Kathleen Parker dumps on C4P over Romney as flip-flopper.

The mere mention of a human role (vs., presumably, a divine plan) was enough to bestir the guardians of scientific inquiry at Conservatives4Palin, who averred that Romney is “simpatico” with Obama and that he “totally bought into the man-made global warming hoax.”

Construe it as a badge of honour.

Plus a heart warming bonus – Parker finds C4P irritating.

That is even better news because a lot of people have been finding Parker as annoying as nettlerash, not just since September 2008 but also when, angered by the sweaty multitudes of the Tea Party she launched her own Arugula Party.

What she hasn’t grasped, of course, is that nobody is saying that politicians should never alter their stance on a particular issue. In many ways an admission that their mind has been changed by a persuasive argument reflects well upon a person’s honesty and integrity.

However suspicions are aroused if the motive for the change of mind is more to please a constituency than a genuine conversion. When, as in Romney’s case, these shifts of position become legion then the mantle of flip floppery surely becomes deserved.

Or, as Auric Goldfinger once told James bond

‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action’.”

cross posted at C4P

Your President has come and gone. His State visit is over. Naturally the UK media went out of its way to be positive because
1. In 2008 they took their cue from your MSM and accepted the myth without expending any effort on shoe leather so it would be embarrassing to ‘fess up
2. He is a left wing politician and therefore our media and academic elite keep any criticism muted
3. Generally, like you Americans, though we find foreigners a little odd, we are polite to them

State visits are peculiar creatures because, unlike the day to day give, take and insult of raw international politics they are also heavy with symbolism – flags, banquets, parades and visits to the host nation’s icons.

When I was a callow youth I sneered at symbols as empty gewgaws designed to hypnotise the ignorant, like the cheap coloured beads offered to primitive tribal chieftains in the 19th century for a thousand square miles of arid landscape packed with enough mineral wealth to create a hundred western millionaires.

But as I grew through the stages of life and began to learn from experience rather than through text books I realised that symbols were emotional shorthand for a common cultural inheritance that stretches back to ancestors long unknown. It made me also realise that we as individuals can only be short term leaseholders of that inheritance which we must inevitably pass on to generations yet unborn.

So we treat them with respect.

And we treat the symbols of our friends with respect.

And before we venture into a friendly foreign land we do a little homework on those symbols – especially if we hold an office in our own country with its own symbolic constellation. Indeed most leaders of nations have diplomatic advisers and heads of protocol waiting on hand to guide them through what can be a an intimidating maze of expectations.

President Obama failed that test when he attended the banquet given in his honour by our Queen. He stumbled over the toast, did not even attempt to pretend he wasn’t using a cue card and had to be instructed in good manners by his hostess

Earlier that day he visited Westminster Abbey where England’s kings and queens have always been crowned and where, just a few weeks ago, millions throughout the world had witnessed the strange mixture of solemnity and joy that characterised the royal wedding. Here also lies the tomb of The Unknown Warrior, the First World War soldier who represents the sacrifice of all those other British service men and women who have no known resting place and on whose grave was placed Kate Middleton’s wedding posy after the pomp and ceremony of her marriage.

Mrs Obama, who had changed her outfit to a purple dress and blue coat, said: “It’s a pleasure to be here again”, to which her husband added: “She gets to come to all the fun places”, then “so nice to see you, how are you?”

He was there to lay a wreath on the Unknown Warrior’s grave. It is not a fun place. It is a place of dark and brooding majesty, a place where hard men are proud to shed tears of respect and remembrance for those who gave their blood and bone so that we may live outside war and terror.

He was then asked to sign the Abbey’s Visitors Book, a simple but meaningful act of symbolic recognition. He had to seek advice for the date and then got the year wrong.

But maybe the 2008 gaffe is understandable seeing that he already appears to be in full campaign mode. Perhaps he felt that Congressman Clyburn would be more impressed by a visit to a multi ethnic school in South London rather than meeting up with the brightest and best of Britain’s young scientists. After all we are contantly being told that Obama has a towering intellect – so what can he learn from a handful of test tube shakers….

Excused as “slips” these blunders appear to be manifestations of his real world view. That traditions and symbols and threads towards the past are the cobwebbed residue of meaningless images irrelevant to the vision of a socially engineered reconstruction of society where there is a place for everyone and everyone is in their place and woe betide any village Hampden who refuses to conform.

As for protocol – I guess the only protocol needed for any young politician on the make in Chicago at the turn of the century was to find the most suitable part of Mayor Daley’s posterior to kiss in order to get further up the ladder.

A sad day for both our lands.

During the late 1940s and early 50s my dad would sometimes buy a copy of the Saturday Evening Post from our local WH Smith in South London. It was a much better deal in terms of pictures and articles of interest than anything published in England at the time. I particularly remember being astonished at the advertisements for food and drink – this at a time when food continued to be rationed in a rather run down dilapidated post war London suburb, still pock marked with bombed out buildings.

As the years rolled by and prosperity returned Hollywood and Rock n’Roll crafted part of my own cultural outlook. As a history teacher and politics nut I developed a fascination for the American scene but never imagined crossing the pond for real, only in my imagination.

Then in 1990, browsing in a local discount bookstore I picked up a copy of “Exploring The West” by Herman J Viola and there, on page 240 was this picture, “Open Range”, painted by Maynard Dixon in 1942…..

‘

I was hooked. I just had to go out there and see that for myself – the big sky, the majestic mesas, the sandy, scrubby landscape. I wanted to sense it, feel it, drink it in with my eyes. Moreover I wanted to stand in front of that painting which the book said was part of a collection of western art near the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. So in the mid 90s we booked a fly drive and I took the car east across the Rockies to Denver, checked into the Brown Palace that night and, bright and early next morning, sauntered out of the hotel to where the gallery was supposed to be and – no gallery, no collection, no picture….apparently the whole project had been closed a few months before and the paintings scattered to the four corners of America.

So I have never seen the painting.

But we did see the landscape. We have driven all around Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. First year we drove from Flagstaff to Bluff, Utah and alongside Monument Valley and I saw it for real.

A few days later we drove to Moab and I stood at Grand View Point in Canyonlands – thinner and with more hair than now – and wanted time to freeze for ever……

….and I so much want to return.

Thank you, Maynard Dixon….

BTW – a few years later we did see many of his paintings at a glorious exhibition mounted at Brigham Young University…..but that painting, sadly, wasn’t there…..

In her icy lair she waits while perplexed scribblers try to convince themselves that beside a distant northern lake there is no shadow roaming free beyond the parameters of their prescribed calculus and ingrained ritualistic incantations.

But it is only pretence because in reality they are ever glancing over their shoulders for although they publicly voice disdain they are privately nervous of someone who refuses to engage within the rules of their vaunted choreography

That is why in several of the pieces that emerged in the aftershock of Huckabee’s withdrawal the name of Sarah Palin was either left out or allowed but a cursory nod. Of course they might merely have been falling in line behind the grand panjandrum of prognostication George Will who returned from his visit to the Delphic Oracle and proclaimed that in 2012 the GOP nominee lacing up armour to enter the lists against Obama would either be Daniels or Pawlenty.

Time was, of course, when George’s diktat would have been enough to seal the deal. Pundits and their media masters controlled the slip road to the information highway and the most that any ordinary Jane or Joe could do was to splutter over their morning cornflakes and shout abuse at the cat in order to let off steam.

But now the GWs of the world are left preaching to an empty chapel as the world and his wife are surfing along the information highway themselves.

Poor George – how frustrating it must be to have your once booming voice reduced to a constricted squeak.

With all the other candidates and pseudo candidates there is blather about exploratory committees, raising money, hiring consultants and strategists, testing the waters in Iowa, fluttering their eyelids at an assortment of governors, politicians and celebrities and, above all, dancing to the musical pipes of the self proclaimed kings and queens of the media.

The result? Allahpundit goes orgasmic.

But, if she chooses to enter the GOP race, it is possible that Sarah Palin could decide to dance to her own tune.

Exploratory committee? A prayer, chat with Todd and the family and a couple of spiders who live in the Palin garage = job done!

Raising money? As one Hot Air comment pitched it

If Palin enters the fray, everything changes. Romney might be able to generate truckloads of money, but Palin can make it rain from the sky on demand.

Consultants/strategists? Here’s Matthew Continetti

Palin’s entry would completely scramble the presidential campaign. She’s quite simply the most famous Republican woman in the world, with shrewd instincts, charisma, passionate supporters, and no fear

Why would someone like that need a consultant? Why would anybody with an ounce of savvy need a consultant?

A consultant is a person who borrows your watch and then charges you to tell you what time it is

Iowa? Once every four years thousands of “consultants/strategists” parachute into Iowa alongside legions of media hacks and their support staff. For several weeks this international assortment of scribblers and voiceovers pretends to take an interest in ethanol subsidies and the Waterloo Black Hawks. Once the caucuses are over they all rush back to their big city apartments and forget about Iowa until the year of the next Olympics – including the candidates who have been pimping themselves to Iowans for several months.

But in Iowa, just as there is in every state, below the first and second tier of GOP apparatchiks who love to sound off to any out of state hack with a mike or a blackberry, there are probably more than a thousand lower level enthusiasts who will gladly crawl barelegged over fifty miles of broken glass to work for Palin.

As for endorsements, she is probably the only political figure in America who walks alone. If they come, then fine. But after the heavy lifting she did for so many candidates in 2010 the lack of reciprocity after the Gifford shooting was quite an eye opener. But then the mathematics of the GOP political equation became clearer. The Republican Party needs Sarah Palin. But perhaps she does not need the Republican Party.

Indeed, if she decides to stand she gave Sean Hannity a clue of how she might position herself towards the end of their recent interview. (10.00-10.55 in the clip)

When he asked her about her views on the current speculation of who might be throwing their hat into the ring she became rather dismissive of such antics so early on in the game. She used the phrase “both sides of the aisle”, talked of “fighting for Family, Faith and Freedom” and, the money quote, declared she was not a real fan of politicians.

This is trademark Palin. Though she wears the Republican label she really puts herself forward as being above party politics. This is how she won and governed in Alaska – and why she continued to be so unpopular with the official GOP establishment up there.

This is why the national GOP elite and their battalions of consultants, lobbyists and media drones loathe her as much as the liberal/left. Positioning oneself above the party disengages power from the cogwheel of the spoils system – the jobs for the boys, the waivers, the sweet government contracts, the backroom deals. The party structure feeds on this and for many it is the raison d’être for the whole mechanism of politics. She briefly broke that culture in Alaska and would do the same in Washington.

Quite a while ago, soon after the dust of 2008 had settled I wrote a comparison between Sarah Palin and the French leader Charles de Gaulle and I still stand by that.

As an Englishman I was always naturally suspicious of anything that de Gaulle did because I knew that he would never fail to place the interests of France above everything else. But I also admired him for it and yearned for the day when we might have such a leader (to my astonishment, in 1979 when the UK had sunk to its lowest depths, she came.)

De Gaulle was one of the most brilliant political operators in any modern democracy. But he achieved success by offering himself to the French people as an anti-politician, concerned only for the future of France.

De Gaulle was relatively unknown to the French people in 1940 but millions of them heard his broadcast from London at the moment of their deepest despair and in those few minutes he became the inspiration and hope for so many. Governor Palin walked onto the stage at the Republican Convention, electrified millions and stole their hearts forever with her grace, her honesty and her love of life sealing there and then a contract and covenant of support through fire and flood whatever may happen

I wrote that in March 2009 at a time when on both sides of the pond “those who know best” had her already shredded and dumped into the dustbin of history. But I had a sense that there were a lot of ordinary Americans who had sealed that contract and covenant – and I was right.

So now my American friends wait and wonder. The runes have been thrown but have yet to be read.

Who knows what the future holds….

Bruce McQuain at Hot Air posted an eloquent and powerful deconstruction of a recent decision of the Indiana Supreme Court

Overturning a common law dating back to the English Magna Carta of 1215, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Hoosiers have no right to resist unlawful police entry into their homes.
The author of the story reporting this is right – somehow the ISC managed, in one fell swoop, to overturn almost 900 years of precedent, going back to the Magna Carta.
In a 3-2 decision, Justice Steven David writing for the court said if a police officer wants to enter a home for any reason or no reason at all, a homeowner cannot do anything to block the officer’s entry. [emphasis mine]

Although Magna Carta (1215) did not stop subsequent medieval kings of England from sometimes acting in a coercive way it was important in that, for the first time, an English king signed a document publicly recognising that his powers were limited by the law.
Of course the barons and prelates who gathered on Runnymede to force King John to sign were mindful of their own privileges and had little concern for the ordinary folk. Nevertheless, from the 16th century, as the position of the commons in parliament became more influential, the rights enshrined in Magna Carta began to have greater resonance. By the time of the early 17th century, in the decades leading up to the English Civil War between King and Parliament the document had assumed a degree of symbolic significance far beyond the original intentions of the baronial clique that had authored it.

Most of the original clauses no longer remain statute law, having been replaced or updated as an adaption to changing circumstances but three clauses still remain as statutes, including this, probably one of the most stirring and majestic proclamations of freedom of all time – not because it burns with fierce oratory but it’s plain matter of fact bluntness in setting out the boundaries of executive authority

No freeman is to be taken or imprisoned or disseised of his free tenement or of his liberties or free customs, or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined, nor will we go against such a man or send against him save by lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land. To no-one will we sell or deny of delay right or justice.

Perhaps a visit to Runnymede would give the justices of the Indiana Supreme Court an opportunity to reflect on the reason why the framers of the US constitution were men who had the imagery of Magna Carta burnt into their very souls…

Magna Carta memorial at Runnymede