The AP reports on some of the interchanges between the Democratic contenders for President during the debate yesterday:

In a 90-minute debate, both rivals pledged not to raise taxes on individuals making less than $200,000, and said they would respond forcefully if Iran obtains nuclear weapons and uses them against Israel. “An attack on Israel would incur massive retaliation by the United States,” said Clinton. Obama said, “The U.S. would take appropriate action.”

Senator Clinton’s answer seems clear enough. But what about Senator Obama? What would constitute “appropriate action”? Food for thought, perhaps, given some of Senator Obama’s support from Hamas.

George Will levitates into the ether in a discussion that begins with Adlai Stevenson and Barack Obama. He asks whether Senator Obama has become today’s “prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting”, as Stevenson was said to be in the 1950’s:

Stevenson, like Obama, energized young, educated professionals for whom, Barone wrote, “what was attractive was not his platform but his attitude.” They sought from Stevenson “not so much changes in public policy as validation of their own cultural stance.” They especially rejected “American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States was specially good and decent,” rather than — in Michelle Obama’s words — “just downright mean.”

The emblematic book of the new liberalism was “The Affluent Society” by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. He argued that the power of advertising to manipulate the bovine public is so powerful that the law of supply and demand has been vitiated. Manufacturers can manufacture in the American herd whatever demand the manufacturers want to supply. Because the manipulable masses are easily given a “false consciousness” (another category, like religion as the “opiate” of the suffering masses, that liberalism appropriated from Marxism), four things follow:

First, the consent of the governed, when their behavior is governed by their false consciousnesses, is unimportant. Second, the public requires the supervision of a progressive elite which, somehow emancipated from false consciousness, can engineer true consciousness. Third, because consciousness is a reflection of social conditions, true consciousness is engineered by progressive social reforms. Fourth, because people in the grip of false consciousness cannot be expected to demand or even consent to such reforms, those reforms usually must be imposed, for example, by judicial fiats.

The iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension was Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970 but whose spirit still permeated that school when Obama matriculated there in 1981. Hofstadter pioneered the rhetorical tactic that Obama has revived with his diagnosis of working-class Democrats as victims — the indispensable category in liberal theory. The tactic is to dismiss rather than refute those with whom you disagree.

Obama’s dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program. Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last proud of America.

Hofstadter dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and psychological disorders — a “paranoid style” of politics rooted in “status anxiety,” etc. Conservatism rose on a tide of votes cast by people irritated by the liberalism of condescension. Obama voiced such liberalism with his “bitterness” remarks to an audience of affluent San Franciscans. Perfect.

It would of course be entirely too mean spirited at this point to wonder if we should reconsider all those fainting episodes of a couple of months ago. Surely there could not have been any calculation or manipulation involved in them. Or, as any preacher’s kid would know, could there have been some manipulation in these events for the rubes that watched them at the revival meeting or on TV? You have to admit that the thought is surely plausible, given all that has happened in the intervening months.

In any event, it is, however, becoming a little clearer that, in some important ways, stylistic if not substantive, Senator Obama appears more and more to be the son, not the nephew, of his spiritual mentor.

Surprisingly, from the Boston Globe:

Corn should be used for food, not motor fuel, and yet the United States is committed to a policy that encourages farmers to turn an increasing amount of their crop into ethanol. This may save the nation a bit of the cost of imported oil, but it increases global-warming gases and contributes to higher food prices.

Candidates for president need to tell Americans the truth about ethanol, but they are falling over themselves in pursuit of the farm belt vote. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton want more ethanol factories built than even President Bush envisaged when he called for 15 percent of US gasoline consumption to be replaced by alternative fuels by 2017. John McCain, who correctly called the ethanol push a boondoggle in 2000, now says that it is “a very important way to achieve energy independence.”

Ethanol consumes almost a quarter of US corn production. The energy self-sufficiency that all the candidates seek should not come at the expense of the environment or the food supply.

Increased ethanol production isn’t the only reason for the spike in food costs, but it’s more controllable than drought in Australia, higher fertilizer prices, or increased meat consumption by the Chinese. Unlike those other cost-drivers, ethanol production is encouraged by federal subsidies.

And it’s not as though ethanol improves the environment. When emissions inherent in the production process are included, ethanol consumption generates more carbon dioxide per gallon than gasoline

The beginning of the end of a fad? We’ll drink to that.

Thomas Sowell characterizes Senator Obama as just another standard fare leftist:

Senator Obama’s election year image is that of a man who can bring the country together, overcoming differences of party or race, as well as solving our international problems by talking with Iran and other countries with which we are at odds, and performing other miscellaneous miracles as needed. There is, of course, not a speck of evidence that Obama has ever transcended party differences in the United States Senate. Voting records analyzed by the National Journal show him to be the farthest left of anyone in the Senate. Nor has he sponsored any significant bipartisan legislation — nor any other significant legislation, for that matter…

his recent talk in San Francisco has stirred up controversy because it revealed yet another blatant contradiction between Barack Obama’s public image and his reality. Speaking privately to supporters in heavily left-liberal San Francisco, Obama let down his hair and described working class people in Pennsylvania as so “bitter” that they “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”

Like so much that Obama has said and done over the years, this is standard stuff on the far left, where guns and religion are regarded as signs of psychological dysfunction — and where opinions different from those of the left are ascribed to emotions (”bitter” in this case), rather than to arguments that need to be answered. Like so many others on the left, Obama rejects “stereotypes” when they are stereotypes he doesn’t like but blithely throws around his own stereotypes about “a typical white person” or “bitter” gun-toting, religious and racist working class people.

In politics, the clearer a statement is, the more certain it is to be followed by a “clarification,” when people react adversely to what was plainly said. Obama and his supporters were still busy “clarifying” Jeremiah Wright’s very plain statements when it suddenly became necessary to “clarify” Senator Obama’s own statements in San Francisco…

However inconsistent Obama’s words, his behavior has been remarkably consistent over the years. He has sought out and joined with the radical, anti-Western left, whether Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers of the terrorist Weatherman underground or pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli Rashid Khalidi. Obama is also part of a long tradition on the left of being for the working class in the abstract, or as people potentially useful for the purposes of the left, but having disdain or contempt for them as human beings.

It is becoming pretty plain where Senator Obama has his comfort zone and discomfort zone, as Professor Sowell’s characterization points out. John Judis has a similar analysis.

Senator Obama said some things the other day that some consider controversial and out of touch with the values and lives of Americans and others deem merely a blunder. Here’s part of what he said to explain his remarks:

What I was saying is that when economic hardship hits in these communities, what people have is they’ve got family, they’ve got their faith, they’ve got the traditions that have been passed onto them from generation to generation. Those aren’t bad things. That’s what they have left. And, unfortunately, what people have become bitter about — and oftentimes have told me about, as I traveled through not just Pennsylvania, but I was referring to states all across the Midwest, including my home state — is any confidence that the government is listening to them. They don’t think that government is listening to them.

“They’ve got family, they’ve got faith, they’ve got the traditions that have been passed onto them (guns, social conservatism?)…that’s what they have left.” At least until a government program comes along, apparently. Why do we keep feeling that a certain Senator learned some of his American history from watching movies like The Grapes of Wrath? Or maybe from reading a critique of Hegel? Question: what percentage of Americans now think this way about their country and their countrymen?

From Zombie’s photo shoot of the San Francisco protest:

HT: Roger Simon

A Reuters “story“:

China says foils ‘terrorist’ plot to kidnap Olympians — Chinese authorities have detained 45 East Turkestan “terrorist” suspects, and foiled plots to carry out suicide bomb attacks and kidnap athletes to disrupt the Beijing Olympics, a police spokesman said on Thursday. Uighur militants have been agitating to establish an independent East Turkestan in China’s predominantly Muslim northwestern region of Xinjiang bordering Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.

Chinese authorities cracked two “terrorist” groups, one of which belonged to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), Ministry of Public Security spokesman Wu Heping told a news conference in Beijing. ETIM was listed by the United Nations as a terrorist group in 2002 and has links to Al Qaeda. The group asked its members to do trial runs using poisoned meat, poison gas and remote control explosive devices, Wu said.

Their aim was “to create an international incident with the goal of disrupting the Olympic Games”, the spokesman said. The first group, led by Aji Muhammat, bought explosive materials and carried out 13 test explosions, Wu said without giving the nationality of the ringleader. Suspects in custody confessed they were ordered to commit suicide when arrested, he said. Police detained 10 suspects and seized 16,000 yuan ($2,300) in cash and a large quantity of “Holy War” training materials, Wu said.

We understand all the problems with China’s authoritarian government. Having said that, if you don’t believe in the story about a “terrorist” plot to wage some kind of “Holy War,” then don’t print the story. Reuters should at least be very clear about what quotation marks mean in a “news” story, so that its readers can properly interpret their imprecise intent.

A certain someone of recent note criticizes the “sensationalist” and apparently Republican New York Times, which he says quoted him out of context, and then amazingly praises Senator Obama as the first and possibly only honest man ever to run for President of the United States:

I have never been exposed to that kind of duplicitous behavior before, and I want to write you publicly to let you know that I do not approve of it and will not be party to any further smearing of the name, the reputation, the integrity or the character of perhaps this nation’s first (and maybe even only) honest candidate offering himself for public service as the person to occupy the Oval Office…

I forgot that The New York Times was leading the bandwagon in trumpeting why it is we should have gone into an illegal war. The New York Times became George Bush and the Republican Party’s national “blog.” The New York Times played a role in the outing of Valerie Plame.

It is interesting that Reverend Wright seems to claim that Senator Obama is the Messiah — or does claiming him as perhaps the first and only honest man to stand for President in 220 years have another meaning? Perhaps it’s just another nutty statement in Wright’s long line of such statements, but it’s a particular kind of nuttiness to assert that a guy who has been a Senator for a couple of years is not just the new Lincoln, but superior to Lincoln, Washington, FDR, Jefferson, and all the others. (HT: Powerline)

UPDATE

It apparently turns out that master showman Jeremiah Wright might just be a big phony baloney who was raised in a very middle class way and is moving into a 10,000 square foot house. So is Wright just a huckster who drives a Porsche and mouths rhetoric that is the precise inverse of the way he lives his own life? This P.T. Barnum aspect to Wright adds an extra fillip to his relationship with the stirring orator he mentored. (HT: Larwyn)

It was 1963. America was A-OK. We were going into space. It was the Jet Age. Progress was non stop towards the New Frontier. And the Ad men of Madison Avenue wanted to cash in on the good feelings abroad in the land. Here was one innovation of the time:

1963: In one of the most significant demographic events in commercial history, the post-war baby boom emerges as a social and marketplace phenomenon. Pepsi recognizes the change and positions Pepsi as the brand belonging to the new generation – The Pepsi Generation. “Come Alive! You’re in the Pepsi Generation” makes advertising history. It is the first time a product is identified, not so much by its attributes, as by its consumers’ lifestyles and attitudes.

Flash forward 45 years. So many Americans are united in their victimhood. But they still want to feel that they’re the coolest, swingingest victims ever. And they’ve found a really hip new theme: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Andrew Ferguson discusses the matter:

What, after all, does “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” mean, precisely? My hunch is that the sentence is one of those things that no one will admit to being confused by, like the movies of Godard or the tenor-sax solos of John Coltrane, lest your peers think you’re a loser or a moron. Certainly Obama fans won’t admit how obscure the sentence is — though several have claimed that it’s lifted from a prophecy of the Tribal Elders of the Hopi Indians. Hopi prophecies are famously obscure.

But this is just wishful thinking. The origins of the phrase aren’t nearly so glamorous or exotic. Two years ago, before Obama even said he wanted to be president, the left wing radical feminist-lesbian novelist Alice Walker published a book of essays and called it We are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For. Believe me: If the line had come from the Tribal Elders of the Hopi nation, Alice Walker would have been more than happy to say so. Instead she said it came from a poem published in 1980 by the left wing radical-feminist-bisexual poet June Jordan. Neither Walker nor Jordan has said what the sentence means. But Walker did offer this hint in the introduction to her book of essays: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for because we are able to see what is happening with a much greater awareness than our parents or grandparents, our ancestors, could see.”

That’s a clue, anyway. The sentence may not have any positive content, Walker seems to be saying, but it does have an indirect meaning, an implication, as a kind of self-referential gesture for the people who claim it. When Obama’s supporters say “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” what they mean is that in the long roll call of history, from Aristotle and Heraclitus down through Augustine and Maimonides and Immanuel Kant and the fellows who wrote the Federalist Papers, we’re number one! We’re the smartest yet! Everybody — Mom, Dad, Gramps and Grandma, Great Grandpa and Great Grandma, maybe even the Tribal Elders — they’ve all been waiting for people as clued-in as us!

Is this what Obama means too? No one who’s wandered through an Obama rally and heard the war whoops and seen the cheerful, vacant gazes would come away thinking, “These are the smartest people ever.” I’m sorry, they just aren’t. What is unmistakable is the creepy kind of solipsism and the air of self-congratulation that clings to his campaign. “There is something happening,” he says in stump speeches. And what’s happening? “Change is happening.” How so? “The reason our campaign has been different is about what you, the people who love this country, can do to change it.”

And the way to change it is to join the campaign, which, once you join it, will change America. Because this is our moment. The time is now. Now is the time. Yes, we can. We bring change to the campaign because the campaign is about change. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. Obama and his followers are perfecting postmodern reflexivity. It’s a campaign that’s about itself. The point of the campaign is the campaign.

“The point of the campaign” — whether an ad campaign or a political campaign — is to sell the product. (Obama strategist David Alexrod is an advertising man.) However, Americans typically tire of their ad campaigns rather quickly. The Pepsi Generation came and went and was replaced by something else in short order. We’ll just have to see how long these ad campaign slogans (”Yes we can” and “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”) stay at the top of the charts.

We noted the other day the grotesque rantings of the “uncle” of one of the leading Presidential candidates during their close relationship of two decades. Today we were reminded by Mona Charen of another, more casual, relationship of Senator Obama, a certain William Ayers. Though this is old news, we looked in on an article in the NYT about this fellow that appeared on September 11, 2001:

No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives…”I don’t regret setting bombs,” Bill Ayers said. ”I feel we didn’t do enough.” Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970’s as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago…

In 1967 he met Ms. Dohrn in Ann Arbor, Mich. She had a law degree from the University of Chicago and was a magnetic speaker who often wore thigh-high boots and miniskirts. In 1969, after the Manson family murders in Beverly Hills, Ms. Dohrn told an S.D.S. audience: ”Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach.”…

Ms. Dohrn, Mr. Ayers and others eventually broke with S.D.S. to form the more radical Weathermen, and in 1969 Ms. Dohrn was arrested and charged with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer during the Days of Rage protests against the trial of the Chicago Eight — antiwar militants accused of conspiracy to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

In 1970 came the town house explosion in Greenwich Village. Ms. Dohrn failed to appear in court in the Days of Rage case, and she and Mr. Ayers went underground, though there were no charges against Mr. Ayers. Later that spring the couple were indicted along with others in Federal Court for crossing state lines to incite a riot during the Days of Rage, and following that for ”conspiracy to bomb police stations and government buildings.” Those charges were dropped in 1974 because of prosecutorial misconduct, including illegal surveillance.

During his fugitive years, Mr. Ayers said, he lived in 15 states, taking names of dead babies in cemeteries who were born in the same year as he. He describes the typical safe house: there were usually books by Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara’s picture in the bedroom; fermented Vietnamese fish sauce in the refrigerator, and live sourdough starter donated by a Native American that was reputed to have passed from hand to hand over a century…

Even today, he finds ”a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance,” he writes.

Swell fellow, this Ayers. Of passing interest perhaps is that Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn hosted a critical introductory event in 1995 for the current Senator from Illinois, and that Ayers and Obama served on a board together after that for a few years. Ayers also is a contributor to Obama. Hmmm. Upon further reflection, we’re pretty sure that this relationship of Senator Obama means nothing at all. After all, his relationship with Tony Rezko meant nothing. Obama only received an unsolicited job offer from Rezko in 1990. Indeed, they only had lunch “once or twice a year,” Obama only got $168,000 from Rezko and his circle, and Obama’s accepting of the essentially free backyard from Rezko was a “mistake” that was nonetheless “handled ethically.” So we’re pretty sure that neither the Ayers nor Rezko situations require any further scrutiny. (Nor does the strange case of the earmarks and the raise — nothing to see here, ladies and gentlemen.)

The ultimate proof that these relationships obviously meant nothing at all is that Senator Obama apparently pays little or no attention to what his associates think or say. After all, though Pastor Wright was Obama’s “spiritual mentor” of 20 years who provided not only the title of one of his books but some of the content of his 2004 DNC speech, Senator Obama never heard of the outrageous things he was saying over the course of their long relationship and the hundreds of sermons he attended. As Obama wrote: “The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation.”

Evidently, Senator Obama hasn’t gone to his church’s bookstore to see the readily available DVD’s, or even read the autobiography that Obama himself wrote or the article in last April’s NYT for which the Senator himself was interviewed. (Apparently, a sermon full of profanity and references to “Bush administration bullshit” does not count as sufficiently offensive, since Senator Obama was seen at one of those.) NYT:

Mr. Obama was entranced by Mr. Wright, whose sermons fused analysis of the Bible with outrage at what he saw as the racism of everything from daily life in Chicago to American foreign policy…He was also interested in the world beyond his own; in 1984, he traveled to Cuba to teach Christians about the value of nonviolent protest and to Libya to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, along with the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Mr. Wright said his visits implied no endorsement of their views…[Wright added: “When his enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli with Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.”]…

Mr. Wright issued a “War on Iraq I.Q. Test,” with questions like, “Which country do you think poses the greatest threat to global peace: Iraq or the U.S.?”…Mr. Wright’s political statements may be more controversial than his theological ones. He has said that Zionism has an element of “white racism.”…On the Sunday after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Mr. Wright said the attacks were a consequence of violent American policies. Four years later he wrote that the attacks had proved that “people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West went on its merry way of ignoring Black concerns.”…

Mr. Obama says…He was not at Trinity the day Mr. Wright delivered his remarks shortly after the attacks…

Curious. Many Americans, even those who don’t go to church regularly, attended services on September 16, 2001, and in the weeks thereafter. Apparently Senator Obama is just never around when his supporters are doing or saying outrageous things.

We learned a lot today about the “US of KKK A“. And about how America invented AIDS. And about how the song should not be God Bless America but God Damn America. And about how FDR knew that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor but let it happen. And about certain nasty words that Senator Clinton has never been called. And far worse as well. Yes, it really is that bad. And we learned it all in church! Hmmm.

We never heard such things in church before. We must have gone to the wrong Sunday School. Speaking of that, would it be considered child abuse to put the kids through sermons of this sort? Does such a church deserve a $22,500 donation from a presidential candidate? What does it say that he attended sermons by this fellow since 1988 or 1990? VDH also has some very pertinent comments on Reverend Wright and Senator Obama.

Question: if this chap were your “uncle“, would you sit next to him at dinner or lock him in the attic?

UPDATE

Spengler explains elements of the strange theology at work in this case. Excerpt:

Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community … Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.

This seems as weird as the idea of President Tom Cruise.

Global warming was a Planetary Emergency. Will this current global cooling merit its own emergency declaration, or is it just a passing thing?

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on…

The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year’s time…it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Scientists…link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn’t itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

We’ve discussed this cooling and its potential causes previously. If it continues, it is only a matter of time until the global huckster community does a 180 and finds a way to blame this too on human activity, exploiting this new form of “climate change” as an excuse for more taxation and regulation.

CNN’s guidance on the reporting of the Castro resignation:

* Please note Fidel did bring social reforms to Cuba – namely free education and universal health care, and racial integration. in addition to being criticized for oppressing human rights and freedom of speech.

Appalling.

You have to admit there is an odd aspect to some of the populist multi-millionaires who have been running for president. They seem to have gotten ahead very nicely in life, but seem to despair of others doing so without the larder of Washington and the generosity of high-achieving politicians and their spouses to redeem our benighted past. VDH:

Barack Obama may have gone to exclusive private schools. He and his wife may both be lawyers who between them have earned four expensive Ivy League degrees. They may make about a million dollars a year, live in an expensive home and send their kids to prep school. But they are still apparently first-hand witnesses to how the American dream has gone sour. Two other Ivy League lawyers, Hillary and Bill, are multimillionaires who have found America to be a land of riches beyond most people’s imaginations. But Hillary also talks of the tragic lost dream of America.

(The “lost dream of America” was recently found in Kazakhstan.)

The tyrant Fidel Castro, called by Diane Sawyer a “dashing revolutionary,” retired today. Here’s a bit of AP’s attempt at even handed treatment of the event:

Castro’s supporters admired his ability to provide a high level of health care and education for citizens while remaining fully independent of the United States. But his detractors called him a dictator whose totalitarian government systematically denied individual freedoms and civil liberties such as speech, movement and assembly.

“Provide a high level of health care.” That would be a laugh if it weren’t tragic. The average monthly salary in Cuba is $16 a month, according to the State Department. Cuba is a nation so poor that people keep the family pig in the bathroom so he won’t get stolen by the neighbors. The fools in the MSM are would also be a laugh, if they weren’t dangerous in their ignorance and smugness.

A story from the alleged news organization Reuters:

Gangs of rioters set fire to cars and garbage trucks in northern Copenhagen on Friday, the sixth night of rioting and vandalism…Scores of cars and several schools have been vandalized or burned in the past week. Police could give no reason, but said that unusually mild weather and the closure of schools for a winter break might have contributed.

“Unusually mild weather and the closure of schools for a winter break might have contributed.” Hmmm. That doesn’t seem as plausible as this explanation. Maybe Reuters should consider a different line of work. They don’t seem to be much interested in the news, after all.

This is the 50th anniversary of the hula hoop fad that swept America in 1958. We seem to have a new version of the same phenomenon today in the Obama craze that has gripped the media and a good chunk of the populace. John Dickerson, Mark Steyn, and Tom Maguire contribute a few more stories and quips in the Ehrenreich genre of ethereal unreality about America’s current instant messiah, King of Kings, and Man of Steel who will save the planet with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men:

Barack Obama just seems to get cooler and cooler. He’s the most popular topic on the New York Times topics page…Internet widgets allow you to see what great thing Barack Obama has done for you…on the New York subway Friday morning, one of our copy editors…heard one woman joke to another: “Obama, will you pick me up after my noninvasive minor surgical procedure?” To which the other replied: “Obama, will you hold my hair back when I puke?”…

Many spiritually advanced people I know…identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul…

John Lewis, the venerable civil rights hero and congressman, put words to this feeling recently. “In recent days, there is a sense of movement and a sense of spirit,” he said, suggesting that he might switch his superdelegate vote from Hillary Clinton to Obama. “Something is happening in America and people are prepared and ready to make that great leap.”…On Facebook, people write about dreams featuring Obama. There is only one correct reaction to the will.i.am “Yes We Can” video and that is to start chanting along…

There was the woman in New Hampshire who compared him with Christ. There was Maria Shriver’s comparison of the candidate with the state of California, with the rhetorical fervor usually seen only after a preacher shouts, “You are healed!”…

“Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair.”…

“Be not afraid; for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all the people: for there is born to you this day in the city of Chicago a Savior, who is Barack the Democrat.”

Questions: (a) the 1958 hula hoop craze lasted two years — how long will this one last? (b) if today’s fad politician is the hula hoop, who will be the frisbee (the second fad invented by Wham-O in the late fifties)? (c) and finally, what’s the deal with all the women who faint at the Senator’s rallies and rather disturbing revival meetings — is it real or is it something else entirely? (The list of these suspicious fainting spells seems to be getting longer and longer.)

Barbara Ehrenreich in the Huffington Post:

When did you begin to think that Obama might be unstoppable? Was it when your grown feminist daughter started weeping inconsolably over his defeat in New Hampshire? Or was it when he triumphed in Virginia, a state still littered with Confederate monuments and memorabilia? For me, it was on Tuesday night when two Republican Virginians in a row called C-SPAN radio to report that they’d just voted for Ron Paul, but, in the general election, would vote for… Obama…

Thanks to Iraq and water-boarding, Abu Ghraib and the “rendering” of terror suspects, we’ve achieved the moral status of a pariah nation. The seas are rising. The dollar is sinking. A growing proportion of Americans have no access to health care; an estimated 18,000 die every year for lack of health insurance. Now, as the economy staggers into recession, the financial analysts are wondering only whether the rest of the world is sufficiently “de-coupled” from the US economy to survive our demise…

Obama is different, really different, and that in itself represents “change.” A Kenyan-Kansan with roots in Indonesia and multiracial Hawaii, he seems to be the perfect answer to the bumper sticker that says, “I love you America, but isn’t it time to start seeing other people?” As conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan has written, Obama’s election could mean the re-branding of America. An anti-war black president with an Arab-sounding name: See, we’re not so bad after all, world!

Once upon a time there was a serious country called the United States of America. It often had serious men, from all over the political spectrum, as leaders and as citizens. That was before “the re-branding of America,” however. Heaven help us all.

An IBD editorial warns that some very unpleasant Global Cooling could be just around the corner:

Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century. Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.

This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe…if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere…

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology…says that “CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales…I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet…Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth…Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again…If we were to have even a medium-sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than ‘global warming’ would have had.”

A Hoover Institution Study…says that “try as we might, we simply could not find any relationship between industrial activity, energy consumption and changes in global temperatures.” The study concludes that if you shut down all the world’s power plants and factories, “there would not be much effect on temperatures.”

(HT: Powerline) Question: could it be that Newsweek was actually right in 1975?

Michael Barone and Victor Davis Hanson both write about this “crazy year” with its topsy-turvy politics. Barone notes one oddity:

absent from political coverage, and even from many of the candidate debates, has been discussion of public policy. Voters lacking signposts in this open field have responded in ways that don’t make much sense: Republicans concerned about the economy tilted toward Mr. McCain, who once said he didn’t know much about the economy, and Democrats eager to withdraw from Iraq tilted toward Mrs. Clinton. The ideas vacuum in campaign 2008 still remains to be filled, and opinion may still take sharp and unpredicted turns.

Yes, it’s a very odd year. But is anything significant changing, or is the strangeness just one of those things that happens from time to time? We believe there is a reasonable likelihood that something significant might be afoot. It’s hard to say precisely what it is. However, one factor might be generational.

We have had it good in America for a very long time now, and memories are short. Indeed, memories of economic privation among the last two generations of Americans are, broadly speaking, non-existent among the young in much of the middle class. Unemployment is 4.9%, almost non-existent, and yet some people seem hysterical. The last time unemployment averaged over 10% in a year was 1940; the last time it touched that level even briefly was a quarter century ago, in 1983. (By contrast, unemployment is many of the grittier parts of the world often averages 20% or 30% or more.) So young Americans really haven’t seen hard times like those that were common to previous generations.

Thus, at least a generation and a half of American middle class young people have a very different perspective, and sense of entitlement, to relative comfort and the boons of technology than did their immediate forbears. We’ve made this point before, but it seems to get ever more acute. Thomas Sowell notes, for example, that the statistical reason that the “middle class is disappearing” is that its members have moved up, not down.

Toys, technology, entitlement, and a decline in paper routes and mowing lawns. There is no end to the mischief that idle minds and idle hands can get into, and this we have the strange obsessions with nonsense in the US and much of the world in recent years — from cigarettes killing a billion (yes, billion!) people to the so-called Planetary Emergency we face.

As Burke said: “Example is the school of mankind and they will learn at no other.” Thus we would not be surprised to see some nutty experimentation in Utopian ideas in the next few years as the younger generations of Americans come up and the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers continue to fade or disappear. That generational shift might be one of the things that contributes to this topsy-turvy political year.

But we think there might be something beyond the generational shift at work. We have had many asset bubbles over the last several decades. The oil bubble, the internet bubble, the housing bubble, and on and on. But we have also had a bubble in Utopianism itself. Just look around. Bubbles often end in a desperate frenzy. We wouldn’t be surprised if one aspect of Obamamania, for example, is the wish to cling to a utopian dream in a time when so many significant stresses threaten to burst the bubble.