Goldberg sums up the GOP Convention

Jonah Goldberg writes in the latest G-file newsletter:

But the two most effective and representative lines of the whole convention came from Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan (as it should be).

From Romney: “President Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.”

While this isn’t necessarily red meat, it’s got a nice pinkish hue bordering on red at the center. It also shows why red meat can be effective. Liberals hate this line because they think making fun of global warming is sacrilegious and “anti-science.” So they’re attacking him for it. But the average voter doesn’t hear anti-scientific blasphemy, they hear, “Obama talks a big game about things that either don’t matter or he can’t do. Meanwhile this guy says he’s going to focus on the economy and getting my kid a job that gets him out of the basement.”

Which brings me to what I think was easily the best line of the night, from Paul Ryan.

We are four years into this presidency. The issue is not the economy that Barack Obama inherited, not the economy as he envisions, but this economy that we are living. College graduates should not have to live out their 20s in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life.

That is brilliant and one of the few lines of the whole convention that elicited serious pangs of writerly envy. It works so well because it is poignant, funny, and feels very, very true. It captures the faded coolness and fizzled hype of the original Obama frenzy. That’s a great message from a young (younger than me!) politician aimed at young people. But it also works very well for older people. People who are no longer all that young understand the pain and anxiety of wasted time and unfulfilled potential. The image makes you feel for the young adults effectively trapped at the bottom of an economic escalator that seems to be moving down as they try to climb up.

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Posted via email from The Blue Pelican

Goldberg sums up the GOP Convention

Jonah Goldberg writes in the latest G-file newsletter:

But the two most effective and representative lines of the whole convention came from Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan (as it should be).

From Romney: “President Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.”

While this isn’t necessarily red meat, it’s got a nice pinkish hue bordering on red at the center. It also shows why red meat can be effective. Liberals hate this line because they think making fun of global warming is sacrilegious and “anti-science.” So they’re attacking him for it. But the average voter doesn’t hear anti-scientific blasphemy, they hear, “Obama talks a big game about things that either don’t matter or he can’t do. Meanwhile this guy says he’s going to focus on the economy and getting my kid a job that gets him out of the basement.”

Which brings me to what I think was easily the best line of the night, from Paul Ryan.

We are four years into this presidency. The issue is not the economy that Barack Obama inherited, not the economy as he envisions, but this economy that we are living. College graduates should not have to live out their 20s in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life.

That is brilliant and one of the few lines of the whole convention that elicited serious pangs of writerly envy. It works so well because it is poignant, funny, and feels very, very true. It captures the faded coolness and fizzled hype of the original Obama frenzy. That’s a great message from a young (younger than me!) politician aimed at young people. But it also works very well for older people. People who are no longer all that young understand the pain and anxiety of wasted time and unfulfilled potential. The image makes you feel for the young adults effectively trapped at the bottom of an economic escalator that seems to be moving down as they try to climb up.

Go to NationalReview.com to sign up for the newsletter.

Posted via email from The Blue Pelican

Jennifer Rubin: Ryan freaks out Obamaland

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/ryan-freaks-out-obamaland...

The Democrats are losing it, literally. The Obama camp and its surrogates are losing the fight to control the narrative about Mitt Romney and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) They are losing the effort to distract voters through the presence at the GOP convention of Obama campaign staffers such as Robert Gibbs and Ben LaBolt, who spend their time wandering about and whining to the media here in Tampa about the “negativity” of the other side. They are losing the ability to con the media into focusing on likability, as if perceptions of Romney and Ryan wouldn’t improve after this event.

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Richard Epstein: Paul Ryan’s Intellectual Muse

http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/126521

In 1944, when Roosevelt unveiled his “Second Bill of Rights,” Friedrich von Hayek, an Austrian economist, political theorist, and future Nobel Prize winner, wrote The Road To Serfdom. That book rightly became a sensation both in England and in the United States, especially after the publication of its condensed version in The Reader’s Digest in April 1945. Hayek’s basic message was the exact opposite of Roosevelt’s. He was deeply suspicious of government intervention into markets, thinking that it could lead to economic stagnation on the one hand and to political tyranny on the other.

The Reader’s Digest version of The Road to Serfdom:

http://www.barefootsworld.net/serfdom.html

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Niall Ferguson on Why Barack Obama Needs to Go

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/08/19/niall-ferguson-on-why-barack...

Why does Paul Ryan scare the president so much? Because Obama has broken his promises, and it’s clear that the GOP ticket’s path to prosperity is our only hope.

Read the whole thing.

He also has a response to his critics:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/21/niall-ferguson-defends-newsw...

Runner up is James Fallows of The Atlantic for his hilariously pompous post “As a Harvard Alum, I Apologize.” Well, as an Oxford alum, I laugh.

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A Nation Adrift From the Rule of Law

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/08/a_nation_adrift_from_the_rule_of_...

Excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal by David Keel, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, about how the idea of the rule of law has been gutted over the last few years

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Barone: GM goes from bad to worse despite Obama bailout

http://washingtonexaminer.com/gm-goes-from-bad-to-worse-despite-obama-bailout...

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that GM is bleeding money because of decisions made by a management eager to please its political masters — and by the terms of the bankruptcy arranged by Obama car czars Ron Bloom and Steven Rattner.

Rattner himself admitted late last year, in a speech to the Detroit Economic Club, that “We should have asked the [United Auto Workers] to do a bit more. We did not ask any UAW member to take a cut in their pay.” Nonunion employees of GM spin-off Delphi lost their pensions. UAW members didn’t.

The UAW got its political payoff. And GM, according to Forbes writer Louis Woodhill, is headed to bankruptcy again.

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Erskine Bowles: Barack Obama Scuttled the Deficit Commission's Work, Not Paul Ryan

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/08/15/Erskine-Bowles-Barack-Obam...

Bowles goes on to say that Obama eventually had some kind words for the commission’s work, but the thrust of his comments is that President Obama didn’t get behind the proposal, despite it meeting and exceeding his own criteria for success.

In other words, according to the Democratic chairman of the bipartisan deficit commission, it wasn’t Paul Ryan that doomed the effort. It was Barack Obama.

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Podhoretz on Ryan, Uniting the right

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/uniting_the_right_rwan8uk...

The secret of Paul Ryan is that he is a blend of the two; philosophically a small-government conservative, managerially a fiscal conservative.

He wants to reduce the size of government for the reasons the Tea Party elucidated — that Big Government saps individual initiative and is a betrayal of the rights enumerated in the Constitution. But he has also mastered the language and the approach of the fiscal conservatives, and has used them to get very specific about the threat posed to the American future by the coming tsunami in entitlement spending.

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George Will: Romney’s presidential pick

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-romneys-presidential-pick/...

When Ryan said in Norfolk, “We won’t replace our Founding principles, we will reapply them,” he effectively challenged Obama to say what Obama believes, which is: Madison was an extremist in enunciating the principles of limited government — the enumeration and separation of powers. And Jefferson was an extremist in asserting that government exists not to grant rights but to “secure” natural rights that pre-exist government.

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Has the Obama Campaign Finally Gone Too Far? - The Soptic Ad

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/08/has-the-obama-campaign-finally-...

The ad is outrageous on so many levels–the woman never worked for Bain Capital or any Bain-associated company; she died seven years after Romney left Bain, at a time when Bain was being run by a major Obama fundraiser; she had her own health insurance that had nothing to do with Bain, and her death had nothing to do with insurance anyway; she went to a hospital thinking she had pneumonia and turned out to be suffering from an incurable cancer–that it has horrified every halfway-objective observer.

More on the story:

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/08/omg-joe-soptic-the-anti-romney-cancer...

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/331761.php

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/148291/

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Repeal the Hollywood tax cuts!

http://washingtonexaminer.com/sunday-reflection-repeal-the-hollywood-tax-cuts...

The movie excise tax was imposed in response to the high deficits after World War Two. Deficits are high again, and there’s already historical precedent. Of course, to keep up with technology, the tax should now apply to DVDs, downloadable movies, pay-per-view and the like.

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Charles Krauthammer: Romney’s excellent trip

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-romneys-excellent-...

Look at how Romney was received. In Israel, its popular prime minister lavished on him a welcome so warm as to be a near-endorsement. In Poland, Romney received an actualendorsement from Lech Walesa, former dissident, former president, Cold War giant, Polish hero.

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