1) I noticed something, during the Clinton presidency: Occasionally he’d be heckled, and all the hecklers would come from the left. None from the right, that I recall. The hecklers would say he wasn’t “doing enough” on this or that issue.
Obama has been heckled too — always from the left, right? I can’t recall an instance of right-wing heckling, but would be happy to be contradicted. They heckled him about gay marriage, before he had his epiphany (or whatever). They heckled him about deportation, and still are.
There is so much to heckle him about from the right. Does it ever happen?
The other day, he was in that Washington, D.C., bookstore, and someone said to him, “Hope you can close Guantanamo.” He said, “We’re working on it.” Then he said, “Any other issues?”
It’s hard for me to imagine someone saying the following: “How is it that presidents can change laws? This isn’t Venezuela. Did I miss something in civics class?”
2) Alois Brunner has at long last been confirmed dead, or declared dead. (For a story, go here.) He lived to a ripe old age — almost 100. Simon Wiesenthal never got him. The Mossad never got him. He lived most of his life in Syria, which is appropriate, given Baathism’s roots in, and likeness to, Nazism.
Brunner gave an interview to a German magazine in 1985. He said, “My only regret is I didn’t murder more Jews.” In the Middle East, he lived among people who have done their best to pick up the slack.
Although Arabs are especially good at killing Arabs. (There are more of them, for one thing.)
3) I see in the Daily Caller that the Democratic National Committee is selling Christmas gifts, or holiday gifts, as they may prefer to call them. One is a tumbler that says “I Hate Tea Parties.”
Maybe the DNC could simply have stopped at the second word: “I Hate.” That could almost be a party slogan.
One of the reasons I rejected the Left, many years ago, is that they were suffused with hate — especially of ordinary people (family-oriented, churchgoing, etc.). There is plenty of hate on the right, of course (much of it is directed at the Republican party). And I was always taught that the Right was the camp of hate. But the Left, in my experience, has always been the champeen . . .
4) I offer the music-minded a little blogpost, at The New Criterion: “Musical odds and ends.” Some of it is odd, but it does end.
UPDATE: My colleague Rick Brookhiser reminds me that Obama was heckled by a conservative congressman — Joe Wilson. How could I have forgotten? I was thinking of ordinary Joes, not congressional Joes.