Breaking - Ed Klein on The Clinton-Obama rift

...After Bill Clinton delivered his electrifying speech at the Democratic National Convention, many political observers concluded that the Clintons and Obamas had called a truce to their long-running feud. Under their armistice, Clinton agreed to make speeches and appear in TV commercials for Obama, acting like a booster rocket for the Democratic ticket in the remaining weeks of the campaign. 

..In fact, since the convention, Clinton and Obama have had a serious falling-out over two issues: the president’s preparation and lamentable performance in his debate with Mitt Romney, and the question of who should be assigned blame — Obama or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — for the intelligence and security screw-up in Benghazi, Libya.    

This new rift, which the Clintons and Obamas have managed to keep secret from the media, has poisoned their relations to such an extent that it could conceivably have an impact on the outcome of the presidential election.     

...“Bill thought that he and Obama were on friendly terms after the convention,” one source told me. “He couldn’t believe that the White House didn’t even extend him the courtesy of a return phone call. He concluded that Obama’s arrogance knows no bounds.”

At the Clinton Global Initiative - Romney as a counterpoint to Obama's appeasement policy - "I will never apologize for America"

There's lots more interesting stuff you can see at the Clinton Global Initiative

Yesterday's man introduced by song "Don't Stop (thinking about tomorrow)"

One of the ironies of Bill Clinton's rousing oratory to the Democratic convention last night was the song played as he waved to the crowd before his speech kept repeating the strains, "yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone" from Fleetwood Mac's Don't Stop.

The song was used as the theme song of Clinton's first presidential campaign, but is now a reminder of the relevance of his presidency to Obama's.

Yesterday is gone and Bill Clinton is yesterday's man. Clinton is a great speaker and a President fondly remembered as governing during one of America's strongest economies in a period that reaped the benefits of Ronald Reagan's victory but had not yet suffered the travails of 9-11. It's sometimes thought that one of the reasons Al Gore lost to George W Bush was because Clinton was kept under wraps during the Gore presidential campaign. Whether it was because the former Vice President did not want to be outshone by his old boss, or the wounds from the Monica Lewinsky scandal were too fresh, it turned out to be a big mistake.  Al Gore's stiff personality, without the boost from the personable, warm Clinton kept him from getting into the big chair in the Oval Office.

Barack Obama knows better and Clinton turned in a typical Clinton performance, eloquent, intelligent, emotionally stirring, and about twenty-five minutes too long to hold everyone's complete attention.

|The former President's heart seemed strangely not entirely in his performance. Probably because he didn't believe all of his finely crafted speech. At one point, Clinton said, "though I often disagreed with Republicans, I never learned to hate them the way the far-right, that now controls their party, seems to hate our President."

If that level of anger is mystifying to Clinton, perhaps we wan't paying any attention to what Democrats were saying in the eight years after he left office. The hatred and invective by them, that still continues, against George W. Bush is staggering by any standard. Leftist Democrats continue to utter Bush's name as if it were a swear word.

But one doesn't listen to Slick Willie for 100% accuracy, one listens to him to hear a good talk. He may have re-written the history of his own presidency through the lens of nostalgia and Obama's through salesmanship, but in the speechifying department, he certainly delivered the goods.

Why the NDP's effort to create a Trudeau-like Layton cult will ultimately fail

Canada's New Democratic Party is a the manifestation of a political movement mired in obsolete radicalism that the major countries in the developed world have rejected. One needs only to look at their leadership of Libby Davies, Joe Comartin, Brian Topp, Paul Dewar, to see irrelevant middle-aged white people who have clasped on to union-driven, "make the rich pay" vapid sloganeering which has been shunned by a world that continues to embrace "The Third Way."

Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Jean Chretien led a wave of blending liberal social policies with conservative economics that created stability and prosperity for their countries and is an approach that has been embraced by the majority of voters in most of the world's major democratic nations.

The NDP, with its regressive policies, was nonetheless able to score an increase in its vote in part due to the personal popularity of its recently deceased leader, Jack Layton. But the NDP surge was even more due to the inept political skills of Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe, whose party's collapse provided virtually all of the NDP's gains.

With Layton gone, the NDP realizes they have no one comparable to replace him, but to cling on to the momentum that Layton's death has given them, they are being shameless in their attempt to replicate a Canadian phenomenon. 

At the end of his political career, Pierre Elliott Trudeau was intensely unpopular. He resigned his seat rather than face Brian Mulroney in an election he knew he was going to lose. Trudeau had earned the enmity of western Canada for the contempt he showed them and was unpopular in the rest of the country for the poor economic leadership of his government. Indeed, much of Trudeau's political success is due to his having the good fortune to face the least charismatic opponents in Canadian political history in the persons of Bob Stanfield (twice) and Joe Clark.

But a funny thing happened after Trudeau resigned. His popularity increased about a decade later, as some people's nostalgia helped them forget how badly he mismanaged the country. He also benefited from a generation of students who were taught that the multicultural policies he imposed were visionary and about the genuine vision he had in his achievement of patriating Canada's Constitution and creating a Charter of Rights. From this nostalgia emerged a Cult of Trudeau that the Liberal Party had been able to use to its advantage until 2006, and still has adherents.

The NDP, as out of touch as they may be, are not completely absent of observational skills, and seeing the sympathy that has been expressed over Layton's death to cancer, think they can ride that sympathy into the creation of a Layton legend and cult that will continue.

But the NDP brain trust forgot a few things. The sympathy for Layton has a lot to do with him being likable and people being naturally empathetic to a public figure dying, almost literally, before their eyes. Layton was as little like Trudeau as he was like Bobby Kennedy. Sixty-one is early to die, but it can only be considered young if you're a Galapagos tortoise. Layton wasn't martyred for his beliefs, he died of a disease that takes thousands of other Canadians every year in circumstances that are no less tragic for the loved ones of those involved.

Patriation of Canada's Constitution

The major difference between Trudeau and Layton that will prevent the Layton cult the NDP hopes for from sticking is that unlike the NDP leader, Mr. Trudeau had accomplishments.

There is no lasting legacy that the NDP can point to for Layton. Whereas Trudeau did have the Constitution, Charter, and multiculturalism, as well as exhibiting strong, determined leadership during the October Crisis. Trudeau helped maneuver Canada's foreign policy towards being more independent and he fought off the greatest threat to the separation of Quebec when it was led by the independence movement's most dynamic and intelligent leader ever, Rene Levesque.

Not the least notable difference between the two men is that unlike Layton, Trudeau actually earned the title of Right Honourable by being elected Prime Minister.

The NDP may be riding high for the moment on Jack Layton's ashes, but with an election more than four years away, the distant memory of a likable guy who didn't really do much to affect Canada will pale in comparison to the issues of the day in 2016. It's the Liberal Party, with its stronger roster of capable politicians and history of national leadership that stands the most to gain from the NDP's loss of Jack Layton.

Christopher Hitchens on Chomsky's Follies

Christopher Hitchens can't speak with his mouth right now due to esophageal cancer, but he still speaks loudly and forcefully with his pen.

His column on the stupidity of Noam Chomsky's moral relativism and misrepresentation appears in the current issue of Slate:

The professor's pronouncements about Osama Bin Laden are stupid and ignorant.

Anybody visiting the Middle East in the last decade has had the experience: meeting the hoarse and aggressive person who first denies that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and then proceeds to describe the attack as a justified vengeance for decades of American imperialism. This cognitive dissonance—to give it a polite designation—does not always take that precise form. Sometimes the same person who hails the bravery of al-Qaida's martyrs also believes that the Jews planned the "operation." As far as I know, only leading British "Truther" David Shayler, a former intelligence agent who also announced his own divinity, has denied that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, took place at all. (It was apparently by means of a hologram that the widespread delusion was created on television.) In his recent article for Guernica magazine, however, professor Noam Chomsky decides to leave that central question open. We have no more reason to credit Osama Bin Laden's claim of responsibility, he states, than we would have to believe Chomsky's own claim to have won the Boston Marathon.

I can't immediately decide whether or not this is an improvement on what Chomsky wrote at the time. Ten years ago, apparently sharing the consensus that 9/11 was indeed the work of al-Qaida, he wrote that it was no worse an atrocity than President Clinton's earlier use of cruise missiles against Sudan in retaliation for the bomb attacks on the centers of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. (I haven't been back to check on whether he conceded that those embassy bombings were also al-Qaida's work to begin with.) He is still arguing loudly for moral equivalence, maintaining that the Abbottabad, Pakistan, strike would justify a contingency whereby "Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic." (Indeed, equivalence might be a weak word here, since he maintains that, "uncontroversially, [Bush's] crimes vastly exceed bin Laden's.")

Read the rest here at Slate

UPDATE : Alan Dershowitz on bin Laden's defender

Not ready for prime time: Jack Layton goes limp under pressure

Jack got the infamous rubdown here.
Too soon to tell if a "happy ending" is in store for the rest of the NDP

Whether or not Jack Layton was masturbated by an attendant at a massage parlour in Toronto in 1996 is of no moral consequence.

However Layton's reaction to the story, the timing of which is obviously political, that in 1996, police found him naked in a "house of ill-repute," is further demonstration, if any more was needed, that the NDP leader is not fit to be the head of Canada's government.

Aside from the obvious lack of judgement demonstrated by a well-known city councillor, as he was in the 1990's, in receiving services of any kind at a bawdy house, Layton's response to the news of it does not bode well for his ability to react to pressure with grace.

Sex has got a lot of men into trouble over the years and most politicians are men with a lust for power, so the term political sex scandal is almost tautological.

There are ways to handle it and there are ways to deal with it effectively and what one does shows a lot about leadership skills.

Layton went to the book on this scandal by immediately claiming "smear" and having his wife issue a statement of support. If that sounds familiar, it's because Bill Clinton did much the same thing. The difference was that in Clinton's case, his scandals didn't break two days before a general election.

And unlike Layton's, Clinton's excuses also had the advantage of not making him look stupid.

Layton has claimed that he went to the massage parlour, pictured above, to get a "shiatsu."

He said he believed the location was a legitimate massage parlour and that he did not receive any sexual services there. That might be true.

But look at the facade of the massage parlour in question, in a seedy part of Toronto's Chinatown, an area that Layton would have been very familiar with, since he was the municipal representative for that area.

If you told me that place is a "legitimate" massage parlour, I'd laugh at you.

There's also a certain incongruity, which is my polite way of saying hypocrisy, to someone who wanted to ban lap dancing and said, "a strip bar is not a petting zoo" who then goes to the sort of place where the clients are the ones being petted.

Layton's reaction was to be rattled, to decry a basic component of the political process that he voluntarily and heartily pursues, and to look and sound beaten.

Being Prime Minister is about leadership. Layton himself has made leadership a central issue of his campaign. Lame, implausible excuses, self-pity and bad reactions are not the way leadership is best exercised.

Canadians are lucky they found out what Jack Layton's version of "Canadian Leadership" is before it's too late.

UPDATE: In a song-and dance interview with the CBC about his little visit to The Velvet Touch Massage Parlour (now if that name isn't a giveaway!), Layton casts more doubt on the veracity of his story than if he had the good sense to keep his mouth shut.

The NDP leader, responding to reporters' questions, said he went to the clinic around 9 p.m., recalling that it was probably after a workout. 

"I went for a massage at a community clinic"

You can see the alleged "community clinic" above. Does that look like a community clinic? Have you heard of many legitimate massage clinics that are open at 9 PM?

Harper talked about Layton being all smiles and snake oil. He got the smiles right, but that would be massage oil, Steve.

(h/t to Blazing Cat Fur for the update)

UPDATE 2: It looks like "Velvet Touch" is a popular name for massage parlours. Here's one I found in Edmonton. And here's one in Youngstown, Arizona, and another in Melbourne, Florida. And here's a Miss Velvet Touch in Niagara Falls who offers massages (among other things)! I bet the clients of these other Velvet Touches all mistook them for 'community clinics' too!