Category: Awards

"What a disgrace that this man is leader of the free world; and at such a point in history. If he had put America stoutly behind the protesters and championed them against the regime, by now they might have toppled it," – Melanie Phillips, airing a meme that will become neocon boilerplate – despite its hallucinatory tinge – in the coming days and weeks.

"Judge Sotomayor is up there at school in New York, she gets a scholarship to Princeton, she’s graduated with all these big honors and awards they said she never won. What’s she doing there in the summer? They said her adviser told her to read children’s classics so she can learn English better. How do you graduate number one in Princeton if you’re in the summer and you’re reading Rumpelstiltskin and Snow White" – Pat Buchanan.

And, yes, that was the banner for an English-only conference, where Buchanan made these remarks.

"The fact is that, as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society. In this he is no different from his allies like the Congressional Black Caucus and Bill Ayers, who have shown themselves perfectly comfortable with Castro and Chàvez.  Indeed, he is the product of a hard-Left tradition that apologized for Stalin and was more comfortable with the Soviets than the anti-Communists (and that, in Soros parlance, saw George Bush as a bigger terrorist than bin Laden)," – Andy McCarthy, torture supporter, at NRO.

The entire post is seriously unhinged, but, then, so is the contemporary American right.

"ACORN IN IRAN? Over 100% voted in 50 cities," – Glenn Reynolds.

(New readers can find a glossary for the Dish's coveted awards here.)

"The president is also speaking in code. The Pope [John Paul II] spoke in a code which was implicit and understood support for the forces of freedom. The code the administration is using is implicit support for this repressive, tyrannical regime," – Charles Krauthammer.

Unbelievable. Stuck in the ancient past.

"Obama's policy now requires getting past the election controversies quickly so that he can soon begin negotiations with the reelected Ahmadinejad government. This will be difficult as long as opposition protests continue and the government appears to be either unsettled or too brutal to do business with. What Obama needs is a rapid return to peace and quiet in Iran, not continued ferment. His goal must be to deflate the opposition, not to encourage it. And that, by and large, is what he has been doing," – Robert Kagan in an article titled "Obama, Siding With The Regime." Yglesias counters. So does Matt Duss.

The shameless domestic politicking of the neocons – even during this monumental event – is staggering.

"From what I can tell, [von Brunn's] hatreds echoed the kind of stuff we hear from the Kos crowd, Chris Matthews, Andrew Sullivan et al … his hatreds would be easier to find at an ANSWER rally than at CPAC," – Jonah Goldberg, arguing that the white supremacist and pathological anti-Semite is in fact a member of the hard left (which now apparently includes Chris Matthews and me!). Dave Wiegel's entertaining round-up of Republican squirm is here.

"You can argue that the joke wasn’t funny, that it was mean spirited, that it was politically motivated, that it was sloppily constructed, that it attacked an innocent “child,” etc. But those are critiques of the joke, not reasons the joke shouldn’t have been attempted. For good or ill, Bristol Palin’s pregnancy long ago became a public event, and it is part and parcel of the “Sarah Palin” construct Letterman was taking aim at.

What is interesting to me is that, ordinarily, teenage pregnancy — and tacit acceptance of same — is tied to the left. Which is to say, the left generally doesn’t snipe at teen pregnancy as a problematic moral condition. Here, however, the joke relies on the suggestion that Bristol Palin’s pregnancy maps with her snowbilly trashiness, while simultaneously rubbing against the perceived morality of her mother — and, by extension, any and all Republicans (who, for better or worse, are tied in the public consciousness to the kind of “family values” platform that here is being ironized). The joke was a political one that simultaneously took shots at the rural bourgeois and Alex Rodriguez, a favorite NY media whipping boy. And so while it may have been unfunny to those with certain sensibilities, the only “justification” necessary is that someone thought it funny enough to make public, and we (thankfully) still have the right to make those kinds of decisions ourselves," – Jeff Goldstein, Protein Wisdom.

"You only thought leftists got excited when American soldiers got killed. As I’ve written before, leftists celebrate each and every death of each and every American solider because they view the loss of life as a vindication of their belief that they are right." – Erick Erickson, RedState. Hilzoy righteously retaliates.