It comes from today's classic Krauthammer column on the White House's war on Fox:

Defend Fox from the likes of Anita Dunn? She's been attacked for extolling Mao's political philosophy in a speech at a high school graduation. But the critics miss the surpassing stupidity of her larger point: She was invoking Mao as support and authority for her impassioned plea for individuality and trusting one's own choices. Mao as champion of individuality? Mao, the greatest imposer of mass uniformity in modern history, creator of a slave society of a near-billion worker bees wearing Mao suits and waving the Little Red Book?

Read the whole thing, as they say.

I'm a day late, but this is important. ABC's Jake Tapper reports that three members of Styx were seen at the White House Monday.

He wrote: "Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto -- 3 members of Styx are about to be given a WH tour."

Domo Arigato? Seriously? You would think that if Tapper were going to make a Styx song reference in his "tweet" on Styx visiting the White House, he could have come up with something better than "Mr. Roboto" -- known primarily to Top 40 poseurs to who didn't like the real Styx before they went commercial. The obvious choice? "Renegade," off Pieces of Eight. It was the band's single best song and it was Obama's secret service code name during the campaign (not to mention the name of Richard Wolffe's book about Obama.)

By the way, Styx is playing with 38 Special at the Calvert Marine Museum on July 7. There is a rumor that the manliest member of the TWS staff will be attending.

UPDATE: A friend writes, "Based on some of the decisions Obama is making, The Grand Illusion
or Borrowed Time are also fitting song references."

John Taylor: "The [national] debt was 41 per cent of GDP at the end of 1988, President Ronald Reagan’s last year in office, the same as at the end of 2008, President George W. Bush’s last year in office. If one thinks policies from Reagan to Bush were mistakes does it make any sense to double down on those mistakes, as with the 80 per cent debt-to-GDP level projected when Mr Obama leaves office?"

Harvey Mansfield's piece in our new issue is well worth your time. Professor Mansfield explores the role that the "science" of economics -- and social science more generally -- may have played in the financial crisis. Warning: This piece includes political philosophy!

Here's Mansfield:

The economists I know are generally, as individuals, sober and cautious, the most respectable of all professors and in their honesty and reliability representing the best in bourgeois virtue. But when they get together as economists, they give way to boyish irrational exuberance over the accomplishments and prospects of economics as a science.

What has happened in the last few months should give them pause. It should make them consider the necessity of looking at economics from the outside, at how it looks and behaves as a whole. There's no way to do this from within economics--no way to formulate an equation that will correctly predict the failure of equations to predict. The idea of prediction itself has to come into question. Prediction is designed to reduce the role of chance in our lives, eliminating unpleasant surprise and replacing it with gratitude and satisfaction. But somehow it doesn't have this effect.

Economic models, many of which view human beings as walking, talking self-interest calculators, are flawed. Humans have a lot of trouble figuring out what is in their interests, and even more trouble acting on those interests. And most economists' models of self-interest are incomplete, because economics has little to say about morality. More Mansfield:

Virtue is a habit, not a calculation. It reflects the fact that human beings live in an overall way of life, in diverse ways of life; it is not possible for us, or most of us, to live perfectly flexibly, always ready to calculate anew in fresh circumstances what it is in our interest to do. Thus the ideal of calculated self-interest posited by economics is not a human possibility. We will get in the habit of being spenders or savers and will not be able to turn on a dime, changing our behavior when our interest changes. Indeed our selves are not independent of our ways of life, and it is not possible to calculate your self-interest without knowing your way of life.

Tyler Cowen and his commentors discuss Professor Mansfield's article here. Be sure to read (and re-read) it. And take notes.

Irving Kristol, in his essay "Utopianism, Ancient and Modern":

"A people who have mortgaged themselves to the hilt are a dependent people, and ultimately they will look to the state to save them from bankruptcy."

First published in 1973.

That odor you smell is coming from all the folks talking these days about drug legalization. Luckily, we have John Walters to set them straight:

What is the alternative to the progress we are making? We have made the kind of compromises with alcohol that some suggest making with illegal drugs. Nonetheless, roughly one in 10 of the more than 100 million Americans who drink each month suffer from alcoholism. Illegal drug use touches roughly 19 million Americans each month with more than one-third of those suffering from abuse or addiction. Will these people be better off if drugs are legalized?

Those who propose abandoning control efforts never face up to the consequences of an America where upwards of 50 million or more people use drugs regularly. Nor do they consider the consequences to Latin America if such a vast number of people in the U.S. use drugs.

Alternative regulatory schemes give little attention to how a free society will function when it sells known disease-causing poisons that are more powerful than alcohol and that profoundly attack the user's capacity for free action.

The policies that drive down drug use attack both demand and supply. Controlling supply reduces consumption as it chokes off access to all types of drugs. No nation that has tried to avoid controlling supply has been able to stand by its permissive approach. Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have all experimented with being more accepting of drugs, only to backtrack later when the resulting destruction was clear. The U.S. has also been more permissive in the past than it is today, only to pay a huge price for the mistake. The predictable costs in addiction and disease are unsustainable.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

It's an oldie, and there's no link, but this passage from Irving Kristol's "The Shaking of the Foundations," published in his On the Democratic Idea in America (1972), leaped out at me today:

It is less comforting but more realistic to reflect that we don't live in the world; we live in a particular world; and history records many particular worlds that did indeed come to their ends—sometimes abruptly, more often slowly and insensibly, but always painfully for those who felt themselves to be part of what was being destroyed.

These words ought to resonate with conservatives as they study the Obama budget and begin to understand the president's ambition.

David Brooks: "The administration has taken its faith in government to such an extreme I’m turning into Ayn Rand. Help!"

The whole thing is worth reading.

Limbaugh:

"Fifty-three percent of American voters voted for Barack Obama; 46% voted for John McCain, and 1% voted for wackos."

Seriously, though, Limbaugh's stimulus compromise is a novel idea. (Though he ought to propose a payroll tax cut rather than cuts in the capital gains and corporate tax rates.)

Voting in Iraq's provincial elections has begun:

In the Karrada district of Baghdad, soldiers and police streamed steadily into the Furat (or Euphrates) Middle School, a worn, dusty building where posters encouraged voting: “Register. Vote. Make the Change.”

By late afternoon, more than half of the 4,000 people eligible to vote early at the school had done so, said Adel Jabbar, a 38-year-old poll monitor. Above the doorways to each room that had been set aside for voting, signs were hung forbidding cell phones, cameras, smoking and weapons.

Mr. Jabbar reported no problems.

Election Day is Saturday.

"I don't think me calling House Republican members would have been that helpful. I tend not to be that persuasive on that side of the aisle."

- Barack Obama, acknowledging he doesn't know how to do bipartisanship and that his whole post-partisan gestalt is about as fact-based as the Easter Bunny. But he does know hope and change!

"Our nation has a long and proud tradition of news organizations that are ideological and partisan in nature, the Huffington Post and the New York Times being two such publications."

--- The McCain Report

It's from Sen. Lindsey Graham: "'The Congress has transcended party for the first time in my lifetime,’’ Mr. Graham said. 'People think we all suck.'"

Tom Wolfe, lamenting the current state of American fiction: "Writers come from master-of-fine-arts programs now. If you add up the college education of Steinbeck, Hemingway and Faulkner, you get to spring break of freshman year."

"China’s Communist rulers, while basking in the glow of their Olympics bash, are surely checking the tea leaves for what this might presage about U.S. support for another U.S. ally: the democratic Republic of China on Taiwan. If the U.S. will not stand up to North Korea, will not stand up to Iran, will not stand up to Russia, then where will the U.S. stand up? What are the real rules of this New World Order?"

-Claudia Rosett

From Pravda, under the headline, "Russia: Again Savior of Peace and Life:"

The international community collectively held their breath waiting for the reaction of Russia after the savage, brutal, criminal attack by Georgia on South Ossetia. After having offered a ceasefire in hostilities, the back-stabbing Georgians immediately violated the ceasefire, invading South Ossetia and causing massive destruction and death among innocent civilians, among peacekeepers and also destroying a hospital.

HT: J-Mart

From this week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly:

EW: Everyone knows you’re a Jay-Z fan, but who else is on your iPod?

Barack Obama: My staff teases me about how eclectic my tastes are. I’ve got Frank Sinatra, I’ve got Sheryl Crow, I’ve got John Coltrane, I’ve got Bob Dylan. There’s Javanese flute music, African dance music, a lot of R&B.

Exit question: Is America ready for a president who actually enjoys Javanese Flute Music?

From the great James Lileks:

In the summer of ’78 I was back home in Fargo between college years – exiled from the civilized world, cast into barbarity. During the day I labored under the hot sun painting giant fuel tanks in the hot sun, next to an auto-body shop that exhaled poison and Eagles all day. A sensitive soul, cast into such grim circumstances. A noble soul, a poet, reduced to living on the gruel of hometown “culture,” almost unable to stir himself each day to face the hopeless allotment that stretched forth until the sun turned its face away.

Naturally, I was in the perfect mood to read the entire Gulag Archipelago. I got all three volumes from the drugstore – which should have told me something about the land in which I lived, that one could buy this work from a creaky wire rack at the drugstore – and it taught me much about the Soviet Union and the era of Stalin. After that I could never quite understand the people who viewed the US and the USSR as moral equals, or regarded our history as not only indelibly stained but uniquely so. Reading Solzhenitsyn makes it difficult to take seriously the people in this culture who insist that Dissent has been squelched. Brother, you have no idea.

The great brooding man is dead – all those years of trial and disappointment done, his country no closer than before to manifesting the spirit he believed was within it. We wouldn’t have liked his Russia – autocratic, mystical, cold and apart from the outside world, unwilling to grant Ukraine the national identity he cherished for his own land – but we are in his debt for decades of revelations. If the translations I read accurately rendered his style, he wrote with a bitter sarcasm that flayed nearly every commissar who blundered into the narrative. It’s a difficult thing to maintain over the course of several thousand pages, but he managed. And then some.

Apparently supporting Barack Obama is more significant than winning an Academy Award these days.

A reader points out that the top headline on Google News moments ago was this item from the LA Times blog: "Now, 2 Obama backers, Bernie Mac and Morgan Freeman, hospitalized"

Passionate Obama supporter Meteor Blades titled his Daily Kos essay on today’s colossal failure of a speech, “By This Foreign Policy Speech Will Future Ones Be Measured.” Fair enough – that’s why they make paint in different colors. In spite of mine and Mr. Blades’s disagreement on the speech’s merits, I still found this passage noteworthy:

I have in the past four decades often found myself at odds with American foreign policy, so much so that I went to prison to oppose it. And knowing history, including the history of my own Indian people, I have reasons enough to be jaded about much that the U.S. has done in the world in the far and near past and recently. I am not very forgiving of those who shaped many of those policies, vicious and hypocritical and resting as they did on a rubric of pernicious American exceptionalism.

Not, of course, that everything the U.S. has done on the world stage has been evil.

I think we’ve finally found the audience for whom this speech was intended!

California Speaker Pro Tem Dom Perata argues for a $10 billion tax hike by invoking the heroes of World War II.

"We've heard so much about the Greatest Generation. Tom Brokaw's book has just unleashed all kinds of paeans to people who were just talking about how wonderful America is thanks to the sacrifices of men and women who died defending the flag, who died for the symbol of the American way of life. I can't help but thinking that is it too much to ask in the memory of someone who died at Normandy to pay a nickel more for a latte. Is it too much to ask for someone who was killed at Pearl Harbor to take the wealth that they've been able to accumulate because of those who died in the Second World War and pay back now for what they were given so much then?"

No comment necessary.

"We weren't interested in a book that was just a defense of the Bush administration." Peter Osnos, founder of PublicAffairs books and publisher of Scott McClellan's new book. More here.

Speaking of Fareed Zakaria, I found the following passage in his column this week puzzling:

"The neoconservative vision within the speech is essentially an affirmation of ideology. Not only does it declare war on Russia and China, it places the United States in active opposition to all nondemocracies." (Emphasis added.)

Leave aside the silly idea that only neoconservatives are driven by ideology, whereas "realists" are "pragmatic." Where in McCain's speech did he "declare war" on Russia and China? Nowhere. And if he had, wouldn't that have been, you know, major news?

Exaggeration and distortion - it must be an election year!

George F. Will on Michelle Obama:

"Michelle, who was born in 1964, says that most Americans' lives have 'gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl.' Since 1960, real per capita income has increased 143 percent, life expectancy has increased by seven years, infant mortality has declined 74 percent, deaths from heart disease have been halved, childhood leukemia has stopped being a death sentence, depression has become a treatable disease, air and water pollution have been drastically reduced, the number of women earning a bachelor's degree has more than doubled, the rate of homeownership has increased 10.2 percent, the size of the average American home has doubled, the percentage of homes with air conditioning has risen from 12 to 77, the portion of Americans who own shares of stock has quintupled ..."

From the Wall Street Journal editorial page:

" ... Mr. Obama can be forgiven if he wakes up at night thinking he's in one of those 'Terminator' movies where the machine in the form of a human being just keeps coming. Nothing – not Bill Clinton's gaffes, not the Bosnian sniper-fire fantasy, not even being outspent 3-to-1 – has been able to stop her."

Years ago, Tom Bethell coined the phrase "strange new respect" to describe the media's treatment of conservatives who turn left as they spend more time in Washington. Lately we've been seeing a strange, new "strange new respect," in which the conservative media (grudgingly!) acknowledge the merits and tenacity of ... Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Paul Auster, looking back at the 1968 Columbia University student uprising: "I am 61 now, but my thinking has not changed much since that year of fire and blood, and as I sit alone in this room with a pen in my hand, I realize that I am still crazy, perhaps crazier than ever."

From a Bay Area protestor's sign:

Would we allow Nazi Germany to host the Olympics?

No. Of course not.

....except for that one time.

Happy Pennsylvania primary day. Since this is the first Democratic primary in weeks, here are two - count 'em, two - quotes from Democratic voters that may spell trouble for Barack Obama in November:

"I originally started out with Barack, but the more and more I learned about him, the less and less I liked him," Michael Hunt, a 55-year-old Indianapolis day trader, tells the Wall Street Journal this morning.

And from today's Washington Post:

"I don't care too much for Obama," Maria Norgren, the daughter and granddaughter of steelworkers, said in the parking lot of the Giant Eagle shopping center here, near the Obama rally.

"I don't even think he's American," added her husband, Edward, who lost his job when the steel mills closed and now mans the counter at the Puff Discount Tobacco and Lottery shop next to the Giant Eagle.

"His father's from Nigeria, right?" asked Maria, wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers T-shirt.

Actually, Obama's father was Kenyan. But that's not the point. The point is that the Democrats need the white working class vote to win in November, as Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz argue here. With Obama as the nominee, they might not get it.

Just when you thought MoveOn.org's massive PR blunder was fading into the shadows, HuffPo rescues it from irrelevancy:

General Betray Us? Of course he has. MoveOn.org can hardly be expected to recycle its slogan from last September, when Gen. David Petraeus testified in support of escalating the U.S. war in Iraq, given the hysterical denunciations that worthy group received at the time. But it was right then -- as it would be to repeat the charge now.

Definitely, buy the full page ad in the New York Times (and don't forget to demand the anti-American discount!).

HT: Hot Air

The Quote of the Day (So Far!) is from Christopher Hitchens, and it's a 'beaut:

Pretty soon, we should be able to get electoral politics down to a basic newspeak that contains perhaps 10 keywords: Dream, Fear, Hope, New, People, We, Change, America, Future, Together. Fishing exclusively from this tiny and stagnant pool of stock expressions, it ought to be possible to drive all thinking people away from the arena and leave matters in the gnarled but capable hands of the professional wordsmiths and manipulators. In the new jargon, certain intelligible ideas would become inexpressible. (How could one state, for example, the famous Burkean principle that many sorts of change ought to be regarded with skepticism?) In a rather poor trade-off for this veto on complexity, many views that are expressible (and "We the People Together Dream of and Hope for New Change in America" would be really quite a long sentence in the latest junk language) will, in turn, be entirely and indeed almost beautifully unintelligible.

Sounds like it's about time for someone to update Flaubert's Dictionary of Accepted Ideas.

David Brooks:

"His Hopeness tells rallies that we are the change we have been waiting for, but if we are the change we have been waiting for then why have we been waiting since we've been here all along?"

Maybe we are the change we have been waiting for that now we can believe in?