,” McBeth was quoted telling the paper.
Other outlets, including Politico, picked up on the earlier false story that Bob Dylan was involved in this. I’m sure that it’ll never get corrected in every place where it has appeared, and in any case, many people who read the first story will never see the correction. It becomes one more myth regarding Bob Dylan’s political point-of-view that will be out there forever, one way or another.
Ugh. Have a nice day!
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Monday, July 14, 2008
Obama on the cover of the New Yorker ...4:20 pm
The New Yorker’s cartoon magazine cover, “depicting candidate [Barack Obama] in Muslim-style outfit fist-bumping gun-toting radical wife,” certainly provides a deliciously ironic moment in the presidential campaign. Obama has been warning about how those horrid Republicans were going to use his race and his name against him, and here his liberal friends at this liberal publication come up with a way to roll all kinds of innuendo against him into one memorable image that is now being splashed all over the media. 
(I feel I can only feature an edited version of the image here, due to the fact that if I display the whole thing, I’ll be accused of being just another right-wing hate-blogger exploiting this liberal satire for my own evil ends.)
In the Huffington Post, Rachel Sklar asks, ” Why would they run a cover that could have run, irony-free, on the cover of the National Review?” Is she serious in thinking that the good people at National Review could have gotten away with running such a picture on their cover? Or that they would even want to? Elsewhere, it’s been described as “just as bad as Fox News.” Really. Jake Tapper at ABC News says that it’s “a recruitment poster for the right-wing.” (You see why I had to blur it!)
Well, as I said to a correspondent, it gets the New Yorker more publicity in ten minutes than that magazine usually gets in a year, which would have to please and motivate any editor, and I think is the ultimate purpose behind it. But a liberal publication certainly has a right to face the various innuendos about Obama squarely and make fun of them. The Obama campaign, on the other hand, knows and fears the power of images like those, as they’ve demonstrated multiple times in the past — famously to the point of asking women dressed in Muslim garb to step out of view when Obama took the stage at an event.
For the record, here in RWB land we don’t believe that Obama is a closet Muslim, no matter what the New Yorker says. I also don’t believe that Obama’s association with William Ayres means that one of his first actions as president would be to toss a molotov cocktail into the Pentagon. I don’t think that his association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright means that Obama too believes that God is on the side of black people to destroy the white enemy.
I in fact presume — although I can’t know his heart — that Barack Obama loves his country, and as president he would do what he believed according to his best judgment was good for the country.
What Obama’s record and past associations convey, however, is a lack of especially brilliant judgment. In fact, he repeatedly displays pretty awful judgment, and a habit of reversing himself, right up to and including the recent relatively trivial episode where he allowed his young daughters to be interviewed for Access Hollywood and then days later announced that he regretted it.
If I were in charge of millions of dollars and were involved in making commercials to support the John McCain campaign, I would frame my “vicious right-wing attack ads” this way: I would make them all about judgment. There would be a series of ads, each using one example of a major failure of judgment on Obama’s part: friendship with William Ayres; real estate gifts from Tony Rezko; twenty year association with and heavy praise of Rev. Jeremiah Wright; and his call for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq in 2007 and 2006 and earlier, when doing so would certainly have precipitated a collapse and prevented the opportunity for stability that exists now from ever arriving. Each ad would concisely spell out how and why Barack Obama was wrong, and illustrate how he has flip-flopped, if applicable. Each ad would end with the simple statement: “Barack Obama: It’s a question of judgment.”
In addition to pointing out the flaws in his judgment, this would effectively turn one of Obama’s great advantages against him. That is, his youth, versus McCain’s age. Viewers would be encouraged to infer that while this McCain guy may be pretty old and not so nice to look at, at least he’s likely to have better and steadier judgment than this Senator Obama guy.
And then, pocketing a hefty fee for my dastardly work, I would retire to a life of luxury and obscurity.
(One that would still not include a subscription to the New Yorker.)
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Thanks ...4:18 pm
I’d just like to pause to very sincerely thank some recent contributors of logistical support, via the PayPal and Amazon buttons on the upper right of the page. Unlike PBS and Expecting Rain, there are no fund raising drives around here. (Instead, the piggy bank is always waiting with baited breath.)
Other ways of chipping in some small tips are by merely clicking on a Google Ad (as at the top of the page), or by entering Amazon.com from one of the links in the right sidebar or elsewhere, and ultimately buying anything at all during that same session on Amazon.
And thanks as ever to all for the e-mails, the kind words, the wisdom, the feedback, the links, and even some (but not too much!) of the constructive criticism.
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Sunday, July 13, 2008
Like sugar and candy ...1:44 pm
Dylan’s recent tour (which ended Friday night in Portugal) didn’t include very much in the way of big surprises in the set lists, but one exception was June 27th in Vigo, Spain, when the eleventh song of the evening was none other than Handy Dandy. It was Dylan’s first ever live performance of this curious tune from 1990’s Under the Red Sky. It was greatly rearranged. My own thought is that it gets going about halfway through when Bob really starts singing. Click here for clip.
…
In the news today are some extracts from a newly-released 1969 interview with John Lennon, in which he offered another angle on what was behind his “the Beatles are bigger than Jesus” quote, and talked about his experience with the Church of England, among other things. It contributes to the view of Lennon as someone who clearly searched for God throughout his life. See also his correspondence with televangelist Oral Roberts in 1972. But he appears to have been too restless a spirit to ever accept any kind of submission. In the final end, I guess, God knows what was in his heart.
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Saturday, July 12, 2008
More Tony Snow ...2:18 pm
A little more than a year ago, Tony Snow delivered the commencement address at the Catholic University of America. The theme of the address was “Reason, Faith, Vocation.” Some of the advice and wisdom he shared with the graduates:
Socrates was right: Know thyself.
But see, there’s more. Once you’ve gotten past the mirror phase, then things begin to get really interesting. You begin to confront the truly overwhelming question: Why am I here? And that begins to open up the whole universe, because it impels you to think like the child staring out at the starry night: “Who put the lights in the sky? Who put me here? Why?” And pretty soon you are thinking about God. Don’t shrink from pondering God’s role in the universe or Christ’s. You see, it’s trendy to reject religious reflection as a grave offense against decency. That’s not only cowardly. That’s false. Faith and reason are knitted together in the human soul. So don’t leave home without either one.
[...]
When it comes to faith, I’ve taken my own journey. You will have to take your own. But here’s what I know. Faith is as natural as the air we breathe. Religion is not an opiate, just the opposite. It is the introduction to the ultimate extreme sport. There is nothing that you can imagine that God cannot trump. As Paul said “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” And once you realize that there is something greater than you out there, then you have to decide, “Do I acknowledge it and do I act upon it?” You have to at some point surrender yourself. And there is nothing worthwhile in your life that will not at some point require an act of submission. It’s true of faith and friendship.
[...]
Finally, love. How trite is that? But it’s everything. It separates happiness from misery. It separates the full life from the empty life. To love is to acknowledge that life is not about you. I want you to remember that: It’s not about you. It’s a hard lesson. A lot of people go through life and never learn it. It’s to submit willingly, heart and soul, to things that matter. Love is not melodrama. You don’t purchase it, you don’t manufacture it. You build it.
Every time I buy something gaudy for my wife she says, “Oh that’s nice,” and then it goes away someplace. The love letters she keeps; I don’t know where the jewelry is.
Love springs from small deeds, the gestures that say casually and naturally “I care.” That acknowledge what’s special about somebody else. If somebody’s smarter, quicker, better, prettier, wiser than you, tell them. Learn from them. Don’t be jealous. Glory in it.
[...]
Think not only of what it means to love but what it means to be loved. I have a lot of experience with that. Since the news that I have cancer again, I have heard from thousands and thousands of people and I have been the subject of untold prayers. I’m telling you right now: You’re young [and you feel] bullet-proof and invincible. [But] never underestimate the power of other people’s love and prayer. They have incredible power. It’s as if I’ve been carried on the shoulders of an entire army. And they had made me weightless.
[...]
When I was your age, I had long hair, a beard and thought of myself as a socialist. You are going to pinball all over the place, from experience to experience, job to job. And I want you to remember that you’ve got company. And that if you engage them with heart and mind, with faith and energy, you are going to find yourself on a cresting wave. It’ll carry you forward and it’ll push you under water from time to time. And some day in the dim and distant future, when you’re looking back at it, you’re not going to think about your car or your career or your gold watch. You’ll think about a chewed-up teddy bear you had as a baby or maybe your child’s smile on a special Christmas morning. The only things that are sure to endure are the artifacts of love. So go out and build as many as you can.
And finally this: Wherever you are and whatever you do, never forget at this moment, and every moment forward, you have a precious blessing. You’ve got the breath of life. No matter how lousy things may seem, you’ve got the breath of life. And while God doesn’t promise tomorrow, he does promise eternity.
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Tony Snow 1955 - 2008 ...9:27 am
A truly classy guy has died at age 53.
“Tony did his job with more flair than almost any press secretary before him,” said William McGurn, Bush’s former chief speechwriter. “He loved the give-and-take. But that was possible only because Tony was a man of substance who had real beliefs and principles that he was more than able to defend.”
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Friday, July 11, 2008
Odds and ends ...11:51 am
Richard John Neuhaus’s remarkable closing address at last week’s convention of National Right to Life Committee is at this link: We Shall Not Weary, We Shall Not Rest.
…
Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) takes on Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats’ bizarre attempts to restrict the free speech of members of congress, and he does it in a Dylanesque style. (Via Hot Air.)
…
The final frontier: Jody Bottum (one time Q&A subject) is, I think, brilliantly on-the-mark in a piece called The Red Planet in which he makes the case that satisfying humankind’s need to look outward could help submerge the growing and destructive tendency to seek after a perfection of the species. (And any piece that includes the words “Vatican”, “terraforming” and “Mars” in one paragraph really has to be read.)
…
Belatedly coming to this, but Jackie Mason’s Independence Day message from last week provides a great and classic lesson in magnanimity and brotherly bipartisanship, and so I can’t resist posting the YouTube clip of it below.
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Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Not much happenin’ here ...2:30 pm
I find myself a little consumed by work and some persistent leftover jet-lag — enough to keep me from getting back into the groove here, anyway.
Via YouTube is this clip of Bob and his band in 2001 and a nice performance of Simple Twist of Fate. It’s consummated by an especially sweet harmonica solo.
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Sunday, July 6, 2008
Who will deliver ...2:45 pm
The lectionary followed by many churches today would have featured Paul, from Romans, chapter 7, including these lines:
I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.
[...]
For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members.
Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
The Dylan reference that St. Paul is making there is in that question, “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” It’s from Bob’s song, What Can I Do For You?. In Bob’s usage, he is referring to man generally, and he sings, “Who would deliver him from the death he’s bound to die?”
The verse that contains this line features a veritably wonderful three-part scriptural progression, when you think about it. The whole verse goes:
Soon as a man is born, you know the sparks begin to fly,
He gets wise in his own eyes and he’s made to believe a lie.
Who would deliver him from the death he’s bound to die?
Well, You’ve done it all and there’s no more anyone can pretend to do.
What can I do for You?
“Soon as a man is born, you know the sparks begin to fly” — that is Job, chapter 5, verse 7. In context:
Although affliction cometh not forth of the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground;
Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.
I would seek unto God, and unto God would I commit my cause:
The next line of Bob’s verse is the wonderful, “He gets wise in his own eyes and he’s made to believe a lie.”
Scripture contains multiple references to the trap that becoming wise in one’s own eyes constitutes. It might be called an underlying theme of the whole business. You can find it in Proverbs, chapter 3, verse 7: “Be not wise in thine own eyes: fear the LORD, and depart from evil.” And also in Proverbs, chapter 12, verse 15: “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes: but he that hearkeneth unto counsel is wise.” It comes up again in Isaiah, chapter 5, verse 21: “Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!” And there are other verses in the Bible saying the same thing.
So, having described the quandary inherent in being born and the lethal traps set for man, Dylan’s song presents that question as also asked by Paul, “Who would deliver him from the death he’s bound to die?”
I guess I have no points of my own to add in this post. Dylan and those other writers seem to have made plenty for today, or any other day. You can click here for a clip of Bob and his band performing the song in question in Seattle, Washington on November 30th, 1980.
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Friday, July 4, 2008
Happy Independence Day ...8:24 am
The old stuff is still good.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
[...]
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
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