Jim Geraghty in yesterday's Morning Jolt:

Hillary Clinton suggests that criticizing Obama makes Afghans want to kill Americans. Madam Secretary, with all the respect due to your office: Shut up.

Your job is to represent us, not to tell us what we can and cannot say in response to American policy and overseas events. . . .

Her latest attempt to spin criticism of the administration as somehow off-limits in the name of diplomacy:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton defended President Obama's apology to Afghan President Hamid Karzai and warned that the GOP's condemnation of the apology could further "inflame" the situation.

Last week, U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan accidentally burned some Qurans, which sparked deadly protests in the country. Obama apologized to Karzai for the "unintentionally mishandled" books – a move that has been criticized by some Republicans.

"I find it somewhat troubling that our politics would inflame such a dangerous situation in Afghanistan," Clinton told CNN on Monday.

. . . Allahpundit [writes][,]

Which Republican soundbite, I wonder, does she think has "inflamed" a situation that's already inspired Afghan lunatics to launch suicide attacks on NATO bases and shoot American troops point blank in the head? I haven't heard of a single case of someone abroad grumbling about Newt Gingrich's rhetoric; I have read a lot of quotes from Muslims venting their rage at infidels who would dare disrespect Islam by burning the Koran.

As a prominent American leader said, "I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you're not patriotic. We should stand up and say we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration."

That leader, of course, was Hillary Clinton in 2003.

(Note: changed link on "latest attempt" because the one in the newsletter isn't working.)

Abe Greenwald and Evelyn Gordon on some musicians / human-rights poseurs.

Headline of the year so far:

Drunken elk hides kids' swing set in a tree

(Via Dave Barry.)

Cardinal Francis George of Chicago predicts that under Obamacare and the HHS mandate, “unless something changes,” in two years all Catholic hospitals will have shut down.

Ace observes,

The state would have to come in and take over, right? I mean, they'd have to. Something Must Be Done, and ergo the state gains new powers, somehow. To fix its previous mistakes.

The real genius of socialism is that it is filled with mistakes and poor decisions, and those very mistakes and poor decisions then supply the justification for additional assertions of power, to fix problems their last power-grab created.

Heather Mac Donald on "the distortions of discourse that flow from affirmative action."

Mark Steyn, prompted by the furor over Foster Friess's now-infamous joke,* quotes a New York Times article, "For Women Under 30 Most Births Occur Outside Marriage":

Amber Strader, 27, was in an on-and-off relationship with a clerk at Sears a few years ago when she found herself pregnant. A former nursing student who now tends bar, Ms. Strader said her boyfriend was so dependent that she had to buy his cigarettes. Marrying him never entered her mind. “It was like living with another kid,” she said.

When a second child, with a new boyfriend, followed three years later — her birth control failed, she said — her boyfriend, a part-time house painter, was reluctant to wed.

Steyn comments,

If, as I do, you live in the country, you have dozens of neighbors like Miss Strader – nice high-school girls who babysit your kids; you lose touch, they move to the next town, and you bump into them a couple of years later doing the late shift at the diner or the general store; they’re 23 or 24, with three kids by three different guys. And they’re still nice, and still kinda pretty, if aged beyond their years. But life and its opportunities are fled. If you’re Britney Spears and you wake up after an almighty bender next to some guy you’d rather not face the grey morning after with, there are high-priced lawyers and managers and minders to make all the bad stuff go away. If you’re Britney at the KwikkiKrap, it’s not so easy. . . .

A country in which Foster Friess’ line rouses more concern than that New York Times headline is not one you’d want to bet on.

*"You know, back in my days, they’d use Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. . . . The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly."

(Edited since originally posted.)

Jay Nordlinger:

I have said it for decades, ever since being exposed to the Arab world while in high school: The region will never, ever progress until the fever breaks — until the culture of the lie, the culture of nutty paranoia, dies or weakens. More than poverty or anything else, it’s lunacy and lies that hold the Arab world back.

Many Arabs will tell you this, when they think it’s safe to do so.

Quick story — a repeat: On 9/11 or 9/12, I received an e-mail from an Egyptian acquaintance, who lectured at the university in Alexandria. Very well-educated, Westernized woman. She said (in essence), “I hope you’re okay. And please know it couldn’t have been Arabs who did this — it must have been the Jews.”

If she could do no better than that — what hope was there for the man who emptied her trash at the university?

Carol Iannone:

[A]t a talk some time ago by a South African scholar, also attended by members of his family, I discovered that they are afraid to walk around their city; whites and Jews are subject to quotas in medical and other professional schools; and many young people are hoping to leave the country never to return.

As in Iraq between the toppling of Saddam and the surge, freedom from an oppressive regime can bring new oppression.

From Michael Potemra, on memory and grief.

Sen. Tom Coburn on today's tax-cut deal: "Washington at its worst."

David Pryce-Jones finds in Germany's current treatment of Greece ominous similarities to the Axis occupation of the 1940s.

Observations and predictions regarding the Middle East, from Daniel Pipes.

From Yuval Levin, an excellent, bleak post on Obama's budget proposal.

Thomas Sowell:

[T]here needs to be some understanding of the reckless accusations that have become part of the all-out attempt to destroy Newt Gingrich, as so many other political figures have been destroyed, by non-stop smears in the media. . . .

[T]he poisonous practice of irresponsible smears is an issue that is bigger than Gingrich, Romney, or any other candidate of either party.

There have long been reports of people who decline to be nominated for federal judicial appointments because that means going before the Senate Judiciary Committee to have lies about their past spread nationwide, and the good reputation built up over a lifetime destroyed by politicians who could not care less about the truth.

The same practices may well have something to do with the public’s dissatisfaction with the current crop of candidates in this year’s primaries — and in previous years’ primaries. Character assassination is just another form of voter fraud.

There is no law against it, so it is up to the voters, not only in Florida but in other states, to punish it at the ballot box — the only place where punishment is likely to stop the practice.

From Jim Geraghty, a call for realism in assessing candidates.

Mark Krikorian:

Mexico’s successful evolution into a modern industrialized democracy is the most vital foreign-policy interest we have — way, way more important than which gang of goat-herding barbarians rules the Hindu Kush or anything that happens in Syria or Yemen or Libya or Belarus or Burma or Uganda or even Iran. And yet Mexico’s an afterthought, both for the media and for policymakers, unless someone’s head gets chopped off — the president didn’t even mention it once on Tuesday [in the SOTU].

Jonah Goldberg* on "this 'national conversation about race' liberals keep clamoring for":

As I've written a million times now, the pattern goes like this. Liberals insist that we must talk openly and honestly about race. A conservative says something open and honest about race. Liberals scream "Racist!" and try to destroy him for saying what liberals hoped he would say.

And it will never end.

*No link; in his free newsletter; subscribe here.

Theodore Dalrymple on courage, culture and the Concordia.

I'm glad I don't have to fly.

I've started a Twitter feed as a means to point to music I wish more people could hear. I’ll aim to add a track each day until I run out of material.

As Dave Edmunds (I think) once said, every musician is a frustrated dj, so it’ll serve a purpose even if no one listens. But who knows, maybe someone somewhere will.

Dave Barry's "Year in Review" is up, and very funny, as always.

Mark Steyn's column this weekend, on our fiscal profligacy, is one of his best. Two passages among many worth quoting:

Public debt has increased by 67 percent over the last three years, and too many Americans refuse even to see it as a problem. . . . Look into the eyes of Barack Obama or Harry Reid or Barney Frank, and you realize that, even as they’re borrowing all this money, they have no serious intention of paying any of it back. That’s to say, there is no politically plausible scenario under which the 16.4 trillion is reduced to 13.7 trillion, and then 7.9 trillion, and eventually 173 dollars and 48 cents. At the deepest levels within our governing structures, we are committed to living beyond our means on a scale no civilization has ever done.

* * *

At this stage in a critical election cycle, we ought to be arguing about how many government departments to close, how many government programs to end, how many millions of government regulations to do away with. Instead, one party remains committed to encrusting even more barnacles to America’s rusting hulk, while the other is far too wary of harshing the electorate’s mellow.

Diana West:

Freedom of speech no longer exists in Austria, as definitively proven by the Vienna high court. This week, a judge upheld the conviction against Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff on the following charge: "denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion." In simplest terms, this means that Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff speaks the truth about Islam, and in Austria, as in other nations across the Western world currently transitioning to sharia (Islamic law), speaking the truth about Islam is not tolerated, and, more and more, is against the law. . . .

Where, exactly, does this leave all of the rest of us in that community of nations whose calendars, despite the press of Islamization, still culminate in Christmas? I offer in response a clarifying quotation . . . from Afshin Ellian, a Dutch columnist, law professor, and professor . . . who in 1983 fled Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution in Iran.

In early 2010, Ellian, commenting on the trial of Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders for allegedly anti-Islamic statements, had this to say:

"If you cannot say that Islam is a backward religion and that Muhammad is a criminal, then you are living in an Islamic country, my friend, because there you also cannot say such things. I may say Christ was a fag and Mary was a whore, but apparently I should stay off of Muhammad."

Merry Christmas.

Nice understatement from Max Boot, on Obama's use of drone attacks:

The fact that a liberal Democratic commander-in-chief is ordering such strikes gives them political and legal insulation that they may not necessarily enjoy in future administrations.

From where he stood he could see the girl plainly, and she was, he tells me, the absolute ultimate word, the last bubbling cry. She could not have looked better to him if he had drawn up the specifications personally.

P. G. Wodehouse, "Trouble Down at Tudsleigh" (in Young Men in Spats)

Merry Christmas.

Excellent short post from Frederick Kagan on Iraq:

“End this war” was never a policy, still less a strategy. The president has accomplished that campaign promise. Now he must face an even harder question: What is our strategy for pursuing and achieving our vital national security interests and objectives in Iraq in the absence of a military presence? So far, the silence from the White House on that issue—apart from bromides about economic activities and friendship—has been deafening.

One immediate concern voiced by Charles Krauthammer:

[W]e are now going to have 16,000 people in the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. . . . And without our own military for protection, do we really want that many Americans out there relying on protection of others? I think they’re going to be sitting ducks.

Let's hope he's wrong.

Definitely worth bragging about:

Hamas celebrated its 24^th anniversary this week, and like any organization, it used the occasion to issue a press release detailing its achievements. So here, according to its own press release, are what Hamas considers its most notable achievements: It has killed 1,365 Israelis and wounded 6,411 since 1987. It has carried out 1,117 attacks on Israel, including 87 suicide bombings, and fired 11,093 rockets at Israel.

From the introduction to "Dave Barry’s Gift Guide" for 2011:

The holiday season is a time of traditions. Here in America, the most popular holiday tradition, observed by millions, is to celebrate the birth of Jesus by going to a Walmart at 4 a.m. on the day after Thanksgiving and getting into fistfights over steeply discounted TV sets.
But many other nations around the world have equally colorful holiday traditions of their own. For example:

In Spain, on Christmas Eve, children traditionally fill their parents’ best shoes with yogurt, then hide in the woods for two to three weeks.

In Austria, instead of Santa Claus they have “Father Wurmwerfer” — a man dressed in a duck costume who rides a unicycle around tossing earthworms to everyone he sees. Legend has it that if you catch one, you will soon wash your hands.

"11 Anachronistic Photos From Behind The Scenes." My favorite:

(Via Neatorama.)

Charles Krauthammer:

In Kansas, Obama lamented that millions “are now forced to take their children to food banks.” You have to admire the audacity. That’s the kind of damning observation the opposition brings up when you’ve been in office three years. Yet Obama summoned it to make the case for his reelection!

This week's Goldberg File (named for its author, Jonah "Goldberg" File)* is exceptionally good. I'll post a long excerpt from it because 1) the excerpted passage deserves wide distribution, 2) it might induce readers to subscribe (free) to Goldberg's newsletter, and 3) it's way better than anything I could write.

The reviews from Obama's Kansas speech are in. People who heard what they wanted to hear loved it. Everyone else . . . eh, not so much.

The consensus among those who loved it was that Obama has finally "found his voice." Here's the Newark Star Ledger: "In Kansas, Obama finally found his voice to make that case." By the way, the "case" the editors are referring to is the same case we've heard for a long time: spend piles more money on education, infrastructure, etc., and tax the wealthy to pay for it. You know, the same "new ideas" liberals have been touting for more than ten decades now.

Howard Gleckman -- yes, that Howard Gleckman! -- of the Urban Institute agrees that Obama has found his voice. He tells Politico, "It is hard for me to believe Republicans are still making a fight of this. This is a total political loser for them. President Obama has finally found his voice on this. It is even hard for Democrats to screw this up."

Yes, absolutely! Now that Obama has found his voice, it's like he's found the One Ring to Rule Them All and nothing can stand in his way!

Tom Brokaw -- who, as we all know, spends his days slipping sawbucks to his vast network of shoeshine boys, newspaper hawkers, drifters down at the docks, soda jerks, and other snitches to keep his finger on the nation's pulse -- saw all this coming. He said on Meet the Press way back on October 30, "I think he's beginning to find his voice. For the last nine months or so we have not known which Obama would show up from week to week. Now they seem to be on track to what the campaign strategy is going to be." So that was it. After all, Brokaw is always the first to spot a political trend. I believe it was just days after the Tet Offensive that he was saying how public opinion was moving against the Vietnam War.

But . . . whoah, what's this? U.S. News on September 20, 2011: "Obama appears to have finally found his voice in terms of dealing forcefully with the Republicans."

And it appears that U.S. News was simply echoing the Washington Blade, which proclaimed in a headline five days earlier: "President Obama finally finds his voice." That blade cuts deep!

Now, hold on, this is strange. Margaret Carlson announced in Businessweek in April that "Obama Finds His Voice on Cuts That Matter."

April? Feh! Historian H. W. Brands noted that Obama had located his political chi back in January, after his speech in Tucson. "Barack Obama has found his voice again," he announced on CNN.com.

This is getting ridiculous. Maybe Michelle should pin Obama's voice to his sleeves like a little kid's mittens, because that guy apparently loses his voice more than Jon Corzine loses billions of dollars.

On October 26, 2010, the Washington Post, reported that "in the final weeks leading up to Election Day, Obama has found his voice." This voice was going to turn around the midterms -- you know, the ones that turned out to be an electoral hot-tea enema that psephologists are still marveling at and which even Obama conceded was a "shellacking." Ah, yes, but as Alec Baldwin might say, "Imagine how much worse the shellacking would have been if he hadn't found his voice."

More than a month earlier, Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute was sure that Obama had already found his voice. On September 24, 2010, he proclaimed: "Obama Finds His Voice -- And America's." Twelve days earlier, the St. Petersburg Times spotted the same trend. "President Barack Obama found his voice last week," the editors insisted. "In a speech in Cleveland and at a news conference Friday, he fought back against Republican demands to extend all of the Bush-era tax cuts and resisted election-year pandering to antsy voters."

I mean, who among us can forget Obama's famous Cleveland Speech? Barely an hour passes on cable news without someone referencing that watershed moment in American politics.

But that's not where the trail begins in the hunt for Obama's voice. "So Julie," NPR host Jackie Lyden began a conversation with health-care reporter Julie Rovner, "a lot of people are saying Barack Obama has found his voice on [Obamacare], quite a shift in strategy."

Who was saying that? Susan Estrich, for one! "Democrats like me steeled ourselves for the bloodbath to come, wondering only how truly bad it would be," Estrich wrote twelve days earlier. "But something seems to be happening on the way to disaster: Barack Obama has found his voice again."

Okay, you get it already. All this represents a fraction of a fraction of the times the press and liberal pundits have proclaimed Obama has "found his voice." (I didn't even include David Gergen's bold proclamations in this regard!) It's amazing how hearing what you want to hear amounts to proclaiming everyone else has heard the same thing.

*Yes, I borrowed that joke from Dave Barry. I have excellent taste and little shame.

John Derbyshire:

A liberal is always a totalitarian at heart, though half of them don’t know it.

Mark Steyn:

In 1975, Milton Friedman said this: “I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.”

Just so. Every time Barack Obama stands at his teleprompter and is forced to pretend that he’s interested in deficit reduction, we have taken a step toward that Milton Friedman reality. You have to create the conditions, as the Tea Party and the town hall meetings did, whereby the wrong people are forced to do the right things.

Jim Geraghty on the GOP field, in today's Morning Jolt:

[I]t seems as if there are a lot of voters who are adamant that somebody in this field has to be a grade-A candidate, and . . . if they have to ignore certain flaws to feel that passion and enthusiasm, they'll do so.

. . . I can't begrudge any Republican for wanting that euphoria of finding the ideal candidate, and if somebody in this field stirs your heart and mind, good for you. But don't fume at those who aren't as quick to fall hard as you are.

Mark Steyn:

We have got used to the fact that Egypt is now a land without Jews. Soon it will be a land without Copts. We’ll get used to that, too.

Andrew Ferguson:

Reporters and columnists who cover business may be the most ideologically motivated journalists in any large newsroom. Various explanations have been advanced for why this is so. One possibility is envy: If you’re of a certain cast of mind, few experiences are more embittering than watching people who are dumber and less sophisticated than you make a lot more money. Whatever its cause, we shouldn’t question the hostility that most business reporters express toward buying, selling, marketing, investing, and every other underregulated activity that a businessman uses to create wealth that the reporters can’t get their hands on.

From Amazon's page for Tyler Cowen's short book The Great Stagnation:

"Tyler Cowen may very well turn out to be this decade's Thomas Friedman."
-Kelly Evans, The Wall Street Journal

Ouch. Was that really called for? (Okay, she was referring to Cowen's potential for "framing the dialogue" on the economy, but still.)

From an article on the orchestral conductor George Szell:

When assured that Szell was “his own worst enemy,” Rudolf Bing, then the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, promptly retorted, “Not while I’m alive.”

Theodore Dalrymple:

How many times nowadays does one see in cafés or restaurants people talking not to people present, but text-messaging to people absent? Even I, who am no technophile, begin to feel anxious if I am separated too long from my e-mail or my mobile phone. Yet earlier in my life I was perfectly content to go months in remote locations without any possible contact with my friends, certain in the knowledge that the friendships would persist through the silence. Technology (as well, perhaps, as time) changes character, but not necessarily in the direction of depth.

I feared Obama's tenure would be disastrous; I didn't expect his political shamelessness. Foolish of me.

Glenn Reynolds:

NPR, as a reader emailed and as I noticed myself, has been all over the Occupy movement in the most charitable of ways. The contrast with the Tea Party — both in terms of the behavior of the participants, and the tone of the media coverage — is stunning, even to those of us jaded by past performances.

This is what jihadists call "respecting women." (And I bet some ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews would agree.) We should call it by its true name: slavery.

(Second link via Yourish.com.)

Excellent interview of David P. Goldman, aka Spengler. Two quotes:

In the great scheme of things the Muslim world is of minor importance to America, and its disintegration will make that plain over time. Far more important are our relationships with India and China. And these depend on the perception that America is the undisputed world hyperpower, such that it is pointless to test our patience. That means more military spending, not less. . . .

* * *

There will be occasions when our national security interests require us to stir up troubles rather than mitigate them.

Jonah Goldberg on the idea of Gingrich debating Obama:

Talk to rank-and-file conservatives about such a matchup and they grow giddy, like nerds asked if they’d like to see a battle between Darth Vader and Gandalf the wizard.

One of the all-time great lines in punditry.

Politico, whose mission statement includes support for “facts over ideology,” has since Sunday published more than 90 stories related to the accusations against Cain. (Via Drudge.)

Courtesy of the Weekly Standard blog, the cover of the issue of Charlie Hebdo that provoked the bombing of the magazine's offices:

Translation of the text (via Google): "100 lashes if you don't die of laughter!"

At The Corner, Michael Walsh quotes the Paris bureau chief for TIME asking Charlie Hebdo's editors (my paraphrase), "Happy now? Was it worth it?" Think he'd have written similarly had Tea Partyers destroyed TIME's headquarters over this cover?

Preposterous hypothetical, obvious answer.

(Edited since originally posted.)

Later: More on the bombing and the reaction to it.

Ramesh Ponnuru, who I wish were wrong, explains why a flat tax fails politically:

[R]eplacing a progressive income tax with a flat tax necessarily means slashing revenues, raising middle-class taxes or both.

Set the new flat rate at a level that can raise as much money as the current tax code and the middle class will pay more. People in the middle of the income spectrum, that is, will have to make up for the sharp fall in rates on high earners. Set it low enough that middle-class taxpayers pay the same as they do now and revenues drop. The only way around this dilemma is to assume that the flat tax will cause an implausibly large boost to economic growth. . . .

The flat tax may seem simple, efficient and appealing, but it’s the fool’s gold of conservative politics.

Mark Steyn on why “pessimism is the way to bet” regarding government spending. His bleakness is justified. We need to put Republicans in charge of Congress and the White House, and then pressure them ceaselessly to eliminate the deficit. The Democrats will spend us into oblivion. With Republicans there's a little hope. But not much.

William Jacobson on tactics the leftist media are using against Cain.