VDH sums up the rather narcissistic and strange journey that President Obama has put America on for the past six months:
in the Middle East, in the case of Israel, with Turkey, on the recent Iranian upheaval, and during the South America visit, Obama is clearly to the left of Europe. He sees himself more as multicultural prophet born out of the Third World, foe of colonialism, angry at past imperialism, skeptical of capitalism, eager to showcase his non-traditional ancestry and tripartite nomenclature. By coming from the West, but separating himself from the history of his own country, Obama has become a citizen of the world, who polls far higher, as intended, in the Middle East, than does his own country…
almost all Obama’s historical references were wrong or distorted: Berlin airlift, death camps, Inquisition, Muslim contribution to the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, Muslim discoveries of breakthroughs in science, math, printing, etc., suggesting that as a postmodernist he (and/or his speechwriters) does not really believe in absolute truth, but rather relative competing narratives predicated on race/class/gender. And the means of magnifying the accomplishments of those “without power” justifies the ends of diminishing those “with power.” The list of other inaccuracies in his Cairo speech could be expanded from the contemporary Middle East to his references to John Adams and Islam…
Here at home — We know the boilerplate: The President outlines the problem, punctuated with those awful “them” and “they” and “some” and “others” who as extremists stand in the way of all good things and present “false choices”, but remain unnamed. (Sort of like the tropes in 1984)…These are the prefaces to his reluctance to … (fill in the blanks: run the private sector, spend massive amounts of money, take over health care, raise taxes, etc.).
Then he pauses, takes a deep breath, and in fact outlines ways to take over GM, regulate compensation, run up massive deficits, nationalize health care, and plan record tax hikes…he finishes with variations on the old campaign formula “this is the moment”, “hope and change”, “yes, we can”, “we will not be deterred.” No one can quite believe that one has just heard Obama deny that he’s going to do exactly what he then outlines he is going to do.
Obama himself gave us ample warning of his reckless grandiosity during the 2008 campaign. So we can’t say we weren’t warned. The situation has only gotten worse in the months since his inauguration. And there’s 3.5 years to go. Help!
The WSJ has some quotes from the President on Iran:
The President yesterday denounced the “extent of the fraud” and the “shocking” and “brutal” response of the Iranian regime to public demonstrations in Tehran these past four days. “These elections are an atrocity,” he said. “If Ahmadinejad had made such progress since the last elections, if he won two-thirds of the vote, why such violence?” The statement named the regime as the cause of the outrage in Iran and, without meddling or picking favorites, stood up for Iranian democracy.
Great stuff! Taranto adds: “Speaking very broadly, there are two possible outcomes in Iran now. The regime may succeed in crushing the opposition, enhancing its own power at the expense of whatever pretense of legitimacy it might have had a week ago. Or it may fail to do so and be weakened or overthrown. The free world has every interest in encouraging the latter outcome.” Indeed it does.
Art Laffer has a piece in the WSJ about the economic double whammy just over the horizon. It happens when the terrible fiscal policies of the Obama administration (and the debt needed to fund them) collide with the need for the Fed itself to issue bonds to contract the monetary base back to normalcy. The result will likely be the depressing picture we painted the other day:
Here we stand more than a year into a grave economic crisis with a projected budget deficit of 13% of GDP. That’s more than twice the size of the next largest deficit since World War II. And this projected deficit is the culmination of a year when the federal government, at taxpayers’ expense, acquired enormous stakes in the banking, auto, mortgage, health-care and insurance industries.
With the crisis, the ill-conceived government reactions, and the ensuing economic downturn, the unfunded liabilities of federal programs — such as Social Security, civil-service and military pensions, the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, Medicare and Medicaid — are over the $100 trillion mark. With U.S. GDP and federal tax receipts at about $14 trillion and $2.4 trillion respectively, such a debt all but guarantees higher interest rates, massive tax increases, and partial default on government promises…as bad as the fiscal picture is, panic-driven monetary policies portend to have even more dire consequences…
starting in early September 2008, the Bernanke Fed…radically increased the monetary base — which is comprised of currency in circulation, member bank reserves held at the Fed, and vault cash — by a little less than $1 trillion. The Fed controls the monetary base 100% and does so by purchasing and selling assets in the open market. By such a radical move, the Fed signaled a 180-degree shift in its focus from an anti-inflation position to an anti-deflation position. The percentage increase in the monetary base is the largest increase in the past 50 years by a factor of 10…
It’s difficult to estimate the magnitude of the inflationary and interest-rate consequences of the Fed’s actions because, frankly, we haven’t ever seen anything like this in the U.S. To date what’s happened is potentially far more inflationary than were the monetary policies of the 1970s, when the prime interest rate peaked at 21.5% and inflation peaked in the low double digits. Gold prices went from $35 per ounce to $850 per ounce, and the dollar collapsed on the foreign exchanges…
the Fed…should contract the monetary base back to where it otherwise would have been, plus a slight increase geared toward economic expansion…I doubt very much that the Fed will do what is necessary to guard against future inflation and higher interest rates. If the Fed were to reduce the monetary base by $1 trillion, it would need to sell a net $1 trillion in bonds. This would put the Fed in direct competition with Treasury’s planned issuance of about $2 trillion worth of bonds over the coming 12 months. Failed auctions would become the norm and bond prices would tumble, reflecting a massive oversupply of government bonds.
When we asked the other day who was going to buy the net new $10 trillion in Treasury securities to fund the Obama deficits, we didn’t realize that the matter was even more serious than we suggested, given the Fed’s need to issue $1 trillion in new debt itself. The strangest aspect of this situation is that our out-of-control Congress and President may ultimately be reined in by, of all things, the refusal of communist China to buy US debt.
Humorous footnotes on the Obama economic policies: (a) Guess how the NYT apportions blame for the future deficits — you got it, blame George Bush: “Mr. Obama’s main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies”; and (b) the NYT’s claim in the same piece that cap and trade “doesn’t cost the government any money” is a howler — the English press seem to understand these things better than their American counterparts: “a vast and unfathomably complex new system, which fosters corruption, raises little revenue and tries to suppress the incentives that are its entire purpose.”
It is a very sad day in America when the Europeans and the Chinese can see clearly what is going on in this nation, but the American press is blinkered because of its increasingly strange worship of a President seemingly untethered from the realities of everyday life.
President Obama was at Omaha Beach. AP: “The sheer improbability of this victory is part of what makes D-Day so memorable,” Obama said.
Is that so? D-Day was a risky enterprise to be sure, with the imponderables of weather, German intelligence, logistical screw-ups, and other matters. But it was an intricately planned assault that featured total air superiority by the Allies, among other strategic and tactical advantages. The Allies had learned the lessons of Dieppe. We’ll quote a bit from volumes 5 and 6 of Winston Churchill’s The Second World War:
The concentration of the assaulting forces — 176,000 men, 20,000 vehicles, and many thousand tons of stores, all to be shipped in the next two days — was in itself an enormous task. (v.5, p.596)
great armadas of convoys and their escorts sailed, unknown to the enemy…to the Normandy coast….the Royal Air Force attacked enemy coast defence guns in their concrete emplacements, dropping 5200 tons of bombs…In the 24 hours of June 6 the Allies flew over 14,600 sorties. So great was our superiority in the air that all the enemy could put up during daylight over the invasion beaches was a mere hundred sorties. (v.6, p.3)
I am well satisfied with the situation up to noon today, 7th. Only at one American beach has there been any serious difficulty, and that has now been cleared up. Twenty thousand airborne troops are safely landed behind the flanks of the enemy’s lines…We got across with small losses. We had expected to lose about 10,000 men. By tonight we hope to have the best part of a quarter of a million men ashore. (v.6, p.7)
The planning for Overlord dates back to at least the Casablanca conference of January 1943 (v.5, pp.70-71). “Sheer improbability of this victory”? — that’s quite a statement about an as long planned and well executed invasion as D-Day. As for the bravery of the Americans of D-Day, we’ll let Ronald Reagan and S.L.A. Marshall tell those stories.
Final thoughts: (a) if the media had been like this in 1944, maybe Obama would have been correct; (b) Gordon Brown’s mistaking Obama Beach for Omaha Beach inspires the thought that perhaps the President was thinking of himself when referring to the “sheer improbability of this victory.”
The NYT reports that the WWII veteran in question was angry about being excluded from the Obama and Sarkozy event in Normandie:
Queen Elizabeth…was not invited to join President Obama and France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, next week at commemorations of the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, according to reports published in Britain’s mass-circulation tabloid newspapers on Wednesday. Pointedly, Buckingham Palace did not deny the reports.
The queen, who is 83, is the only living head of state who served in uniform during World War II. As Elizabeth Windsor, service number 230873, she volunteered as a subaltern in the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service, training as a driver and a mechanic. Eventually, she drove military trucks…
The Dinocrat’s grandparents were born into the hardscrabble America of the late 19th century. Half the people were farmers and almost no one was rich. It was a world of short lives, a world without cars, telephones, airplanes, pharmaceuticals, access to books, and often without running water and indoor plumbing. News came sporadically and late if it came at all. The Dinocrat’s grandchildren experience a generally much richer America of far greater longevity, a world of instant communications among everyone on the planet, and instant access to a global encyclopedia of immeasurable size. Every kid with his cell phone has far greater resources at his fingertips to broadcast and receive the news of the world than were ever available to Edward R. Morrow.
It is a world of great promise, but also of considerable peril, as we have discussed on many occasions. More has changed in the last 130 years in terms of population, long life, prosperity, communications, available knowledge, technology, and global reach than in any comparable period of human history. It is perhaps trivial to say, but it is also true: we do not understand the vast complexity that has grown up about us. The complexity of the modern world has overtaken our ability to understand it, and this creates instability — how much instability is a little hard to say at the moment.
Meanwhile, instability comes from another angle as well. Any ideology that insists on the literal truth of books that are millennia out of date is ipso factoat war with the modern world. It is an inevitable conflict. It is unknown at this time whether George Bush’s ambitious but ahistorical approach to solving the problem will have any lasting impact on the matter. What seems clear to us is that an unambiguous understanding and defense of the Judeo-Christian-Enlightenment values that underpin our freedom and prosperity is necessary for America and the West to make it through the 21st century in a form recognizable to our forbears. At the moment it looks somewhat unlikely that the Western world will pass this test.
The modernness of the modern world is a thing that we do not understand. It has all happened so fast. The proper reaction to so much change in so short a time is modesty. Instead we have just the opposite. In Europe there are substantial elements of the population who would like to see the modern world destroyed. In the US, many people want “change” at an even more accelerated pace, but many of the changes they are getting are a fantasy — the numbers just don’t add up. Maybe we’ll muddle through, but a train wreck of some sort seems likelier to us at the moment. Are we unduly pessimistic?
Mark Steyn discusses ongoing events in Europe and around the world, and sees unrest growing as a function of demographic change (HT: Powerline):
Beyond the fashionable “anti-Zionism” of the Euro Left is a starker reality: The demographic energy…in almost every Western European country is “Asian.” Which is to say, Muslim. A recent government statistical survey reported that the United Kingdom’s Muslim population is increasing ten times faster than the general population. Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp, and many other Continental cities from Scandinavia to the Côte d’Azur will reach majority Muslim status in the next few years….
the Islamicization of Europe entails certain consequences, and it might be worth exploring what these might be. There are already many points of cultural friction — from British banks’ abolition of children’s “piggy banks” to the enjoining of public doughnut consumption by Brussels police during Ramadan. And yet on one issue there is remarkable comity between the aging ethnic Europeans and their young surging Muslim populations: A famous poll a couple of years back found that 59 percent of Europeans regard Israel as the greatest threat to world peace.
Fifty-nine percent? What the hell’s wrong with the rest of you? Hey, relax: In Germany, it was 65 percent; Austria, 69 percent; the Netherlands, 74 percent. For purposes of comparison, in a recent poll of Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — i.e., the “moderate” Arab world — 79 percent of respondents regard Israel as the greatest threat to world peace…
there are occasional arcane points of dispute: one recalls, in the wake of the July 7 bombings, the then London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s somewhat tortured attempts to explain why blowing up buses in Tel Aviv is entirely legitimate whereas blowing up buses in Bloomsbury is not. Yet these are minimal bumps on a smooth glide path: The more Europe’s Muslim population grows, the more restive and disassimilated it becomes, the more enthusiastically the establishment embraces “anti-Zionism”…
In Britain in January, while “pro-Palestinian” demonstrators were permitted to dress up as hook-nosed Jews drinking the blood of Arab babies, the police ordered counter-protesters to put away their Israeli flags. In Alberta, in the heart of Calgary’s Jewish neighborhood, the flag of Hizballah (supposedly a proscribed terrorist organization) was proudly waved by demonstrators, but one solitary Israeli flag was deemed a threat to the Queen’s peace and officers told the brave fellow holding it to put it away or be arrested for “inciting public disorder.” In Germany, a student in Duisburg put the Star of David in the window of an upstairs apartment on the day of a march by the Islamist group Milli Görüs, only to have the cops smash his door down
Europe has big problems on its hands, and it’s hard to see how any of this ends well. We expect repression of law abiding citizens and their freedom of speech, and fantasy solutions like banning American talk show hosts from England. But ultimately these things cannot work — people will act out what they cannot say. What happens then?
along comes the precedent-shattering President Obama traveling through Europe on his virginal passport, a passport that was used precisely once before he became a national political figure. His tour of Europe was the burlesque of a preening popinjay. He gave the Queen an iPod. His wife gave her a friendly squeeze. Oh yes, and the President declared that the official language of German-speaking Austria is “Austrian.” All that was amusing, but the criticism of his homeland while in Europe was not…
While in Europe, our sententious president blamed America for genocide and torture. He brought up Hiroshima and Guantanamo. He accused us of arrogance. What can President Obama possibly have against arrogance? Since his emergence on the national stage a year or so ago, he has given me the impression that he considers arrogance among the virtues.
It was in Strasbourg, among what he might call the Strasbourgundians, that he was most critical of his country. Said our president: “Instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.”…
our President noted to his European audience that a new financial order is being created by the world’s top 20 financial powers, not by “just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy….But that’s not the world we live in, and it shouldn’t be the world that we live in.” Whoever told our president that the post-World War II world came from these two great men “sitting in a room with a brandy” misinformed him. His knowledge of history is as defective as is his knowledge of Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s tastes.
Meanwhile, allies of the administration are mincing no words when it comes to the tea parties. A Democratic congresswoman from Illinois whose husband went to jail for bank fraud, no less, criticized the tea parties as follows: “It’s despicable that right-wing Republicans would attempt to cheapen a significant, honorable moment of American history with a shameful political stunt…Made to look like a grassroots uprising, this is an Obama bashing party promoted by corporate interests, as well as Republican lobbyists and politicians.”
It seems that the Obama administration is a curious mixture of naked political hardball on the one hand, and a kind of ignorant arrogance on the other. Where will this combination take us?
In the course of criticizing President Obama’s strange apology tour of Europe, Charles Krauthammer quotes the President on North Korea’s missile launch:
“Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something. The world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons. Now is the time for a strong international response.”
These words of Obama give new meaning to the term “empty rhetoric”. The UN didn’t even put out its customary Strongly Worded Communiqué. Russia even defended the NK launch. Re-read the statement by the President, a man who says “words must mean something” and denies it by his own inaction.
What do you make of a man who would say such things, who actually has the power to enforce what he says but clearly has absolutely no intention to do so? Is he delusional? Does he think he is still campaigning for office and can say the most ludicrous things and no one will care? Ask yourself, after this European apology tour and the President’s statements, do our enemies feel emboldened or chastened?
When Hillary Clinton giggles (at 0:33 of this CNN video) about stopping piracy, what do the Somlai pirates think? When Obama breaks into giggles (at 0:10 of this CBS video) about the worst financial crisis since the 1930’s, what are we to make of him?
In the old days, wasn’t it the tin pot dictators of the world who would combine outlandish rhetoric with impotence and inaction, and then break into laughter for good measure? The world has been stood on its head, and some days we can’t believe that everyone doesn’t see the obviousness of it.
The Politico reports some statements by President Obama in Europe:
“America is changing but it cannot be America alone that changes,” he said. He ticked off exactly what steps the U.S. was taking — closing Guantanamo Bay prison, ending torture, trying to confront climate change…“We cannot pretend somehow that because Barack Hussein Obama got elected as president, suddenly everything is going to be OK.”…
Obama looked back to a nation that elected him just a few months ago and said it, too, had at times “showed arrogance” and “been dismissive even derisive” toward its European cousins. “In America, there’s a failure to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world,” Obama said.
James Lewis in The American Thinker responded to that last comment:
those arrogant Americans. First they rebel against King George III and all the crowned heads of Europe. Then they welcome tens of millions of poor and persecuted people from the Old World. Then they fail to bow down to Europe’s greatest figures — from Napoleon and Otto von Bismarck to the Kaiser, Hitler and Stalin. Then they fight a civil war, losing half a million people to liberate black people in America. Then they diss the man the BBC considers to be the greatest philosopher ever, one Karl Marx, whose followers killed 100 million innocents in the 20th century. And then, to top it all off, they liberate both the Western half of Europe (in 1946) and the Eastern half (in 1989).
The post-partisan era is over before it began. Pew: “Barack Obama has the most polarized early job approval ratings of any president in the past four decades. The 61-point partisan gap in opinions about Obama’s job performance is the result of a combination of high Democratic ratings for the president — 88% job approval among Democrats — and relatively low approval ratings among Republicans (27%)…there was a somewhat smaller 51-point partisan gap in views of George W. Bush’s job performance in April 2001.”
The issue of the Obama bow and the lack of reaction in the MSM is a perfect miniature of the deep divide in the country today.
To date the NYT has been too busy to notice the unique and inappropriate event of a US President bowing low before a king, though in the days when its circulation was much higher it condemned such behavior as appearing “obsequent”.
But that was 15 long years ago. Here are the sorts of thing that have been keeping the paper occupied in these days of its decline. Gail Collins:
the Obamas wowed them in Europe. We were expecting a good reception, given the fact that the previous administration set the bar so low that Barack was able to get hysterical applause just by telling a crowd of students that Americans don’t believe in torturing people. Back home, we’re just grateful that we don’t have to sit on the edge of our collective seats wondering how the president will embarrass us next…In London, Obama was the most popular guy in the gang. When President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and China’s Hu Jintao got into a squabble, Obama took them off to separate corners and resolved the conflict, to universal applause.
And this apparently is a news story, not an opinion piece, by Helene Cooper in the NYT:
Mrs. Obama’s equivalent of the Jackie-Kennedy-takes-Paris moment of 1961. No, Mrs. Obama didn’t give a big speech or negotiate a tricky diplomatic incident. She went heel to heel with Carla Sarkozy. There they were, currently the two most famous first ladies in the world, standing side by side — Mrs. Obama, of course, a few inches taller than Mrs. Sarkozy, but not towering over her as she had over Queen Elizabeth II.
There they were, exchanging the first kiss-kiss, on both cheeks, the European way, clasping each other’s hands…not even the meeting with the queen, can come close to finally appearing in the same camera lens with the former Carla Bruni, an Italian-born singer and former Victoria’s Secret model now dominating the French political-fashion scene…
Mrs. Sarkozy sparked “Carla mania” last year when she visited Britain as France’s first lady, but the British press is fickle. “Carla Bruni may have seduced every man she met last year, but this year Michelle Obama charmed us all,” raved The Guardian in an article headlined, “How Britain was wooed by Michelle Obama.”
Given the priorities evident in the NYT’s brand of journalism, is it really any wonder that the Times, which bought the Boston Globe for $1.1 billion, is now threatening to shut it down unless it gets $20 million in concessions from employees?
President Obama bowed deeply before the Saudi King (at 0:57 of this video), an unreciprocated gesture which was inappropriate to say the least. The President correctly refrained from doing so to Queen Elizabeth. (”Heads of state and their wives do not go around bowing and curtsying to each other,” according to JFK’s chief of protocol.) Ed Morrissey’s Tale of Two Bows continues the documentation of this strange and inverted time in America. How very odd indeed.
Unsurprisingly, the elite media continue to have no interest in the story, though they (and others) felt quite differently about Presidential relations with Saudi Arabia and its king just a few short years ago when Bush was President.
Moreover, not that long ago, the New York Times itself once strongly disapproved of a Democratic President’s appearing to bow to an emperor. Alas, in the world of the media’s Obama-worship, it’s just business as usual for the a constitutionally protected industry that, amazingly, still considers itself the sentinel of democracy.
Here’s how it was meant to go. Barack Obama was supposed to sweep into Europe on his first major trip abroad as the new JFK, greeted by adoring fans moistly waving little American flags. His progress would be part celebrity world tour, part celebration of the end of the Bush era. A needy Gordon Brown would bask in the Obama glow, hoping its rays would improve his own deathly pallor. Meanwhile, the rest of Europe’s leaders would fall to their knees, humbly agreeing to any request made by the visiting emperor, mindful that in a choice between them and Obama, their own electorates would choose Obama every time.
That was the way it was supposed to be. Instead, Obama arrived last night on the eve of what organisers promise will be a raucous day of anti-globalisation protest on London’s streets, the demonstrators’ previous loathing of George Bush rapidly transferred to the commanders of the ailing world economy. Brown will still crave the Obama magic dust, but he may find his American visitor has less of it to sprinkle around, beleaguered as he is by rising opposition from both left and right at home, even the first muttered grumbles that the 44th president might turn out to be neither a new FDR nor a JFK, but a JEC - Jimmy Carter.
The AP’s morning worship includes a President “rallying the world” and restoring the reputation of the United States of America “across the globe”:
Obama tries to rally world to cope with downturn…President Barack Obama promised world leaders he would listen, not lecture, as they seek a common fix to the financial crisis. “We can only meet this challenge together,” he said…Obama stepped on the world stage for the first time as president, aiming to shore up both America’s economy and its reputation across the globe.
You almost expect the American MSM to start calling him the Dear Leader.
(By the way, the UK papers are not far behind the US press, unless they are engaging in subtle humor. The Telegraph, for example, praised the President’s soaring rhetoric, as follows, “in words that echoed Franklin D Roosevelt, the American President at the time of the Great Depression, he said: ‘Basing decisions around fear is not the right way to go’.” But was the praise serious or tongue-in-cheek?)
The FT reports the EU’s comments that the President Obama’s stated economic policies, in their intended scope and duration, are “the road to hell”:
Mirek Topolanek, the Czech Republic’s prime minister…said EU leaders had been disturbed at a summit in Brussels last week to hear calls from Tim Geithner, the US Treasury secretary, for more aggressive policies to fight the global downturn.
“The US Treasury secretary talks about permanent action and we, at our spring council, were quite alarmed at that…The US is repeating mistakes from the 1930s, such as wide-ranging stimuluses, protectionist tendencies and appeals, the Buy American campaign, and so on,” he told a European parliament session in Strasbourg. “All these steps, their combination and their permanency, are the road to hell.”
President Obama really has united the world. Europe deplores Obama’s economic plans. China hates his plans as well. And so do the sages of the Democratic Party back in the good old USA. President Obama truly has united the world — in opposition to him.
The other day we saw Miss and Mrs outlawed in Europe. Now they’re using spy planes and thermal imaging to spy inside people’s homes. It’s supposed to save maybe £380 a year. Daily Mail:
snooping on the public has reached new heights with local authorities putting spy planes in the air to snoop on homeowners who are wasting too much energy. Thermal imaging cameras are being used to create colour-coded maps which will enable council officers to identify offenders and pay them a visit to educate them about the harm to the environment and measures they can take…
More than half the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions come from the domestic sector, which includes property and transport. Almost 60 per cent of a household’s heat is lost through uninsulated walls, lofts and windows, costing the average home £380 a year.
(If they really want to solve the problem, why aren’t they spying on the cows in the UK’s barns?) What else will government be using such means to snoop about and then show up at your house to give you uninvited lectures for your own good?
On the more conservative side, the Labour Party is being chided for a “pathological inability to accept fiscal responsibility,” Obama administration spending is described as the “road to hell,” and Obama’s ratings are down 14%. But the side of ever more intrusive government still seems to be winning by quite a lot, does it not?
Euro chiefs ban ‘Miss’ and ‘Mrs’ — The European Parliament has banned the terms ‘Miss’ and ‘Mrs’ in case they offend…rules also mean a ban on Continental titles, such as Madame and Mademoiselle, Frau and Fraulein and Senora and Senorita…
Officials have also ordered that ’sportsmen’ be called ‘athletes’, ’statesmen’ be referred to as ‘political leaders’ and even that ’synthetic’ or ‘artificial’ be used instead of ‘man-made’. The guidance lists banned terms for describing professions, including fireman, air hostess, headmaster, policeman, salesman, manageress, cinema usherette and male nurse. However MEPs are still allowed to refer to ‘midwives’
It’s almost impossible to imagine that people get paid to think up pernicious foolishness like this.
We first encountered Corporate Gadfly Evelyn Y. Davis 35 years ago at Citibank’s annual meeting. Even then she was a well-known figure. She bought shares of common stock in major companies, and she’d use her position as a shareholder to ask provocative questions at the company’s annual meeting.
Sometimes her questions would be about executive compensation, sometimes about governance issues like the elimination of staggered boards. She was quirky but she did her homework. She read the annual reports, 10-K’s and proxy statements before she opened her mouth.
In this CNBC video from last year, she praised Jamie Dimon and his ability to handle the Bear Stearns takeover, said judgment was pending on Vikram Pandit, and scolded Hank Paulson because he no longer had time for her. She also said that the managements of Fannie and Freddie should be tossed out, and that it was outrageous for those entities to make loans to people who are not creditworthy. In our experience, some CEO’s really disliked her, and they were usually the weaker sort.
This year there’s a new breed of Corporate Gadfly. The government of the United States has bought some shares in some public companies, and so some elected officials and some citizens want to play a new version the Evelyn Davis role. However, they haven’t bothered to read the annual report, the 10-K or the proxy statements. But that doesn’t stop them. The administration and Congress just make things up and no one in the media calls them on it. And that’s not the worst of it.
In the relatively decorous Golden Age of the Corporate Gadfly, an individual like Ms. Davis would cast a vote at an annual meeting, and would live with the results, win or lose. Today’s citizen-gadfly is apparently a more robust character. In the matter of AIG, for example, he wants to garrotte executives with piano wire to make his point. As a result, corporate executives will no doubt become ever more productive as they travel in pairs, disguise themselves, and prepare themselves to dial 911 on a moment’s notice. (The government won’t guarantee the anonymity of the threatened, by the way.)
With the ignorance of the inquisitors and the threats of violence against private individuals, the Golden Age of the Corporate Gadfly would appear to have ended. This all looks a bit like the French Revolution, as the government and the citizenry compete to determine which is the more vile.
Alan S. Blinder is a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. He wrote this today in the NYT:
there are arguments in favor of nationalization. Or are there?
The fact that this debate is going on four months after the election and Obama’s introduction of his economic team shows how screwed up this administration is. Even the Left is puzzled at the administration’s dithering on the single most crucial issue in the country right now. There is zero excuse for not having a plan in place today. Zero.
The Telegraph reports that President Obama gave British Prime Minister Gordon Brown a nice collection of movies on DVD’s:
Barack Obama ‘too tired’ to give proper welcome to Gordon Brown…Sources close to the White House say Mr Obama and his staff have been “overwhelmed” by the economic meltdown and have voiced concerns that the new president is not getting enough rest…A well-connected Washington figure, who is close to members of Mr Obama’s inner circle, expressed concern that Mr Obama had failed so far to “even fake an interest in foreign policy”…
The real views of many in Obama administration were laid bare by a State Department official…The official dismissed any notion of the special relationship, saying: “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”…
British diplomats…concede that the mood music of the event was at times strained. Mr Brown handed over carefully selected gifts, including a pen holder made from the wood of a warship that helped stamp out the slave trade — a sister ship of the vessel from which timbers were taken to build Mr Obama’s Oval Office desk. Mr Obama’s gift in return, a collection of Hollywood film DVDs that could have been bought from any high street store, looked like the kind of thing the White House might hand out to the visiting head of a minor African state.
The Telegraph gave Obama a bit too much credit: “In addition to passing the largest stimulus package and the largest budget in US history, Mr Obama is battling a plummeting stock market.” That’s not true. According to his own account, Obama doesn’t pay attention to the stock market.
This is a small story, but contains disturbing elements. Diplomatic protocol in such visits shouldn’t change from one administration to the next. Is Obama’s senior staff incompetent? How then did they get their jobs? Or is it true that Britain is not important to Obama? And what’s up with the DVD’s? That’s beyond embarrassing. That shows that no one, including the President, thought to ask what was the usual gift in such visits. You’d think it would be hard to be so clueless.
