Boy, the prospect of losing big next Tuesday has sent the good people of the National Review into a real tailspin. They can’t even make sense anymore. Consider two examples just posted in the last hour or so:
From 250k to 200k [Rich Lowry]
I thought Obama had always said he was going to cut taxes for families making less than 250k. But, as a friend points out, in his infomercial he said he’d cut them for families making less than 200k. A McCain web ad picked up on this the other day. (My column on Obama and taxes here, by the way.)
Hey Rich — you’re an idiot! Obama never said he would cut taxes between 200K and 250K. What he has said over and over again is that he would cut taxes below 200K, and that there would be no tax increase between 200K and 250K. One example, from the second debate:
If you make less than a quarter of a million dollars a year, you will not see a single dime of your taxes go up. If you make $200,000 a year or less, your taxes will go down.
[UPDATE (11:20 am): To be fair to Lowry, I and others emailed him to correct his error, and he has updated his post.]
Here’s another doozy:
Obama’s 99% Lie [Ed Whelan]
In an MSNBC interview yesterday, Barack Obama repeated his canard that differing judicial philosophies among Supreme Court justices don’t matter in “ninety-nine percent of cases [because] the Constitution is actually going to be clear. Ninety-nine percent of the cases, a statute or congressional intent is going to be clear. But there are going to be one percent, less than one percent, of real hard cases” where differences in judicial philosophy do matter.
What an idiotic statement. If Sarah Palin said something so stupid, she’d be pilloried from coast to coast. As I explained months ago (when Obama used a figure of 95% for the same general proposition):
As Obama ought to know, the unanimity rate on the Supreme Court is nowhere near 95%. According to the Harvard Law Review’s statistics for the past three terms, cases with dissents accounted for 64.4% (2006 term), 45.7% (2005 term), and 62.0% (2004 term) of all cases. Indeed, last term, cases dividing 5-4 accounted for over a third of all cases, and the three justices that Obama cited as justices he likes-Breyer, Ginsburg, and Souter-agreed in the disposition of non-unanimous cases only 61%, 60%, and 63% of the time, respectively.
Obama, far from being an idiot, is very intelligent. And, “as somebody who taught constitutional law for ten years” (as he tells us in the interview), he surely knows that what he is saying is false. In other words, the only plausible conclusion is that he’s lying-and he’s doing so in order to distract attention from the terrible impact that his appointment of hard-left judicial activists would have.
Hey Ed — you’re an idiot too! Obviously, Obama is not saying that 99% of decided cases at the Supreme Court are “clear.” That would indeed be an idiotic statement. What he’s saying is that in the great majority of instances overall, the Constitutional provision or the statute at issue answers the question pretty clearly. That is true. The tiny subset of cases that actually reach the Supreme Court — remember, the Court receives something like 10,000 petitions a year, and grants review in around 1% of them — are the hard ones. That’s why the Court takes them, and that’s why there are often dissenting opinions in those cases. Interestingly, even at the Supreme Court something like a quarter to a third of the cases are decided unanimously. But in any event, this Ed Whelan fellow is attacking the flimsiest of straw men.
Stupid is as stupid does, as the saying goes. And these guys are doing some serious stupid these days.
And I would encourage people that haven’t seen it already to click on David’s link to Obama’s answer on the courts (the “What he’s saying” link above), because it is an excellent example of Obama’s intelligent, sober, thoughtful approach to answering questions.
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p>As for Ed Whelan and other conservatives, I suppose it’s difficult to separate “stupid” from “willfully misleading” at this stage of what for them is a losing campaign. All the crap is set to hit the fan; they just want to see what sticks. I’m therefore not sure if Whelan is simply in make-shit-up mode or whether he really just doesn’t understand that 99% of cases (actually, probably closer to 99.99% of all filed cases) do not present difficult constitutional issues in which ideology plays a big role. Either seems to be a distinct possibility here.
It’s similar to the truly dense interpretation the Right has applied to Obama’s 2001 discussion of the Warren Court and the Civil Rights movement. They want him to be saying something wrong, so that’s what they hear him saying, even if he isn’t saying it.
Starting at minute 1:50….McCain uses the same knowingly false information, saying he just reduced it to 200,000.
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p>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
Erica Jong Tells Italians Obama Loss ‘Will Spark the Second American Civil War. Blood Will Run in the Streets’
by Jason Horowitz | October 30, 2008 | Tags: PoliticsBarack ObamaDick CheneyErica JongGeorge W. BushJane FondaKen FollettMichael ChabonNormal MailerPhillip RothTom Wolfe
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p>Getty Images
Erica Jong, 1976.It seems that the final days of the presidential campaign have made Erica Jong and her friends more than a little anxious.
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p>A few days ago, Jong, the author and self-described feminist, gave an interview to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, the choicest bits of which were brought to my attention by the reliably sharp-eyed Christian Rocca, the U.S. correspondent of Il Foglio, who published excerpts on his Camillo blog. Basically, Jong says her fear that Obama might lose the election has developed into an “obsession. A paralyzing terror. An anxious fever that keeps you awake at night.” She also says that her friends Jane Fonda and Naomi Wolf are extremely worried that Obama will be sabotaged by Republican dirty tricks, and that if an Obama loss indeed comes to pass, the result will be a second American Civil War.
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p>Here’s a translation of Jong’s more spirited quotes to the Milan-based Corriere, as selected by Rocca.
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p>”The record shows that voting machines in America are rigged.”
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p>”My friends Ken Follett and Susan Cheever are extremely worried. Naomi Wolf calls me every day. Yesterday, Jane Fonda sent me an email to tell me that she cried all night and can’t cure her ailing back for all the stress that has reduces her to a bundle of nerves.”
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p>”My back is also suffering from spasms, so much so that I had to see an acupuncturist and get prescriptions for Valium.”
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p>”After having stolen the last two elections, the Republican Mafia…”
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p>”If Obama loses it will spark the second American Civil War. Blood will run in the streets, believe me. And it’s not a coincidence that President Bush recalled soldiers from Iraq for Dick Cheney to lead against American citizens in the streets.”
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p>”Bush has transformed America into a police state, from torture to the imprisonment of reporters, to the Patriot Act.”
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p>She also laments that not all of America’s men of letters share her devotion to Obama.
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p>”Tom Wolfe and John Updike are men of the right and Philip Roth is at this point a hermit who leads a monastic life in Connecticut, far from everything and everybody.”
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p>Luckily, she said there is her and Michael Chabon, who, she says, have “taken the place of Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer respectively.”
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p>They have the same political sensibilities, she said, but a better “sense of humor.”
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p>