Has anyone located the Presidential backside?

by Smitty

The Spiegel interview has a few good riffs, especially the second page, emphasis mine:

SPIEGEL: You famously coined the term "Reagan Doctrine" to describe Ronald Reagan's foreign policy. What is the "Obama Doctrine?"

Krauthammer: I would say his vision of the world appears to me to be so naïve that I am not even sure he's able to develop a doctrine. He has a view of the world as regulated by self-enforcing international norms, where the peace is kept by some kind of vague international consensus, something called the international community, which to me is a fiction, acting through obviously inadequate and worthless international agencies. I wouldn't elevate that kind of thinking to a doctrine because I have too much respect for the word doctrine.

SPIEGEL: Are you saying that diplomacy always fails?

Krauthammer: No, foolishness does. Perhaps when he gets nowhere on Iran, nowhere with North Korea, when he gets nothing from the Russians in return for what he did to the Poles and the Czechs, gets nowhere in the Middle East peace talks -- maybe at that point he'll begin to rethink whether the world really runs by international norms, consensus, and sweetness and light, or whether it rests on the foundation of American and Western power that, in the final analysis, guarantees peace.

CK thrashes the Right equally for lacking leadership, and then asserts he's too old to back up his trash-talk with running for office himself.

Great dodge, buddy. He's sufficiently crafty that I have to wonder if his anti-Palin rhetoric isn't just slick reverse psychology.

• Sarah is still a few weeks shy of Going Rogue, so her actual policy directions at the national level aren't known.
• Taking the skeptical stance on Sarah buys credibility, and enables heavier hits on BHO without seeming as partisan.
• Condescending to the popular, charismatic candidate will piss the conservative base right off, helping galvanize support.

I'll see CK's contrarian and raise him a curmudgeon: lack of a central "personality" on the right ain't no bug. It's a feature. What's at stake is the commitment to the Constitutional principles of the country, not the individual stylings of a stuffed shirt or a stuffed skirt.

What good another Reagan, or even an American Magaret Thatcher (should Sarah prove to be of that caliber) if you follow that leader with a G.H.W. Bush? The real threats are dire, structural, and exceed any on person's capacity to address. Swapping out our First Black President in exchange for our First Woman President macht nichts without a societal course change as firm and protracted as our commitment to debt slavery.

Socialism is the opiate of the bureaucracy, to paraphrase Nietszche. But cold turkey is a better answer to the problem of dope than more dope.

Full circle, then, CK: fine snark indeed. Your attention and wisdom is drawn towards figuring out how to convince the American people that, given the choice between Canaan and Egypt, the current movement towards Egypt is undesirable.

Krauthammer thinks Governor Palin unqualified?

by Smitty (h/t HotAir)

This is a fascinating three minutes of your time.

K+ is completely correct on his point that the GOP has operated on a seniority system going back at least my four decades. Going unsaid in his remarks are the ringing non-triumphs of the Bush-41 1992, Dole 1996, and McCain 2008 campaigns.

Romney certainly sells a fine Progressive brand of snake oil, and can certainly give good speech, like BHO. Does anyone have advice on how to overlook the fact that the libertarian ideals of the Constitution are antithetical to the Progressive snake oil? The collectivist crap has only been bankrupting the country these 80-ish years or so. Mitt:

• I can stare at the First Amendment and ignore theological differences with you.
• I can admire your fine rhetoric and capacity to deliver a stirring speech: I joined in the standing ovation for you at CPAC with gusto. Great buildup, masterful delivery.
• But if you're not in touch with the basic concepts of Federalism, then why bother, sir?

You'd be offering the same non-choice between Obama and McCain: "Vote for me, I say 'tomato' with a long 'a' in the middle."

The comment that Governor Palin has to do the homework is also well-founded. You can complain that BHO didn't, but that just underscores the point: "We the People" let an arguably unprepared, unexamined candidate into the office this time around. Possibly John McCain over-estimated the critical thinking with which the voters would come at the question. This "Vote for the groundbreaker, even if there are some weaknesses, FML" is not the precedent you want to reinforce.

The fact that Governor Palin would be the first female POTUS really needs to be a tangential point, or we're continuing the DNA-based decision making that marred the 2008 election cycle. "Anyone not voting for X is Y!". X goes Obama->Palin, Y goes racist->sexist. The scourge of Affirmative Action wasn't completely stomped out with the Ricci decision. Playing to Progressivism just to win an election on gender is playing into their fell hands.

In the credit where due department, HRC is nothing if not cunning. She's suddenly not going to Russia. Of course, it's entire too early to connect the dots with other (scroll down a bit) "Unwelcome Distractions". But it doesn't take a prophet to realize that, if BHO is AFU in 2012, HRC will come back with the fury of a cancer that's been in remission for a few years. Possibly I could have chosen a more pleasant metaphor, but as long as the electorate favors Beltway hangtime over Constitutional fidelity, the egalitarian oxymoron "political class" shall continue to weaken all you hold dear, tumor-like.

This is my worry about Governor Palin: there will be a legitimate argument made that her resume is relatively thin compared to Secretary Clinton's. A Palin/Romney ticket will be "too weak on foreign policy, which is our number one national concern." Understand, a magic unicorn shall have recovered the economy in time for the election. Or so the propaganda shall instruct us to think. How about that General Petraeus, anyway? Has he quaffed the Progressive kool-aid, one wonders?

Full circle, then, I appreciate that K+ is seemingly immune to Governor Palin's charms. Uncharmed thinking is a Good Thing. However, Romney needs a come-to-Beavis meeting where he unloads the Progressive baggage. Either way, don't count HRC out. Or, rather, do: you're likely helping her game.

Update:
Goldberg, also, seems to hope that Governor Palin can come through, while deliberately muting the enthusiasm.

Geithner and his Republican friends

James Crumley catches Charles Krauthammer defending tax cheat Tim Geithner:

"We have in Geithner a guy with amazing experience, extremely smart, who has been in every crisis over the weakness in 2008, all the rescues. He is a man who inspires confidence in our economy, which is what it is really lacking.
"And to sink his nomination over what I think is a triviality is simply unserious. Our crisis is too strong, too big, and his is too much of an asset to deny him office over unpaid taxes, which in the end he refunded and repented."

Uh, excuse me? How is Geithner's "amazing experience" -- up to his eyeballs in the mess at Citigroup -- an argument in his favor? In what sense does Geithner's status as a protege of Robert Rubin "inspire confidence in our economy"?

Take a poll and tell me what percentage of the American people can correctly identify Geithner before you credit him with such inspirational powers. And I think that "confidence" isn't the only thing our economy is "really lacking"; it also lacks a couple trillion dollars of asset value destroyed by the collapse of the housing bubble, which even the inspirational magic (?) of Geithner cannot restore. But Krauthammer's degree is in psychiatry, not economics, so I suppose he's an expert in the effect of inspirational confidence.

Krauthammer makes a very interesting argument. Only people from Bob Rubin's coterie of former Goldman Sachs operatives can be allowed to run Treasury because, well, they've been running it so long and therefore they're the only ones who know how to run it. So when Geithner is nominated, any objection to the nomination is "a triviality . . . simply unserious."

This fetish of expertise, this belief that only the anointed disciple of Bob Rubin could possibly be acceptable as Treasury secretary -- am I the only one who detects the whiff of bovine excrement here? And why is Krauthammer peddling this excrement? Did he enter into some secret pact during that dinner with Obama at George Will's house?