So this morning the Washington Post runs a story detailing what kind of a jerk Mitt Romney was in high school. This is a surprise, right? A high school kid being a jerk. This has never ever happened before. Why, you might well ask, would the Washington Post devote valuable time and space to writing about this event? And why, you might well follow up, is this worth posting about when everyone should be talking about the environment?

The answer is easy. It builds a meme and it translates Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage from a liability into a perceived strength.

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When Barack Obama made his unsurprising announcement today that he has finally evolved far enough to endorse homosexual marriage, ironically an evolutionary dead end, he made two other interesting statements.

First, he attributes his evolution to his Christian faith. This is sort of odd, speaking as a Trinitarian Christian, because it puts Christ in the position of disavowing himself. This is not surprising. Anyone who learned Christian theology from Jeremiah Wright is bound to have imbibed a substantial number of heresies.

The most surprising statement was this:

[W]hen I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf…

Really. Our troops are fighting on his behalf? I had always imagined they were fighting on behalf of the nation.

While many of us would prefer that political campaigns were run on issues, the fact is that most are won or lost based on imagery. What do we remember from the 2008 campaign beyond “hope and change?” Was the deciding event in 2004 the policy differences between George Bush and John Kerry or was it the Swiftboat Veterans? Other than the recount, what do we really remember about 2000 other than the last minute DUI revelation? Jim Webb owes his senate seat to George Allen’s infamous “macaca” comment and if Scott Brown prevails over Elizabeth Warren it won’t be because of policy differences it will be because of her bogus claim of “Cherokee” lineage.

The current presidential campaign is no exception. That is why we must fight and win the minor wars that flare up over Obama’s epicurean proclivities, the travel arrangements for Seamus, and most recently the grotesque credit-grubbing indulged in by Obama over the death of Osama bin Laden and the life of Obama’s imaginary girlfriends.

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In terms of iconography this photo is destined to rival that taken of FDR on D-Day.*

With some trying to turn bin Laden’s death into a campaign talking point for Obama’s reelection, it is useful to remember that the trail to bin Laden started in a CIA black site — all of which Obama ordered closed, forever, on the second full day of his administration — and stemmed from information obtained from hardened terrorists who agreed to tell us some (but not all) of what they knew after undergoing harsh but legal interrogation methods. Obama banned those methods on Jan. 22, 2009.

–Jose A. Rodriguez

The Washington Post, The path to bin Laden’s death didn’t start with Obama

Any doubt that Barack Obama is a small, petty, and inconsequential human was dispelled last week when his campaign released an ad claiming credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden,  portraying the decision to order a raid to do something to bin Laden (we aren’t quite sure what his intent was based on the directive issued by the White House) as some kind of watershed moment in American history. As was noted then, the video is notable for being narrated by the guy who allowed bin Laden to rise to prominence and insinuating that Mitt Romney would not have ordered the raid.

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The newest Obama campaign video highlights the killing of Osama bin Ladin.

This video is hardly surprising. http://www.gutsycall.com takes you to https://donate.barackobama.com/page/contribute/o2012-donate-main. So it isn’t like this move hasn’t been telegraphed for a year. It is notable for a few things.

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Last week we pointed out the Obama re-election strategy of criticizing his wealth and religion.

After two false starts, one castigating Ann Romney for her decision to be a stay at home Mom — part of their War on Women theme — and another calling into question the reason there is a dog in the White House, one would think that the White House might try to refine their strategy a bit. But the White House is nothing if not consistent.

On Friday they dispatched the hapless Governor Brian Schweitzer (D-MT) to The Daily Beast reprise the War on Women attack and to criticize Romney’s religion.

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In the past week the presidential campaign has been hit by two events that many have termed silly. First there was the Hilary Rosen comment denigrating Ann Romney’s decision to stay at home and actually raise her children rather than elect to have a stranger do that. Second was the softer Seamus-on-the-roof story rolled out by the Obama campaign yesterday.

Many, especially our own “smart set”, have criticized the attention these events have attracted as somehow taking away from the high minded policy discussion that is supposedly taking place.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

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My 12 year old daughter has been caught up in The Hunger Games craze. She went to see the movie with a dozen or so of her friends. So I haven’t seen the movie. But I am reading the books as an exercise in due diligence.

I’m not going to review the books as that has been done by much more talented writers than myself, so I’ll limit myself to a few observations on the trilogy.

1. Unlike some popular young adult fiction the romance is limited and well within the comfort zone of most parents. Where books like the popular All-American Girl series by Meg Cabot descend into a how-to manual for things like masturbation, the budding romance between Katniss and Peeta and the existing attraction between Katniss and Gale is well handled. tasteful, and even wholesome.

2. The violence isn’t graphic. Much more emphasis is placed on the anticipation of danger than the actual danger itself. But if I have to choose between explaining violence or sex to my daughter, I’ll take violence any day.

3. Nicely written. Good use of language and good pacing. If you are considering indulging in creative writing you could do a lot worse than reading the books to study the author’s craft.

4. Good lessons that are missed in many other books. The themes over and over are self sacrifice, doing the hard right rather than the easy wrong, self-sufficiency and self-reliance, loyalty to friends and family even when it runs against your personal interests, etc.

I suppose one of the virtues of the story is its ambiguous politics. A lefty can see Katniss as a OWS member facing off against the 1%. We can empathize with her as a Tea Party member. I tend to think that the books trend more right than left because the government is evil, the people are oppressed by bureaucrats enforcing mindless regulations, and so on. But that is all secondary. The books are fun to read and your child could do much worse than picking one of them up.

Image: Andrea di Bonaiuto (1346-1379), Descent of Christ to Limbo

[He] suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried; he descended into hell;

The storm that erupted yesterday when Barack Obama woke up and discovered the Supreme Court of the United States was not only not elected but it could overturn “duly passed” laws, even those passed in the dead of the night by the barest of purchased majorities, has been more than adequately covered on these pages and others by actual lawyers and those who think they are.

I’m pretty sure Obama knows what Marbury v. Madison is, even though yesterday he gave a darned good impression of being a total goober in regards to our Constitution. The simplest explanation is that he knows how the vote went on Friday and is working to change that vote, failing that he is setting the predicate for running against the Supreme Court in November.

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This has been an extraordinarily difficult primary season for many conservatives, me among them.

Against what is probably the weakest incumbent president since Herbert Hoover, we have managed to field an array of candidates worse than those we had in 2008 and perhaps worse than those competing for the nomination at our low point of 1996.

Our best candidate, Texas Governor Rick Perry, was torpedoed by a lack of preparation on his part. Sure the patent dishonesty of Michele Bachmann’s Tardasil nonsense had an impact as well as the demagoguing of a state educational issue as a soft-on-immigration stance but let’s not excuse the fact that these attacks should have been anticipated by anyone participating in a GOP primary.

For some months I have held the view that conservatives could very well be better served by a President Obama opposed by a Republican Congress than a President Romney working in concert with a decidedly un-conservative Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

The events of the past few weeks have convinced me I was wrong. We are one election away from entering the death spiral to status as a Third World kleptocracy and I believe Governor Mitt Romney, for all his manifest faults, is the best man left standing to prevent that from happening.

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Yesterday the Obama Administration effectively outlawed coal as a fuel source and it underscores the importance of Congress severely circumscribing the authority of regulatory agencies.

The Environmental Protection Agency will issue the first limits on greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants as early as Tuesday, according to several people briefed on the proposal. The move could end the construction of conventional coal-fired facilities in the United States.

The proposed rule — years in the making and approved by the White House after months of review — will require any new power plant to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt of electricity produced. The average U.S. natural gas plant, which emits 800 to 850 pounds of CO2 per megawatt, meets that standard; coal plants emit an average of 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt.

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Earlier this month I posted on the attack by Lisa Miller, the Washington Post’s egregiously stupid religion correspondent, on Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney because they had large families. Miller found large families to be vaguely threatening to her self esteem and indicative of a “smug fecundity” and not valuing women for anything other than their ability to reproduce.

Today Miller doubles down and accuses Rick Santorum of being a “cafeteria Catholic.”

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Every once in a while, despite our political differences, people of good faith can come together in agreement on major issues. Exhibit A is this New York Times op-ed by the unfortunately named Stanley Fish whom Wikipedia assures me is someone of some import though for what reason I really can’t tell.

From Professor Fish:

If we think about the Rush Limbaugh dust-up from the non-liberal — that is, non-formal — perspective, the similarity between what he did and what Schultz and Maher did disappears. Schultz and Maher are the good guys; they are on the side of truth and justice. Limbaugh is the bad guy; he is on the side of every nefarious force that threatens our democracy. Why should he get an even break?

There is no answer to that question once you step outside of the liberal calculus in which all persons, no matter what their moral status as you see it, are weighed in an equal balance. Rather than relaxing or soft-pedaling your convictions about what is right and wrong, stay with them, and treat people you see as morally different differently. Condemn Limbaugh and say that Schultz and Maher may have gone a bit too far but that they’re basically O.K. If you do that you will not be displaying a double standard; you will be affirming a single standard, and moreover it will be a moral one because you will be going with what you think is good rather than what you think is fair. “Fair” is a weak virtue; it is not even a virtue at all because it insists on a withdrawal from moral judgment.

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Has the Obama Administration declared war upon religious freedom in the United States?

This is not as extreme a question as it appears at first blush.

What initially appeared to be a series of unrelated act is now taking on the color of a conscious strategy to eliminate the ability of religious groups to control any aspect of their lives outside the barest of liturgical practices.

In interests of full disclosure and to avoid allegations of plagiarism, I need to take a short detour to explain the genesis of this story.

Two Words.

Glenn Beck.

At this point you have to make a decision whether or not you wish to read on.

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One of the amazing things about the Internet is the way people you barely know can affect your life. One of those guys was Captain (ret.) Carroll LeFon who blogged at the eponymous Neptunus Lex. Back in 2004, when the Iraq war was running hot and I was new to the idea of having actual people read what I’d written, Lex lent his help, good offices, and advice on any number of my war blogs.

According to reports, Lex died when an Israeli-built Kfir fighter he was piloting crashed at NAS Fallon, NV.

He was a major voice in the milblogger community whose good humor, level head, unfailing willingness to help, and amazing writing talent will be sorely missed.

A better tribute than I could ever write can be found at the US Naval Institute.

In his homily of January 22, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput said the following:

As the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb observed more than a decade ago, “What was once stigmatized as deviant behavior is now tolerated and even sanctioned; what was once regarded as abnormal has been normalized.” But even more importantly, she added, “As deviancy is normalized, so what was once normal becomes deviant. The kind of family that has been regarded for centuries as natural and moral – the ‘bourgeois’ family as it is invidiously called – is now seen as pathological” and exclusionary, concealing the worst forms of psychic and physical oppression.

My point is this: Evil talks about tolerance only when it’s weak. When it gains the upper hand, its vanity always requires the destruction of the good and the innocent, because the example of good and innocent lives is an ongoing witness against it. So it always has been. So it always will be. And America has no special immunity to becoming an enemy of its own founding beliefs about human freedom, human dignity, the limited power of the state, and the sovereignty of God.

If you ever had any doubts about the truth of this statement you need look no farther than today’s Washington Post where a creature called Lisa Miller writing in the Washington Post’s “On Faith” feature titled Romney and Santorum and Archaic Ideas of Fertility comes to the conclusion that the large families of Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum show that they want to keep women barefoot and pregnant:

There’s nothing wrong with big families, of course. But the smug fecundity of the Republican field this primary season has me worried. Their family photos, with members of their respective broods spilling out to the margins, seem to convey a subliminal message that goes far beyond a father’s pride in being able to field his own basketball team. What the Republican front-runners seem to be saying is this: We are like the biblical patriarchs. As conservative religious believers, we take seriously the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply.

Especially worrisome is the inevitable corollary to that belief: Women should put their natural fertility first — before their brains, before their ability to earn a living, before their independence — because that’s what God wants.

Smug fecundity…biblical patriarchs…inevitable corollary. The only thing missing are the scare quotes.

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Over the course of two election cycles I’ve expressed extreme discomfort at the idea of a Mitt Romney presidency. I have a lot of, to me anyway, good reasons. Boiled down to two, though, the are 1) a lack of evidence that he would govern in a way that can be distinguished from Barack Obama in the key areas of judicial appointments and controlling the regulatory impulses of federal agencies and 2) that the man has no compunction about lying about anything. For heaven sakes, he may be the first president in history, and certainly the only in my lifetime, to lie about his own first name.

The last (praise the Lord) debate gave Romney the opportunity to demonstrate both points. I direct you to this exchange (h/t to Boston Catholic Insider):

KING (Moderator): Governor Romney, both Senator Santorum and Speaker Gingrich have said during your tenure as governor, you required Catholic hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims.

And Mr. Speaker, you compared the governor to President Obama, saying he infringed on Catholics’ rights.

Governor, did you do that?

ROMNEY: No, absolutely not. Of course not.

There was no requirement in Massachusetts for the Catholic Church to provide morning-after pills to rape victims. That was entirely voluntary on their part. There was no such requirement.”

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The utter fecklessness of Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick is becoming more apparent by the day. Last week she decided that a proposed Virginia law, one that the Republican governor has suddenly gone squishy on, is the equivalent of rape because it could conceivably require something be “inserted into the vagina, and then moved around.”

Since then we’ve discovered that not only did Lithwick simply lie about what the law required and we’ve found that Virginia Planned Parenthood requires two ultrasounds with each abortion. Presumably to insure they only kill half their patients.

To hear Lithwick tell it, a trans-vaginal ultrasound is a horror tool invented by rich, white, elderly Republicans to enslave and defile women who only want to be left in peace to dismember their unborn child. The truth is quite different, and in the context of this artificial kerfuffle, and quite ironic.

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[UPDATE: I'm informed by someone very much in touch with the Virginia political scene that the root of the problem is the Bob McDonnell's staff are, at the best, pro-life squishes and they are presently negotiating with themselves over the best way of selling out.]

Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, a Romney supporter and leading contender for the VP spot on a Romney-headed ticket, demonstrated his complete philosophical alignment with Romney yesterday by flipflopping on a bill he has championed and in the process hanging VA GOP delegates out to dry.

For those who haven’t been paying attention, Virginia’s legislature has been going after the abortion industry root and branch. Last year they passed a law requiring aborttoirs to be regulated as if they did what they do: perform a surgical procedure which can be life threatening. This year a bill is being finalized that requires a woman seeking an abortion to see ultrasound pictures of the baby. Somehow this bill, which does not require any medical procedure the woman was not going to receive in the first place, has the pro-abortion lobby in a tizzy. Dahlia Lithwick at Slate has predictably styled this as rape.

Up until yesterday, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell had unconditionally supported the bill. 

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