Happy Feet Friday

Here’s a comical “How-to-Dance” video from the 1940s – comical, but the music is hot (no surprise – the instrumental’s provided by Jimmy Dorsey and his band) and the dancing is superb.

Obama Has a Biden Moment

Joe Biden has the well-deserved reputation of possessing a V-8 mouth and a two-cycle brain, but perhaps the most fascinating thing about him is that, in the steady stream of his logorrhea-driven ramblings, he occasionally says something true.

Joe’s influence over the president must be starting to kick in, because Obama uttered his own Bidenism recently. At Osan Air Base in South Korea, the president told 1,500 hundred troops, “You guys make a pretty good photo op."

Now this is a “truth” in the sense of being a very self-revelatory statement, a comment that unmasks the president’s attitude about practically everything: “It’s all about me.” Not the troops – certainly not the troops in Afghanistan – and not the war dragnet on terrorism. Sure, he made a few conciliatory remarks, thanking the troops for their service, and apparently drawing cheers when he promised to increase military pay. But the photo op quip pretty much sums up his perception of the value of the U.S. military: the troops are simply a nice prop in support of his title of Commander-in-Chief.

Andrew Ferguson Continues to Excel at Fool-Spotting

One of my favorite books of political essays is Fools Names, Fools Faces, by Andrew Ferguson (which I hope to highlight in an upcoming Thursday book-review post). Mr. Ferguson’s breezy, ironic style is on full display in this Weekly Standard article from June of this year, as he tackles Newsweek magazine and its editor, Jon Meacham, as well as the self-congratulatory liberal press, in general. A couple of pearls from the article:

Everybody is crazy about Jon or at least is hoping not to get fired by him. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that everybody has his favorite "Meachamism," a word I just made up to describe a statement so comically banal or transparently untrue that only a man whom everybody is crazy about or hopes not to get fired by would try to put it into print. My own favorite Meachamism is rather obscure. It pops up in a book that nobody has read, even though it's about a president, George H.W. Bush, that everybody pretended to kind of admire once we got a good look at his son. The book is called My Father, My President, by Doro Bush. On page 218, Doro prints this quotation from Jon: "An important thing to remember about the press is there is no ideological bias."

* * * *

Monday wasn't even over yet before everybody found out that Maureen Dowd, who as everyone knows writes a column for the New York Times, had lifted a paragraph from a popular blog and put it into her column and passed it off as her own work…Her explanation was implausible in every particular, compounding her original offense. Normally everybody loves it when this happens, because everybody gets to say to one another, "In Washington the cover up is often worse than the crime!" But this was Maureen. The unthinkable began to emerge as the implausibility sunk in. Everybody's favorite was not only lazy and unimaginative but dishonest too--a bit of a fraud. Just in time the "media critic" for the Washington Post stepped in to deliver summary judgment. Maureen, he announced, had made an "inadvertent mistake." Relieved, everybody went back to loving Maureen and wanting to be loved by her.

One of my favorite Meachamisms – I am employing the term somewhat loosely, but still, I think, appropriately, because, although Meacham might not have coined the descriptive phrase, he permitted it to appear on the cover of his magazine – is the title of a cover story in a recent edition of Newsweek that referred to Al Gore as “The thinking man’s thinking man”. Complementing the verbal Meachamism, the cover featured a visual aid in the form of a photo of Al. The photo is cunningly cropped to display Al’s face from the nose up; no flash of teeth to distract us from admiring that awesome forehead, behind which, we are doubtless intended to believe, even newer and more brilliant thoughts are crackling, like Jiffy-Pop popcorn within its expanding tin-foil globe. And there’s an apple over his head, the juxtaposition of man and fruit proclaiming, with a particularly ham-fisted – or perhaps ham-brained – lack of subtlety, the official Newsweek position that Al is our very own Isaac Newton.

(A floor-sweeping doff of my cavalier’s hat to Ed Driscoll).

Non-Judgmental

Excellent satire on the response by liberal pea-brains to the terrorist attack by Nidal Hassan from Caroline Glick (H/T: Moonbattery).

Louis Armstrong: Not Just a Great Musician

Something of a social philosopher, as well. Terry Teachout has posted a fine article on Satchmo at Commentary online: "Satchmo and the Jews".

From the Shelves of the Paco Library

Scottish-born author Bruce Marshall was trained as an accountant and also served with distinction in both world wars. He wrote books ranging from comic fiction to espionage novels, and a fascinating biography of Wing Commander F.F.E. Yeo-Thomas and his exploits working with the Resistance in WWII (The White Rabbit, highlighted in a previous “Shelves” post). On a couple of occasions he turned his experience in accountancy to literary use, most notably in The Accounting, an enthralling novel about a British accounting firm auditing a French bank and stumbling across a fraud scheme.

Today, however, I wanted to focus on two of my favorites, the first of which is Father Malachy’s Miracle. It is the tale of a devout and innocent Catholic priest who is perturbed by the goings on at the Garden of Eden, a local dance hall. During an argument with a Protestant minister on the subject of miracles, Father Malachy claims that God can even move the dance hall – and that He will, indeed, do so. The miracle does occur, and the Garden of Eden winds up being transported to an island off the coast. This incident leads to confusion and a considerable amount of chagrin, not least for the Catholic Church, which is unwilling to accept that this act is, in fact, a miracle. Pilgrims begin descending on the original site of the dance hall, creating a carnival atmosphere, and pestering the reclusive Father Malachy relentlessly. Abashed by all of the attention, the priest prays to God to return the dance hall from whence it came, God, once again, granting Father Malachy’s request. It is an amusing object lesson in being careful what you wish – or pray – for.

The other novel is the cold-war classic, Vespers in Vienna. Published in 1947, the book deals with British Colonel Michael “Hooky” Nicobar, who has received the unpleasant assignment of assisting in the repatriation of displaced Soviet citizens to the Motherland. He becomes deeply involved in the case of a ballerina who is desperately trying to avoid being returned to Russia. The crusty, by-the-book colonel, as he discovers the horrible truth about the likely fate of most of the returnees, is conflicted between duty and his own moral sense; however, he is helped in this internal struggle (initially against his will) by the Mother Superior of a local convent. The book, incidentally, was ultimately made into one of the better cold-war movies: The Red Danube (1949), starring Walter Pidgeon, Ethel Barrymore, and the young (and very fetching) Janet Leigh in the role of the ballerina.

More Awesome Smartness Than We’ve Ever Seen Before

And, if we’re lucky, than we’ll ever see again. According to Andy McCarthy at NRO, President Wile E. Obama – Super Genius - has already bollixed up the criminal trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed & Co.