"Publishers Fret Over Obama’s ‘Failure to Perform’/Michelle finished her book. Why is Obama having trouble living up to his part of their lucrative contract?"

Headline at American Spectator.

Contracts that come with a reported $65 million advance, such as the one signed by Barack and Michelle Obama in February 2017 with Penguin Random House (PRH), will inevitably include [a "failure to perform" clause].... At the time the Obama deal was made in early 2017, insiders were telling Publishers Weekly that books by both Michelle and Barack would be released in fall 2018. Michelle’s book, Becoming, was released by PRH’s Crown division on schedule in November 2018 and has exceeded expectations. Barack’s book will be released at least two years behind schedule with no publication date in sight....

"I don't want a Nixonian ending for Trump. He was pardoned by Ford and allowed to go to retirement. I want Trump prosecuted to whatever extent the law allows..."

"... both as punishment and by way of warning to others who would run for election, not to serve the country but to serve themselves."

That is the top-rated comment (by far) on a WaPo column by Joe Scarborough, "Trump is hurtling toward a Nixonian ending."

The commenter's name is "prairie fire," which can refer to several things, one of which is has to do with the Weather Underground:

The leading members of the Weather Underground (Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and Celia Sojourn) collaborated on ideas and published a manifesto: Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism. The name came from a quote by Mao Zedong, "a single spark can set a prairie fire."....

The manifesto's influence initiated the formation of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee in several American cities. Hundreds of above-ground activists helped further the new political vision of the Weather Underground. Essentially, after the 1969 failure of the Days of Rage to involve thousands of youth in massive street fighting, Weather renounced most of the Left and decided to operate as an isolated underground group. Prairie Fire urged people to never "dissociate mass struggle from revolutionary violence"....

According to Bill Ayers in the late 1970s, the Weatherman group further split into two factions — the May 19th Communist Organization and the Prairie Fire Collective — with Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers in the latter. The Prairie Fire Collective favored coming out of hiding and establishing an above-ground revolutionary mass movement....

That reminds me: Mitt Romney is predicting that Donald Trump will be "solidly" reelected in 2020:

"I think that not just because of the strong economy and the fact that people are going to see increasingly rising wages," Romney said, "but I think it's also true because I think our Democrat friends are likely to nominate someone who is really out of the mainstream of American thought and will make it easier for a president who's presiding over a growing economy."

Some people love Trump and some people hate Trump. Both help Trump. I wonder how many people are hoping the economy goes bad, that it would be worth it to get Trump. Meanwhile the lukewarm among us are hoping the Democrats keep calm, stick to the middle, and give us a blandly normal candidate.

And I should say it again: I think if Nixon were having his troubles within the present-day framework of new media, he wouldn't have to resign and the impeachment route would also fail.

It's not the most poorly timed NYT article ever, but this David Brooks article — "My $120,000 Vacation" — was published yesterday.

"Thanks to the Four Seasons’ new 24-day, round-the-world fantasy trip, you get all the indulgences of travel without any of its hassles. But like all fantasies, is this too much of a good thing?" Ugh. How embarrassing to find yourself — you, the moralizing columnist — asking that question on the day of the Paris attacks. I'd be smacking David Brooks around anyway, even if this were not published on a day when you pretty well know that the editors must have wished they could recall this one and publish it some other time.

It got me thinking back to September 11, 2001, a day when I spent the morning reading the paper NYT delivered to my doorstep. I calmly read it for an hour or two before setting off for work, not knowing what those who used TV or radio in the morning already knew. What was in the paper that morning? Maybe you remember: "No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen":

''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. The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings. He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings....

''Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,'' he writes. But then comes a disclaimer: ''Even though I didn't actually bomb the Pentagon -- we bombed it, in the sense that Weathermen organized it and claimed it.'...

Mr. Ayers has always been known as a ''rich kid radical."... Thinking back on his life, Mr. Ayers said, ''I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire. And hope and history rhymed.''

Terrible. Terrible beyond terrible timing, but what mind-crushingly bad timing. Brooks's bad timing is almost nothing compared to that. But still, it must pain him with a pain with which no one can sympathize that his effort traveling the world and cogitating about it appears in print at a point when no one will be enticed to share his broodings.

But so what if the Four Seasons slaps its brand on a package tour and you flit from place to place on a chartered jet? I don't see what's particularly posh about this. They keep plying him with champagne. He goes around the world stopping in Tokyo, Beijing, the Maldives, the Serengeti, St. Petersburg, Marrakesh and New York, because these are all places with Four Seasons hotels, so that's where you stay. Who are your co-travelers, these people who pay $120,000 each to be shuttled around like that and always assured of a stay in a Four Seasons hotel?

Each morning you get to choose from an array of options — a visit to a Russian ballet school? A tour of Nevsky Prospekt shopping street? An excursion to the Fabergé Museum? The people on this trip loved the experience. They were very satisfied customers.... The people on this trip were by and large on the lower end of the upper class. One had a family carpet business. Another was an I.T. executive at an insurance company. There were a few law partners....

Yes, thanks, David. This is what anyone can figure out from the description. $120,000 isn't really that much to spend for all this. It's kind of a bargain, a bargain with nice branding that effectively sends the message that one can see the world from inside a cocoon of protection. Who with $120,000 to spare falls for a pitch like that? The lower end of the upper class. Brooks is looking down on these people.

[T]hey were socially and intellectually unpretentious. They treated the crew as friends and equals and not as staff. Nobody was trying to prove they were better informed or more sophisticated than anybody else. There were times, in fact, when I almost wished there had been a little more pretense and a little more intellectual and spiritual ambition.

Almost wished? You wished it every moment, didn't you? These people were beneath you. A family carpet business. They didn't even know to treat the servants as servants. And, you, David Brooks, didn't know how to treat rather ordinary people as people.

The guests were delighted by the intricate wall carvings in the Royal Harem building in Istanbul, by the vegetables in a Turkish restaurant, by 15 minutes of opera in a Russian palace. But over dinner, they mostly spoke with their new friends about their kids and lives back home, not about the meaning and depth of what they had just seen. 

The rubes. They looked to each other for friendship and human contact. I wonder what they thought of the disapproving eminence from The New York Times. They visit the Hermitage and see Rembrandt’s "Return of the Prodigal Son" but nobody talks about the meaning of the familiar Bible story. They visit Ephesus but don't air their opinions about St. Paul, so Brooks is forced to tell us what he might have told the carpet people and their ilk:

Paul must have been regarded as an extreme religious crank, preaching a life of poverty and love. His antimaterialistic and anti-achievement message was diametrically opposed to the prevailing ethos of classical Rome, with its emphasis on wealth, power and grandeur.... It would have been nice to stand amid these ruins reading Paul, or to talk about how to reconcile material happiness with spiritual joy as we were on the very spot where Paul preached, where the ethos of Athens met the ethos of Jerusalem. But our guide never really told us Paul’s story. He spent most of his time instead taking us through the royal palaces, with the grand chambers, frescoes and meeting halls. He gave us those material facts about the place that tour guides specialize in (who built what when), but which no one remembers because they don’t really have anything to do with us emotionally. The Ephesus visit was an occasion to have a good discussion about how to live and what really lasts. But if anybody was thinking such thoughts, they went unexpressed.

And the anybodies included Brooks himself. America is full of people who would love to talk as long as you want about the meaning of Christianity. Why would "the very spot where Paul preached" get you closer to any significant meaning... especially from folks who opted into the Four-Seasons-branded package tour? But if you thought it was important — mystical? — to talk about Paul's ideas in the very place where he had them, why didn't you see fit to talk? Why didn't you think the people you were living with were worthy of conversation? Imagine what you could have said: I paid $120,000 to stand here and think about Paul, but Paul's ideas are in a book and I can read that book again, but I've read it already, and I know it's perfectly obvious that it would have been better for me to donate $120,000 to charities that serve the poor and stay in America and find the people who truly believe in Christianity and to talk about Paul with them, but I'm here now, and you are the people who are with me, and I want to hear what you think about Paul.

But Brooks keeps his opinions to himself until he gets home and puts it in writing, opening himself only to those of us who encounter him on the other side of text.

UPDATE: Here's another post, dealing with some of the ethical issues.

"Centrists Should Mourn the Demise of the Filibuster: Only the extremists win—and in the end, mostly the Republicans."

A Slate headline, quoted in its entirety at Instapundit, as if he's not seeing the snark.

To see the snark, examine the logic

1. After the filibuster, only the extremists will win.

2. Most of the winners will be Republicans.

3. [Unstated.] Most of the extremists are Republicans. 

What counts as "extremism"? In this context, it has to do with how we think about judges. (And executive nominees, but I'll leave them to the side for simplicity's sake.) The "extreme" should be understood as the more ideologically slanted or threateningly powerful individuals that the President would otherwise have refrained from nominating. But even with the minority party disabled by the inability to filibuster, there are political constraints.

Obama can't just nominate, say, Bill Ayers.

2 websites were a-merging/The fans began to howl.

"Fans Howl After Weather Site Buys Out Rival."

In the eyes of Weather Underground’s ardent fans, the Weather Channel appears to represent the wrong kind of weather information: personality-driven sunniness and hype, they say, rather than the pure science of data. As Mike Tucker, a computer professional in New Hampshire, put it on Facebook, reacting to news of the deal: “Nooooooooooooooooo! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”

The controversy illustrates the deep national divide between those people who just want to know if it’s going to rain, and people who really, really, care about the data underlying the weather. Christopher Maxwell, a manager at a solar energy company in Richmond, Va., is in the really-really-cares-about-the-weather camp. He said he saw the Weather Channel deal as a sad sellout for Weather Underground.

“It seems to happen all the time,” he said. “Something great gets invented and sold in the United States, and it gets bought up and destroyed.”

Weather Underground was founded in 1995 in Ann Arbor, where it grew out of the University of Michigan’s online weather database. The name was a winking reference to the radical group that also had its roots in Ann Arbor....

And the radical group — is it really okay to wink at terrorists? — got its name from Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues": "You don’t need a weatherman/To know which way the wind blows." My post title refers to another Bob Dylan song "All Along The Watchtower": "Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl."

Now, from the first-linked article, I see:

[Wunderground and Weatherbug] are dwarfed by Weather.com and the other properties owned by the Weather Channel, which is owned by a consortium that includes Comcast, Bain Capital and the Blackstone Group. The Weather Channel sites draw almost 50 million visitors a month. But only half of Weather Underground’s users also use Weather.com in a given month, which might be considered a silent protest of sorts.

Bain Capital!

You know, it's 2012 and 2 riders are approaching. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Barack Obama... Bill Ayers... Weather Underground. Make your own connections. Mitt Romney... Bain... Weather Channel....

"'There must be some way out of here,' said the joker to the thief/'There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief'/Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth/None of them along the line know what any of it is worth..."

Do you think this is but a joke?

Andrew Breitbart, posthumously, vets Barack Obama.

Part I:

In 1998, a small Chicago theater company staged a play titled The Love Song of Saul Alinsky, dedicated to the life and politics of the radical community organizer whose methods Obama had practiced and taught on Chicago’s South Side.

Obama was not only in the audience, but also took the stage after one performance, participating in a panel discussion that was advertised in the poster for the play....

This is who Barack Obama was. This was before Barack Obama ran for Congress in 2000...

This was also the period just before Barack Obama served with Bill Ayers, from 1999 through 2002 on the board of the Woods Foundation. They gave capital to support the Midwest Academy, a leftist training institute steeped in the doctrines of — you guessed it! — Saul Alinsky, and whose alumni now dominate the Obama administration and its top political allies inside and out of Congress...

My Dinner with Bill Ayers.

A coming attraction, by Tucker Carlson.

"If we were really domestic terrorists, shoot, President Obama would be wanting to pal around with us wouldn’t he?"

"I mean he didn’t have a problem with paling around with Bill Ayers back in the day when he kicked off his political career in Bill Ayers apartment, and shaking hands with Chavez and saying he doesn’t need any preconditions with meeting dictators or wanting to read US Miranda rights to alleged suspected foreign terrorists. No if we were real domestic terrorists I think President Obama wouldn’t have a problem with us."

Sarah Palin, via Instapundit, who adds:

Heh. And the ATF would be helping you smuggle guns. . . .

Bill Ayers: "Did you know that I wrote ['Dreams From My Father']?"

Nice comic timing. Or do you think the comedy is the equivalent of hiding something in plain sight?

ADDED: Protein Wisdom:

As someone who knows a thing or two about interpretation, I don’t need John Hawkins or Rick Moran to point out Ayers’ tone of sarcasm. What I’m interested in is the rather pointed tone of the sarcasm — it’s too deliberate, and the question seems too staged — and I’m suggesting that, while Ayers wants to joke it all away (to provide himself an out), he also very much wants credit. It’s who he is. It’s who they all are....

Maureen Dowd on the Sharron Angle/Harry Reid debate.

I smell a whiff of anti-feminism in this focus on laundry and food:

The senator began the debate with a gentle reminiscence about his mother, who took in wash from the brothels in scruffy Searchlight, Nev.

Angle could have told the poignant story of her German immigrant great-grandmother who died trying to save laundry hanging on the clothesline in a South Dakota prairie fire, which Angle wrote about in her self-published book, “Prairie Fire.” But instead the former teacher and assemblywoman began hurling cafeteria insults. “I live in a middle-class neighborhood in Reno, Nevada,” she said. “Senator Reid lives in the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C.”

I thought "Prairie Fire" was William Ayers's "forgotten communist manifesto." Lefties are poetic — "A single spark can start a prairie fire" — but apparently Sharron Angle wrote a book about an actual prairie fire. Literal. Righties are so concrete. Dumb as a block.

But, so... Dowd's point is that Sharron Angle is a high-school "mean girl." Hey, I wonder if she read my October 8th piece answering Slate's question "Who gets to be a feminist?" I wrote:

So what am I supposed to care about here? You don't get any special rights or privileges for being a feminist, so what difference does it make? "Who gets to be a feminist?" Is it some high-school clique with mean girls deciding who gets in? Are there guardians at the entrance? The entrance of what? Nothing hinges on it. One woman says, "I am a feminist" and another says, "No, you're not." This is political polemic of a very dull sort.

I see the liberal women as having the exclusionary "mean girl" attitude, but Dowd is trying to pin that stereotype on Angle. How does Angle's failure —  in a political debate — to rhapsodize about an ancestor exclude anyone? I can see that Reid might wish things had stayed sweet and gentle, but how is a political debate a time for hugs? If women are to be in politics, we need to rise above the socialization toward niceness and not hurting anyone's feelings.

And how is it "hurling cafeteria insults" to question Reid about how he got so rich when he's spent nearly his whole career in politics? It certainly wasn't saying my neighborhood is better than yours — which might be mean-girlish. He lives in the Ritz-Carlton in Washington!

Dowd is hot to flip everything around. If you want to talk about mean girls, she's the mean girl! But look at how she portrays herself:

... I was getting jittery....

As the politicians droned on and my Irish skin turned toasty brown, I worried that Governor Brewer might make a citizen’s arrest and I would have to run for my life across the desert. She has, after all, declared open season on anyone with a suspicious skin tone in her state....

After the debate was over, Angle scurried away and so did I — in a different direction. I was feeling jittery again. If she saw me, she might take away my health insurance and spray-paint my locker.

Dowd is my age — nearly 60. Isn't there something really awful about presenting your emotional life in adolescent terms when you are that old? Especially when you're cozily situated on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Here's Dowd's description of Sharron Angle:

Even sober and smiling beneath her girlish bangs, the 61-year-old Angle had the slightly threatening air of the inebriated lady in a country club bar...

Now, click over to Dowd's column and see how she looks: sober and smiling beneath her girlish side-swept bangs, the 58-year-old Dowd has a slightly threatening air. Which is just fine! Don't get me wrong. A columnist should feel threatening. But she's not a timorous girl. Or maybe she is when she gets out in the world, out of her comfort zone. If so, that's not fine. And it's not Sharron Angle's flaw.

Silly WaPo headline: "Obama and Democrats appeal to new voters in midterms."

By "appeal," of course, they don't mean that voters find them appealing. I know that without reading the article. Is anyone clueless enough to think otherwise?

First paragraph:

President Obama is declaring his stake in the November midterm elections, as his Democratic Party prepares to announce an ambitious strategy to appeal to independent voters in its quest to maintain control of Congress.

Declare! Ambitious! Strategy! Appeal! Independent! Quest! Control!

Could you please settle down and become a newspaper?

Obama plans to issue a call-to-action video message to his supporters on Monday. Democratic officials called the video the first in a series of personal efforts designed to rekindle the grass-roots momentum that propelled Obama to the presidency -- this time, in a way that will benefit his party's congressional and gubernatorial candidates.

Let me try to understand. The Washington Post, which aspires to prestige in journalism, is front-paging the news that the President of the United States is going to release a campaign video and that he wants his party to win in the November elections? And it presents this non-news in cheesy PR language? Do the editors have no shame?

And what the hell does "designed to rekindle the grass-roots momentum" even mean? A presidential video is the opposite of grass roots.

Also, it's a mixed metaphor. Kindle... grass. Are we growing grass or burning things? Or did you mean to make me think of a prairie fire? Remember "Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism" (1974) by Bill Ayers, et al.? ("We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years.")

That's not the image WaPo wanted, I'm sure. "The name came from a quote by Mao Zedong, 'a single spark can set a prairie fire.'"

Ambitious! Strategy! Quest! Control!

Is it a "hit piece" if the NYT parallels Tea Partiers and 60s radicals?

Gateway Pundit thinks it is and so does American Power, but they are righties. You have to look at this from a lefty perspective, and that's something that I — with a long life experience among the lefties — can do. (I went to the University of Michigan as an undergrad in 1969 and had SDS people arguing on the other side of my dorm room wall, I lived in the West Village in the 1970s, I went to NYU School of Law circa 1980, and I have been with the law professors at the University of Wisconsin — in what is affectionately known as the People's Republic of Madison — since 1984. I have had lovers quarrels with Communists.)

Here's the photographic juxtaposition that American Power calls "a genuinely sick comparison":



It was the front-page teaser for this "Week in Review" piece by Benedict Carey. Carey is a medicine and science writer for the newspaper, and his topic is the public display of anger in American politics. He's looking at the long history of demonstrations, and it's a great concept to put up a 60s "Days of Rage" photograph with a man yelling and gesturing along with a present-day Tea Party photograph with a man yelling and gesturing in just about the same way. That the man in the 60s photo is Bill Ayers is a fabulous bit of irony. It's a perfect illustration for Carey's topic, Carey's topic is a good one, and the newspaper succeeds in attracting readers.

Now, I understand the right-wing anger — hmmm — at the juxtaposition. The 60s protesters are Weathermen, and the Weathermen advocated and practiced violence. They murdered people. The Tea Partiers, by contrast, are engaging in the highest form of freedom of expression: assembling in groups and criticizing the government.

But people on the left admire and respect the 1960s protests. They wish there was more expressive fervor on their side today. To have the passion and vitality of the 60s is a good thing. And the air of potential violence, especially in the absence of any actual violence? I think lefties love that. They may not admit they do. But there's a frisson. Remember, the NYT readers are aging liberals. They — we — remember the 60s as glory days. Yes, there was anger, and yes, it spilled over into violence sometimes, but the government deserved it, and these young people were idealistic and ready to give all for their ideals. They are remembered — even as (if?) their excesses are regretted — in a golden light.

***

Now, let's look at what Carey says:

Each party charged the other with fanning the flames of public outrage for political gain. 

Sounds pretty balanced!

But ... [w]hat is the nature of public anger anyway, and can it be manipulated as easily as that?...

At a basic level, people subconsciously mimic the expressions of a conversation partner and in the process “feel” a trace of the other’s emotion, recent studies suggest....

And in groups organized around a cause, it’s the most extreme members who rise quickest, researchers have found....

See? He's a science writer. He's mining the sociology of anger. Carey first notes that "lone-wolf" actions are more likely to occur. But what of the notably non-loner types who go to demonstrations?

Protest groups that turn from loud to aggressive tend to draw on at least two other elements, researchers say. The first is what sociologists call a “moral shock” — a specific, blatant moral betrayal that, when most potent, evokes personal insults suffered by individual members...

The second element is a specific target clearly associated with the outrage. A law to change. A politician to remove. A company to shut down....

Given the shifting political terrain, the diversity of views in the antigovernment groups, and their potential political impact, experts say they expect that very few are ready to take the more radical step.

“Once you take that step to act violently, it’s very difficult to turn back,” [Kathleen Blee, a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh] said. “It puts the group, and the person, on a very different path.”

So there. Carey concludes with a calming message about the link between vocal protest and real violence. Now, there is a bit of a warning:

If a group with enduring gripes is shut out of the political process, and begins to shed active members, it can leave behind a radical core. This is precisely what happened in the 1960s, when the domestic terrorist group known as the Weather Underground emerged from the larger, more moderate anti-war Students for a Democratic Society, Dr. McCauley said. “The SDS had 100,000 members and, frustrated politically at every step, people started to give up,” he said. “The result was that you had this condensation of a small, more radical base of activists who decided to escalate the violence.”

That appears near the end of the article. But you can easily see the message: Democracy. As long as the political process seems to work, people won't cross the line into violence. And the size of the Tea Party movement is a safeguard. In Carey's scenario, it's only if the masses of people — the ordinary, pretty conventional people — cool off and go home that we ought to worry about violence. You have the "radical core" left. That's what you don't want. So this NYT piece, after teasing us with the similarity between Tea Partiers and Weatherman, draws a decisive line separating them.

Bill Ayers "admits" he wrote "Dreams From My Father."

I'm putting "admits" in quotes, because I think he's toying with the conservative blogger who accosted him in a Washington airport. And yet, even though I think he's joking, I also think he's playing with the whole idea of lying.

This, you realize, is especially clever and post-modern.

Get it? Let's say he did write it. Well, he's not really admitting that. He's making fun of the way some conservative bloggers think they've found evidence that he wrote it. He knows most sensible people believe their evidence is bullshit, and this has been amusing to him because he — in this scenario of mine — knows that, actually, they are right.

Now, confronted in the airport, he's handed an opportunity to stir them up into a frenzy — create a vortex around himself — ah, that feels so good! — by telling one of these conservative bloggers that he really did write it. Ah, ha ha ha.

And — he anticipates — that they will ultimately be beaten over the head with how stupid they were to have believed him when obviously he was just jerking their chain.

And this will be especially funny, because he'll know that these people, his enemies, who look like complete idiots, were actually right. And what better way is there to throw everyone off the track?

Brilliant!

Both William Ayers and Barack Obama "use the phrase 'beneath the surface' repeatedly."

"And what they find beneath the surface, of course, is the disturbing truth about power disparities in the real America, which each refers to as an 'imperial culture.' Speaking of which, both insist that 'knowledge' is 'power' and seem consumed by the uses or misuses of power. Ayers, in fact, evokes the word 'power' and its derivatives 75 times in Fugitive Days, Obama 83 times in Dreams."

Jack Cashill is back, marshalling the evidence that Bill Ayers helped Barack Obama write "Dreams From My Father."

Are these things really that striking? It's thoroughly pedestrian for a political writer to talk about power, and "Knowledge is power" is a big cliché.

Cashill makes much of the 2 authors' references to eyes, eyebrows, and faces.

There are six references to "eyebrows" in Fugitive Days -- bushy ones, flaring ones, arched ones, black ones and, stunningly, seven references in Dreams -- heavy ones, bushy ones, wispy ones. It is the rare memoirist who talks about eyebrows at all.

Etc. etc. Note that the one adjective they have in common is "bushy" — bushy eyebrows.

If we were playing "The Match Game" and Gene Rayburn asked the question name an adjective that is frequently used with "eyebrows," they'd all match with "bushy" — unless some ditz, say, Betty White, wrote "arched," in which case she'd crouch behind her card and attempt to waggle her eyebrows until, say, Bennett Cerf, clobbered her with his own card.

"Obama held his tongue when asked what he thought about Ortega's speech. 'It was 50 minutes long. That's what I thought.'"

"President Obama endured a 50-minute diatribe from socialist Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega that lashed out at a century of what he called terroristic U.S. aggression in Central America and included a rambling denunciation of the U.S.-imposed isolation of Cuba's Communist government. Obama sat mostly unmoved during the speech but at times jotted notes" [writes Major Garrett at FOXNews.com.]

Notes, eh?

America responsible for evils of world.

Ortega angry.

I'm bored.

Communism... good for Cuba? Wd b much more successful if not for U.S. evil.

Racism

expansionist policy of U.S.

Look serious. Pretend these are real notes. Listen thoughtfully.

Sandinistas... Contras... check info

Look thoughtful

He can't blame me. I was 3.

When is this idiot going to shut up?

Boooorrrrringggg

ADDED: Actually, Obama said "I'm grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old." That rhetoric sounded familiar. Remember this?



IN THE COMMENTS: Maguro said:

Not sure why he needed to take notes since he listened to the same sermon at Trinity Church for 20 years. You'd think he'd have it memorized by now.

The political news of the day.

1. Obama's Attorney General: Eric Holder -- "a centrist on most law enforcement issues, though he has sharply criticized the secrecy and the expansive views of executive power advanced by the Bush Justice Department."

2. Ted Stevens finally goes down to defeat. The new Senator from Alaska is Mark Begich. The Dems now have 58 seats in the Senate, 2 short of filibuster-busting power.

3. Hillary might say "no" to SOS: "The Clinton camp’s effort to downplay her interest in the post might simply reflect her need to create an alternative storyline if the deal falls apart for other reasons, including the possibility that insurmountable problems arise during the vetting process, Democrats not connected with Clinton cautioned. Another possible motivation: Pushing back against the perception that she’s at the mercy of Obama’s team."

4. No Beau.

5. Joe won't go.

6. Draft Sarah.

7. Ayers airs his pent-up thoughts: "Not only did I never kill or injure another person, but the Weather Underground in its six-year existence never killed or injured another person... We did something that was extreme. Some of you would call it not only extreme but kind of nuts. You might call it off the track. You might call it crazy. You might call it defying of common sense. It was certainly illegal. To call it terrorism stretches the definition of terrorism to everything you don't approve of."

8. Remember Jerry Brown? He's now the California attorney general and he's seeking constitution review of Prop 8 in the California Supreme Court. He's looking for "certainty and finality in this matter."

9. Huck's being mean to Mitt.

10. Do we have to keep thinking about Al Franken?

"Good Morning America" pals around with Bill Ayers.

I'm "live-blogging" my view of the video.

-6:19: ABC has glossy graphics swirling Ayers's book "Fugitive Days" at us. The book is being "re-released." Oh! So this is a book tour.

-5:58: The interviewer, Chris Cuomo, insists "you did have a meaningful relationship with Barack Obama, didn't you?" Ayers does nothing but evade. He knew him like thousands of others, and "like millions of others worldwide, I wish I knew him better." That answer is pure bullshit.

-5:16: Cuomo attempts to follow up: "You used the term 'family friend'..." Cuomo is obviously working from notes, trying to act the part of a reporter capable of asking follow-up questions, and Ayers has to tell us where the phrase "family friend" came from, because it's not something Ayers just said, it's something he wrote in an afterword to his book. Ayers then launches into his prepped statement about how he didn't want to talk during the campaign, when people were using a "dishonest narrative," but he knew Obama on a "professional" level, like "thousands of other people." "Thousands of other people" is Ayers's favorite phrase.

-4:12. Yeah, he and Obama were on a board together, Ayers concedes quickly when pressed, then moves to the purely abstract level: This notion of "guilt by association" is wrong. And you know what the "interesting" thing is? Voters didn't buy the argument of guilt by association. Ugh! I don't care about your political analysis! Tell us the facts that you know. As for the shortcomings of guilt by association, we can do our own analysis. What you have that we don't is the information about the substance of the relationship, and you're being as slippery as possible. You think we don't notice, don't you? Ayers is relying on our dullness.

-3:11: Cuomo says that people do want to know about a candidate's relationships. This sets Ayers off justifying his actions during the Vietnam War era: Part of the "dishonest narrative" was to "demonize" him. "Let's remember, what you call a 'violent past' -- that was at a time when thousands of people were being murdered by our government ever month." Ha! I told you "thousands of people" is his favorite phrase. "And those of us who fought to end that war were actually on the right side. So if we want to replay that history, I would reject the whole notion that demonizing me or the Weather Underground is relevant."

-2:34: Cuomo cuts off Ayers -- who was about to plunge into a second point -- to try to deal with the question whether Ayers's violent past is relevant to what we think of Obama. Cuomo has a hypothetical: If McCain had launched his political career in the home of some anti-abortion activist who'd blown up clinics -- "but never hurt anyone" -- don't you think we'd find that relevant? Ayers's argument is that during the Vietnam War, the despicable acts were being carried out by our government. So then, the anti-abortion terrorism would be fine too if only we believe the abortion is murder? We can see that Ayers is simply unrepentant, and the hypothetical falls by the wayside.

-1:53: Ayers says he never hurt anyone (as if co-conspirators are not responsible for each other's acts) and repeats his oft-quoted self-justification: "I don't think we did enough." He adds: "Just as today, I don't think we've done enough to stop these wars. And I think we must all recognize the injustice of it and do more." So if Obama associates with Ayers now, he is associating with someone who thinks the United States has conducted and continues to conduct despicable unjust wars that must be stopped. If Obama had presented himself as having this kind of militant, anti-war attitude -- this fundamental belief that the American government is doing evil in this world -- he would never have been trusted to become Commander in Chief.

-1:19: Pressed again on the relationship, Ayers lectures us again at the abstract level: "guilt by association... has a long and tragic history in America." See how he makes that rhetorical move every time? He's asked about something specific about himself, and he switches the subject to something much larger -- and more abstract. He also loves to remind us about America's failings. Don't look there. Look here.

-1:05: Now, he's driveling on about how Obama is willing to listen to "a lot of people, from a lot of walks of life." Oh, I would guess Obama is willing to talk to thousands of people.

-0:44: Cuomo sees an opening. Oh, so then Obama sought you out. He wanted to hear from you. That means something. Ayers denies that Obama sought him out. "The truth is we came together in the civic community, around issues of school improvement, around issues of fighting for the rights of poor neighborhoods to have jobs and housing and so on. And that's the full extent of our relationship." That is Ayers's best point, really, and it's odd that he didn't say that in the beginning. If Ayers really cared primarily about helping Obama, he would have made this his central talking point.

-0:20: Ayers follows up that best point with a mini-rant, which ends the segment: "This idea that we need to know more -- like there's some dark, hidden secret link -- is just a myth, and it's a myth thrown up by people who wanted to kind of exploit the politics of fear, and I think it's a great credit to the American people that those politics were rejected. The idea that we should continue to be frightened and worried, you know, barricaded -- is falling down, and it should."

The idea that we need to know more is a myth? He's telling us we shouldn't need to know more, that we're paranoid or fear-mongers if we demand more information. Ridiculous! If we think there is more information, we get to ask. If there truth is there's nothing more to the story, fine. But to condemn us for wanting to know more is absurd.

We didn't find out enough about the man we elected President. We were made to feel that it was wrong to ask. I don't need to hear an avowed terrorist bitching about other people supposedly "exploit[ing] the politics of fear." A terrorist deals in fear, and I assume he'd like to control what inspires our fears. Fear the American government, he says, but don't fear Barack Obama.

Don't look there! Look here! I'll decide for myself what ought to be feared.

IN THE COMMENTS: Joan said:

How disappointing the Cuomo did not talk to Ayers at all about his agenda for school reform, and whether Obama agrees with those ideas. We can all agree that Obama does not support terrorists and repudiates what Ayers did with the WU. What is of most concern to me is what Obama thinks of Ayers' present work, which is just horrific for all that it is nonviolent.

AND: There is a second part to the interview. Here. It looks like the "book tour" part of the interview that Cuomo alludes to in Part 1. Feel free to watch it. Maybe I will later, but for now, life goes on without William Ayers.

A bumbling new chapter in the saga who wrote "Dreams from My Father"?

The other day we were talking about the theory that William Ayers -- Obama's ex-terrorist neighbor -- had actually ghost-written Obama's memoir "Dreams from My Father." I think, in the comments, there are some allusions to the kind of computer analysis that is used in literary scholarship to figure out if a known author has written a particular work that is attributed to him.

Now, we see this about "Dr Peter Millican, a philosophy don at Hertford College, Oxford, [who] has devised a computer software program that can detect when works are by the same author by comparing favourite words and phrases." He's been contacted by "Robert Fox, a California businessman and brother-in-law of Chris Cannon, a Republican congressman from Utah" about running the test on Obama's book and Ayers's.

“He was entirely upfront about this. He offered me $10,000 and sent me electronic versions of the text from both books.” [Millican said.]

Millican took a preliminary look and found the charges “very implausible”. A deal was agreed for more detailed research but when Millican said the results had to be made public, even if no link to Ayers was proved, interest waned.

Millican said: “I thought it was extremely unlikely that we would get a positive result. It is the sort of thing where people make claims after seeing a few crude similarities and go overboard on them.” He said Fox gave him the impression that Cannon had got “cold feet about it being seen to be funded by the Republicans”.

I find it hard to believe that if Millican had the digital files that he could resist running them through his computer program out of sheer curiosity. I wonder what "took a preliminary look" means. You have a program and you have the digital files. I don't quite understand. But Millican makes it sound like Cannon and Fox backed out when they thought the news would probably be that Ayers is not the ghostwriter and that the public would be told. But that's what nearly everyone already thinks, and Millican has essentially gone ahead and told us so.

Why didn't Cannon and Fox strike a deal with Millican before sending him the digital files? Then Millican wouldn't have had his own knowledge of the results (preliminary or not) when negotiating. Why would Cannon and Fox care about suppressing the information if it turns out to be what people expect when they could have had Millican obliged to vouch for the result if it happened to be what they were hoping for?

Cannon insisted, however, that he was not interested in making an issue of Obama’s memoir “even if it were scientifically proven” to be someone else’s work.

Huh? If there's one thing in this whole story that reeks of lying, it's that. Cannon and Fox -- what bumblers!

IN THE COMMENTS: Larry says, "This may well have been the most wingnutty, wingnut idea of this election." Oh, I don't know. There's this.

"Obama pals around with hippies."

Bill Ayers is "the pussiest terrorist," according to Jackie and Dunlap:



(So many great lines in this new episode of Red State Update.)

"My Friend Bill Ayers."

A column by Wall Street Journal columnist Thomas Frank:

... I met him in the same way Mr. Obama says he did: 10 years ago, Mr. Ayers was a guy in my neighborhood in Chicago who knew something about fundraising. I knew nothing about it, I needed to learn, and a friend referred me to Bill.

Bill's got lots of friends, and that's because he is today a dedicated servant of those less fortunate than himself; because he is unfailingly generous to people who ask for his help; and because he is kind and affable and even humble....

... Mr. Ayers has been involved with countless foundation efforts and has received various awards. He volunteers for everything. He may once have been wanted by the FBI, but in the intervening years the man has become such a good citizen he ought to be an honorary Eagle Scout.

Frank reams the McCain campaign for its "vilest" attacks on a man "who cannot or will not defend himself." I think most people believe that a person who has done terrible things (and then faced up to whatever legal process the government chooses and is able to put him through) may go on to redeem himself with sincere remorse and impressive good works. But is that true of Ayers?

As far as remorse is concern, Frank concedes Ayers's failure... but it's this infuriatingly prissy concession:

Nor will I quibble with those who find Mr. Ayers wanting in contrition. His 2001 memoir is shot through with regret, but it lacks the abject style our culture prefers.

Yeah, Ayers famously regretted that he "didn't do enough." We don't think that's "abject" enough, and it's not a matter of "style." It's substance. And we're not a "culture" with a preference. In judging Ayers's regret inadequate, we're human beings with a sound conception of morality.

As for his good works, there's a problem there too, and it's what relates most directly to Obama. Some people think Ayers's present-day work in the field of education is too radical, and they sincerely want to know whether Obama is too far to the left. That's why I'm interested in Ayers and Obama. I still don't know the answer, and I don't think there is any way to know the answer other than to elect Obama President and see what he does. That's what Obama is asking us to do.

***

I realize that I've never read the whole text of the NYT article about Ayers that appeared -- in chilling coincidence -- on September 11, 2001. That morning, I sat at my dining table and read the newspaper, my habit back then. I didn't find out about the attacks until I was walking into work, after both planes had hit the towers. So it's not that I was too distracted or disgusted to read that article, that fateful day. I just didn't. Pulling it up just now to make last link, I decided to force myself through the text.

He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings....

He writes that he participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972. But Mr. Ayers also seems to want to have it both ways, taking responsibility for daring acts in his youth, then deflecting it.

''Is this, then, the truth?,'' he writes. ''Not exactly. Although it feels entirely honest to me.''

But why would someone want to read a memoir parts of which are admittedly not true? Mr. Ayers was asked.

''Obviously, the point is it's a reflection on memory,'' he answered. ''It's true as I remember it.''

There are many people who find this sort of talk very charming. I may have read that far, that day, and found it charming. I understand that kind of thinking: Truth is for boring, little minds. There are complex blends of truth and fiction that are more true, that "feel entirely honest." I don't believe it anymore, but I understand it.

Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: ''Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at,'' is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. And he says he doesn't actually remember suggesting that rich people be killed or that people kill their parents, but ''it's been quoted so many times I'm beginning to think I did,'' he said. ''It was a joke about the distribution of wealth.''

Maybe he didn't say it, and anyway, it was a joke. It was the sort of thing people said back in 1970.

In his book Mr. Ayers describes the Weathermen descending into a ''whirlpool of violence.''

''Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,'' he writes. But then comes a disclaimer: ''Even though I didn't actually bomb the Pentagon -- we bombed it, in the sense that Weathermen organized it and claimed it.'' He goes on to provide details about the manufacture of the bomb and how a woman he calls Anna placed the bomb in a restroom. No one was killed or injured, though damage was extensive.

Between 1970 and 1974 the Weathermen took responsibility for 12 bombings, Mr. Ayers writes....

So, would Mr. Ayers do it all again, he is asked? ''I don't want to discount the possibility,'' he said.

"I don't want to discount the possibility." That's what Ayers said right before terrorism became drastically unfashionable.

He also writes about the Weathermen's sexual experimentation as they tried to ''smash monogamy.'' The Weathermen were ''an army of lovers,'' he says, and describes having had different sexual partners...

Not enough attention has been paid to monogamy smashing. Does anyone care that these people had multiple sex partners? It's hard to remember how people used to think they were making political progress alone, in bed, with one other person. (Oddly, their theory would justify the present-day opposition to gay rights for "the defense of marriage.")

And if there were another Vietnam, he is asked, would he participate again in the Weathermen bombings?

Ayers responds by reciting a Seamus Heaney poem with the lines "once in a lifetime/The longed-for tidal wave/Of justice can rise up/And hope and history rhyme" and says ''I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire. And hope and history rhymed.'' In other words, yes.