URLs du Jour

2008-06-11

  • There's new P. J. O'Rourke content out there on the Internets today, and its topic is my favorite Senator, John E. Sununu.
    I went to see Senator Sununu at his office in the Russell Building and said that I assumed he had a political philosophy. "I like to think so," he replied. "But it's not something I have written down on an index card."

    As a gut reaction conservative myself, I take the senator's point. In fact, however, Senator Sununu could write his political philosophy on a small piece of paper: "I have a deep-seated belief that America is unique, strong, great because of a commitment to personal freedom--in our economic system and our politics. We are a free people who consented to be governed. Not vice-versa." (Italics added for the sake of the multitudes in our government's executive, legislative, and judicial branches who need to fill out that index card and keep it with them at all times. And if the multitudes are confused by "Not vice-versa" they may substitute, We aren't a government that consents to people being free.)

    If only there were 50 more Senators like him.

  • Cato's Chris Edwards has a brief post on Obama's reality-based economic rhetoric:

    Candidate Obama just added some skilled economists, but that didn’t prevent him from making ridiculous claims about recent economic policies in a speech yesterday. Take one Obama statement: “our president sacrificed investments in health care, and education, and energy and infrastructure on the altar of tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy CEOs.” Obama is wrong on every point in this remark.

    Click over for details. Chris makes the point that those actual economists don't stop the candidate from talking claptrap. I'd like to add the additional point that the only place you'll see the claptrap debunked is in places like Cato. The NYT and WaPo?—fuhgeddaboudit.

  • That's the most common spelling of "fuhgeddaboudit", by the way. Yes, Pun Salad is anal enough to care about these things. We might misspell "their" as "there", but we try to get the big words right.

  • But it's not only economic issues. Glenn Reynolds deems Obama's "new kind of politics" "shamelessly dishonest." Usually that sort of rhetoric comes from the more rabid members of the VWRC; when it's coming from Glenn, you might think that saner Democrats might realize there's a problem there.