Obama the Front Man

Breaking News

August 5, 2013

Good morning Jolters,

Congress has left Washington for its annual summer vacation, and won't return until after Labor Day. But they didn't leave empty-handed — President Obama gave them an exemption from Obamacare, ensuring members and staff won't have to pay full freight on the exchanges the law will force them onto (as other Americans of similar means will have to). Is this the president's the definition of fair? Now, even Howard Dean wants to defund Obamacare!

Speaking of what this president believes, don't miss Kevin Williamson today. What's in a law? Not much if the Obama administration can change it on a whim, as a favor, or to increase approval ratings. President Obama, over the past five years, has used the law as mere guidelines to his agenda (Obamacare, DOMA, the DREAM Act are cases in point). What do executive orders and the upending of the rule of law mean to a democracy? Hint: It's not good.

Detroit has enough problems these days, but apparently its workers want to add to the city's financial woes. Backed by the unions (which lost last year when Michigan became a right to work state), fast-food restaurant workers are demanding a "living wage" — pay more than double the current minimum wage. Jillian Kay Melchior reports on why this power play will backfire and leave Detroit even worse off than it is now.

From viewing parties to Twitter, Desiree (Des) Hartsock, a.k.a ABC's Bacherlotte is sure to dominate the news today (we too are shaking our heads). Will she find true love or will she get jilted? What is the allure of these dating reality shows — could it be a longing for true love? Katrina Trinko looks at why so many young women today would like to live happily ever after.

The 2010 class of congressional freshmen will always be remembered as the tea-party class. Will the 2012 class be remembered as the Get Along Gang? Jonathan Strong has the story from Washington. And do you remember the news a few weeks back about the man who videotaped himself with a shotgun in downtown D.C., a block from the White House? Well, he's in jail now for carrying across state lines, but that isn't stopping his political ambitions — he wants to make a run for president in 2020.

In case you missed him Friday, we have Mark Steyn on Huma, the sale of the Boston Globe, and the August international terrorist threat, here, here, and here.

Before we turn you over to Jim for his third reason to hate modern politics (as promised, love begins tomorrow), did you know that National Review is on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest? Follow us on each, you won't be disappointed — despite the fact that even we have to relay the news in 140 characters or less.

Something Worth Hating About Modern Politics, Part Three: All-or-Nothing Narratives and Portraits

If most of the people you know are a mix of strengths and weaknesses, virtues and vices . . . why can't we perceive political figures the same way? Why must they get tossed into the "good guy" or "bad guy" category?

Maybe Marco Rubio is a good guy and a usually-solid conservative who just started to pursue an immigration deal like it was the White Whale, a desire for a big bipartisan deal that drove him to believe too many Democratic promises on the immigration bill.

Maybe Pat Toomey is as solid a conservative Republican as we're going to get in Pennsylvania, but who felt he had to find a bipartisan agreement on background checks on guns.

Maybe Max Baucus is a guy whom we on the right will be happy to replace, as he was a usually-reliable Democratic vote from a usually-red state . . . but maybe he's also the kind of guy who's willing to call them as he sees them, up to and including declaring the implementation of Obamacare a "train wreck."

I don't know whether this is more an issue of the media's shoehorning people and circumstances into one of these either-or narratives, or the public insisting their formation come to them in simple, good-guy-vs.-bad-guy narratives. But if your choices are flawed vs. flawed, and the coverage and discussion of them portrays it as good vs. bad, doesn't the public end up blinded to the flaws of one of the options?

A few weeks ago, I wrote:

In the past few months, we've witnessed news events where the media quickly turned the story into a binary choice between two options:

Do we want to support the Syrian rebels or the Assad regime? Is Snowden a hero or a traitor? Do we stand with Morsi or with the Egyptian military?

Of course, in all of those examples, both antagonists are deeply flawed, perhaps too flawed to be worthy of official U.S. support, or even public-opinion support. The Syrian rebels have all kinds of Islamist, priest-throat-cutting goons in their ranks, and they're taking on a brutal dictator who's used sarin a few times; Morsi took Egypt in an autocratic, Islamist direction . . . and then the military forces that replaced him started shooting protesters.

Snowden may have done the public a service by exposing an invasive surveillance system that violated privacy rights and perhaps the Fourth Amendment, but he also broke his oath, the law, and is now playing footsie with some of the world's most repressive regimes.

Why must we pick a side? Why is there this compulsion to declare one side is the "good guy" here?

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