“The contempt for “women and children first” is not a small loss. For soft cultures in good times, dispensing with social norms is easy. In hard times, you may have need of them.”

From this excellent column.

It’s odd that one tack the Democrats may attempt this fall is to argue for Barack Obama’s foreign policy success. As Leeden points out, Iran and Syria have been directly responsible for numerous American deaths and terrorist attacks, yet Obama has failed to offer any assistance to the increasingly powerful opposition groups in both those countries. Instead, his assistance has gone to opposition groups in Egypt and Libya, helping to topple two regimes that were certainly oppressive to their populations, but they were far less violent and repressive than either Iran or Syria, nor were they actively opposing U.S. interests in the world, as are Iran and Syria.

It makes one suspect that our President’s foreign policy ambitions are limited to advancing his own political interests rather than his country’s foreign policy interests.

“Despite the rhetoric employed, the current dominant idea in the United States seems to be not so much that the “rich” (and, in practice, the middle class) have to pay “their fair share” to those who are starving to death in rat-infested squatter camps (of whom there aren’t many), but that they must subsidize upper middle class people who are non-productive yet living very nice lives, often better lives than those who are hard-working and subsidizing them.”

From this excellent piece by Barry Rubin.

Given its strength across the party spectrum, it remains a puzzle to me why there is so much support among religious people for increasing the extent, both in breadth and depth, of federal influence in the personal affairs of American citizens. Of all people, those of the book should be particularly concerned about human systems demanding obeisance, especially those with the power to enforce it violently.

What I ponder when we meet is his devotion to progressive political policies. We don’t talk about it very much because our political viewpoints are closely interwoven with our understandings of the world, and there’s not much flexibility. But the futility of the centralized government project for accomplishing what he claims to want seems at such odds, it baffles me to hear him advocate for more of what has failed for the past 80 years.

So I ponder it, but it seems irresolvable.

From this excellent piece by Matthew Spaulding.

What I wonder at is his level of confidence that his audience will not encounter anyone or any source information that exposes him. He must know that his viewers are hermetically sealed from the very easy evidence that what he is telling them is false, and he knows it’s false, and he’s saying it anyway. That is a problem.

When he speaks at a press conference, though, the things he says raise a lot of questions and inferences that undermine his reputation and standing. Criticism of his performance on Wednesday are widely available. This one from John Hinderaker at Powerline is on point. The President’s actions over the past two years belie the claims he makes about his commitments and his agenda. It’s troubling.

I wonder if the Charles Koch Foundation would get the attention from as many people as they will if it hadn’t been for the smear attacks by the Left. The information and discussion in their video has been available, but I think a lot of people uneasy about the direction the Progressives are taking the country will find helpful information like this more often, because they’ll recognize the name. That’s a delightfully ironic possibility.