Pun Salad

Apologies to those who looked in vain for our usual Sunday phony update. Also sympathy, because if you actually spent Christmas surfing for cynical takes on the best our political system has to offer for principled leadership—I'm pretty sure that made the baby Jesus cry.

But on the day after Christmas, it's OK. So:

• Newt gets the Bad Lip Reading Treatment:

  I love these things. Perhaps too much.

• Victor Davis Hanson enumerates four words that Obama was supposed to exemplify: "Brilliant", "Healer", "Reformer", "Magnanimous". Or so we were told. Hanson shows the phoniness behind each. His conclusion:

  I could go on, but we know only that we know very little about Barack Obama, and what we do know is quite different from what is alleged. All presidents have mythographies, but they also have a record and auditors that can collate facts with fiction. In Obama's case, we were never given all the facts and there were few in the press interested in finding them.

  To quote Maxwell Scott in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

  Good article. Good movie, too.

• Also detecting phoniness in our President: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez:

  US President Barack Obama said Monday that Venezuela's government threatened "basic democratic values," and President Hugo Chavez hit back calling him a fake and an embarrassment to blacks.

  Getting insulted by Chavez would be an honor for a normal guy, but when it's Obama, it's just embarrassing.

• Paul Rahe is equally unimpressed with both Mitt and Newt:

  Neither man recognizes that the source of our problems is government meddling and the distortion that this produces in what would otherwise be a free and relatively efficient market. What they think of as a cure is, in fact, the disease.

• Jonah Goldberg is unimpressed with Ron Paul's explanations about his past flings with racists, antisemites, and Nazis:

  If Paul's explanations are to be believed at face value, he's a shockingly naïve man. If your goal is to persuade people that the libertarian cause is free of bigotry, courting support from bigots is a really stupid way to do it.

  That's from National Review. Paul gets a somewhat more sympathetic view from guys at Reason, like Jacob Sullum and Brian Doherty.